Hilary Term 2012: Welcome

This term offers the usual remarkable range of early modern events. Marking ongoing debates about the universities and academic freedom, CEMS continues the series on ‘The Universities in Historical Context’ with presentations by G. R. Evans on ‘Dumbing down?’ Did that happen in early modern universities?’ (26 January) and Robin Briggs on ‘Academic Freedom, past and present’ (1 March). In a new CEMS series, ‘Representing the Early Modern’, Peter Mack (Director, The Warburg Institute), speaks on ‘The Library and Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute as Research Instruments’ (9 February).

Other seminars with early modern components include the Early Modern Literature Graduate Seminar, the Graduate Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History: ‘Scientific and Other Mentalities in Early Modern Europe’, the Seminar on the History of the Book 1450-1830, the Seminar in Irish History, and the Enlightenment Workshop. Note also Oxford Bibliographical Society lectures by Brian Cummings, Elizabeth Solopova and Kate Bennett. There is a conference on ‘Renaissance Italy and the Idea of Spain 1492-1700: St Edmund Hall, 12-14 January.

A major new Bodleian exhibition on ‘The Romance of the Middle Ages’ opens on 28 January. And the Bodleian’s Walter Harding collection of printed music is commemorated in ‘Ragtime to Riches: celebrating the legacy of Walter Harding’, with talks by Abigail Williams and Michael Burden – and music too (18 January).

Advance notice of a conference on Lucretius and the Early Modern, with a fine line-up including Stephen Greenblatt, to be held on 16-17 May: registration details will be circulated when available.

Early Modern Literature Seminar, Michaelmas Term2011

Edward Paleit (University of Exeter) opened the year’s early modern seminars with a fresh look at a little-studied play, Fletcher and Massinger’s The False One (ca. 1619). A leading example of the Jacobean interest in Lucan’s Pharsalia, this play is a sensitive register of literary and perhaps ideological differences, given that the authorship of the different parts has been established with some certainty. Paleit looked closely at parallels with Jonson and Shakespeare to suggest the continuity of divergent dramatic traditions.

In a session held jointly with the Merton College History of the Book Group, Sebastiaan Verweij (Research Assistant, Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne), discussed the challenges of collating seventeenth-century books. He presented a Merton copy of Donne’s Fifty Sermons (1649), which, as can be discovered from the excellent copy notes on the Bodleian’s SOLO catalogue, has an inscription from the publisher: ‘January 4th 53 I doe warrant this booke perfect & the best edition witnese my hand Richard Marriot’. Evidently he meant that the book had been made up from the most completely corrected sheets, a fascinating glimpse into publishing practice. Verweij also demonstrated the ‘Hailey’s Comet’ collator, which to the skilled eye can quickly bring differences between copies into view.

A more interventionist way with early printed books was the topic of Adam Smyth (Birkbeck, University of London). He discussed the ways in which the religious community at Little Gidding developed a distinctive technique of cutting and pasting from printed texts, creating amongst other things a synoptic New Testament, complete with illustrations. Discussion ranged across both the theological and the practical aspects of these remarkable experimental texts.

Katherine Duncan-Jones concluded the term with a paper on ‘Thriving by Foolery in Familiar Letters’. Expanding the familiar theme of foolery from the stage to the social history of the time, she took as one example the ways in which Sir Michael Hickes won the goodwill of his patron Sir Robert Cecil through jokes at his own expense. The paper opened up some fascinating insights into early modern culture, even if it did not necessarily make Cecil’s sense of humour look more attractive.

The Universities in Historical Context: Howard Hotson

Do current higher education policies rest on a mistake? In a fascinating session in the CEMS ‘Universities in Historical Context ’ series (24 November), Howard Hotson described how techniques he had devised for understanding early modern intellectual history unexpectedly proved useful in analysing the contemporary university crisis.

In recent years, Hotson has been attempting to use statistical data to map out the ‘intellectual geography’ of seventeenth-century Europe, and to show how the relatively open market in higher education caused by the fragmentation of political authority in the Holy Roman Empire turned the Rhineland region into the pedagogical laboratory of Protestant Europe.  This graph of matriculation data, for instance, suggests that the Thirty Years War saw a dramatic transfer of academic leadership from the German Reformed universities to the Dutch Republic.

When the UK government started predicting that marketizing the English university system would drive up standards and drive down prices, Hotson decided to use these techniques to put these predictions to an empirical test. His point of departure was the enormously influential Times Higher Education World University Rankings, since the apparently ‘absolute’ domination of the these Rankings by private American universities underpins claims that privatizing and marketizing the UK university system will deliver better value for money. And yet, as his analysis in last May’s LRB showed, correcting for the relative size of population, GDP and higher education spending showed that this assumption was without empirical foundation: the almost totally public university system in the UK offers much better value for money than the mixed university system in the US.  Astonished by the international resonance of this simple argument, he subsequently applied his analysis to the other leading university systems as well, generating further graphs like this:

Analysis of the second influential league table, the Academic Ranking of World Universities or ‘Shanghai index’, likewise undermines the assumption that British universities are failing to maintain their position internationally.

It is gratifying to see the ease with which skills in early modern studies can be transferred to critiquing contemporary policy; but it is equally disturbing to discover that journalists, politicians, and university administrators, although highly versed in economic and management orthodoxy, apparently lack the ability to subject their own assumptions to straightforward analysis of this kind. The discussion following the paper ranged from the possible parallels between Ramist dichotomies and Power Point presentations to some urgently contemporary questions: do the humanities betray their own principles in succumbing to the wholly quantitative discourse of current higher education policy? or do they lose their case by failing to engage in more depth with quantitative analysis?

The Universities in Historical Context: Laurence Brockliss

The Browne Review and the coalition’s policies have left universities on the defensive about what they do and why. A new CEMS series on ‘The Universities in Historical Context’ aims to set these debates in perspective. It was launched on 3 November by Laurence Brockliss, a leading historian of education who is working on the ninth and final volume of the History of the University of Oxford, encouragingly subtitled The First 800 Years. In a paper that ranged skilfully and illuminatingly between past and present, Professor Brockliss drew a distinction between the traditional rationales for universities on the Continent, where the predominant model is vocational, and the emphasis in the Anglophone world either on a moral justification for higher education or on skills transferrable between many different occupation. This difference could be traced back to the early modern period, when the English universities, failed to conform to either the northern, Protestant or southern, Catholic patterns. Where elsewhere the arts course formed a relatively brief gateway to the higher faculties of law, medicine, and theology, in Oxford and Cambridge the proportions were reversed. Lest we take too much pride in a long tradition of liberal education, Professor Brockliss pointed out that the length of the arts course to a large extent reflected the deficiencies of English schools in bringing students to the necessary level. The lack of a vocational emphasis reflected not a higher moral purpose but the fact that entry to the church and the legal and medical professions did not depend on academic qualifications. The other major difference from the Continent was the collegiate structure, which through the early equivalents of the tutorial system had the necessary flexibility to bridge the gap between school and university. When the traditional system came under attack in the nineteenth century, rationales like Newman’s The Idea of a University gave a new moral or theological dignity to what had originally been more pragmatic arrangements, and the newer universities tended to absorb that ethos. There was a lively and informed discussion of the fortunes of the idea of the university today, with a series of reforms on the Continent to some degree producing a convergence with the Anglophone model even as the British government moves towards a far more utilitarian model. The series will continue on November 24 with a paper by Howard Hotson on ‘Markets, choice, efficiency and educational revolution in early modern German and neoliberal English universities: a strange instance of policy “impact” for early modern research?’

UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges

Our sister Centre, the University College London Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, held its launch conference on 15-17 September, with an impressive muster of international speakers. Questions addressed included African Atlantic connections, conceptions of the Amerindian, diplomacy and culture, intellectual geography, women’s writing, festivals, neo-Latin literature, Anglo-French and Anglo-Spanish cultural relations, diplomatic and cultural relations with the Levant, the theory and practice of Hebrew studies, and epistemology and politics. The conference saw the launch of the new MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series. Keynote speakers were Barbara Fuchs, Andrew Hadfield, Brenda Hosington, Andrew Laird and David Norbrook.

COK conference: Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700

The second international Cultures of Knowledge conference, held at St. Anne’s College, 5 – 7 September 2011, addressed spatial dimensions of intellectual history. The papers ranged across and beyond Europe, through and beyond the seventeenth century. Presentations were given from two projects exploring the temporal and spatial representations of  correspondence networks in the early modern period: Mapping the Republic of Letters and the Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic.

Neo-Latin Reading Group, Trinity Term 2011

The Neo-Latin reading group continued its exploration of early modern poetry and prose, beginning with Thomas More’s Coronation Elegy for Henry VIII. This poem presents Henry’s accession as a deliverance from the evils flourishing under his father, and raises questions as to how its first readers understood its expectations of monarchy. Stephen Harrison pointed to Ovid’s Tristia 4.2 as a close thematic and metrical parallel, and advanced other Latin analogues to question the ironic reading recently outlined by David Rundle (whose Renaissance blog is here). If Milton’s Latin poetry has been neglected, it is partly because of the difficulty of catching in translation an idiom whose playfulness, Gordon Teskey has argued, does not square with normal images of the austere Puritan. Professor Teskey, visiting this term from Harvard, has contributed a preface to an excellent collection if verse translations by David Slavitt. His presentation  for the reading group centred on Mansus, with special reference to the conclusion, where Milton imagines himself looking down from heaven and applauding his own poetic deeds. Professor Teskey offered a fascinating interpretation of this vexed passage – so vexed indeed that it is often omitted in translations – and is modified by Slavitt. Returning to our series of Selden events, Nick Hardy explored John Selden’s Uxor Ebraica, a work which ‘was much more than an intervention in contemporary debates: it was a kaleidoscopic work of late humanist erudition which blended historical and literary sources, moving with ease between Roman law and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and quoting from the full range of texts regarded in the seventeenth century as classical: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and even Arabic’. In a challenging overview of early modern intellectual history, Per Landgren (visiting from Göteborg University, Sweden) introduced ‘the Aristotelian concept of historia in the late Renaissance’, emphasizing how widely the term’s neo-Latin usage differed from what we would now describe as history, and the overlap with Aristotelian ‘natural history’.

Early Modern Literature Graduate Seminar, Trinity Term 2011

The Early Modern Literature Graduate Seminar explored different aspects of representation in early modern drama. In the light of his research on early modern writing on memory and the ars memoriae, Rhodri Lewis reconsidered Hamlet’s second soliloquy,  in which he first responds to the revelations of Claudius’ treachery, within the reconstructed contexts of it pays particular attention to Hamlet’s claim that his memory can be subject to erasure at his will. Rather than losing his focus on revenge at some point in the middle of the play (on account of moral, philosophical, psychological, religious or juridical scruples), Lewis argued, from the moment the revenge plot is set in motion, Hamlet struggles against the very lack of vividness with which his filial duties exist in his mind. Gordon Teskey (Harvard) asked ‘What is Comus?’, drawing attention to the problematic status of a masque as between historical event and poetic creation, and offering an acute though friendly challenge to contemporary historicist criticism of Milton. David Bevington (University of Chicago) offered challenges of a different kind to much current work on ‘Shakespeare on Religion’, highlighting the resistance of the plays to confessional paradigms of all kinds; Professor Bevington showed his command of the whole Shakespearean canon, and discussion ranged from John Shakespeare’s will to the recent discovery of a Jane Shaxspere who had drowned while picking flowers in the Stratford area.

Ancient Rome and early Modern England

The second of two conferences on ‘Ancient Rome and Early Modern England’ was held at Jesus College on 21-22 May. The first conference, held at the Huntington Library, concentrated on politics and political thought: the focus here was on literature. Roman plays of course received a lot of attention: Paulina Kewes explored ‘Constitutional Instability in Titus Andronicus’, Richard Hillman made the case for neglected French influences on Shakespeare’s Rome, Warren Chernaik discussed representations of Caesar, and the topic of Blair Worden’s plenary lecture was ‘Clarendon, Ben Jonson, and the Conspiracy of Catiline’. Richard Rowland analyzed representations of domestic violence from Sophocles through to the early modern period. The reception of Roman poetry was surveyed across a wide range of writers through the period, with papers by Daniel Andersson on the reception of Juvenal, Edward Paleit on the reworking of Lucan in Jacobean drama, Gesine Manuwald on Thomas Campion’s debt to classical poetry, Sheldon Brammall on topical aspects of John Vicars’s Virgil translation, and David Norbrook’s plenary lecture surveyed different political receptions of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Poets’ views of Rome were not always idealizing: Adam Swann found the ‘curse of Roman influence’ in Milton’s History of Britain. Papers on the translation and reception of prose writers ranged from Katie East on Cicero and Serena Connolly on the Distichs of Cato to Fred Schurink on military contexts of  classical translations. Freya Cox Jensen gave an overview of translations of Roman historians, showing how far the forthcoming Universal Short-Title Catalogue will change our understanding of authors’ relative popularity. Richard Serjeantson discussed political aspects of Francis Bacon’s writings and Tracey Sowerby explored ‘The Roman Influence on English Diplomatic Thought’. Tom Roebuck, discussing the reception of Athenaeus, and Nick Hardy, speaking on ‘Rome and Greek Identities in Early Modern British Erudition’, reminded us that Rome was less rigidly demarcated from other parts of the ancient world than later academic divisions have implied.

Renaissance Cultural Crossroads

Though based on the online English Short-Title Catalogue, this new resource is based on much new research and offers additional information on intermediary translators and liminary material. It is now easy, for example, to locate texts translated from English into Latin; and from Latin into Scots.