CALL FOR PAPERS: ‘Courage, Language, Discretion and Learning’: Lancelot Andrewes and Early Modern Religious Culture

Posted on 22 May 2019

This conference will be the first to investigate the works of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) and his engagement with early modern cultures of religion, literature and learning.

20^th– 21^st March, 2020, University of York, UK

Andrewes was the most renowned elite preacher of his generation. His sermons were celebrated by listeners, readers and poets; he occupied powerful roles in the Jacobean court, and his writings paved the way for later reforms in the English church. Andrewes was a famous polemicist, a major translator of the King James Bible, an internationally respected scholar, and an influential teacher at Cambridge. This conference intends to explore his writings in all their variety: sermons, polemical tracts, devotional works and university lectures.

Recent research on Andrewes has uncovered the range of influences upon his thinking. We are now in the position to enquire how Andrewes’s own various roles, his use of different genres and his appeals to diverse audiences shaped his writing. In asking these questions, the conference will contribute to a broader understanding of early modern religious writing. We hope it will allow us to investigate the relationship between sermons and other genres, and to study the connections between Andrewes and the work of other early modern scholars, philosophers and thinkers. In the light of the ‘religious turn’ in literary studies and new work on the history of early modern scholarship, an examination of the variety of Andrewes’s literary output will explore connections between seemingly disparate strands of early modern religious, political and scholarly discourses.

The conference will feature plenary addresses from Peter McCullough (Lincoln College, Oxford) and Kathryn Murphy (Oriel College, Oxford). We are also requesting the submission of abstracts for twenty-minute panel papers and we welcome researchers at any stage of their career, including research students, to contribute.

Topics may include (but are by no means restricted to) Andrewes and…

Early Modern Universities and / or pedagogy
The parish church and/ or London
Biblical translation and biblical languages
Early modern scholarship and the study of antiquity
His influence and reception, home or abroad
Literary culture
Performance
Genre and form
Politics and / or polemic
The law
His contemporaries
Ecclesiology
Liturgy and practice
Prayer and devotional writings
Early modern natural philosophy

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words and brief biography to andrewes2020@gmail.comby 1^st October 2019.

Thanks to generous grants from CREMS and the Society of Renaissance Studies, we are able to offer some travel bursaries for ECRs and PhD students, with particular preference reserved for those giving a paper. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please mention this in your email, when contacting the organizers.

Joseph Ashmore and Tilly Zeeman

Please see our website for further information and blog https://lancelotandrewes.wordpress.com/

CFP Lancelot Andrewes poster (PDF , 169kb)CFP Lancelot Andrewes poster (PDF , 169kb)‌

Sponsored by the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, University of York and the Society for Renaissance Studies.