News

Helen Coffey and Naomi Barker will be presenting papers at a conference on the subject of ‘Music and Power in the Baroque Era’ hosted by the Centro di Studi Luigi Boccherini in Lucca in November. Helen will be discussing how political connections and rivalry contributed to patronage at a number of courts in north Germany in her paper ‘Opera for the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg: musical and dynastic connections during the late seventeenth century’.

Susie West's article 'Finding Wroth's Loughton Hall' has just been published in the Sidney Journal. Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, daughter of Penshurst Place, Kent, made her marital home at Loughton Hall, Essex, and remained there as a widow until her own death in 1651. The house was burnt down in 1836. The home environment she created was both shaped by and informed her evocation of place and space in her work. Wroth had a role in remodelling the old house, and there is a tantalizing but unproven association with Inigo Jones, known to Wroth from the Court.

Angeliki Lymberopoulou has been invited to speak at a number of events. She will be presenting on a small, portable triptych from the Sam Fogg collection in London at the Scientific Symposium – Painting and Society in Venetian Crete: Evidence from Portable Icons  (11 and 12 January 2017). National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Faculty of History and Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and History of Art.

Jonathan Gibson’s chapter ‘From Palatino to Cresci: Italian Writing Books and the Italic Scripts of Early Modern English Letters’ opens a new book published in the University of Pennsylvania Press’s ‘Material Texts’ series, Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain , edited by James Daybell and Andrew Gordon.

The latest edition of Spenser Review is out, with reviews of a wide range of books on medieval and early modern topics, and features including a piece on Nathaniel Hawthorne's incorporation of The Faerie Queene into family life.

Check it out here

Edmund King is co-organising a conference with Monika Smialkowska (Northumbria University) in the spring on Shakespeare! The conference is taking place at Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK on the 24th of May 2017.

We are delighted to announce the following one-day conference, which will be held in honour of a recently-retired member of the OU Medieval and Early Modern Research Group. Women and Gender in Early Modern Britain and Ireland: A Conference in Honour of Anne Laurence will be held on 4 June 2016 at the Institute of Historical Research in London. Speakers include Amy Erickson, James Daybell, Gemma Allen, Mary O'Dowd, Frances Nolan, Rosalind Carr, Jane Humphries, Judith Spicksley and Amanda Capern. 

Members of the OU's medieval and early modern research group will be speaking at a CHASE event held at Birkbeck on 21 April 2016. Full details available here

Leah R. Clark has just received a British Academy Small Grant for her project ‘The Peregrinations of Porcelain: Touch, Transfer, and Translation in Cross Cultural Exchange (1450-1500).’

Leah R. Clark has recently co-edited a special volume of the Journal of Early Modern History 'The Art of Embassy', which includes articles that argue for the importance of visual and material approaches to early modern diplomatic encounters. Her co-written introduction (with Nancy Um) also appears in the volume.