The Thomas Browne Seminar

Overview
News
Publications
Bibliography
Resources
Event Archive

Overview

Thinking with Mysticism (from medieval to early modern)

Friday 31st May 2019

CREMS, University of York (in The Treehouse, then the Bowland lecture Theatre – both are in the Berrick Saul Building)

1.00-2.30 (Treehouse)

Medieval Mysticisms

Michael Hahn,Monastic dissemination of mystical illumination: Bonaventure’s practical advice and his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum
Jack Ford, Cistercian affectus – Title tbc
Hossein Salimian Rizi, (Un)Gendered Self–Annihilation in Hafiz’s Ghazals 10 and 15

2.30-3.00 Coffee

3.00-4.00 (Treehouse)

Early Modern mysticism

Liam Temple, “Fellow Waiters…of the first Resurrection”: Philadelphian mystics and their networks
Jessica Hamel-Akré, Voilà mon appétit: Dr. George Cheyne’s Mystic Diets

4.15 (Bowland Theatre)

Shazia Jagot,From Baghdad to Canterbury: Sufism, Alchemy and Middle English Poetry

5.00 (Bowland Theatre)

Keynote:Dr Sarah Apetrei, Title tbc

Contact: Kevin Killeen (kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk)

No registration required. Open to anyone interested.

Overview

The Thomas Browne Seminar is a forum for exploring the intellectual history of the seventeenth century, the relations between its apparently incompatible disciplines and the social, scientific and political contexts in which they arose. It is not, by any means, restricted to Thomas Browne himself, but also examines more broadly the intellectual culture in the mid-seventeenth century.

Papers are invited on any aspect of mid-century culture, the history of science and scholarship, religious and antiquarian thought, natural history, politics and the history of trivia, in particular, but not restricted to, those related to Browne. As the seminar will involve an ongoing series of meetings, ideas for future seminars are also invited.

The TBS is run jointly by the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Thomas Browne was a significant figure in the scholarly and scientific community of the seventeenth century, who nevertheless defies categorisation and whose blend of humanism, scholasticism and natural philosophy is testament to the intellectual flux of the period.

News

New Paperback edition of Browne, Jan 2018

Thomas Browne: Selected Writings (21st-Century Oxford Authors), ed. Kevin Killeen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Sir Thomas Browne Day !

A new Norwich-based Thomas Browne Society is launching this year, with a series of event on 19 October. This includes a ‘City of Stories’ blog, a talk by Claire Preston at the Norwich Millennium Library, an OED Browne ‘Word of the Day’, a tour of St Peter Mancroft, a performance and a concert.

See events and programme at: http://www.sirthomasbrowne.org.uk

Conference: The Edition as Argument, 1550-1750

Queen Mary, University of London

16^th - 17^th July 2014

From the philology of Lorenzo Valla to twentieth-century debates over copy-text to the new frontier of digital humanities, textual scholars have always argued over the making of meaning. Indeed, argument is integral to the practice of editing: to privilege one reading is to demote another. Bibliographical, historical, and textual choices: these ineluctably and often invisibly inform our larger understanding of the text, the author, and the culture from which they emerge. They can destabilise or confirm our most basic assumptions, from a single word – what is “blew”? – to the nature of the book: what is a text? what is an author? what is an edition?

This landmark two-day conference will draw together experienced and new editors, to analyse and to celebrate editions in progress and to inspire a new generation of editors and editions. Hosted by the AHRC-funded Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (forthcoming, OUP), the event will explore the future of editing in universities and offer perspectives from curators and publishers.

AHRC award for Oxford Works of Sir Thomas Browne

The AHRC have awarded a grant of c. £946,000 to bring to completion a new 8 volume Oxford University Press edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Browne. The grant, which runs for 5 years, is a collaboration between Universities of Birmingham (Claire Preston, PI), York (Kevin Killeen) and Cambridge (Andrew Zurcher). The edition, under the general editorship of Claire Preston, will include authoritative editions of all Browne’s published works together with his correspondence and his voluminous notebooks. Critically and textually annotated, the edition will be available in print and in electronic formats. The grant includes provision for two postdoctoral research assistants and two Ph.D. studentships. This international collaboration involves a team of scholars, working on Thomas Browne. The editors are Reid Barbour (North Carolina), Brooke Conti (SUNY Brockport), Anne Dunan-Page (Aix), Felicity Henderson (Royal Society), Kevin Killeen (York), Antonia Moon (British Library), Kathryn Murphy (Oxford), Claire Preston (Cambridge), William West (Northwestern), Jessica Wolfe (North Carolina), and Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge).

The Complete Works project will be inaugurated with a single-volume Works of Browne, published in the new series, Oxford 21^st Century Authors: Sir Thomas Browne (OUP, 2013) edited by Kevin Killeen (York). http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199640430.do

News on Browne and the project can be found on the website of the ‘Sir Thomas Browne Seminar’: http://www.york.ac.uk/english/news-events/browne/

The Oxford University Press Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne, gen. ed. Claire Preston

A major new edition of the complete works of Sir Thomas Browne has been commissioned by Oxford University Press, due to be published in 2017.

Archive of past seminars and related conferences

Publications

‌Recent publications

Kevin Killeen

Thomas Browne: 21st-Century Oxford Authors, ed. Kevin Killeen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Paperback 2018

From the blurb

The Browne volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers a comprehensive selection of the work of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebal, Sir Thomas Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, in which the broken shards of urns found in a field lead him onto a history of mortality and oblivion, and the elaborate Escheresque architecture of The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite attern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most enduringly famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth century - its science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities. Across this range of material, Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's published work, as well as much of his posthumous writing, together with detailed endnotes and an expansive introduction to Browne's work and life.

Reid Barbour

Sir Thomas Browne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

From the blurb‌‌

Sir Thomas Browne: A Life is the first full-scale biography of the extraordinary prose artist, physician, and polymath. With the help of recent archival discoveries, the biography recasts each phase of Browne's life (1605-82) and situates his incomparable writings within the diverse intellectual and social contexts in which he lived, including London, Winchester, Oxford, Montpellier, Padua, Leiden, Halifax, and Norwich. The book makes the case that, as his contemporaries fervently believed, Browne influenced the intellectual and religious direction of seventeenth-century England in singularly rich and dynamic ways.

Special attention is paid in the biography to Browne's medical vocation but also to his place within the scientific revolution. New information is offered regarding his childhood in London, his European travels and medical studies, the setting in which he first wrote Religio Medici, his impact on readers during the English civil wars, and the contemporary view of his medical practice. Overall, the image of Browne that emerges is far bolder and more cosmopolitan, less complacent and provincial, than biographers have assumed ever since Samuel Johnson doubted Browne's claim that his life up to age thirty resembled a romantic fiction filled withmiracles and fables.

Kevin Killeen

Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2009)

Winner, Council for College and University English Book Award, 2010
Shortlisted for the History of Science Society Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize 2010

From the blurb:

This book addresses one of the most enigmatic of seventeenth century writers, Thomas Browne (1605-1682), whose voracious intellectual pursuits provide an unparalleled insight into how early modern scholarly culture understood the relations between its disciplines. Browne's work encompasses biblical commentary, historiography, natural history, classical philology, artistic propriety and an encyclopaedic coverage of natural philosophy. This book traces the intellectual climate in which such disparate interests could cohere, locating Browne within the cultural and political matrices of his time. While Browne is most frequently remembered for the magnificence of his prose and his temperamental poise, qualities that knit well with the picture of a detached, apolitical figure, this work argues that Browne's significance emerges most fully in the context of contemporary battles over interpretative authority, within the intricately linked fields of biblical exegesis, scientific thought, and politics. Killeen's work centres on a reassessment of the scope and importance of Browne's most elaborate text, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, his vast encyclopaedia of error with its mazy series of investigations and through this explores the multivalent nature of early-modern enquiry.

‘The judges were impressed not only by the intellectual breadth and depth of this study, but also by the evident respect and affection for its subject that informs the book throughout. Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (or Vulgar Errors) (1642-72) is an extraordinary dense and eclectic work that spans the fields of biblical scholarship, philology, history, politics and science. Kevin Killeen explores each of these fields in impressive depth and detail to make sense of Browne’s work for modern readers. His book is both a remarkable intellectual achievement and also a labour of love which illuminates the learning and passion that underpin Browne’s enquiries, but makes intelligible the intimate connections that Browne and his contemporaries understood to exist between different forms of knowledge.'

Judges citation from the Council for College and University English Book Award, 2010

Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (eds)

Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed (Oxford University Press, 2008)

From the blurb:

Doctor, linguist, scientist, natural historian, and writer of what is probably the most stunning prose in the English language, Sir Thomas Browne was a virtuoso in learning whose many interests form a representative portrait of his age. To understand the period which we more usually refer to as the Civil War, the Restoration, or the Scientific Revolution, we need to understand parts of the intellectual and spiritual background that are often neglected and which Browne magnificently figures forth.

This collection of essays about all aspects of Thomas Browne's work and thought is the first such volume to appear in 25 years. It offers the specialist and the student a wide-ranging array of essays by an international team of leading scholars in seventeenth-century literary studies who extend our understanding of this extremely influential and representative early-modern polymath by embracing recent developments in the field, including literary-scientific relations, the development of Anglican spirituality, civil networks of intellectual exchange, the rise of antiquarianism, and Browne's own legacy in modern literature.

For the Contents, please see the Browne bibliography under Resources.

Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd (eds)

"A man very well studyed": New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Brill, 2008)

From the blurb:

For many years, scholarship on Thomas Browne (1605-1682) saw him as tangential to his period’s thought and writing: an obscure and quaint stylist, detached from the turbulence of mid-17th century England. This volume contributes to the current reevalution of Browne’s involvement in his times: identifying his political commitments, milieu, reading, and readers. The essays collected in this volume place Browne’s works in unexpected contexts - in Holland, Poland and Germany, in Restoration politics, in publishing history and medical theory. It presents new research into his reputation in the later 17th century, his manuscripts, medical dissertation, association with the Hartlib circle and habits of revision. Essays on familiar works place them in new light, while readings of his letters, notebooks, and lesser works broaden our understanding of Browne as a writer. The result is a fuller picture of Browne’s significance in 17th-century European culture.

Contributors include: Eric Achermann, Hugh Adlington, Reid Barbour, Harm Beukers, Siobhán Collins, Louise Denmead, Karen Edwards, Doris Einsiedel, Kevin Killeen, Mary Ann Lund, Philip Major, Antonia Moon, Kathryn Murphy, Brent Nelson, and Claire Preston.

For the Contents , please see the Browne bibliography under Resources .

Claire Preston

Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Winner of the 2005 British Academy Crawshay Prize

From the British Academy citation:

Behind Claire Preston’s Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science, and informing it throughout, lies a rich background of reading and research, some of it – as with her investigation of the Renaissance obsession with collections (so-called 'cabinets of curiosities') - published previously in their own right as articles. Browne is of course, one of the great English prose stylists. That has long been recognized. Dr. Preston pays due and discriminating attention to the way Browne writes, and those characteristics of his prose that make him so strikingly individual and memorable in a period (after all) of other great prose writers. But she has been able as well and with consummate skill to establish and clarify his position as a man striving for encyclopaedic knowledge while simultaneously despairing of ever being able to attain it.

Central to her book is the concept of 'civility', in the sense of 'civil behaviour', as a key to Browne’s work and thinking: an ideal that extends far beyond its ordinary social sense to encompass intellectual collaboration and exchange, selfless investigation, and the bringing to bear upon all the varied spheres of human enquiry, whether scientific or otherwise, of such fundamental values as courtesy, modesty, honesty and generosity.

Refreshingly, Dr. Preston focuses less upon Browne’s early book Religio Medici (although she writes excellently about it) as upon the later and more important but less well-known Pseudodoxia Epidemica (or, Vulgar Errors), Urn-Burial, and the magnificent Garden of Cyrus. Andrew Hadfield, reviewing Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science recently in the TLS described it there as an 'engaging, intelligent and often Brownian study', 'learned and witty', 'a fitting tribute to its subject'. It is certainly a book eminently deserving of the Academy’s Crawshay prize.

Manfred Pfister (ed. and trans.)

Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia-Urnenbetattung und andere Schriften (EDITION SIGNAThUR, 2014)

Eine Auswahl der Schriften des bedeutenden englischen Arztes, Universalgelehrten und Prosakünstlers aus dem 17. Jahrhundert. Erstmalig in dieser Zusammenstellung mit dem Vorwort 'Sir Thomas Browne und das Salz der Erde'; Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Auszüge), Hydriotaphia - Urnenbestattung (zweisprachig), Der Garten des Cyrus (Auszüge), Brief an einen Freund, Über Träume, Musaeum Clausum, Musaeum Criticum, Bibliographie.

Bibliography

Browne bibliography

This bibliography consists of scholarly works on Browne, although it is by no means complete and will be updated at intervals. Titles may appear in more than one category. News of publications or notable omissions gratefully received: kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk.

Resources

About Browne

Browne's work online

Useful editions of Browne’s work are available online at James Eason’s University of Chicago site. However he does warn that the texts have only been partially proof-read. It also includes contemporary responses to Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia Epidemica and much else besides.

Also of use are the following:

Event Archive

Beyond Words: The Unknowable and the Unutterable in early modernity

Friday 1^st June 2018, CREMS, University of York

· Kevin Tracey (Science Museum), Point not only in respect of the Heavens above us, but of that (…) Celestial Part within us’: Negotiating Early Modern Cosmography through Books and Instruments

· Allegra Baggio Corradi (Warburg), The leksikon fantastikon of Niccolò Leonico Tomeo: The notion of halitus between natural science and divination

· David Manning (Leicester), Some Remnants of Pseudo-Dionysius? Rethinking Henry Hammond’s Practical Divinity

· Mathilde Zeeman (York), Lancelot Andrewes and the apophatic

· Kevin Killeen (York), The Jobean Apophatic and the symphonic unknowability of the world

· Travis Williams (University of Rhode Island), Unspeakable Creation: Writing in Paradise Lost and Early Modern Mathematics

· Rosie Paice (Portsmouth), ‘Lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms’: translation as theme and event in Paradise Lost

· Julie R. Klein (Villanova), How to Move beyond Language

· Jelle Kalsbeek (Warburg), Isaac Beeckman and musical apophatic

· Nika Kochekovskaya (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), Allegory as an expression of the unutterable in early modern literature: case of M.K. Sarbiewski (1594-1645)

· Keynote: William Franke (Vanderbilt), Paths Beyond Words: The Ways of Unsaying in Early Modernity

Epistolary Cultures: Letters and letter-writing in early modern Europe

18^th-19^th March 2016: CREMS, University of York,

Organisers: Freya Sierhuis and Kevin Killeen (and only vaguely a Thomas Browne Seminar)

Plenary Lectures:

Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge), Deciding things in the letters of Sir Thomas Browne
Henry Woudhuysen, ‘“‘I write in annother mans hande for feare my owne will not be vnderstood”: Fulke Greville, Letter-Writer’

Speakers:

Dirk van Miert (Utrecht), From Joseph Scaliger to Immanuel Kant: the European Republic of Letters
Paul Botley (Warwick), The Censorship of Isaac Casaubon’s Letters
Jeanine De Landtsheer (Leuven) Justus Lipsius, and correspondence networks
Marie-Louise Coolahan (RECIRC, Galway) The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Letters
Evan Bourke (Galway), ‘Women and Samuel Hartlib’s correspondence network’
Felicity Maxwell (Galway),Mary, Queen of Scots’ letter to her former servants
Emilie Murphy (Galway),Circulation practices of Catholic correspondence networks
Samuli Kaislaniemi (Helsinki) Learning letterlocking: William Cecil’s letters to his father.
Mel Evans (Birmingham), Tudor epistolary style and authority
Guillaume Coatalen (Cergy-Pontoise, France) Holograph letters of Queen Elizabeth I
Joe Moshenska (Cambridge), The letters of Sir Kenelm Digby,
Norah Carlin (Edinburgh) Kenelm Digby’s Letters to James Lord Cranfield, 1642-3
Amy Bowles (Cambridge), Scribal Letter Anthologies: Ralph Crane's Copies of Francis Bacon's Letters
Dianne Mitchell (Pennsylvania) Posting Poems in Early Modern England
Lindsay Ann Reid (Galway), Turberville’s Tymetes and Pyndara
Katherine Heavey (Glasgow), Thomas Heywood's Heroides in Early Modern England.
Jana Dambrogio (MIT) and Daniel Starza Smith (Oxford):Letterlocking Workshop
Tom Charlton (Queen Mary), Letters in the life, and Life, of Richard Baxter.
Johanna Harris (Exeter), ‘Baxter and the repurposing of letters.
Alison Searle (Sydney), Prison Letters: Nonconformist Networks and Fellowship
Brian Cummings (York), on Erasmus and Letter writing practices,
Jan Cizek (Olomouc, Czech Republic), Comenius and education
Luke O’Sullivan (Durham), Speaking with Seneca in Montaigne’s Essais
Claire Bartram (Canterbury) Letter Writing and Literary Culture in Elizabethan Kent.
Giacomo Comiati (Warwick) A Renaissance Manual for Epistles in Latin and Italian
Fatima Essadek (Mazoon University College) The Sultan's Letters in Europe
Rachel F Stapleton (Toronto) Epistolary (Auto)fictions of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza
Stephanie Childress (Texas), Spenserian Epistolarity
Tilmann Walter (Würzburg), Medical Republic of Letters
Peter van den Hooff (Utrecht University),The patient’s story and looted Dutch letters
Eleonora Carinci (Cambridge), Camilla Erculiani’s Lettere di philosophia naturale (1584)
D.C. Andersson (Oxford) Early Modern Pauline letters
Jaska Kainulainen (Helsinki), Early Jesuit letter writing
Hélène Miesse (Liège) Goro Gheri as the “perfect secretary”
Vittoria Feola(Padua/Oxford) Letters as Collectibles: the Bartolomeo Gamba Collection
Andreas Fingernagel (National Library of Austria)
Stefano Pagliantini (Bassano del Grappa)
Miranda Lewis (Digital Editor at EMLO)
Fabio Zampieri (Padova Museum for the History of Medicine)
Alberto Zanatta (Padova Museum for the History of Medicine)

Magic and Intellectual History

Thursday 5^th March 2015, Treehouse, Humanities Research Centre,

Rinotas Athanasios (Athens), Compatibility between Philosophy and Magic in the Work of Albertus Magnus
Ovanes Akopyan(Warwick), From Marsilio Ficino to the Bible: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and his circle on magic, prisca theologia and Aristotle
Allison Kavey (CUNY), Agrippa's Magical Cosmology
Todd Borlik (Huddersfield), Magic as Technological Dominion: John Dee and the Draining of the English Fens
Mark A. Waddell (Michigan State), Sympathy and Lies: Plausibility, Credibility, and the Weapon Salve in Early Modern England
Frank Klaassen (Saskatchewan) Magic and the English Reformation: A reconsideration
Francis Young (Ely) Liturgical Change and Ceremonial Magic in Reformation England
Alex Corrigan (Edinburgh), Was John Napier of Merchiston a Magician?
Ofer Hadass (Haifa), "An Angell's Sight": Religion and Magic in Richard Napier’s Medical Practice
Jean-Paul De Lucca (University of Malta), Tommaso Campanella between Renaissance Magic and Modern Science
Stephen Clucas (Birbeck, University of London), Magic and intellectual history: the problem of transgression

Classical Philosophers in Seventeenth Century English Thought

28 May 2014, Treehouse, Humanities Research Centre

Sarah Hutton (Aberystwyth), 'Demystifying Seventeenth-century Platonism: the Cambridge Platonists revisited'.
Helen Smith (York) Early modern matter theory
Francesco G. Sacco (Unical / Warburg), Mythology or Modern Science? Robert Hooke and ancient learning
Alissa MacMillan (Toulouse) On Curiosity and Religion: Hobbes, Calvin, and the Ancients
Craig Martin (Oakland), English Polemics and Aristotle’s Paganism
Patrick Gray (Durham), Milton, “The Passion,” and the Problem of Passibility
Elisabeth Thorsson (York), From Antiquity to Enlightenment: Locke and the Logos
Giuliana Di Biase (Chieti-Pescara), The influence of Cicero on Locke’s moral thought
Jessica Wolfe (North Carolina), 'Men are lived over againe': Thomas Browne and the transcorporating philosophers

Time and Early Modern Thought

Northern Renaissance Roses Seminar, 9^th-10^th May 2014

Friday: Treehouse, Humanities Research Centre

Jane Desborough (Leeds), The Clock and Watch Dial as a Reflection of Perceptions and Experiences of Time
Alexander Cummins (Bristol), Time and Magic in Early Modern England
Zoe Gibbons (Princeton), Objectified Time in Shackerley Marmion’s The Antiquary
Denise Kelly (Queens, Belfast), ‘Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time’: ‘Keeping’ Time in Early Modern English Theatre and Culture
Robert Stagg (Southampton), Shakespeare’s Clocks
Joanne Paul (NCH), ‘An instance of grasped time’: Kairos in the Tudor Art of Politics
Oliver Dubouclez (Liège), Time and Contemplation in Francesco Piccolomini’s Naturae Totius Universi
Grigol Gegelia (European University Institute), The Machiavellian Occasion
L.D. Haydon (Kent), Milton and the Problem of Epic Time
Helen Davies (Lancaster), ‘Tyrants expect no time’: constructing the temporally impaired body of Richard III in the ableist space of Tudor England
Mathew Champion (Queen Mary, London), Contemplating Time and Eternity in Early Modern Louvain

Saturday: York Minster Old Palace Library

Lucy Razzall (Cambridge), ‘Nothing is permanent in temporall things’: John Donne, Time, and the Material
Sam Ellis (York), A Measure of Methuselahs: Counting out Time in Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia
Harriet Phillips (Queen Mary, London), Knowledge and Oblivion in Pseudodoxia Epidemica
Lydia Janssen (KU Leuven), Time and the writing of history. Antiquarianism and the treatment of time in early modern historiography
Michal Choptiany (Warsaw), Bartholomaeus Scultetus and chronology: An inquiry into the scholarly workshop of an Upper Lusatian astronomer
Emily A.E. Thomas (Groningen), On the Emergence of ‘New’ Early Modern Metaphysics of Time
Rachel White (Lancaster), Manipulating Metre: Revelations of Poetic Temporality in the Areopagus
Sharon Galbraith (Lancaster), Short Death, Long Sleep: Timing Mortality in Early Modern Perceptions of Piers Plowman
Michael Edwards (Cambridge), Time and the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy

Concert by the Minster Minstrels

Northern Renaissance Roses Seminar, 2014

http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/northern-renaissance-seminar/

http://www.york.ac.uk/crems/

The conference is organised by Kevin Killeen (kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk), Liz Oakley-Brown (e.oakley-brown@lancaster.ac.uk) and Sam Ellis (se654@york.ac.uk )

Poetics and Prose theory in Early Modern English

29 May 2013, CREMS, University of York

Gavin Alexander (Cambridge): The proportions of early modern poetics
Hannah Leah Crummé (Kings College London): Theorizing English Rhetoric (Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike and Fernando de Herrera)
Michael Hetherington (Cambridge): Remembering Lysias: The Coherence of the Text in Early Modern England
Micha Lazarus (Oxford): Sidney and Vettori’s Aristotle
John Roe (York): ''Besely seeking with a continuell chaunge': the poetics of indeterminacy in Petrarch and Wyatt'.
Louise Wilson (St Andrews): Theories of pleasure in early modern literary criticism
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (King's College, London): A pause for thought?: Critical writing by women and men 1610-1660
Katherine Acheson (University of Waterloo in Ontario): The 'Way of Dichotomy': Visual Rhetoric, Dichotomous Tables, and Paradise Lost
Kevin Killeen (York): The Prose of the Physics of Resurrection
Florence Hazrat (Cambridge): Poesy, Plot and Parenthesis: Rhetorical Figures as Structural and Narrative Strategy in Early Modern Prose Writing
Stuart Farley (St Andrews): The Extemporary Method in Early Modern English Prose
Jenny Richards (Newcastle): Appealing to 'the physical ear': Thomas Nashe on prose style

Invention, Philosophy and Technology in the Seventeenth Century: A Symposium

23rd May 2012, University of York

Ayesha Mukherjee (Exeter) The economy and philosophy of manure in Hugh Platt
Paddy Bullard (Kent) Isaac Walton and Joseph Moxon, on technical manuals
Eleanor Decamp (Oxford) '[Keep] sharp Instruments...as neere as you can, ever hidden from the eyes of the Patient': the visibility of surgical objects in seventeenth-century literature
Tullia Giersberg (King's College, London) Cornelis Drebbel's 'Perpetuum Mobile' and the Contested Meanings of Invention in Ben Jonson's 'Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court' (1614-15)
Raphael Hallett (Leeds) 'Invention', 'Creation' and Early Modern Laboratory Culture
Helen Hills (York) Inventio and invenzione: from saintly relic to art and back in baroque Italy
Adam Ganz (Royal Hollway) 'Close, naked, natural', How the Lens changed writing
Michael Harrigan (Warwick) Plantation, Labour and Technology in the Early Modern 'Antilles'
Katherine Hunt (London Consortium, University of London) From procedural to miscellany: how to make a firework in the mid-seventeenth century
Cesare Pastorino (Sussex) Francis Bacon and the State Promotion of Innovation: the Early Stuart Patent System
Daisy Hildyard (Queen Mary's, London) 'The Workmen could give me very little Account of any thing': John Locke and Daniel Defoe meet miners
Will Calvert (Cambridge) Invention, National Power, and the Limits of the Possible in Early Stuart England
Claire Preston (Birmingham) Big Dig: the poetics of early-modern drainage

Early Modern Libraries

18th March, 2010, University of York

Bill Sherman (York) Mapping the World of Knowledge: Hernando Colón and the Biblioteca Colombina
Lisa Skogh (Stockholm) Library of Swedish queen Hedwig Eleonora
Daniel Starza-Smith (UCL) Edward, second Viscount Conway
Hugh Adlington (Birmingham) On Donne’s Library
Piers Brown (York) On Donne’s Library