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.