Monthly Archives: August 2020

ACU Medieval and Early Modern Studies Seminar Series

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at ACU are delighted to invite you to attend our next virtual seminar on Thursday 17 September at 2:00 PM AEST: “Re-Reading the abuses of the age: from seventh-century Ireland to twelfth-century France,” presented by Constant Mews (Monash).

Please email MEMS.seminar@acu.edu.au for Zoom details and to RSVP. For more information on the seminar series see here.

Parergon 37.1 preview: Reframing Feminine Modesty, Complaint, and Desire in the More Family

We asked contributors to the current issue of Parergon to give us some additional insights into their research and the inspirations for their articles. In this post, Kelly Peihopa at the University of Newcastle, Australia, discusses ‘Reframing Feminine Modesty, Complaint, and Desire in the More Family’. DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2020.0003

Kelly Peihopa began this article as her major work for part of her BA degree in the history discipline. This earlier work focused on the education of the women of Thomas More’s immediate circle, and how the More women worked within patriarchal restrictions to further their education and reputations. She became fascinated with how some early modern women overcame certain patriarchal restrictions by working through the channels of patriarchy, which enabled them to continue their education and protect their reputations; something that was unique to the More women during the early 1500s.

Because of a fascination with the More women’s history, Kelly began to work towards an honours thesis in English. She developed her paper into a wider argument to include themes such familial, religious and modesty rhetoric, as well as complaint and petitions, which were specific ways More women used their feminine voice to enable a ‘safe passage’ for their works. This research was extended to include More’s traceable women ancestors with extant literary evidence during the early modern period, which found a literary legacy was sustained by the More women for several generations. Upon earning first class honours, she was encouraged to turn her thesis into an academic paper. Once again, the work was researched anew, refurbished and reframed over several months (and with more editing than she’d like to admit), to eventually become what it is today. Her article establishes how one family of women, through the legacy of their forbear, were able to continue to pursue a humanist education and publish and profess their religion through their works. They successfully performed this under the guise of genres, such as translation, letters and religious works, through exploiting rhetorical arguments and always navigating modesty and familial tropes to frame their work. Her work also found that without the ‘protection’ of a humanist circle, their work diminished. By considering the textual oeuvre of the More women as a chronological whole, something that is not usually considered in Morean women scholarship, the far-reaching literary legacy established by Thomas More can be appreciated as a unique achievement among early modern women’s writing.

Kelly became interested in early modern women’s writing after working as a research assistant for the Early Modern Women Research Network (EMWRN), under Rosalind Smith and Patricia Pender at the University of Newcastle. Her PhD dissertation is titled ‘Tudor Women’s Prison Literature: Reception, Circulation, Attribution’, which focuses on women’s prison writing which has been omitted from the prison canon because of the variety of genres and modes used, and the volume of dubious or contested works. Kelly also works as a research assistant for the Gender Research Network at the University of Newcastle. She has published creative nonfiction articles on domestic violence in Australia in Meanjin (‘The Hands of a Woman,’ Spring 2018) and Sūdō Journal (‘Becoming a Statistic,’ 1: 2019), and in 2020, co-edited a digital edition of Mary Wroth’s Urania manuscript with Paul Salzman on EMWRN’S digital archive, The Material Cultures of Early Modern Women.

Parergon can be accessed via Project MUSE (from Volume 1 (1983)), Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Humanities Full Text (from 2008). For more information on the current issue and on submitting manuscripts for consideration, please visit https://parergon.org/

CFP Female Experience in Early Modern England

Female Experience in Early Modern England | 6-7 November 2020, University of Auckland

This two-day conference is sponsored by the Alice Griffin Fund and organised by the School of Humanities at the University of Auckland. We invite academics and postgraduate students to submit proposals for 20-minute papers on the topic of female experience in early modern England.

The last fifty years have seen an expanding interest in women’s history in the early modern period, from the everyday lives of ordinary and élite women to their artistic production and involvement, disproving Virginia Woolf’s assertion that Shakespeare’s sister ‘died young – alas, she never wrote a word’.

In 2020, this conference asks, where has this interest in female experience brought us and what are the areas that remain vibrant or underexplored? Were women the authors of their own experience, is that experience different from what scholars previously believed, and if so, how? We are seeing a surge of women in humanities disciplines, encouraging the comparison between women as ‘authors’ of their experience now and in early modern England. What does the work of emerging scholars have to contribute to the discussion of the female experience in early modern England?

Papers should address some of these questions. They may raise questions of ‘authorship’ in regards to literary or artistic production. They may consider women’s experiences of early modern life and the ways in which they or others organised that experience, in a real or representational context. We also welcome proposals for workshops that offer hands-on insight into female experience, whether performative (song, theatre, dance, games, letter writing) or practical (making medicines or cosmetics). We envisage these workshops to be either 30 minutes or 1 hour each.

We have chosen England as a topic of discussion because of its centrality in previous discussions of early modern female experience. The conference aims to challenge the ever-evolving contemporary perspective that we know all there is to know about how women lived in the past and to fashion one or two surprises. In particular, this conference aims to foster new discussions on a topic that is no longer ‘new’ but still in need of continuing study. It aims to incorporate interdisciplinary perspectives, acknowledging the multi-faceted ways in which female experience was lived and imagined. We encourage talks that engage with the practical aspects of female experience, including marriage and household management, personal care, adornment and medical care; as well as female creative and performative experiences.

The keynote speaker will be Associate Professor Sarah Ross, Victoria University Wellington, whose lecture is entitled, Woe is She: “Female Complaint” and Women’s Songbooks in Early Modern England.

We are calling for submissions by both established scholars and by PhD candidates/MA students. New Zealand speakers who are not based in Auckland may be eligible for a travel bursary. Applications for presentations from scholars based overseas via Zoom are welcome. The conference is free and we plan to offer online access.

Please submit a 150-200 word abstract and a short CV for your paper by 30 September 2020 to Susannah Whaley: swha390@aucklanduni.ac.nz. If you would like to apply for a travel bursary, please notify Susannah, who will supply further details when they are available.

Contacts:
Susannah Whaley, postgraduate coordinator: swha390@aucklanduni.ac.nz
Associate Professor Erin Griffey: e.griffey@auckland.ac.nz
Professor Tom Bishop: t.bishop@auckland.ac.nz

Parergon 37.1 preview: A Clerical View of Gender in Twelfth-Century Flanders: The Voice of Lambert of Ardres

We asked contributors to the current issue of Parergon to give us some additional insights into their research and the inspirations for their articles. In this post, Yongku Cha, Professor of History at Chung-Ang University, South Korea, discusses ‘A Clerical View of Gender in Twelfth-Century Flanders: The Voice of Lambert of Ardres’. DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2020.0000

I am currently a professor in the Department of History at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea. I earned my PhD in medieval history from the University of Passau, Germany. I have published, among others, “A Case Study of the Conflict between Husbands and Wives in the Twelfth Century: Focusing on Arnold and Beatrice of Guînes-Ardres’’ (Journal of Western Medieval History 32 (2013): 107–134), “The Relationship between Fathers and Sons in the Twelfth Century: Baldwin of Guines and His Eldest Son” (Journal of Family History 39/2 (2014): 87-100), and “Women, Marriage, and Cultural Transmission: The Marriage of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II and the Byzantine Princess Theophano (972)” (The Historical Review of Soong Sil University 37(2017), 391-423). My main research and teaching interests focus on the gender and men’s history in Medieval Europe.

My article published in Parergon 37.1 looks at the twelfth-century view on gender, focusing on the family chronicle of Guînes and Ardres (the Historia comitum Ghisnensium) written by Lambert, who worked as a household chaplain in the church of Ardres. There is still relatively little published scholarship on gender constructions of the secular aristocracy; even though Lambert is relatively well known for offering a richly detailed account of an aristocratic family in twelfth-century Flanders, there has been no research revealing his views on gender and masculinities. His duties and experiences enabled him to have personal interactions with aristocratic women and men. These secular interests and responsibilities provide insight into the aristocratic gender system such as marriage, sex, family life, conjugal relations, or affections. By disclosing Lambert’s ideas about male and female gender categories, this article will contribute to scholarship on the studies of femininities, masculinities, and gender construction in the twelfth century aristocratic family.

I have conducted much of my research by crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries and taking new approaches – these are also Parergon’s aims –, which allow an in-depth understanding of the mutual interactions between family strategies of the aristocracy and gender roles in the twelfth century. Lambert’s depictions of marriage, female and male virtues and moral weaknesses, variations in gender stereotypes, and the performance of masculinities provide interesting clues for understanding clerical ideas of medieval gender identities. Moreover, Lambert emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between men and women; readers would recognize that women have been deeply involved in the process of forming masculinities.

Based on women’s and gender studies, my research will continue to investigate modern political discourses and representations or ‘deliberate’ misrepresentations of medieval women. I intend to publish other papers on this subject, specifically considering the national appropriations of the medieval past which make use of medieval women to support nationalist ideologies in Germany, France, and Italy during the 1920s and the 1930s.

Parergon can be accessed via Project MUSE (from Volume 1 (1983)), Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Humanities Full Text (from 2008). For more information on the current issue and on submitting manuscripts for consideration, please visit https://parergon.org/

FactGrid

FactGrid is a free, multilingual, shared database for historians, a joint initiative of German research centers. The platform runs on the versatile Wikibase (like Wikidata). The data can be used freely by anyone but can be edited only by historians. At the moment there are 150,000 items in the data set and it is constantly expanding with new projects. The full database of the German National Library will be integrated into the platform.

They welcome new research projects but it is also possible to upload older datasets or migrate finished projects to the website. To browse and request an account: https://database.factgrid.de For more detailed information on the platform: https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/1591

CFP Enemies in the Early Modern World

Enemies in the Early Modern World 1453-1789: Conflict, Culture and Control, Live from the University of Edinburgh, 27-28th March 2021

From Luther’s insistence that the Pope is the antichrist, to Cortes’s justification of the conquest of Mexico on the grounds of Aztec human sacrifice, from the expulsion of Jewish people from the Iberian peninsula following the Reconquista to the subjugation and enslavement of human lives to fuel the trans-Atlantic slave trade, from Dutch trials for homosexuality in the 1730s, to accusations of witchcraft during the British Civil Wars, the conflicts and exploitations of the Early Modern World were often fueled and ‘justified’ by a belief in an enemy. Such belief systems would inspire textual, visual and auditory polemic, and propel physical action, thereby ‘othering’ people of a different religion, ethnicity, culture, dynastic allegiance, gender and sexuality into imagined enemies, justifying the need to control and inflict violence upon them. This conference, open to researchers of history, literature, visual culture, politics, theology, philosophy and archaeology etc, will explore the processes by which individuals, communities, and countries were fashioned into the role of the enemy, as well as the dreadful consequences, such as war and persecution.

By moving from the local to the national, from the national to the global, and through an interdisciplinary vantage point, we aim to reconstruct the construction of enemies in the Early Modern World. We invite papers from researchers at every stage of their academic journeys, and PhD students and Early Career Researchers are particularly encouraged to apply.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic this conference will be completely online
via a TBD conferencing platform.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to
early.modern.enemies@gmail.com along with a brief bio of circa 100
words addressed to Thom Pritchard and Eleonora Calviello by the 30th
September 2020
.

For more information see the attached flyer.



ACU Medieval and Early Modern Studies Seminar Series

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at ACU are delighted to invite you to attend our next virtual seminar on August 21 at 2:00pm AEST:

“Plague Time: Space, Fear and Emergency Statecraft in Early-Modern Italy”, presented by Nicholas Eckstein (University of Sydney).

Please find the poster for the event attached below. To RSVP for Zoom details, please email: MEMS.seminar@acu.edu.au.