The Paris Early Modern Seminar is proud to host the first seminar for the International Consortium of Centres for Early Modern Studies (ICCEMS).

This seminar will be led by Dr. Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Paris-Nanterre) and Prof. Ladan Niayesh (Université Paris-Cité), on the Brepols series “Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Europe“.

Abstract

In this presentation, we would like to introduce the series we co-edit with Brepols publishers, “Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Europe” (https://www.brepols.net/series/PEEMB). The aim of this series is to investigate polyglot practices in early modern English literary texts by crossing perspectives in a transdisciplinary approach. Volumes in the series analyse how an English linguistic, but also social and political, and more generally cultural, identity is built by means of contact and interaction with other languages, through borrowings and translations.

We will present briefly volume 1, which was published in 2022, volume 2, which will come out later this year, and volume 3, in preparation. We will then open a discussion with the group about what polyglossia means for us who work in early modern studies, how it can help us think the triangulation between languages, lands and nations in an era of commerce, colonisation and conflict, and in particular the place of English and England within the British Isles and beyond, put in geographical and linguistic perspective with other languages and nations, near and far.

About the Speakers

Laetitia Sansonetti is Senior Lecturer in English (Translation Studies) at Université Paris Nanterre and a junior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. Her research bears on the reception of classical and continental texts in early modern England, language learning, poetry and rhetoric and questions of authorship and authority. Her current research project on translation and polyglossia in early modern England (https://tape1617.hypotheses.org/) is funded by a five-year grant from Institut Universitaire de France.

Ladan Niayesh is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Paris (ex-Paris Diderot) and a member of the LARCA research centre of the CNRS (UMR 8225). Her research focuses on Early Modern travel writing and travel drama, more specifically in connection to Muscovy and Persia. Her latest publications include Three Romances of Eastern Conquest (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Eastern Resonances (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), coedited with Claire Gallien. She currently coedits the Persian travels of the Sherley brothers with Kurosh Meshkat and Alasdair MacDonald for the Hakluyt Society.

This online seminar will take place on 16 May, 10am-11.30pm CEST (UTC +2). Register to attend.

SHAPING IDEAS: CONVERSATIONS ON THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF GILES OF ROME

Dear Colleagues,

Please find here the announcement for the first session of the online seminar on Giles of Rome, 15 December at 8pm Paris time zone (NB this is 8am 16 December in NZ).

This is a multi-lingual online seminar intended to facilitate new discussions and raise new questions concerning the political thought, context and influence of Giles of Rome. The group will focus, in particular, on philological issues and questions of historical context.

Please register through the links in the below pdf. The organisers, Chris Jones and Frédérique Lachaud, can provide texts if the papers to read in advance of the seminar.

On Friday 3 November, the Flinders University History Seminar series is pleased to welcome Dr Hazel Freestone (Independent Scholar/ Cambridge). Dr Freestone’s paper is titled: ‘A Social Revolution? Married Clergy in the Anglo-Norman Realm, 1050–1200’ .

The session is online only via TEAMS at 9am ACDT (9.30am AEDT and 10.30pm in the UK). See the below flyer for further details.

Monday 13 November, 6.00-8.30pm

6.00-6.25pm: Guest arrival and registration
6.30-7.30pm: Bill Kent Memorial Lecture
7.30-8.30pm: Light refreshments will be provided

Venue: Monash Conference Centre, Level 7, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne

Associate Professor Nick Eckstein will speak on: Time and Space in Renaissance Florence (and the Mouse in Matteo Cavalcanti’s Underpants).

Nick Eckstein taught and researched for 22 years in the History Department at the University of Sydney, where he was Cassamarca Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance History. He is also former Deborah Loeb Brice fellow (1999-2000) and Visiting Professor (2003,2006) at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Nick’s research and publications emphasise the social and cultural history of renaissance and early-modern Italy. His articles and books include a major study reconstructing the changing social context and reception of Florentine art by lay audiences in the fifteenth century, Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence (Yale University Press, 2014). More recently, he has published articles and chapters on the perception, utilisation and evolution  of urban and rural space during periods of plague crisis in early-modern Italy, and has also been writing a book on this subject.

Registrations: Please ensure you have registered via the online registration form by Wednesday 8 November 2023.

For further details, see https://www.monash.edu/prato/alumni/bill-kent-memorial-lecture

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The MEMS program at the Australian Catholic University, Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University, the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the Australian National University, the Medieval and Early Modern Centre at the University of Sydney and Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia in partnership with ANZAMEMS are delighted to host a masterclass on:

Medieval and Early Modern Sources:
Skills for reading medieval and early modern manuscripts and printed texts

This two-day masterclass will introduce postgraduate students and ECRs from across Australia and New Zealand to a range of textual sources for medieval and early modern research and provide some introductory skills training for how to identify, read and analyse these materials. The event will draw together experts in each of these fields and provide participants with opportunities to network and expand disciplinary horizons as well as develop palaeographic, reading and analytical skills. Texts will include medieval charters, sources from the State Library of Victoria’s early modern Emmerson collection, early modern German printed texts, medieval hagiographies, manuscript fragments from the Bischoff collection at Monash University’s Sir Louis Matheson Library, and more.  Participants will be brought into contact with leading scholars in medieval and early modern studies from different institutions around Australia and the UK. The masterclass is organised by a new national consortium of medieval and early modern studies centres in Australia (established in 2022), and participants will have the opportunity to engage with members of those centres (ACU, ANU, Sydney, UWA, Monash) as well as other specialists.

Confirmed presenters include: Professor Miri Rubin (QMUL); Professor Chris Ocker (ACU/University of Redlands; Dr Susanne Meurer (UWA); Dr Anne Holloway (Matheson Library, Monash); Dr Anna Welch (State Library of Victoria); Professor Ros Smith (ANU); Dr Hélène Sirantoine (University of Sydney).

DATE: Thursday 2 November and Friday 3 November 2023
VENUE: ACU, Melbourne Campus (Fitzroy/East Melbourne)
CONTACT: Megan.Cassidy-Welch@acu.edu.au 
BURSARIES: Available to assist with travel costs if required. Accommodation (1 or 2 nights), lunch, morning and afternoon teas are also provided.
ELIGIBILITY: Current ANZAMEMS members currently enrolled in a higher degree program or within 7 years of completion of a higher degree program. Independent scholars as well as those with institutional affiliation are welcome to apply. Attendance will be capped at about 15-20 participants.

APPLICATIONS should be emailed to Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch (Megan.Cassidy-Welch@acu.edu.au) and should include in one page: a statement of current HDR or ECR status; proof of current ANZAMEMS membership; statement about need/interest in this research skills training; whether a bursary is needed to support attendance; any other relevant statement re. career/candidate interruption that may be relevant to the application.

Applications should be received by OCTOBER 15 2023.

Tuesday 31 October 2023
6:30 pm (AEDST) online only
ANU Centre for Early Modern Studies

Dr Katherine Butler Schofield
Senior Lecturer, King’s College London

After more than a decade of political insecurity in Mughal India, the relative stability of the first twenty years of emperor Muhammad Shah’s reign (r. 1720–48) ushered in a significant revival of the arts at the imperial Mughal court in Delhi, Shahjahanabad. Right at the centre of this vibrant milieu was the emperor’s singing teacher and master of the imperial musicians, Anjha Baras Khan. But posterity has forgotten him. Instead, it is his rivals Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” and Firoz Khan “Adarang” whom we remember today as the greatest Indian classical musicians of the eighteenth century. Why?

This musical rivalry played out against the geopolitical backdrop of a much more tumultuous drama: what eyewitnesses called the “scattering of Shahjahanabad”. Delhi was repeatedly invaded, sacked, and occupied 1739–61, and Mughal court musicians were forced to flee to the four corners of India, where they had to seek new patrons and employ novel strategies to survive. What happened to Delhi’s musicians during this time of crisis is copiously documented in a biographical genre new to Indian musical literature at this time: the commemorative compendium of “lives”, or tazkira. In this talk, I will be looking at musicians’ biographies and genealogies in Persian, Urdu and classical Hindi as both a product of this era’s upheaval, dispersal, diversification, innovation, and anxieties; and as a record of these things. Both views give us unusual access to the history of elite artisans on the move in late Mughal India.

Dr Katherine Butler Schofield is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. Working with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s research interests lie in South Asian music, visual art, and cinema; the history of Mughal India; Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; musicians at risk; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. She has been Principal Investigator of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2011–15/16) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2018). Her books include Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (CUP, 2023), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India, with Francesca Orsini (Open Book, 2015), and Monsoon Feelings: a History of Emotions in the Rain, with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau (Niyogi, 2018).

Katherine trained as a viola player before embarking on postgraduate studies in Indian music history at SOAS University of London. She came to King’s in 2009 after a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. She was formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown.

Monash University Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) is pleased to announce their semester 2 2023 seminar series beginning 28 July (details below). For Zoom links to any sessions, or to be added to the CMRS newsletter, email:

cmrs-postgraduatecommittee@monash.edu