“The Affective Politics of Fear in Early Modern Spain: The Recycling of an Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory into an Anti-Muslim One”, Professor Francois Soyer

Date: Wednesday August 24
Time: 12:00-2:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney

This work examines how the study of emotions can help us understand the appeal of conspiracy theories and how they are exploited by governments and elite institutions to provoke fear and forge collective identities. It focuses on a particular conspiracy theory in early modern Spain: that of a vengeful Muslim doctor known as el vengador who systemically murdered Christian patients. It argues that the myth was in fact a clumsy recycling of a well–established anti-Semitic myth and that it also built upon existing anxieties about medical treatment. The libel of medical murder was part of an ‘affective politics of fear’ in which the discourse of hate was instrumentalized by sections of the ruling hierarchy and polemicists to mobilize early modern Iberians against certain groups designated as a threat. Jews and Muslims became negative reference groups, equal objects of fear and anxiety whose role was interchangeable in order to formulate a normative collective identity.

Francois Soyer is an Associate Professor in Late Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Southampton and a Partner Investigator of the Centre for the History of Emotions. His research focuses on anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim propaganda produced between 1450 and 1750.

Francois Soyer (University of Southampton): “The Affective Politics of Fear in Early Modern Spain: The Recycling of an Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory into an anti-Muslim one.”

Date: 12 August, 2016
Time: 12:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33, The University of Western Australia
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/the-affective-politics-of-fear-in-early-modern-spain-the-recycling-of-an-anti-semitic-conspiracy-theory-into-an-anti-muslim-one/

This work examines how the study of emotions can help us understand the appeal of conspiracy theories and how they are exploited by governments and elite institutions to provoke fear and forge collective identities. It focuses on a particular conspiracy theory in early modern Spain: that of a vengeful Muslim doctor known as el vengador who systemically murdered Christian patients. It argues that the myth was in fact a clumsy recycling of a well-established anti-Semitic myth and that it also built upon existing anxieties about medical treatment. Sara Ahmed’s research on modern British society has demonstrated the role played by hate and fear in the creation of collective identities by creating boundaries with ‘others’ who are constituted as a ‘threat’ to the existence. Likewise, the libel of medical murder was part of an ‘affective politics of fear’ in which the discourse of hate was instrumentalised by sections of the ruling hierarchy and polemicists to mobilize early modern Iberians against certain groups designated as a threat. Jews and Muslims became negative reference groups, equal objects of fear and anxiety whose role was interchangeable in order to formulate a normative collective identity.

Francois Soyer is an Associate Professor in Late Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, UK, and a Partner Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800. His research focuses on anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim propaganda produced between 1450 and 1750.

Dr Sarah Goldmsith (York University), “We have both of us suffered a good deal’: Nostalgia, Melancholy and Death on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour.”

Date: 16 August, 2016
Time: 1:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33 (first floor, Arts Building), The University of Western Australia
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/we-have-both-of-us-suffered-a-good-deal-nostalgia-and-melancholy-on-the-eighteenth-century-grand-tour/

The emotional dimension of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour has rarely been considered, yet the letters, diaries and publications of travellers and their correspondents offer a rich insight into eighteenth-century emotional culture and expectations, ranging from expressions of love, jealousy, grief and mirth. This paper will explore the emotional strains and states caused by travel, separation and distance through probing the complex narrations surrounding nostalgia, melancholy and death. While tracing how numerous travel discourses engaged with contemporary theoretical understandings, my paper will also consider the influences of age, social status and gender in created differing standards of emotional expression.

Sarah Goldsmith completed her AHRC-funded PhD, ‘Danger, Risk-taking and Masculinity on the British Grand Tour to the European Continent, c.1730-1780’ at the University of York in November 2015. She has since spent a year as an Associate Tutor with the History Department at York, and will be starting a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship with the University of Leicester in October 2016. This will involve a new project, ‘Embodying the Aristocrat: A History of the Eighteenth-Century Elite Male Body’.

Dr Miranda Stanyon (King’s College, London), “Educating Edmund Burke: Music and the Incorrigibility of Eros in ‘Samson’s Feast’.”

Date: 6 September, 2016
Time: 1:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33 (first floor, Arts Building), The University of Western Australia
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/educating-edmund-burke-music-and-the-incorrigibility-of-eros-in-samson-s-feast/

As a student at Trinity College Dublin, the young Edmund Burke had a passion for extracurricular learning, training himself as a rhetorician and theorist of the passions in an ‘Academy of Belles-Letters’ that was a space of both male sociability and self-education. This paper uses the idea of ludic poetry – educative, playful, exploratory, performative – to examine a little-studied ode from this period attributed to Burke, ‘To Dr H——n’ (1748). Thought to be addressed to the philosopher Francis Hutcheson, the poem is largely and curiously a meditation on love and a retelling of the story of Samson and Delilah. The biblical story had been famously reimagined in Milton’s closet-drama Samson Agonistes, and in 1748 Dublin audiences had recently seen it adapted for the stage in Handel’s oratorio Samson. Burke may well have known and responded to these performances. Most prominently, though, his ode is a parody of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Music (1697). It is thus an implicit engagement with the music ode tradition and its discourse on the passions. Central to the passions of the poem are questions of sound, stoicism, and seduction which preoccupied the young Burke, and which resonate with his later life as a theorist of the sublime, statesman, and orator.

Dr Miranda Stanyon studied music and arts at The University of Melbourne before coming to London in 2010 to undertake a doctorate in English literature at Queen Mary University of London. After spending two years as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, she joined King’s College London in September 2015.

Dr Matthew Champion (University of Cambridge), “Liturgical Narrative and Emotion in Fifteenth-Century Ghent.”

Date: 6 September, 2016
Time: 2:15pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33 (first floor, Arts Building), The University of Western Australia
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/liturgical-narrative-and-emotion-in-fifteenth-century-ghent/

On Saint George’s Day, Sunday April 23, 1458, the Duke of Burgundy Philip le Bon entered Ghent for the first time since the city’s crushing defeat by Burgundian forces at Gavere on July 23, 1453. The Duke’s long absence from the city was transformed into triumphal presence in an elaborately constructed entry ritual. Crucial to this ritual were the emotional transformations evoked by the deployment of sacred narrative on the city’s streets. Writing an emotional history of the Ghent entry, this paper will examine the ways in which this ritual transformation was mediated in chronicle reports of the entry, and the ways in which the emotional structures of the liturgy provided a framework for negotiating change in fifteenth-century Ghent.

Dr Matthew Champion is currently the Jeremy Haworth Research Fellow in History at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. His research spans the history of liturgy and emotions, early witchcraft theory, calendars and chronology, civic ritual, and relationships between time and visual and musical cultures in the Burgundian Low Countries. His current project on the sounds of time interprets the advent and spread of musical clocks in Europe and beyond from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

Free public lecture hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800) / Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group / Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (UWA):

“Anger, Envy and Hatred: “Jewish Emotions” in Early Modern European anti-Semitic Polemics” Dr Francois Soyer (University of Southampton, UK)

Date: Wednesday 10 August, 2016
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Austin Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, The University of Western Australia
Registration: No RSVP required.
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/anger-envy-and-hatred-jewish-emotions-in-early-modern-european-anti-semitic-polemics

This lecture examines the role played by emotions in how the figure of the Jew was perceived and represented by early modern anti-Semitic polemicists. It argues that we urgently need to re-examine and nuance the existing perception of the early modern period as one of bland continuity in European anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic polemics and discourse with the medieval period. With the advent of the printing press, the consequent mass production of books and pamphlets and increased lay literacy, a new type of vernacular polemical literature appeared in early modern Europe alongside the older conversionist literature. These new vernacular polemics were no longer concerned with the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Rather their explicit objective was to lobby secular and ecclesiastical powers to take action against Jews (usually persecutory legal measures or expulsions) by actively promoting fear and hatred of Jews amongst the lay population. The History of Emotions can provide us with a conceptual framework that will help us understand how and why the discourse of anti-Jewish hatred was altered and adapted by authors from Protestant northern Germany to Catholic Portugal to target their new readers.

“The use of the term ‘freedom’ in diplomatic discourse of the Renaissance Dubrovnik”, by Dr Valentina Zovko (University of Zadar, Croatia)

Date: 23 August, 2016
Time: 6:00-7:00pm
Venue: Fox Lecture Theatre (G.59, ground floor, Arts building), University of Western Australia
RSVP: This is a free events, but RSVPs are requested: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/zovko

This lecture analyses the appearance and usage of the term “freedom” in speeches given by the Dubrovnik’s Renaissance ambassadors. Its meaning can be analysed over a longer period of time, depending on the person it addressed, the purpose it had to serve, and situations in which it appeared. Freedom speeches represent a permanent feature of the period. They were used to send messages of the community’s self-perception from the town leaders’ point of view. The government created an image of the city and used it for political purposes, always adapting it to specific social and cultural contexts. Written documents that witness Dubrovnik’s history confirm that the term “freedom” in its diplomatic discourse represented far more than a mere figure of speech. The chapters of this great city`s history began and ended with freedom.

Valentina Zovko completed a PhD in 2012 at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, with a thesis entitled ‘The role of the ambassadors of the Republic of Dubrovnik in expansion the borders onto the hinterland (at the turn of 14th in the 15th century)’, work which signalled the start of her main scientific interest in the political and socio-cultural issues visible throw the sphere of Dubrovnik`s late medieval diplomacy. She is currently an Assistant Professor and Head of the Department for Medieval History, University of Zadar. Her research focuses on issues of medieval and early modern diplomacy, medieval centres of power, identity, prosopography, emotions and perceptions in the Middle Ages. She has been guest professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and Institute of History in Warsaw, Poland.

English Department Research Seminar Series
Professor Liam Semler, The Arrival, Form and Meaning of the Early Modern Grotesque in England

Date: Wednesday 3 August, 2016
Time: 3:00pm–5:00pm
Venue: Room S226, John Woolley Building, University of Sydney

Liam’s paper is based on the introduction to his book manuscript, The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents, 1500-1700. The manuscript is a large collection of sources and documents from English Renaissance texts that discuss or refer to the grotesque. The sourcebook is arranged chronologically and the sources are annotated and cross-referenced. This dataset gives an expansive insight into the discourse of the grotesque from 1500-1700 in England. An aim of the collection is to help widen the scholarly discussion of the early modern English grotesque beyond the usual parameters which tend to prioritise the theories of Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin. The primary terms for the grotesque that are traced through two centuries of English writing are ‘grottesco/grotesque/grotesque-work’ and ‘antic/antique/antique-work.’ These are explored in relation to other key terms and English visual imagery. It is hoped that a richer sense of the specifically English grotesque from 1500-1700 will emerge from this analysis of the textual archive.

Global Middle Ages Series
Dr Francesco Borghesi, ‘Renaissance Culture and Religious Pluralism’

Date: Wednesday 3 August, 2016
Time: 4:00pm-5:30pm
Venue: SOPHI Common room, University of Sydney, Brennan McCallum Building, Level 8, Room 822

This seminar will look at the ways in which the Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) dealt with different religious belief systems in his search for what he called a ‘philosophical peace’, and at how his views were scrutinised by a theological commission established by Pope Innocent VIII. As using ‘religious pluralism’ applied to a fifteenth-century experience may appear anachronistic, in order to test this terminology Pico della Mirandola’s perspective will be compared to that of the Belgian Jesuit Jacques Dupuis (1923-2004), whose book Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism led him to be investigated by the ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’, whose Prefect was at the time Joseph Ratzinger, the soon-to-be Pope Benedict XVI.

Early Modern Circle Seminar
“The Emotional Resonances of Bells in Early Modern Northern Europe”, Matthew Champion (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge)

Date: Monday 15 August, 2016
Time: 6:15pm
Venue: Room 506, Level 5, Babel Building, The University of Melbourne, Parkville
Registrations: Not required
Information: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/the-emotional-resonances-of-bells-in-early-modern-northern-europe/

In 1499 fire reduced the church of the Premonstratensian Abbey at Averbode, including its clock and bells, to ruins. The monastery’s reform-minded Abbot, Gerard van der Scaeft, employed bell-founders from ’s-Hertogenbosch to comb the ashes for salvage metal, and clockmakers from Leuven and Turnhout carried out an ambitious programme of renewal. On the hour, the new clock played the Pentecost sequence Sancti spiritus adsit nobis gratia, and on the half hour, the Marian sequence Virginis Mariae laudes. The clock at Averbode is just one example of a number of musical bells that were installed across northern Europe from the fourteenth century. This paper will consider the resonances of these musical bells, charting a course through an emotional history of sound, time, materiality and devotion – from their first appearance in Rouen in 1321, to Averbode and texts composed about its bells by the famous humanist Desiderius Erasmus.

Matthew Champion is currently the Jeremy Haworth Research Fellow in History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. In September 2016, he will take up a lectureship in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. His current research centres on European temporalities from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

CMEMS/History Public Lecture: “The Evolution of Record-Keeping as a Means of Understanding Criminality, 1780–1860”, by Professor Robert Shoemaker (The University of Sheffield)

Date: Tuesday 28 June, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre (Geography & Geology Building), University of Western Australia

All Welcome – you don’t need to RSVP. For other enquiries, contact joanne.mcewan@uwa.edu.au.

This paper seeks to understand why detailed personal information about accused criminals, the data which makes the Digital Panopticon project (http://www.digitalpanopticon.org/) possible, started to be collected from the late eighteenth century. Whereas little information beyond the name of most criminals was kept at the start of this period, by 1860 information about their personal and criminal histories and physical descriptions was routinely recorded. The initiative to start keeping such records came from both new official requirements and personal and local initiatives. Records were often compiled to meet functional requirements to assist with the prosecution of crime and punishment of criminals, but this explanation does not explain why information was kept about so many personal characteristics, in such detail, and often long before it was officially required. This paper argues that such record-keeping was often driven by local initiatives and imperatives, and that this reveals the development of a grass-roots information-gathering culture. Ultimately, the substantial amount of information generated reveals a strong and widely held desire to understand crime, long before the self-conscious enterprise of ‘criminology’ was invented.

Bob Shoemaker is Professor of Eighteenth-Century British History at the University of Sheffield and Co-Investigator on the Digital Panopticon project. For more information, see: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/history/staff/robert-shoemaker.

The Perfect Match – A Rare Book of Rare Maps

Date: Thursday, 16 June, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-8:00pm
Venue: Friends Room, Ground Floor, Mitchell Library Building, Sydney
Cost: Friends of the State Library: $10.00 Guest: $15.00. For more info and to book tickets: http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/friends-perfect-match-rare-book-rare-maps

The Library has a wonderful collection of rare atlases. Maggie Patton will discuss the development of the first atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum created by Abraham Ortleius in 1570 along with a number of other significant atlases from the 16th and 17th centuries held in the collection. A selection of these original atlases will be on view.

Includes refreshments.

Maggie Patton is Manager Research & Discovery with a particular expertise in maps and rare books.

The Middle Ages Now

Date: Wednesday 15 June, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-7:30pm
Venue: Law School LT 104, Level 1, Sydney Law School, Eastern Avenue, the University of Sydney
RSVP: Free event with online registration requested. Please click here for the registration page

HASHTAG for this lecture: #middleages

Co-presented by the Global Middle Ages Faculty Research Group in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Sydney, the newly established Sydney Social Science and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions and Macquarie University

The Middle Ages have never been more current. Particularly since 9/11, the term ‘medieval’ has been used to describe, for example, climate-change deniers, climate-change scientists, Christians, Muslims, IS, and Al-Qaeda, to name a few. In these contexts, the Middle Ages denotes ignorance, superstition and barbarism.

Why this turn to the idea of the Middle Ages to explain our modern times? Our speakers will explore the long history of the ‘modern’ Middle Ages and its particular relevance for today’s global culture.

Introductions:

• Professor Sahar Amer, Chair, Department of Arabic Language and Cultures, University of Sydney

Speakers:

• Associate Professor Lynn Ramey (Chair) Vanderbilt University, USA
• Professor Laura Doyle, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Professor Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State University, USA
• Associate Professor Geraldine Heng, University of Texas at Austin, USA

“Learning and Researching Medieval Culture in an Immersive Environment: Recreating St Brendan’s Voyage through the Digital Humanities,” Associate Professor Lynn Ramey (Vanderbilt University)

Date: Wednesday 8 June, 2016
Time: 5:00-6:30pm
Venue: SOPHI Common Room, Brennan MacCallum Building (8th floor), The University of Sydney
RSVP: Please email your RSVP to sahar.amer@sydney.edu.au promptly should you wish to attend

The lecture will be followed by a small reception.

Study abroad is a time-tested and popular solution for learning language and culture. Unfortunately for those of us studying the past, immersion is no longer an option. Professor Ramey’s work looks at the precedents for and advantages of creating historical immersive environments using a video game engine. With the Anglo-Norman tale of St. Brendan’s Voyage as a setting, our game investigates the research question of representing time and space in way that may allow us to better understand the different perception of these concepts in the pre-Modern era. In addition, we look at the ways that Anglo-Norman can be learned more effectively in context in an immersive environment.

Lynn Ramey is Associate Professor of French at Vanderbilt University, USA. Her research centres on pre-modern cultural interactions between the Christian and Muslims worlds. Her most recent book is entitled Black Legacies: “Race” and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014; paperback edt. 2016). She is currently working on a series of video games in Unity that will allow users to play through moments of cultural interaction as medieval travellers encountered other peoples for the first time.