|
Jeremy Shearmur - Francis Bacon: Renaissance Epistemologist? Bacon is an ambivalent figure. He is sometimes looked at as a precursor of modern science and of modern theories of scientific knowledge. He has also been both praised and criticized for his vision of a future in which knowledge is power. But there are also aspects of his work that place him very much as a late Renaissance figure. In this brief talk, I will discuss two elements of his work: his theory of prejudice, and some issues concerning its interpretation, and also his cosmological readings of certain Greek myths.
Neville Potter - Venus Revealed? Interaction between Text and Image in Illustrations of the Reclining Female Nude in the Renaissance. This paper examines Vittore Branca’s thesis that the interespressività between word and image in manuscripts of Boccaccio’s Decameron initiated a new topos in Western art, that of the reclining female nude, which was quickly incorporated into the canon as a reclining Venus. Illustrations in manuscripts from as early as 1427 depicting the story of Cimone and Efigenia (the first story of the fifth day of the Decameron) quickly spread from Venice throughout Western Europe via the 1492 printed edition of the Decameron. According to Branca, Efigenia’s transformation to a recumbent Venus can be traced through differing depictions by artists such as Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, Palmio il Vecchio, Veronese, Rubens, Manet and many others, up to the present day. Wenzel has however pointed out that Giorgione’s use of the topos in the Dresden Venus of 1510-1515 was a depiction of Venus, rather than of the story of Cimone and Efigenia. Branca dismisses another renaissance text, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, as a source for the Dresden Venus. However an examination of the Hypnerotomachia shows that it influenced not only Giorgione’s iconography, but many other areas of intellectual activity, giving a unique perspective on the pervasiveness of this remarkable text in European thinking The paper examines iconographic sources of the Hypnerotomachia and of the Venus tradition, and suggests a different interpretation of the transformation of Efigenia.
Denise Ryan - What's in a Dame? Perspectives on women in sixteenth-century English civic life and drama. Civic religious drama, which performed creation to doomsday plays on feasts like Corpus Christi and Whitsun, both reached its height and ran its course in the sixteenth century and is an intriguing window through which to view the place of women. Social historians have demonstrated the hidden contributions women made to the social life of provincial England in this period. Drama scholars, in contrast, have rated women's input more circumspectly. Women did not act in the plays (their parts were played by men) and they had a limited direct influence over production (the plays were produced by the trade guilds from which women were largely excluded). The portrayal of women in the plays has usually been viewed quite conservatively - as simply reflecting and reinforcing female stereotypes. This paper, conversely, examines the portrayal of women in selected plays from the Chester cycle and elsewhere to present some new perspectives on the way such plays contested historical concepts of women and gender roles: the defiant mothers in The Slaughter of the Innocents, for instance, provides an example.
Duncan Driver - Plucking out the Heart of Hamlet's Mystery Having established the uncertain and multifarious nature of an Elizabethan conception of the human heart, this paper will demonstrate the importance of the heart to theories of early modern selfhood, and illustrate how the period’s rhetoric of the heart relates Shakespeare’s Hamlet to these concerns. Hamlet’s continuous references to his heart, it will argue, are a salient example of how the play dramatizes contemporary tensions between prudence and sincerity, the theatrical and the ‘real’, and the inner and outer man. The paper will explore how the heart-related rhetoric of the play reflects a newly emergent inner quality to the age’s notion of individual identity, linking Hamlet’s heart to the influential work of Montaigne and Petrarch, among others. Shakespeare’s cryptic rendering of Hamlet’s heart, it will conclude, is a significant but largely unrecognized instance of how he adumbrates latter conceptions of individuality, personality and selfhood.
Julian
Lamb
- "Much
excellentlie ordered in a small roome": The Use of Language in
Spenser's 'Amoretti' and Shakespeare's Sonnets. I will discuss Spenser’s Amoretti and Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the light of Renaissance poetry and rhetoric manuals between 1550 and 1603. In the latter, there is an increasing awareness that what made poetry meaningful was the way in which a poet manipulated the forms at his disposal; that, for example, an image or a metaphor would mean according to how it was used and deployed in a particular circumstance. I will argue that in both sonnet sequences the speaker comes to the realization that meaning is not prescribed but something enacted by him, and, as a result, is in a constant state of development and emergence. I will also link this with a more general Renaissance trend in understanding language and meaning.
Derek Allan (Philosophy) - Malraux, Art and Time: A New Perspective on the Renaissance The philosophy of art (aesthetics) has given us two principal ways of conceptualising the relationship between art and time (or the ‘temporal nature’ of art). There is the familiar idea that art – or at least great art – is timeless, or ‘eternal’. Contrasting with this is the powerful stream of thought originating with writers such as Hegel and Taine, and developed in various ways by Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers, that treats art, like all other aspects of human activity, as part of man’s historical experience. Both approaches have serious shortcomings, which this paper will briefly discuss. The paper goes on to outline an alternative conception of the temporal nature of art developed by the twentieth century French writer, André Malraux. Malraux argues that the creative act that we today name ‘art’ brings forth a world to which change is intrinsic – a world which is, in his words, ‘born to metamorphosis’. This process of metamorphosis applies to all art, from Palaeolithic times to the present – including of course the art of Renaissance.
Judi Crane (English) - 'The childbed privilege': denied, obeyed,
distorted? Childbirth
Ralph
Elliott
(English) - A Great Feast of Languages
Thomas Mautner (Philosophy) - Was Montaigne a Sceptic? Montaigne, often described as a neo-sceptic, reminds us of the
diversity of social customs and moral convictions, drawing on many
authorities, including the ancient sceptic Sextus Empiricus. But, as as
far as morality is concerned, Montaigne was not a sceptic.
|