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SEM 14/04/26 Joint ICCEMS-PEMS seminar (online) Working with digital collections: does seeing the actual thing matter? Guillaume Coatalen (UVSQ) et Blandine Demotz (CY)

Working with digital collections: does seeing the actual thing matter?

14th April 2026 – 10:00-11:00 AM (CET) – ONLINE meet.google.com/cxb-susn-qsu

Online, an ICCEMS/PEMS Tacit Knowledge Workshop for Phd students and early career researchers with Guillaume Coatalen (UVSQ) et Blandine Demotz (CY)

The exponential growth of digital collections has radically changed research in the field of early modern manuscripts by making it possible to access an impressive number of sources on a screen. To save time, expenses, and limit our carbon footprint, it may be tempting to decide not to consult the physical objects in libraries and other repositories. Digital pictures, however, flatten manuscripts and by doing so necessarily leave out characteristics which may be crucial. In that regard, digital collections only give a partial insight into the materiality of manuscripts. This paper looks at when and why researchers must see the actual thing based on the case study of Thomas Cromwell’s correspondence.

 

Guillaume Coatalen is Professor of English studies at the University of Versailles Saint Quentin (France). He has published on a variety of topics including early modern manuscripts, translation, rhetoric, Elizabeth I’s French correspondence and Petrarchan sonnets. He is the author of Two Elizabethan Treatises on Rhetoric: Richard Rainold’s Foundacion of Rhetoricke (1563) and William Medley’s Brief Notes in Manuscript (1575) (Brill, 2018) and the co-author of Elizabeth I’s foreign correspondence: letters, rhetoric, and politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and of Translating Petrarch’s Poetry: L’Aura del Petrarca from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century (Legenda, 2020). He is completing a book on the figure of the poet in early modern plays for Manchester University Press.

 

Blandine Demotz is a PhD student at Cergy Université. Her thesis, titled “‘I require you on the kynges behalf that ye procede’: agency and State authority in Thomas Cromwell’s letters (1532-1540)” offers a rhetorical analysis of Cromwell’s correspondence and aims at understanding how the minister built his own ethos in writing, while confronting it to the actual limits of his administrative role. Blandine Demotz has published a number of articles focusing on Cromwell’s administrative and literary position, among which “Hierarchy and Diplomatic Letter Writing in Early Modern letters: The Case of an Unpublished Letter from Thomas Cromwell to Mary of Hungary”, in Reformation & Renaissance Review. She currently teaches English literature and translation at Université Lyon 3 Jean Moulin (France).

SEM 6/01/26 PEMS/ ICCEMS, Christine Sukic (Université de Reims-Champagne-Ardenne), présentation de son ouvrage Ineffable Bodies

6 février, 10h-11h30, séminaire PEMS/ ICCEMS, Christine Sukic (Université de Reims-Champagne-Ardenne), présentation de son ouvrage Ineffable Bodies – séance organisée par Paris-Cité, salle 830, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, place Paul Ricoeur, 75013

 

Dear PEMS and ICCEMS members, 

The next session of the Paris Early Modern Seminar-ICCEMS joint session, organised by Université Paris Cité, will take place in hybrid form on Friday 6 February 2026, 10-11.30AM (Paris time) on our campus, room 830, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, Place Paul Ricoeur, 75013, Paris, and online through the following link:

(https://meet.google.com/mtk-uqjj-fau)

Our speaker for this session will be Christine Sukic, who will be presenting her latest monograph, Ineffable Bodies: Heroism on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2025).

Her respondents will be Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Ladan Niayesh (Université Paris Cité).

Ineffable Bodies focuses on early modern heroism in drama through the notion of ineffability in order to define new dramatic forms. Drawing from Vladimir Jankélévitch’s studies on the ineffable, the book focuses on heroic bodies on the early modern stage as the seat of an aesthetic shift in drama: the early modern heroic body testifies to an inability to tell heroic stories. Examples are taken from plays by Shakespeare, Chapman and Daniel in which martial heroes are placed in a position where they cannot give full sway to their heroic status or are simply revealed as failed heroes. The playwrights experiment with action and favour forms that have lost their meaning or contents, stressing the mutation from the factual or the material to the immaterial and the ineffable.

 

Biography:

Christine Sukic is professor of early modern English literature and culture at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France, and is the current president of the French Shakespeare Society (Société Française Shakespeare). She has published studies on Shakespeare, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe and Samuel Daniel and has edited or co-edited eight collections on the heroic body and representations of the immaterial. She is the author of a monograph on George Chapman’s tragedies and has translated and edited Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois into French for the Pléiade series (2009). She has co-translated and co-edited Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris with A.-M. Miller-Blaise, to be published by Classiques Garnier in 2025.

 

Description:

SEM 22/01/26 Helena Taylor (Exeter) – Practising Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century French Salon

La prochaine séance de PEMS organisée par Université Sorbonne Nouvelle et Sorbonne Université aura lieu le jeudi 22 janvier de 17h30 à 19h, en salle ODG 830, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, place Paul Ricoeur, 75013.

Nous aurons le plaisir d’entendre Helena Taylor (Exeter) sur le sujet suivant 
Practising Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century French Salon”.
 
 
Abstract: Practising Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century French Salon

In this paper I will look at some examples of ‘salon writing’ — work that derived from and represents sociable intellectual contexts — to examine how they both explore and stage philosophy as a sociable practice. Looking at verse and prose by Antoinette Deshoulières (1638–94) and Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), I will argue that properties of salon writing  — such as exchange, conversation, multivocality, playfulness, humour — enable a certain set of poetics and will examine how such poetics underpin these authors’ approaches to philosophical enquiry and practice.

Helena Taylor is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter where she is currently PI on the ERC-awarded, UKRI-funded project, Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Her research focuses on intersections of literature and philosophy, socio-historical approaches to literature and the history of ideas, noninstitutional communities and cultures of learning, and inclusive methodologies that interrogate the canon and disciplinary exclusion. Her recent book, Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (OUP,2024), was awarded an honorable mention in the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender book prize.
 

SEM 13/11/25 séminaire, Mark Robson (Dundee) – “Love, for example”

SEM 13/11/25 séminaire, Mark Robson (Dundee) – “Love, for example” – séance organisée par Paris Nanterre – précédée de l’accueil des nouveaux.elles doctorant.e.s à 17h, salle ODG 317, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, place Paul Ricoeur, 75013 – 17h30-19h

Abstract

In her book Desire/Love, Lauren Berlant proposes that the example is always the problem for desire/love, always under an unbearable pressure to make material that which provokes or allows our attachments. Drawing on a range of early modern English examples, I will trace the interplay of fantasy, imagination and the complexity of the exemplary affective object’s relationship to literary form. Thinking about exemplarity in discourses of love invites attention to the tension between different modalities of idealisation, those demanded by affective investment, and that demanded by the inevitable interpenetration of content and form. 

Biography 

Professor Mark Robson is Chair of the Scottish and English Literatures panel for the Scottish Graduate School in the Arts and Humanities doctoral awards at the University of Dundee. His research can be divided into work on literature (particularly early modern); on critical theory and philosophy (particularly politics and aesthetics, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière); on drama, theatre and performance. His current work is centred on the intersections of drama, theatre and performance with philosophy and critical theory. He is interested in the creative-critical overlap (border, divide, metaphor, etc.), and with performative modes of writing. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris Nanterre for the autumn term.

CFP JE PEMS/LRS, 21 Novembre 2025, Université Paris-Cité : “Informal Forms”

David Roelands’s elephant, included in Magazin oft’ Pac-huys der loffelycker penn-const, 1617. https://manchesterarthistory.wordpress.com/2022/07/04/fieldnotes-from-the-museum-early-modern-netherlandish-calligraphy-by-niels-weijenberg/

PEMS/ LRS One-Day Joint Conference

21 November 2025

 Université Paris-Cité

Olympes de Gouges building, room 830

 “Informal Forms”

The Paris Early Modern Seminar and the London Renaissance Seminar invite contributions for their next joint conference, to be held at Université Paris-Cité on 21 November 2025.

How are we to understand the relationships between formal and informal forms? In sixteenth and seventeenth-century Anglophone and European writing and, indeed, in visual and material culture, the emphasis on highly wrought and final form coexists with forms, modes and genres that are subject to mission creep, rewriting, reordering, re-use and other forms of movement into informality. Indeed, often it is only possible to contextualise or understand wrought forms by using the more informal, intertextual or associated forms that such complete forms seem to disavow.

Relationships between formal and informal forms are everywhere. Thus, if a portrait is (often) a finished object, it can nevertheless be much more deeply intelligible if set alongside account books, notebooks, poems letters or even – in the case of Artemisia Gentileschi – a court case. If a sonnet or love lyric is a final product, then it might be copied, rewritten, extracted by Tottell or otherwise repurposed. If a Midsummer Night’s Dream is an intricate comedy, it is intertextual with materials from far across culture, remade from other forms. Moreover, many forms – journal, diary, meditation, parish record – have ab initio highly flexible horizons of expectation and understanding and might be written, rewritten and re-ordered as priorities change. Moreover, as time passes the material form of texts is changed – they are rebound, re-shaped, menaced by damage, iconoclasm, decay.

This symposium invites you to take your own research area and consider the relationships that might be covered by the term “informal forms” in early modern culture – the connection of drafting to completion; the removal or return of details, copying, redaction and missing pages. We would like you to speak on any aspect of these relationships that work for you from a beautiful gold cup delivered with an annotated or scrappy letter, a diary, commentary a painting’s owners’ documents versus the image. Any or all of these can fit the brief.

Papers will be between 15 and 20 minutes (length tbc) and we welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages. We are keen to have abstracts from historians, art historians and literary scholars. Please send an abstract of 150-200 wordsto s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk, aurelie.griffin@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr and emma.bartel@u-paris.fr by July 15, 2025. Topics we are interested in might include, but are not limited to:

  • ‘Sets’ of texts both formal and informal
  • Texts that have been deformed, wrecked and reformed
  • Texts that ‘explain’ more final and formal forms.
  • Informal forms and intertextuality or circulation
  • Informal forms and authorship
  • Informal forms and gender
  • Literary forms.

SEM 4/04/25, PEMS/ ICCEMS, Armel Dubois-Nayt (UVSQ), “Mary, Queen of Scots in the Querelle about Women’s Education”, online, 10-11.30 am

Illustration.

Mary Stuart, portrait by François Clouet (1558-1560), Royal Collection (public domain).

“Mary, Queen of Scots in the Querelle about women’s education”

Mary Stuart has been the subject of much controversy among historians since the sixteenthcentury. These debates can be explained in part by the religious or national standpoints of the authors involved, which have been discussed at length. This has not necessarily been the case of their gender biases, i.e. the way in which they consider the difference between the sexes. And yet those prejudices play a decisive role in the reconstruction of the character of the Queen of Scots and her history. The aim of this talk will be to show how discourses on the difference/inequality of the sexes, which form the querelle des femmes, can enrich our understanding, if not of this queen and her actions, then at least of how they are narrated. To do so, it will focus on one specific topic of discussion: women’s access to education. It will clarify the terms of the debate on women’s education as they were formulated in early Renaissance before turning to Mary Stuart’s contribution to the debate in her exercise book and her self-fashioning as a learned lady. Finally, it will recreate the debate on Mary’s scholarly achievements between the philogynist Brantôme and the misogynist John Knox.

Biography: Armel Dubois-Nayt is an associate professor of English at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin/Paris-Saclay. She specializes in cultural history in early modern Scotland, England and France with special emphasis on the gender controversy. She has just finished a monograph on “Mary Queen of Scots in the querelle des femmes” after co-editing several volumes on this gargantuan controversy in Europe. 

Since 2020, she has been running the AVISA project which aims at writing the history of sexual harassment before #metoo with Pr. Réjane Hamus-Vallée (UEVE). Together, they have just published Écrire l’histoire du harcèlement sexuel sur la longue durée – Nommer, dénoncer, représenter, mettre en image ou en musique, Paris, L’harmattan, (in the “des idées et des femmes” series edited by Guyonne Leduc), 2025.

This conference will take place over Zoom. The link can be obtained by sending an email to parisearlymodernseminar2023@gmail.com

SEM, 15/11/2024, 17h30-19h, MDR USN : Clotilde Thouret (Paris Nanterre), « Théâtre, prostitution, représentation(s) : quelle économie du spectacle ? » 

Le séminaire aura lieu le vendredi 15 novembre de 17h30 à 19h à la Maison de la Recherche de La Sorbonne Nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais, 75005. La séance est organisée par l’Université Paris Nanterre.

 Présentation:

Les controverses sur le théâtre, en Europe et plus encore en Angleterre, entretiennent et relancent une association topique, voire une assimilation, entre théâtre et prostitution. L’usage de la métaphore et de la figure est tel que l’on peut parler d’une « tropologie ». Cette association a souvent été relevée mais sans toujours en creuser la signification ni tenter d’en circonscrire la réalité. En reprenant textes polémiques et dramatiques, on se demandera ce qu’il en est du pouvoir révélateur du trope et de sa faculté occultante : la prostitution dit-elle quelque chose de l’expérience théâtrale ? le théâtre dit-il quelque chose de la prostitution ?

Clotilde Thouret est professeure de littérature générale et comparée à l’Université Paris Nanterre. Ses recherches portent sur le théâtre, en particulier sur le théâtre européen de la première modernité, à travers les rapports entre poétique et politique, les polémiques, les émotions esthétiques, les publics et les modes d’existence des œuvres.

Publications : Théâtre réinventé. Défenses de la scène dans l’Europe de la première modernité (Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019) ; Théâtre et scandale (Fabula, Les colloques en ligne, 2019). De 2013 à 2018, co-direction, avec François Lecercle, du projet « la Haine du théâtre » (Labex Obvil, Univ. Paris-Sorbonne), sur les controverses sur le théâtre en Europe ; Littérature et polémiques, coll. « Poétiques comparatistes », Lucie éditions, 2022.

Discutant.e.s: Yan Brailowsky et Laïla Ghermani

La séance sera disponible en hybride. Le lien peut être obtenu sur demande auprès de Louise Roszak: parisearlymodernseminar2023@gmail.com

Doctoriales de PEMS, 15/11/2024, Maison de la Recherche de La Sorbonne Nouvelle

Les doctoriales du Paris Early Modern Seminar auront lieu le 15/11 à la Maison de la Recherche de La Sorbonne Nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais. 

PROGRAMME 

Organisation: Louise Roszak, Louise MccCarthy, Johann Paccou, Alice de Nanteuil.

10h00-10h15: Accueil participants + présentations informelles

10h15-11h00: Table Ronde, présentée par Johann Paccou: Participer à une communication scientifique 

11h00-12h00: Retour expérience docteur.e.s (Emma Bartel et Mathilde Alazraki)

12h00-14h00: Déjeuner

14h00-16h00: Ateliers

  • Guillaume Coatalen: Atelier Paléographie (14H00-14h50)

  • Pause (14h50-15H00)

  • Béatrice Rouchon: Atelier Pagination des Livres Anciens: Comment s’y Retrouver?  (15h00-15h50)

  • Pause (15h50-16h00)

16h00-17h00: Présentation des nouveaux doctorants (ouvert aux EC)

Les doctoriales seront suivies d’une conférence par Clothilde Thouret (voir article supra).

SEM 28/03/2024, 17h30: Julie Vanparys-Rotondi (UCA), “Katherine Parr et son entourage féminin face aux tensions confessionnelles dans l’Angleterre du XVIème siècle”

La Réforme anglaise au féminin, Katherine Parr, Elizabeth Tyrwhit et Anne Askew

Le Paris Early Modern Seminar aura le plaisir de recevoir Julie Vanparys-Rotondi (Université Clermont-Auvergne) pour la présentation de son ouvrage La réforme anglaise au féminin – Katherine Parr, Elizabeth Tyrwhit et Anne Askew, publié aux Presses universitaires de Strasbourg en 2023.

La rencontre aura lieu de 17h30 à 19h en Salle du Conseil (Maison de Recherche de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais 75005).

Les discutant.e.s seront Aurélie Griffin (USN) et Guillaume Coatalen (CYU).

 
Présentation de l’ouvrage  La réforme anglaise au féminin – Katherine Parr, Elizabeth Tyrwhit et Anne Askew (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023)
 
Cet ouvrage étudie la figure et l’engagement de trois femmes dont le rôle fut notable, sous diverses formes, dans le mouvement de la Réforme protestante en Angleterre. Pour la première fois, sont mises en parallèle les démarches de la reine Katherine Parr (c. 1512-1548), d’Anne Askew (1521-1546) et d’Elizabeth Tyrwhit (c. 1519-1578), actrice peu connue de la Réforme anglaise et proche du mouvement puritain, que cette étude croisée permet de faire découvrir au public francophone. En effet, l’auteure entrelace les destins de ces trois femmes dans le contexte confessionnel délétère du XVIe siècle anglais, leurs témoignages de foi et leur influence auprès de leurs contemporains et au-delà.
 
Julie Vanparys-Rotondi est maîtresse de conférences au département d’études anglophones de l’université Clermont Auvergne. Elle est membre du centre de recherche de l’Institut d’histoire des représentations et des idées dans les modernités (IHRIM-UMR 5317 du CNRS). Ses travaux portent sur les questions religieuses en Angleterre au début de la période moderne. Parallèlement, elle s’intéresse à l’histoire des sciences et des pratiques agricoles dans les manuels d’agronomie anglais de la première modernité et à leurs liens avec la Réforme.

SEM: 15/02/2024, 17 h 30: “Présentation de l’édition numérique du MS 787 de Douai (Sorbonne Université, University of Victoria)”, L. Cottegnies, avec L. Fang, B. Rouchon, C. Saignol et N. Thibault (Maison recherche Sorbonne nouvelle)

La prochaine séance du Paris Early Modern Seminar aura lieu le jeudi 15 février à la Maison de la Recherche de La Sorbonne Nouvelle. Nous aurons le plaisir de recevoir l’équipe du projet d’édition numérique du manuscrit 787 de Douai (Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore) piloté par Mme la Professeure Line Cottegnies (Sorbonne Université) avec la collaboration de Côme Saignol (développeur), Béatrice Rouchon (Doctorante, SU), Ada Souchu (Masterante, SU), Nicolas Thibault (doctorant, SU), Emma Bartel (docteure, SU), John Delsinne (Doctorant, SU) et Louise Fang (MCF Sorbonne Paris Nord).

Vous trouverez le descriptif ci-dessous.

La discutante sera Charlotte Coffin (UPEC).

La rencontre aura lieu de 17h30 à 19h, le jeudi 15 février, en salle
Claude Simon (Maison de Recherche de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais 75005).

Présentation de l’édition numérique du MS 787 de la Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Douai (Sorbonne Université, University of Victoria)
Line Cottegnies, en collaboration avec Côme Saignol, Béatrice Rouchon, Ada Souchu, Nicolas Thibault, Emma Bartel, John Delsinne et Louise Fang
La Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore conserve depuis la fondation de la Bibliothèque de Douai un recueil manuscrit (sous la cote MS 787) de neuf pièces de théâtre anglaises transcrites par un scribe anonyme en 1694 et 1695, et qui provient très probablement d’une des nombreuses institutions anglaises, collèges ou monastères, qui existaient alors à Douai. Six de ces pièces sont de Shakespeare : trois comédies, Twelfth Night, As You Like It et The Comedy of Errors, suivies de trois tragédies, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar et Macbeth. Ce manuscrit présente un très grand intérêt pour les spécialistes de Shakespeare et pour les historiens étudiant la vie des catholiques anglais, les collèges de la période de la première modernité ou l’histoire du théâtre. Notre projet, commencé pendant la crise sanitaire, arrive au terme de sa première phase, la première partie des pièces étant mises à la disposition du public. Il vise à offrir une édition numérique semi-diplomatique du texte, avec un appareil critique, des six pièces de Shakespeare dans un premier temps (seconde livraison des trois pièces restantes, printemps 2024). L’équipe du projet, fruit d’une collaboration entre Sorbonne Université, l’Université de Victoria (Canada) et la Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, est dirigée par Line Cottegnies, et composée au 1er janvier 2023 de: Emma Bartel (Docteure, SU), John Delsinne (Doctorant, SU), Louise Fang (MCF Sorbonne Paris Nord), Béatrice Rouchon (Doctorante, SU), Côme Saignol (développeur), Ada Souchu (Masterante, SU), Nicolas Thibault (Doctorant, SU).
En vous souhaitant une excellente semaine,

CFP: LRS/ PEMS One-day Conference, “London Locations”, 14 June 2024, Birkbeck

London Locations: Urban Geography, Creative Opportunities and Literary Representations

London Renaissance Seminar / Paris Early Modern Seminar One-day Conference

14 June 2024

Room 106

43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Birkbeck, University of London

Hand-coloured map of London cut from 1635 edition of Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitatis Orbis Terrarum.  MAP L85c no.27 (Digital Image File 3371). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. For better image resolution, view the image in LUNA.

Source: Civitates orbis terrarum. Public Domain Mark 1.0 https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/view-of-london-in-civitates-orbis-terrarum

 

What did London locations mean to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people, and what do they mean to contemporary scholars?

Exploring both aspects of London’s places, this one-day conference considers the many meanings of London’s places for literary and cultural research. As a hugely expanding metropolis and the centre of printing, law, playing and the court as well as offering key opportunities to clerics and religious dissidents, London locations can be significant in many ways. Please tell us about well-known and notorious places – St Paul’s, the playhouses, the court – or about corners and streets we have forgotten, misunderstood and overlooked. You might want to find out more about where your author landed, how she lived in Cheapside, Stepney or Edmonton; how a printer worked; where ballads were sold, how a comedy uses London’s streets. You might want to tell us about the City of London or its suburbs and close villages, and speak about London’s evolving geography and architecture before and after the Great Fire. How did artists and writers inhabit its streets and how was their work inspired by it? Which London Locations facilitated the creation of networks for artists? We are keen to hear about primary material and located research as we think about whether London is a cosmopolis, global centre, birthplace of empire.

At the same time, we want to know how we should approach these London locations and we welcome papers considering how we should theorise London’s places and what London’s locations suggest about its place in the world.

Papers will be between 15 and 20 minutes (length tbc) and we welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages. We are keen to have abstracts from historians, art historians and literary scholars. Please send an abstract of 150-200 words stating the location or locations you explore, the main terrain of your argument and what you want to discuss and a short biographical note, to s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk, e.lauenstein@bbk.ac.uk and aurelie.griffin@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr by Friday 5 April 2024.

 

jeudi 11 mai 2023, 17h30-19h, Victoria Moul (UCL), Protestant poetics, c. 1550-1650: the sixteenth-century transformation of Latin verse and its impact on English poetry

Séance organisée par : Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3

Lieu: Maison de la recherche Sorbonne nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais (75005), salle du conseil + Zoom (ask our secretary, Mathilde Alazraki, for the link: mathilde.alazraki@hotmail.fr) 

Protestant poetics, c. 1550-1650: the sixteenth-century transformation of Latin verse and its impact on English poetry
 
The lively debate about English prosody, focused in particular upon the decorum of rhyme and the role of quantitative metrics, is a well-known feature of late Elizabethan literary criticism. But the intense interest in form and metre at this period, which culminates in the metrical variety and pronounced innovation of the Sidney Psalter and, ultimately, in the achievement of Herbert’s Temple, sits within, and emerges from, a geographically wider and chronologically precedent Latin phenomenon. Although it has gone unremarked in modern scholarship, the range of available forms and metres for Latin verse underwent very rapid change in the second half of the sixteenth century, leading to an explosion in the possibilities especially for Latin lyric. This paper, drawing extensively upon both printed and manuscript sources, will offer an overview of this revolution in Latin poetics, while also suggesting some of the most important points of contact between formal developments in English and in Latin verse. Works mentioned or discussed are likely to include those of Walter Haddon, Abraham Fraunce, Philip and Mary Sidney, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Abraham Cowley.
 
Victoria Moul is Reader in Early Modern Latin and English at University College London. She has published widely on classical, early modern and modern poetry in English and Latin, with particular expertise in the bilingual literary culture of early modernity. Her most recent book in this field is A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Literary Culture in Early Modern England, published last year by Cambridge University Press.

Vendredi 14 avril 2023, 16h30-18h: Janelle Jenstad (University of Victoria, Canada), Early Modern Stage Directions and the Encoded Playbook: Text or Markup?

Séance conjointe PEMS / ShakeS (Shakespeare en Sorbonne), organisée par : Sorbonne Université

Lieu: Maison de la recherche de Sorbonne, rue Serpente (75006), salle D 323. Also on Zoom – please write to our secretary for the link: mathilde.alazraki@hotmail.fr )

“Early Modern Stage Directions and the Encoded Playbook: Text or Markup?”

How we encode, render, and count stage directions in a digital edition depends on the relationship between stage directions and the rest of the text. Are stage directions paratexts or are they part of the text of the playbook? What information do we need to capture when we encode stage directions? Where and how should we display them in our digital interface? And how should we number them in order to make them linkable and citable? This paper begins by showing the shifting placement of stage directions relative to the text block in the period 1500 to 1700 and briefly summarizing the recent burst of scholarship on stage directions, their purpose, authorship, and intended user. Then the paper turns to the challenge of encoding stage directions in the XML markup language of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and reflects on the applicability of the <stage> element specification to early modern drama. Finally, the paper turns to how the Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) project proposes to handle the rendering and numbering of stage directions both in our digital editions and in the LEMDO Hornbooks print-on-demand series. (This paper draws on research jointly conducted with Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award student Mahayla Galliford.)

Janelle Jenstad is Professor of English at University of Victoria. She directs The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) and Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO), and co-coordinates The New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE) and Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE). With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). With Kaethler, she is co-general editing the MoEML Mayoral Shows Anthology (MoMS). She is editing in particular John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 and 1633 texts) for MoEML; The Merchant of Venice with Stephen Wittek for the NISE; and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, Scholarly Editing, and Digital Studies/Champs Numeriques. Chapters appear in Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge).

 

vendredi 10 mars 2023, 17h30-19h, Harry Newman, “Character, Reproduction, and Authorship in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale”

Séance organisée par : Université Versailles St Quentin (Paris Saclay)

Lieu : Sorbonne Université, rue de la Sorbonne (75005), salle F671 (free – if you are planning to attend please send a message to our secretary, Mathilde Alazraki, by 8 March: mathilde.alazraki@hotmail.fr)

+ Zoom (free – to receive the link, please fill in the registration form by 8 March: https://forms.gle/kAwQTV7cDgbtbFFr9

There is still a widespread belief that towards the end of his career Shakespeare turned away from radical experiments with character (especially what is often called “inwardness”), adjusting his methods to privilege instead plot, action, and—as Anne Barton put it forty years ago—“the impersonal quality of a moment of dramatic time.” In this talk, I want to offer a reading of The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610) that puts a new spin on the debate about the place of character in “late” Shakespeare, exploring the play’s role in the treatment of Shakespeare the author as a character in literary history. Focusing on notions of reproduction and retrospection, I suggest that the tragi-comedy is central to the historical and enduring characterisation of Shakespeare as an immortal father of literature whose “dead likeness”—in Paulina’s phrase, describing Hermione’s statue—can be found in his plays. Most significantly, The Winter’s Tale shaped the bookish staging of Shakespeare as a deceased author (“the late” Shakespeare) in the influential opening leaves of the volume whose 400th anniversary we are celebrating this year, the First Folio of 1623.

Harry Newman is a senior lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on theatre and book history, gender and sexuality, and the history of medicine and technology. His first monograph, Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama, was published by Routledge in 2019, and he has edited special journal issues on “Metatheatre and Early Modern Drama” for Shakespeare Bulletin (vol. 36, no. 1, 2018; co-edited with Sarah Dustagheer) and on “Character Beyond Shakespeare” for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (vol. 21, no. 2, 2021). He is currently working on an alternative history of character in early modernity, and writing the introduction to the next Oxford World Classics edition of The Winter’s Tale.

Séminaire interuniversitaire sur la première modernité britannique (1500-1700)