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"Professor Adams challenges the widely held belief that Anne was a manipulative seductress, offering a fresh perspective on her role and intentions. She discusses the meanings behind historically significant terms and phrases, providing intriguing insights into the letters exchanged between Anne and Henry. Join Natalie and Tracy as they uncover and discuss the layers of history, revealing a complex and spirited Anne Boleyn who may have been more pious and principled than history often portrays."
Varsha Panjwani, who hosts the Women and Shakespeare podcast, talks about Shakespeare in India with Thomas Dabbs.
Blog Posts and Stories
Medieval Murder Maps
How a vengeful noblewoman masterminded the assassination of a priest.
Fred Lewsey describes the research of Manuel Eisner suggesting that the priest, John Forde, "who had his throat cut on a busy London street almost seven centuries ago", was the victim of a revenge killing orchestrated by Ela Fitzpayne, a noblewoman.
This is a 14th-century murder mystery - a bit outside our period, but fascinating stuff!
What Can a 17th-Century English Doctor Teach Us About Embracing Uncertainty?
"What you begin to feel as you read Browne, or what I do at least, is an ever-expanding sense of possibility, of unexplored paths forking off left and right at every comma and semi-colon, and in fact, it was by tiptoeing down one of these paths more than ten years ago that I found myself considering the fate of our bodies in a different sense. A corpse, after all, is only the final thing we need to dispose of. Throughout our lives, the body continuously sheds material—from hair to urine to tears—and I thought it would be funny, maybe interesting even, to consider how we deal with these lesser disintegrations."
Should We Pay More Attention to Shakespeare’s Contemporaries?
This Early Modern Scribbling blog post by Piers Mucklejohn esplores the lives and careers of some of the "mysterious figures hovering behind the literary scenes of Elizabethan and Jacobean England".
"This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to early modern doubt, combining gender studies with religious history, the history of literature, social history, and the history of science.
"This volume seeks to bring a global perspective to the history of Central Europe by addressing understudied global and colonial entanglements. Exploring the impact of these interactions on court life and home towns, labor migration, material culture, and religious communities, the microhistories presented here reveal the myriad ways in which connections and disconnections underpinned early modern Germany."
"This book offers a revisionist look at the historiography of the Republic of Letters and the community of learning in early modern Europe. It suggests a new approach, conceptualising the learned world as a web of imagined communities in which the members do not know all their peers."
A critical edition, enriching "our understanding of how astrology, prophecy, politics and literature interacted in shaping early modern European thought".
"The concepts of trust and risk provide important insights into the social and cultural life of early modern England but remain relatively unexplored in early modern literary studies.
"This collection addresses that gap by exploring a wide range of literary genres and texts including comic drama, lyric verse, emblem books, ledgers, wills, polemical prose and religious epic. Contributors explore issues of personal trust through the faith and lies that characterize Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne's sermons and Milton's Paradise Lost."
"This volume explores the cultural as well as the ideological impact and function of the pirate figure in early modern historiography, literature, and popular culture."
"This monograph endeavors to chart the development of Islamic philosophy, namely kalām, during the early modern Maghreb. The primary focus is on the Moroccan thinker Ibn Yaʿqūb al-Wallālī (d. 1716) and his text Ashraf al-Maqāṣid fī Sharḥ al-Maqāṣi"
4 Sessions, $220 ($198 for Newberry members, seniors, and students).
"This course will examine six examples of 'Renaissance renegades'—people who bucked tradition of class, gender, and sexual orientation to create a sense of self. We’ll explore the traditions and trends within which they arose, as well as the artifacts (writings, historical documents) that serve as witness to their refusal to conform."
"The explicit aim is to analyse human diversity as considered in early modern theologies, responses of religious authorities and religious interpretations of difference, but also pious practices that seek to do justice to the differences in human disposition."
"The Turin Humanities Programme and Fondazione 1563 are pleased to invite doctoral students and early career researchers to submit their applications to the Summer School Slavery and Serfdom in Europe and the Americas in the Early Modern Period.
"The Summer School aims to explore the modern debates surrounding slavery and serfdom in Europe and the Americas within the timeframe of the Early Modern period, defined here broadly as stretching from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth."
Conference: Magic, Monstrosity, and the Natural World in the Early Modern Period
SAS Institute of History and the Scientiae, Bratislava, Slovakia.
"The aim of this conference is on the one hand to explore the medieval aspects of early modern texts, both Latin and vernacular, and on the other to shed light on the many representations of the Middle Ages found in texts of the early modern period."
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