Teaching and Learning in Early Modern England: Skills and Knowledge in Practice
University of Cambridge
1-2 September, 2016

Organisers: Jennifer Bishop and John Gallagher

From the workshop to the schoolroom, teaching and learning were everyday activities in early modern England. But who learnt what, from whom, and where? How did knowledge transmission work in practice? And what did it mean to be educated, to be skilful, in a rapidly changing society? This conference aims to bring together scholars working on the transmission of knowledge and skills in order to ask new questions about the educational cultures of early modern England.

What was being taught in early modern England?
Scholarship on artisanal and technical knowledge has pointed the way towards a history of education and knowledge transfer not limited by the walls of educational institutions. This history can bring together the studies of literacy and language, of artisanal and technical crafts, of science and medicine, of print, fashion, and commerce.

Where did teaching and learning happen?
Outside established educational institutions lay vibrant cultures of knowledge transmission and exchange. This conference is interested in sites where knowledge was transmitted formally or informally, from workshops to schoolrooms and printing houses to coffee houses. What was the role of location, neighbourhood, and community in the circulation of knowledge? How did material environments interact with learning processes?

Who was a teacher?
Who were the masters, teachers, tutors, and experts — male and female, English and immigrants — who transmitted knowledge and skills in early modern England? How did masters and teachers establish their technical or pedagogical authority, and how did they advertise or compete with one another? Can we reconstruct networks of knowledge, communities of teachers? Do our historiographies do justice to all those who performed educational labour? This conference hopes to consider ushers, technicians, servants, and labourers alongside masters and tutors.

How were skills and knowledge taught and transmitted?
Learning is more than an intellectual experience. What were the physical, oral, and sensory realities of early modern learning? In artisanal and academic situations, how was embodied knowledge taught and transmitted? What was the role of the oral and the verbal in the transmission of knowledge? How can scholars access the experiences of teachers and learners in early modern England?

The deadline for abstracts is 1 April, 2016. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to teachingandlearning2016@gmail.com.

The Royal Palace in the Europe of Revolutions
Centre André Chastel, Paris, France
28-29 October, 2016

Organized by Basile Baudez and Adrián Almoguera

Since the publication of Nikolaus Pevsner’s History of Building Types in 1976, architectural historians have been alert to the importance of typologies for rethinking their discipline. As analyzed by Werner Szambien or Jacques Lucan, thinking through types allowed for the articulation of concepts of convenance, character and composition in both public and private commissions. Along with metropolitan churches and royal basilicas, in ancien régime Europe princely palaces represented the most prestigious program an architect could expect.

For a period in which the divine right of kings was being called into question, however, what happened to the physical structures of royal or princely power, symbol of political authority and dynastic seats? Did the national models of the Escorial, Versailles, Het Loo or Saint James palaces still hold, even in light of new models made available through the publication of archeological discoveries in Rome or Split?

The second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century represent a moment of intense construction or reconstruction of the principal European palaces, from Caserta to Buckingham Palace, Saint-Petersburg to Lisbon, Versailles to Coblenz. This trend, addressed by Percier and Fontaine in their Résidences des souverains de France, d’Allemagne, de Russie, etc. (1833), took place in a Europe that was undergoing political developments that altogether changed the nature and symbolic structure of princely power.

This symposium, focused on Europe from roughly 1750 to 1850, aims to interrogate the manner in which architects and their patrons integrated the changing concepts of character in architecture and symbolic place of dynastic palaces, reconciling them with theory and/or practice through rethinking issues of distribution, construction, environmental situation, décor, function, reuse of interpretations of printed or drawn sources.

Submissions of 500 words (maximum) should be sent before May 1, 2016 to basile.baudez@gmail.com and af.almoguera@gmail.com.

ANZSA 2016: Shakespeare at the Edges
University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ
17-19 November, 2016

The Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA) calls for papers for its biennial conference Shakespeare at the Edges. We meet at the edge of Shakespeare’s World―12,000 miles from Shakespeare’s Globe. The location of the conference is a chance in the quadricentennial year to think about “edges” in Shakespeare from a wide range of perspectives. Papers might consider (but not feel restricted to) the following:

• Does it mean anything to read/perform Shakespeare at the edges? Does location continue to make a difference?
• Does 2016 represent an edge in Shakespeare Studies? Where have we come to over four hundred years and where should we go to next? Are some lines of inquiry leased out? Are others opening up in, say, performance studies, digital/media approaches, new archival studies?
• How does thinking about the edges (paratexts) of the play text or the stage enrich understanding of early modern theatricality?
• What happens if we place Shakespeare at the edge and place other writers at the centre? Should we reshape our sense of the Early Modern?
• Is Shakespeare edgy? Does he explore “edges” as some have claimed? Where and how is he edgy, and where does he play it safe?

The Conference will feature plenary and panel sessions, live performance and film screenings. Conference highlights include keynote addresses by Lisa Hopkins (Shakespeare on the Edge, 2005, and Renaissance Drama on the Edge, 2014); and Margaret Jane Kidnie (Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 2009, and Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. with Sonia Massai, 2015); and a special performance for delegates of Regan Taylor’s commedia-inspired Maori adaptation: Solothello. Proposals for panels, papers, and interactive workshops are all welcome.

Inquiries and proposals should be sent to: anzsa2016@waikato.ac.nz by July 1, 2016.

Proposals of 200 words should include a 50-word bio noting institutional affiliations (if any). Research Higher Degree students will be invited to submit their paper in advance for the Lloyd Davis Memorial Prize for best postgraduate paper. The best paper will receive an award and scholarly mentoring from a senior member of ANZSA. Details for the prize, and notification of a professional seminar for grad/post grad researchers on the afternoon of November 16, will be circulated later.

Mark Houlahan, English Programme, University of Waikato
ANZSA President and Conference Convenor: maph@waikato.ac.nz

43rd Annual Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies
Vatican Film Library, Saint Louis University
14-15 October, 2016

Guest Speaker
Lowrie J. Daly, S.J., Memorial Lecture on Manuscript Studies:
Madeline H. Caviness(Mary Richardson Professor Emeritus, Tufts University): “Medieval German Law and the Jews: The Sachsenspiegel Picture-Books”

The Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies is the longest running annual conference in North America devoted exclusively to medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies. Organized by the Vatican Film Library in conjunction with its journal, Manuscripta, the two-day program each year offers a variety of sessions addressing the production, distribution, reception, and transmission of pre-modern manuscripts, including such topics as paleography, codicology, illumination, textual transmission, library history, provenance, cataloguing, and others.

Paper or session proposals are invited for the 43rd Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies. Proposals should address the material aspects of late antique, medieval, or Renaissance manuscripts. Papers are twenty minutes in length and a full session normally consists of three papers. Submissions of papers may address an original topic or one of the session themes already proposed. Submissions of original session themes are welcome from those who wish to be organizers.

Please submit a paper or session title and an abstract of not more than 200 words by 15 March 2016 via our online submission form. Those whose proposals are accepted are reminded that registration fees and travel and accommodation expenses for the conference are the responsibility of speakers and/or their institutions. For more information, contact Erica Lauriello, Library Associate Sr for Special Collections Administration, at 314-977-3090 or vfl@slu.edu.

Seafaring: An Early Medieval Conference on the Islands of the North Atlantic
University of Denver, Denver, CO
3-4 November, 2016

Conference Website

Seafaring: an early medieval conference on the islands of the North Atlantic is a three-day national conference that brings together scholars of early medieval Ireland, Britain, and Scandinavia to imagine cooperative, interdisciplinary futures for the study of North Atlantic archipelagos during the early medieval period. Seafaring invites proposals for two kinds of sessions, seminars and workshops/forums, that will help imagine more collective and cooperative futures for scholars of the so-called “British” archipelago and/or reinvigorate the interdisciplinary mandate of early medieval studies.

Designed less around traditional conference presentations than as a “workspace,” Seafaring: an early medieval conference on the islands of the north Atlantic invites proposals that will engage participants in mini-tutorials, masterclasses, writing workshops, and learning laboratories—all of which are designed to widen their linguistic competence, interdisciplinary methods, geographic familiarity, and temporal scope, within and beyond the early medieval period.

The primary workspace for this conference will be an eight-to-twelve-person seminar. Seminars will meet for two days of the conference in order to foster extended discussion. Seminar organizers may wish to ask participants to read their papers or summarize pre-circulated writing. Either way, the emphasis of the seminar is on protracted, constructive discussion: of an individual’s paper, of connections between papers, and of the seminar topic. As a format that takes up some but not all of the conference, the seminar allows each participant to be a full member of one seminar and to sample others during remaining time blocks.

Individuals who would like to participate in a seminar should submit one-page paper proposals directly to the seminar organizers by March 15, 2016.

Fostering truly collaborative and interdisciplinary work across the early medieval North Atlantic often requires scholars to continuously expand already highly-developed expertise in methodology, languages, or discipline. Such efforts are often time consuming and proceed in autodidactic isolation. A scholar of Old English, for example, may find herself wanting to work with medieval Welsh or Irish or gain facility with the language of archaeological reports. We thus seek proposals for one-to-two hour workshops and forums in which participants share and learn from one another’s expertise in order to broaden their awareness and understanding of other islands of the North Atlantic.

Submit your proposal for masterclass, workshop, mini-tutorial, or other format for active learning to SeafaringConference2016@gmail.com, subject line: “Workshop Submission”

Please include 1) a seminar/workshop cover sheet, 2) brief (100-word) workshop abstract followed by 3) a one-page description that includes session length, format, texts (if applicable), and goals. Workshop/Forum proposals are due March 15, 2016.