CALL FOR PAPERS: Sir John Cheke and the Cambridge Connection in Tudor England

St John’s College, Cambridge
19-20 July 2014

Confirmed Speakers: Stephen Alford (Leeds), Alan Bryson (Sheffield), Norman Jones (Utah State), Scott Lucas (The Citadel), John McDiarmid (New College of Florida), Ceri Law (Cambridge), Anne Overell (Durham), Aysha Pollnitz (Rice), Richard Rex (Cambridge), Fred Schurink (Northumbria), Cathy Shrank (Sheffield), Jeremy Smith (Glasgow), Tracey Sowerby (Oxford), Andrew Taylor (Cambridge).

2014 marks the quincentenary of the birth of one of the most significant, but neglected, scholars of Renaissance England, Sir John Cheke (1514-57), fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge and the first Regius Professor of Greek in the University. This conference offers a timely re-assessment of Cheke and of the important group of colleagues who coalesced around him at Cambridge in the 1530s. The conference title derives from Winthrop S. Hudson’s 1980 study The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, which assigned members of the group a leading role in Elizabeth’s religious settlement. Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570) memorializes the beginnings of the group at Cambridge, which centred on ‘those two worthy starres’, Cheke and Thomas Smith, but also included Cheke’s brother-in-law William Cecil, Smith’s student John Ponet, John Aylmer, the future rhetorician Thomas Wilson and others. In the 1540s, Cheke’s appointment as tutor to Prince Edward began the movement of the whole group into leadership roles at court and in the church. Smith and Cecil were major figures in government during Edward’s reign, and (unlike Cheke) survived Mary I to serve Elizabeth I, Cecil of course as her famous chief minister. Other members of the group, such as Wilson and Nicholas Bacon, were also Elizabethan statesmen. Some not only practiced politics but wrote about it, including Cheke, Aylmer, and Ponet in his remarkable Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (1556), which defended tyrannicide. Texts by Smith and Wilson explored perceived socioeconomic problems of the commonwealth. Members of the group also provided leadership in the church, Cheke as an eager aid to both Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and the reformer Martin Bucer, Ponet in his catechism, both Ponet and Aylmer as bishops. Cheke, Smith and Cecil gave important encouragement to mid-Tudor students and practitioners of mathematics and the natural sciences. The Cambridge connection was a major presence in English intellectual, political and religious life into the first half of Elizabeth’s reign and had a shaping influence well into the seventeenth century.

We invite proposals for papers that consider any aspect of the life, writings, and activities of Cheke and the other members of the group surrounding him at Cambridge and their impact on Tudor England. Topics might include (but are not limited to): art and architecture, communities and networks, education and universities, gender and society, government and political reform, humanism and scholarship, ancient and vernacular languages, mathematics and the natural sciences, religious controversy and reform, translation and rhetoric. We especially welcome proposals from PhD students and other early career academics and expect to have bursaries available to cover some of the expenses of attending the conference.

Please send proposals (250 words) by 1 May 2014 to Alan Bryson (a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk), John McDiarmid (diarmid@starpower.net), or Fred Schurink (fred.schurink@northumbria.ac.uk).

CALL FOR PAPERS: Northern Renaissance Roses Seminar, 2014: 'Time and Early Modern Thought’

Sat 10th May 2014 - York Minster Old Palace Library Run jointly by the universities of Lancaster and York, this seminar will look at ‘time’ in the renaissance. We will consider this broadly, but papers would be welcome, for example, on any of the following:

• Was there a ‘concept of time’, distinct to the period? What ideas of time were inherited from antiquity?
• How was time related to music and poetics, measure and proportion? how was it perceived, on the pulse, in the heart and on the brain?
• How was time related to timelessness, quotidian time to divine time? What did it mean, as Plato has it, to suppose time is a moving image of eternity?
• Was the relationship between time and mortality – emblematised in the Renaissance hour-glass and skull – terrifying or mere renaissance kitsch?
• What were the functions of early modern antiquarianism and the obsession with chronologies?
• How does renaissance theatre figure time, and what is the relationship between dramatic time and quotidian time?
• What was the relationship between time and space, eternity and infinity?
• Who were the Renaissance theorists of time?

The seminar will be held in the beautiful surroundings of York Minster Old Palace Library, and will conclude with a concert given by the Minster Minstrels, a renaissance-baroque early music wind group.

The seminar particularly encourages early career and post-graduates working in any Renaissance discipline: literature, history, music, art, philosophy.

Please send abstracts (c. 250 words) by Dec 15th to Kevin Killeen and Liz Oakley-Brown http://www.york.ac.uk/crems/

Fools and Folly in Early Modern Europe

Saturday 18 February 2012
https://www.soton.ac.uk/cmrc/news/conferences/2011_12/18_fools_and_folly.html

A one-day symposium hosted by the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture at the University of Southampton and Chawton House Library, Hampshire

This one-day symposium on Fools and Folly in Early Modern Europe will bring together historians, art-historians and literary scholars from the UK, Europe and beyond who are currently working on folly. While the 'wisdom' of folly in the early modern period has become a familiar concept, it has lacked significant cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural investigation. This symposium will include papers on Erasmus's character of Folly; the fools of Tudor interludes, French 'soties' and Shakespearean drama; king's fools and court jesters; carnivals and festive folly; and the representation of folly in art. Speakers will examine and consider the many manifestations of folly in early modern Europe and consider its different political, religious and social purposes. The event will also, via roundtable discussions, invite contributions about other research into folly, and related foolish things.

Speakers include:
Professor Luc Duerloo (Antwerp) on Hapsburg court culture
Dr Peter Happé (Southampton) on Ben Jonson
Professor Richard Hillman (Tours) on Mad Discourse
Dr Suzannah Lipscomb (UEA) on Tudor natural fools
Dr Alexander Samson (University College London) on Spanish folly and madness
Dr Peter Sillitoe (V&A) on Masques
Professor David Smith (New Hampshire) on Jan Steen
Professor Greg Walker (University of Edinburgh) on John Heywood
Dr Anna Whitelock (Royal Holloway) on Archie Armstrong

The symposium will be held in the unique setting of Chawton House Library, an Elizabethan manor house and former home of Jane Austen's brother. Coffee, lunch, tea and drinks will all be provided.

Registration cost: £40. Some postgraduate bursaries will also be available.

For further details and to register, please contact: Dr Alice Hunt; a.hunt@soton.ac.uk

NEH Seminar: Tudor Books and Readers

John N. King of The Ohio State University and Mark Rankin of James Madison University will direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on the manufacture and dissemination of printed books and the nature of reading during the era of the Tudor monarchs (1485-1603).

In particular, they plan to pose the governing question of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the emergence of new reading practices associated with the Renaissance and Reformation. Participants will consider ways in which readers responded to elements such as book layout, typography, illustration, and paratext (e.g., prefaces, glosses, and commentaries). Employing key methods of the history of the book and the history of reading, this investigation will consider how the physical nature of books affected ways in which readers understood and assimilated their intellectual contents. This program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in the literary, political, or cultural history of the English Renaissance and/or Reformation, the history of the book, the history of reading, art history, women’s studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including rare book librarians), mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

This seminar will meet from 18 June until 20 July 2012. During the first week of this program, we shall visit 1) Antwerp, Belgium, in order to draw on resources including the Plantin-Moretus Museum (the world’s only surviving Renaissance printing and publishing house) and 2) London, England, in order to attend a rare-book workshop and consider treasures at the British Library. During four ensuing weeks at Oxford, participants will reside at St. Edmund Hall as they draw on the rare book and manuscript holdings of the Bodleian Library and other institutions.

Those eligible to apply include citizens of USA who are engaged in teaching at the college or university level, graduate students, and independent scholars who have received the terminal degree in their field (usually the Ph.D.). In addition, non-US citizens who have taught and lived in the USA for at least three years prior to March 2012 are eligible to apply. NEH will provide participants with a stipend of $3,900.

Full details and application information are available at http://www.jmu.edu/english/Tudor_Books_and_Readers. For further information, please contact Mark Rankin (rankinmc@jmu.edu). The application deadline is March 1, 2012.

The Tudor and Stuart Ireland Conference

University College Dublin on Friday and Saturday, 2 - 3 September 2011.
Early Modern Ireland is a flourishing field of research and this conference will provide all scholars interested in the period with an opportunity to share their ideas in an interdisciplinary forum.

The conference is part-funded by the UCD Graduate School of Arts and Celtic Studies and further supported by the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland and UCD School of History & Archives.

Registration is now open. If you wish to register for the conference, please click here.


To view the conference programme, please click here.

If you have any queries regarding the conference, please contact the organisers (Suzanne Forbes, Neil Johnston and Eoin Kinsella) at the email address below.

info@tudorstuartireland.com