Tous les articles par Emma Bartel

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.