



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:
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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
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
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).

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 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,
Room 106
43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD
Birkbeck, University of London

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.
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)
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).
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.
Séance organisée par : Université Paris Nanterre
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 February: mathilde.alazraki@hotmail.fr)
+ Zoom (free – to receive the link, please fill in the registration form by 8 February: https://forms.gle/CKrifuHPk3S5NXvG8)
My work on Anglo-Spanish cultural and political relations began with doctoral research and eventually a monograph on the marriage of Mary I and Philip II, followed by a fellowship studying cultural and intellectual exchanges. That it comes as a surprise to many people that England had a Spanish king in the mid-Tudor period and was ruled by the same monarch who thirty years later would attempt an invasion of the country with his Gran Armada is a telling reflection of how marginal and peripheral Spain and its culture have been in accounts of both the literary history and historiography of early modern England. Habsburg Spain’s hegemony in Europe in this period was not without fruit in the realms of art, literature, and culture. Multidirectional, many-layered, multi-dimensional contacts, encounters, and exchanges, through translation, peace and war, sharing and appropriating technology and material practices, produced a complex web of dynamic, shaping and determining influences. Transnational, connected, and global history approaches have complicated and undermined literary histories rooted in communities that had yet to come into being and languages whose identification with culture was merely emergent. In this presentation, I propose to present some early results from my work producing a new synthesis about England and Spain in the early modern period, which recognises that while often disavowed Hispanic worlds were nevertheless key to the emergence of many aspects of English Renaissance Culture.
Alexander Samson is Professor of Early Modern Studies in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. His research interests encompass the early colonial history of the Americas, Anglo-Spanish intercultural interactions and early modern English and Spanish drama. He has edited volumes on The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Ashgate, 2006), A Companion to Lope de Vega (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008) with Jonathan Thacker, Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance, a monographic Special Issue of Renaisance Studies (2012), and Philip IV and the World of Spain’s Rey Planeta (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming) with Stephen Hart. He has published articles and book chapters on everything from historiography and royal chroniclers in 16th century Spain to English travel writers, firearms, maps, John Fletcher, Cervantes, female Golden Age dramatists and historical fiction. His book Mary and Philip: the Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain was published by Manchester University Press in 2020. He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Hispanic Worlds in English Renaissance Culture, as well as editions of Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero and James Mabbe’s Exemplary Novels. He runs the Golden Age and Renaissance Research Seminar and directs UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.
Heidi Brayman (UCR), Soundproof: Deafness, Muteness, and Alterabilities in Early Modern England
Maison de la recherche Sorbonne nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais (75005), salle du conseil (5.30pm-7pm)
Also via Zoom (ask our secretary for link)
A religious, legal, and literary history of deafness and muteness, Soundproof considers a range of vocal silences and alternative modes of communication in early modern England, exploring the status and meaning of deafness and muteness as disability, practice, ploy, and convention in households, theaters, abbeys, and courts of law. The project engages the deeply complicated forms of representing disability in the early modern period – the moment, for example, when the assumption that the congenitally deaf are inevitably mute was at last called into question. As the pun in the title suggests, the book is also concerned with issues of evidence and proof, and it seeks to make a methodological and theoretical intervention into our understanding of historical and literary standards of evidence and argument.
Heidi Brayman is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Her first monograph, Reading Material, is a study of print, gender and literacy in early modern England; she has also co-edited three volumes, Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800; Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives; and Books in History, Books as History: New Intersections of the Material Text. A former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, she turns in her current book project to a more explicit engagement with English theatrical practice and performance, along with religious history, devotional lyric, and critical disability studies.
Books published by PEMS members in 2022 will be presented:
https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503598147-1
The volume focuses on the role of translation and lexical borrowing in the expansion of specific English lexicons (erudite, technical, or artisanal) as evidenced in printed texts from the early modern period. It considers how language shapes identity in social, religious, philosophical, artistic and literary contexts, and is in turn shaped by claims of social, religious, philosophical, artistic and literary identity.
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526164094/
This collection explores connections between the full range of the Herbert brothers’ writings and activities, despite the apparent differences both in what they wrote and in how they lived their lives. More specifically, the volume demonstrates that despite these differences, each conceived of their extended republic of letters as militating against a violent and exclusive catholicity; theirs was a communion in which contention (or disputation) served to develop more dynamic forms of comprehensiveness. The literary, philosophical and musical production of the Herbert brothers appears here in its full European context, connected as they were with the Sidney clan and its investment in international Protestantism.
Séance organisée par l’université Paris Cité (LARCA)
17h30-19h (Paris time)
Lieu: Maison de la recherche Sorbonne Université, 28 rue Serpente (75006), amphi Molinié, D035 / also via Zoom: please write to our secretary, Mathilde Alazraki, for the link (mathilde.alazraki@hotmail.fr)
In 1587 Noël Taillepied, a Franciscan friar, undertakes to write a treatise about apparitions, which he chooses to entitle Psichologie in order to rehabilitate the belief in purgatory, and consequently in the return of the souls of the deceased against the growing reformed heresy that reduces all apparitions to angels or devils and claims that miracles have ceased. But the book seems to have been published in a hurry and its publication coincides with the peak in the activity of the Holy League in Paris. Beyond mere curiosity of discovering yet another early modern treatise on the supernatural, editing Psichologie aims at unravelling Taillepied’s plagiarising techniques, his close interactions with the Parisian printers, and his possible implication in the League militancy.
Pierre Kapitaniak is professor of Early Modern British Civilisation at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. He works on Elizabethan drama as well as on the conception, perception and representation of supernatural phenomena from the 16th to the 18th century. He published Spectres, Ombres et fantômes : Discours et représentations dramatiques en Angleterre (Honoré Champion, 2008), and co-edited Fictions du diable : démonologie et littérature (Droz, 2007). He translated into French and edited Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch/ La sorcière (Classiques Garnier, 2012). He is also engaged with Jean Migrenne in a long-term project of translating early modern demonological treatises, and has already published James VI’s Démonologie (Jérôme Millon, 2010) and Reginald Scot’s La sorcellerie démystifiée (Millon, 2015). He is currently preparing the edition of Noël Taillepied’s Psichologie (1588).