Abstracts
'Approaching the Idea of Europe through French Literature', Niall Oddy
Why use literature to study the history of the idea of Europe? And why use literature produced in one vernacular to research a topic that is, by definition, 'transnational'? My paper aims to address these questions by reflecting on my PhD research on conceptions of Europe in sixteenth-century France. Studies of the disintegration of Christendom in the early modern period and its replacement, as the largest unit of collective allegiance, by an idea of Europe tend to draw on evidence from across the continent. Confining research to material produced in French, on the other hand, allows for a consideration of the implications of the development of a discourse on Europe at a time of emerging French nationhood. This paper will present readings of Rabelais and Montaigne, exploring the use, and non-use, of the word 'Europe' in their works.
'"This rich Jewell of speaking Tongues": Early modern England between languages', John Gallagher
In her recent Printers without borders: translation and textuality in the Renaissance, Anne Coldiron argues that ‘what is asserted and promulgated as [early modern] English literature was actually founded on and thoroughly permeated by the foreign’. Coldiron’s work speaks to a growing consensus among literary scholars that the literary culture and print culture of early modern England were polyglot and international in their texts, techniques, and personnel. But underlying this textual Babel was the multilingual oral culture of a nation whose language was little-regarded abroad, and a city alive with the voices of immigrants and visitors. In this paper, I want to look at early modern London as a city full of polyglot spaces. It’s my contention here that by understanding the places, the practices, and the people that made London function as a multilingual city, we can better understand trends in early modern linguistic change and literary culture.
'The Challenges and Benefits of Researching Early Modern News Songs in Four Languages', Una McIlvenna
This presentation looks at my research into English, French, German and Italian news songs. While English language ballads are well-studied, their counterparts on the Continent are not so well researched, and so I am often able to show continuities in theme, language and motif across Europe that have until now been deemed to be English in origin. But there are issues: my fluency is not uniform across all languages, digitisation of early documents is widely divergent from one country to another, and uneven collecting habits of ephemeral material can bias the analysis. This talk will look at the difficulties and the benefits of research that is multilingual, interdisciplinary and longue durée, and offer suggestions for solutions to the challenges.
'Defying Linguistic Divides. Philips of Marnix of Saint-Aldegonde Facing the Multilingual Low Countries ', Alisa van de Haar
Philips of Marnix, Lord of Saint-Aldegonde (1540-1598), a Calvinist leader and the right hand of the Dutch pater patriae William the Silent, embodies the complex multilingual situation in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, spanning roughly the modern-day Netherlands, Belgium, and some areas of northern France. Born within a family of aristocrats in Brussels, Marnix’s mother tongue was French, but he quickly learned to speak and read Dutch fluently through his contacts with locals. He grew out to be one of the main propagandists of the Dutch Revolt against the Habsburg crown, writing in both mother tongues of his country; French and Dutch. Strikingly, the research tradition has treated his French and Dutch texts as forming two distinctive oeuvres. A combined analysis, however, brings to the fore a sophisticated interplay between the writings in the two languages, that also successfully addresses the cultural and literary contexts of each of the vernaculars. His example thus makes a case for respecting contemporary political borders, which are not always congruent with linguistic ones. But Marnix’s efforts extended even further. While attempting through his texts in both native tongues of the Low Countries to unite this linguistically divided people, Marnix encouraged them at the same time to look beyond their borders.
'London Calling: Linguistic and Literary Adaptations of Tasso and Ariosto in Late Sixteenth-Century England', Bryan Brazeau
In “Translation as Challenge and Source of Happiness,” Paul Ricoeur articulates a concept of linguistic hospitality: “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home.” This presentation focuses on the work of two important translators in Early Modern England: Edward Fairfax, and John Harington, who translated the most popular Italian narrative poetry of the previous century (Tasso and Ariosto). Fairfax and Harington both employ a number of strategies in their translations in order to adapt these works to suit an English audience, at times altering the original text. My analysis asks how the “linguistic hospitality” employed by these writers shaped the first English versions of Tasso and Ariosto, and considers what these pragmatic adaptive strategies might reveal to us about how these writers perceived the potential audience of these texts.
'Whose Consent Matters? Reading Romeo and Juliet Transnationally', Rachel Holmes
Clandestine marriage looks just like marriage, and it became a nexus of anxieties in a sixteenth century Europe rocked by the Reformation. With the Reformation came both desperate attempts by the Church to seize jurisdiction over marriage and an increasing secular interest in matrimonial law. While disapproval of clandestine marriages was common to all jurisdictions, such unions remained of varying validity across Europe, and the tale of the lovers of Verona is emblematic of this debate. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is but one of no fewer than thirteen adaptations in early modern Europe, and the apparent divergences between these evidence coeval but distinct legal preoccupations. By working transnationally at the interface between law and literature, I am able to show how our understanding of a famous literary text such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is enriched by situating it in the context of broader literary, legal, historical, and cultural debates.
'Printable Borders: Molière in Early Modern England', Suzanne Jones
Although a play is designed to reflect the immediate society in which and for which it is first produced, a dramatic work can also survive in print. This print version can then be transported easily across national boundaries. Dramatic texts have always been viewed as texts that are pliable; it is expected that a play is to be reworked for new performances, as well as for new printed works.
In the late seventeenth century Molière’s plays were carried into post-Restoration England and re-constructed to form English versions for the newly reopened theatres. While these translations and adaptations, like their source-texts, were geared towards the social moment in which they were produced, the translators also sought to preserve them by publishing them. Given that Molière’s plays existed in print, the English dramatists were called on to justify their adaptation process in paratextual material. My paper will explore the ways that the first translators of Molière used print to present their works as considered engagements with the source-texts, thereby demonstrating that researching the early modern period across national boundaries can illuminate the extended lives of dramatic works.
'Folie à deux: Praises of Folly in the Works of Marin Držić and William Shakespeare', Martina Pranić
Marin Držić, a playwright, a poet and a priest from the Republic of Ragusa, a city-state on the easternmost brink of early modern Christendom, died when Shakespeare was roughly 4 years old. And yet, he is anachronistically hailed as the Croatian Shakespeare, occasioning comparisons of the two authors’ works, poetics and worldviews. Having contrasted the two on philological, stylistic, poetic and cultural grounds, Croatian criticism established solid points of convergence that speak of the authors’ use of similar characters, compositional elements and rhetorical devices (especially in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Grižula); their shared interest in transforming literary tradition (in the case of Comedy of Errors and Pjerin, the very same one—Plautus’ Menaechmi); and an overlapping preoccupation with metatextual rethinking of the text’s own organization and the questioning of generic norms. A very plausible argument even exists for a geographic-inspirational connection between Shakespeare’s Illyria and Držić’s native Ragusa.
In this paper, I acknowledge the established parallels and propose to take them beyond positivist and structuralist observations and into an exploration of some of philosophical principles that both playwrights share: namely, a recurring idea that there is paradoxical wisdom in folly, which sees certainties in all their absurdity and points to the futility of mankind’s aspirations to absolute Truth. For both Shakespeare and Držić, folly of the Erasmian kind is the key philosophical fixation, a wise Folly that clad the world in a jester’s hat and employed sharp irony to mock institutions, discourses and values of the serious world. By juxtaposing a major Renaissance author with one hitherto underrepresented in English-language scholarship, the paper will speak in favour of working across national boundaries and in more than one language and offer a polyphonous take on the concept of folly in the period in which ideas, just like people and objects, were on the move.
'Approaching the Idea of Europe through French Literature', Niall Oddy
Why use literature to study the history of the idea of Europe? And why use literature produced in one vernacular to research a topic that is, by definition, 'transnational'? My paper aims to address these questions by reflecting on my PhD research on conceptions of Europe in sixteenth-century France. Studies of the disintegration of Christendom in the early modern period and its replacement, as the largest unit of collective allegiance, by an idea of Europe tend to draw on evidence from across the continent. Confining research to material produced in French, on the other hand, allows for a consideration of the implications of the development of a discourse on Europe at a time of emerging French nationhood. This paper will present readings of Rabelais and Montaigne, exploring the use, and non-use, of the word 'Europe' in their works.
'"This rich Jewell of speaking Tongues": Early modern England between languages', John Gallagher
In her recent Printers without borders: translation and textuality in the Renaissance, Anne Coldiron argues that ‘what is asserted and promulgated as [early modern] English literature was actually founded on and thoroughly permeated by the foreign’. Coldiron’s work speaks to a growing consensus among literary scholars that the literary culture and print culture of early modern England were polyglot and international in their texts, techniques, and personnel. But underlying this textual Babel was the multilingual oral culture of a nation whose language was little-regarded abroad, and a city alive with the voices of immigrants and visitors. In this paper, I want to look at early modern London as a city full of polyglot spaces. It’s my contention here that by understanding the places, the practices, and the people that made London function as a multilingual city, we can better understand trends in early modern linguistic change and literary culture.
'The Challenges and Benefits of Researching Early Modern News Songs in Four Languages', Una McIlvenna
This presentation looks at my research into English, French, German and Italian news songs. While English language ballads are well-studied, their counterparts on the Continent are not so well researched, and so I am often able to show continuities in theme, language and motif across Europe that have until now been deemed to be English in origin. But there are issues: my fluency is not uniform across all languages, digitisation of early documents is widely divergent from one country to another, and uneven collecting habits of ephemeral material can bias the analysis. This talk will look at the difficulties and the benefits of research that is multilingual, interdisciplinary and longue durée, and offer suggestions for solutions to the challenges.
'Defying Linguistic Divides. Philips of Marnix of Saint-Aldegonde Facing the Multilingual Low Countries ', Alisa van de Haar
Philips of Marnix, Lord of Saint-Aldegonde (1540-1598), a Calvinist leader and the right hand of the Dutch pater patriae William the Silent, embodies the complex multilingual situation in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, spanning roughly the modern-day Netherlands, Belgium, and some areas of northern France. Born within a family of aristocrats in Brussels, Marnix’s mother tongue was French, but he quickly learned to speak and read Dutch fluently through his contacts with locals. He grew out to be one of the main propagandists of the Dutch Revolt against the Habsburg crown, writing in both mother tongues of his country; French and Dutch. Strikingly, the research tradition has treated his French and Dutch texts as forming two distinctive oeuvres. A combined analysis, however, brings to the fore a sophisticated interplay between the writings in the two languages, that also successfully addresses the cultural and literary contexts of each of the vernaculars. His example thus makes a case for respecting contemporary political borders, which are not always congruent with linguistic ones. But Marnix’s efforts extended even further. While attempting through his texts in both native tongues of the Low Countries to unite this linguistically divided people, Marnix encouraged them at the same time to look beyond their borders.
'London Calling: Linguistic and Literary Adaptations of Tasso and Ariosto in Late Sixteenth-Century England', Bryan Brazeau
In “Translation as Challenge and Source of Happiness,” Paul Ricoeur articulates a concept of linguistic hospitality: “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home.” This presentation focuses on the work of two important translators in Early Modern England: Edward Fairfax, and John Harington, who translated the most popular Italian narrative poetry of the previous century (Tasso and Ariosto). Fairfax and Harington both employ a number of strategies in their translations in order to adapt these works to suit an English audience, at times altering the original text. My analysis asks how the “linguistic hospitality” employed by these writers shaped the first English versions of Tasso and Ariosto, and considers what these pragmatic adaptive strategies might reveal to us about how these writers perceived the potential audience of these texts.
'Whose Consent Matters? Reading Romeo and Juliet Transnationally', Rachel Holmes
Clandestine marriage looks just like marriage, and it became a nexus of anxieties in a sixteenth century Europe rocked by the Reformation. With the Reformation came both desperate attempts by the Church to seize jurisdiction over marriage and an increasing secular interest in matrimonial law. While disapproval of clandestine marriages was common to all jurisdictions, such unions remained of varying validity across Europe, and the tale of the lovers of Verona is emblematic of this debate. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is but one of no fewer than thirteen adaptations in early modern Europe, and the apparent divergences between these evidence coeval but distinct legal preoccupations. By working transnationally at the interface between law and literature, I am able to show how our understanding of a famous literary text such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is enriched by situating it in the context of broader literary, legal, historical, and cultural debates.
'Printable Borders: Molière in Early Modern England', Suzanne Jones
Although a play is designed to reflect the immediate society in which and for which it is first produced, a dramatic work can also survive in print. This print version can then be transported easily across national boundaries. Dramatic texts have always been viewed as texts that are pliable; it is expected that a play is to be reworked for new performances, as well as for new printed works.
In the late seventeenth century Molière’s plays were carried into post-Restoration England and re-constructed to form English versions for the newly reopened theatres. While these translations and adaptations, like their source-texts, were geared towards the social moment in which they were produced, the translators also sought to preserve them by publishing them. Given that Molière’s plays existed in print, the English dramatists were called on to justify their adaptation process in paratextual material. My paper will explore the ways that the first translators of Molière used print to present their works as considered engagements with the source-texts, thereby demonstrating that researching the early modern period across national boundaries can illuminate the extended lives of dramatic works.
'Folie à deux: Praises of Folly in the Works of Marin Držić and William Shakespeare', Martina Pranić
Marin Držić, a playwright, a poet and a priest from the Republic of Ragusa, a city-state on the easternmost brink of early modern Christendom, died when Shakespeare was roughly 4 years old. And yet, he is anachronistically hailed as the Croatian Shakespeare, occasioning comparisons of the two authors’ works, poetics and worldviews. Having contrasted the two on philological, stylistic, poetic and cultural grounds, Croatian criticism established solid points of convergence that speak of the authors’ use of similar characters, compositional elements and rhetorical devices (especially in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Grižula); their shared interest in transforming literary tradition (in the case of Comedy of Errors and Pjerin, the very same one—Plautus’ Menaechmi); and an overlapping preoccupation with metatextual rethinking of the text’s own organization and the questioning of generic norms. A very plausible argument even exists for a geographic-inspirational connection between Shakespeare’s Illyria and Držić’s native Ragusa.
In this paper, I acknowledge the established parallels and propose to take them beyond positivist and structuralist observations and into an exploration of some of philosophical principles that both playwrights share: namely, a recurring idea that there is paradoxical wisdom in folly, which sees certainties in all their absurdity and points to the futility of mankind’s aspirations to absolute Truth. For both Shakespeare and Držić, folly of the Erasmian kind is the key philosophical fixation, a wise Folly that clad the world in a jester’s hat and employed sharp irony to mock institutions, discourses and values of the serious world. By juxtaposing a major Renaissance author with one hitherto underrepresented in English-language scholarship, the paper will speak in favour of working across national boundaries and in more than one language and offer a polyphonous take on the concept of folly in the period in which ideas, just like people and objects, were on the move.