Tyndale’s Quiddities – “They nosel them in sophistry”
The Independent Works of William Tyndale and his Theology
Tyndale Society Oxford International Conference
Hertford College, Oxford
1-3 October, 2015

This conference will examine every aspect of Tyndale’s thinking on education and theology in his time, as evidenced through his ‘independent’ writings: his prologues, introductions, glosses, comments and polemical works. In his Obedience, Tyndale writes about how those who show a genuine interest in the Word of God, are kept away from it by the Church. The Church authorities, he argues, needlessly impose the learning of philosophical distinctions before allowing anyone proper access to the Bible: ‘What wonderful dreams have they of their predicaments, universals, second intentions, quiddities, haecceities and relatives.’ The terms he refers to here belong to the scholastic and nominalist vocabulary of those who considered themselves as custodians of the Scripture. In their discourse, the Latin word quidditas refers to what any particular substance or being has in common with others, whereas haecceitas refers to its ‘this-ness’, i.e. what makes it unique. Although both these Latin concepts were used by Tyndale (and Erasmus before him) with a certain degree of irony, they can be applied to his own writings when we examine the philological, moral and spiritual insights he borrows from and/or shares with others, as well as those that make him different.

Papers that deal with these issues and their historical context are welcomed. Abstracts of maximum 150 words to be sent for the attention of: Professor Guido Latré, University of Louvain-la-Neuve, tynconf@gmail.com by 15th February, 2015.

For more on the Tyndale Society, please visit: www.tyndale.org

Magic and Intellectual History
CREMS, University of York
Thursday 5 March, 2015

Keynote speaker: Dr Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck)

This symposium will explore the place of magic in the intellectual culture of early modern England and Europe. It will focus on how magic was perceived and understood in philosophical, religious and scientific thought, and the ambivalence that surrounded it as topics of scholarship.

Papers might attend to the following:

• How did early modern thought accommodate magic into its disciplines?
• Why was magic the object of so much ‘elite’ scientific and philosophical thought?
• Magic and the study of nature
• Magic and the ineffable
• Redefining the parameters of magic
• Magic and religion
• The occult and hidden operations of nature
• Scepticism and magical thought
• Magic and language / magic and metaphor
• Literature and the portrayal of magic
• Magic and the devil
• Magicians and their day-jobs

Abstract deadline: 15 October, 2014 (c. 250 words)

Contact: Kevin Killeen, kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk

This symposium is part of a diffuse and ongoing Thomas Browne Seminar that has digressed quite far: http://www.york.ac.uk/english/news-events/browne.

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.

Object Emotions, Revisited: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Yale University, New Haven, CT
February 20-21, 2015

Keynote speaker: Spyros Papapetros (Princeton U)

Organizing Committee: Padma Maitland (UC Berkeley); Christopher P. Miller (UC Berkeley); Marta Figlerowicz (Yale U); Ksenia Sidorenko (Yale U); Emma Natalya Stein (Yale U)

“Object Emotions” continues a critical dialogue about new directions in humanities research and theory that began at UC Berkeley in 2013. This conference is inspired by the recent heightened attention to objects and emotions as new points of entry into history, literature, art, architecture, area studies, and the social sciences. We aim to foster interdisciplinary reflections about the critical uses of thing theory, affect theory, the histories of emotions, and new materialism. We also want to study how these discourses might benefit from being set in conversation with each other.

Last year, these questions inspired papers on, among many other topics, forms of animism in fourteenth-century England, the role of tiles in Taiwanese architecture, representations of churches in Willa Cather, oral accounts of labor in factories in India, and the songs of Kylie Minogue. This coming conference seeks to be similarly diverse and experimental in the kinds of approaches it brings together. By exploring emotions and objects in conjunction with each other we hope to bring out the shared stakes of these scopes of critical inquiry, as well as the divergences among the ways feelings and things are studied in particular disciplines.

Questions we want to ask include, but are not limited to, the following: How is the task of describing emotions within the context of a poem different from describing them within the context of a painting or a temple? How do the current fields of affect theory, thing theory, and the history of emotions participate in the much longer history of debates about the subjective and the objective? How do emotions and the bodies experiencing them relate to each other? Are there cultural differences in the way objects and emotions are defined and assessed? What does it mean to attribute feelings to an inanimate object, or even to describe this object as the cause or inspiration of a feeling? Do feelings have an animating force? How does the critical framing of scale—the microscopic, the individual, the human, the social, the global—change the way we pursue questions about objects and emotions?

The conference will take place at Yale on February 20th and 21st, 2015. Participants will include both graduate students and faculty members. We welcome papers that address any of the questions described above, or related ones, with reference to the bodies of theory shared across disciplines or to individual works of literature, art, or architecture. Please submit 250-word abstracts to Padma Maitland at padmamaitland@berkeley.edu by November 15, 2014.

Letters & Letter Writing, Signed, Sealed, Delivered
Lisbon, Portugal
22–24 March, 2015

In the eighteenth century, the letter, which had been the foremost medium of long-distance communication since antiquity, came to be considered as a particularly intimate, natural, and authentic form of expression and communication, capable of providing unadulterated insights into the writer’s mind. Epistolary novels dominated the literary market, and the letters of celebrated public figures became equally popular reading material. ‘In a man’s letters, you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process’, Samuel Johnson wrote in a letter to Hester Thrale in 1777. Today, this idealisation of the letter’s natural spontaneity and authenticity seems naïve at best. Letters can be manipulated as well as manipulative; they can be intercepted, censored, or fatally misread; a letter-writer might engage in histrionic self-dramatisation or active deception; genuine epistolary expression might be compromised by linguistic, social, cultural, sexual, and moral conventions alike. Letters can be almost completely impersonal, as in the case of spam mail, business communications, bills, circulars, or newsletters. And, of course, even when a correspondent believes himself or herself to be completely genuine at the moment of writing a letter, the recipient might still read a profoundly unreliable document, since the fixed materiality of the letter clashes with the mutability of the human mind and heart.

Letters are central to research in many disciplines yet have rarely been addressed in a genuinely multi-disciplinary way. The first interdisciplinary conference on letters and letter writing opened up a number of interesting avenues of inquiry. From Roman epistles to neo-epistolarity; from high Victorian fiction to literary modernism; from concentration camps to asylums; the letter has a bewildering variety of functions, forms and meanings. We would like to continue this dialogue by opening up a call for presentations around issues arising out of this discussion.

Proposals of 300 words are invited for this inter-disciplinary conference on the following themes for any historical period or geographical location:

• What is a letter?
• Social class or status and letter writing
• The materiality of letters and letter-writing: letters on ostraca (potsherds), tablets, papyri, vellum; handwritten letters versus typewritten letters; the significance of stamps, ink, envelopes, writing-desks and other paraphernalia of epistolary communication
• Love letters / hate mail
• Dear John…
• Letters to oneself
• Open letters
• Famous letter writers, for example Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thackeray, Hardy, Eliot, Trollope, Wilkie Collins
• The epistolary novel
• Letters in literature
• Letters in other art forms (e.g. letters in songs, envelope art)
• Methods and networks of delivery/postal services?
• Letters versus conversations
• Letters and posterity
• Communication across space and time
• The role of letters in doing business
• Letters in the internet age and digital letters
• Letters and authorship
• Editorial decisions in collecting letters
• Letters as historical data
• Methods of epistolary research

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 31 October 2014. All submissions are minimally double blind peer reviewed where appropriate. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 23 January 2015. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words.
Emails should be entitled: Letters2 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Linda McGuire: linda.mcguire@nullescdijon.eu
Rob Fisher: letters2@nullinter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the At the Interface programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.