Public Lecture: ‘Compelled bie his father’: the phenomenon of child marriage in sixteenth-century northern England'

Wednesday, 5 November 2014
6.30pm, Venue Webb Lecture Theatre (G.21), Ground Floor, Geography & Geology Building, UWA

Dr Loretta Dolan
The University of Western Australia

Abstract

The purpose of my research on child marriage is to give a clearer understanding of how the practice of child marriage affected the nurture of the child. By analysing the emotional responses and reactions of children to their marriages, we are able to appreciate the practice from the perspective of the child. This gives children a voice though which we can observe conflicts with authority and how children exercised agency in relation to their marriages. Ecclesiastical depositions form the basis of my research with the evidence given by the witnesses in matrimonial court cases providing social detail as well as the circumstances surrounding the marriage. They reveal why casino child marriages had occurred. All hinge on agreements between parents and other adults whilst none identify the agency of the child in choosing their own marriage partner. Evident are negotiations concerning debts, identification of one of the parties as being a ‘good bargain’, the marriage of stepchildren due to the union of their parents, marriage of wards, coercion of the child by adults other than their parents, and lastly, compulsion of family and friends. All were considered valid motives for the marriages to take place. Depositions themselves also allow for a considerable range of social class situations to be analysed. Reputation and honour was of paramount concern to people who used the services of the Church courts, and all were eager to defend their reputations.

Public Lecture: "I’ve Got You under My Skin: The Green Man, Trans-Species Bodies, and Queer Worldmaking."

Thursday, 14 August 2014
6.30pm, Venue Arts Lecture Room 5 (G.61), Ground Floor, Arts Building, UWA

Carolyn Dinshaw
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English
Chair, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

Abstract

The eerie figure of the foliate head, at once utterly familiar and totally weird, was a decorative motif well nigh ubiquitous in medieval church sculpture in Western Europe. This imagined mixture of human and vegetable — a head sprouting leaves or made up of vegetation — became known in the 20th century as the Green Man. It has proven to be a powerful icon of boundary crossings (sexual and racial) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the US, UK, and Commonwealth countries. This aesthetically intricate, affectively intense image represents a body that is a strange mixture, a weird amalgam: it pictures intimate trans-species relations. Carolyn Dinshaw describes foliate heads in their medieval casino online settings and then traces modern and contemporary uptakes of this imagery in buy viagra online the US, UK, Canada, and Australia (including work by Western Australian author Randolph Stow), focusing particularly on the traumatic contexts of HIV/ AIDS and of decolonization out of which new queer worlds are being imagined.

About the Speaker

Carolyn Dinshaw is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her books include Chaucer and the Text (1988), Chaucer”s Sexual Poetics (1989), Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999) and How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (2012). Find out more about Professor Dinshaw”s work and research interests here.

Public Lecture: “Marriage, Passion and Love”

“Marriage, Passion and Love.” (A chapter from Anne of France’s ‘School for Ladies’: Gendered Emotions and Power in Early Modern France)
Associate Professor Tracy Adams (The University of Auckland & ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Distinguished International Visiting Fellow)

Date: Monday 10 February 2014
Time: 5.30 – 6.30pm (please note that this is earlier than previously advertised)
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre, G21, Geography Building, The University of Western Australia

Abstract: This project follows the careers of a female network originating at the court of Anne of France (1461-1522), regent for her brother Charles VIII, and mentor to many girls who went on to illustrious careers: Marguerite of Austria, Louise of Savoy, Diane de Poitiers and Anne of Brittany. To this original circle I add the next generation: Anne of Brittany’s daughters Claude, Queen of France and Renée, Countess of Ferrara, together with Louise of Savoy’s daughter, Marguerite de Navarre, who in turn trained her own daughter, Jeanne d’Albret. Master of politics, Anne passed on knowledge about succeeding in a man’s world. Her father Louis XI chose her to be unofficial regent on his deathbed, apparently believing that in this way she would encounter less opposition than if she were formally appointed. Although female regency in France continued to be exercised unofficially, it was an important institution. From the beginning of Anne’s regency until Louis XIV came of age, ending the regency of Anne of Austria, the kingdom was for all practical purposes ruled by women for about 42 years, which is to say that, in a kingdom that prohibited female rule, women ruled about 25% of that time.

I examine Anne of France’s extended circle as an “emotional community” with the goal of understanding how members were prepared emotionally to exercise power while conforming to a repertoire of female stereotypes. Their libraries are of special interest, because in the works they shared we find models for ideal emotional modulation. I will present from a chapter on marriage, passion, and love. Passionate love was the result of an imbalance of humors; marital affection was an idealized, modulated emotional state between spouses in dynastic marriages. I compare some idealized representations of marital relationships in works from the libraries of the women with reports about these relationships from chronicles and ambassadors’ letters. These sources are all “texts”, of course, but I believe that, in comparing what was perceived as an ideal with impressions of the women, we find clues as to how they assimilated and manipulated their
emotional models.

This public seminar is hosted by the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group (PMRG), The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE).

Public Lecture: “The Luttrell Psalter”


Public Lecture
The Luttrell Psalter: Imaging England on the Eve of the Black Death
Professor Michelle P. Brown, University of London

When: Thursday 28 November at 6:00 PM
Where: Webb Lecture Theatre (G.21, Geography Building, UWA)
RSVP: Contact Anne Scott to RSVP by Monday 25 November 2013.

Michelle P. Brown is a plenary speaker for the 2013 CMEMS/PMRG Conference, which opens with this public lecture. She is Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and a Visiting Professor at University College London and Baylor University (Texas). She was formerly the Curator of Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library and a Lay Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

Download PDF of lecture poster.

PMRG/CMEMS Annual Conference, 2013

TEXTUALITY TECHNOLOGY MATERIALITY
In the Medieval and Early Modern World28-30 November 2013
The University of Western Australia, Perth

Confirmed plenary speakers:
* Professor Tim Fitzpatrick (The University of Sydney)

Call for abstracts
The convenors of the 19th Annual Conference of the Perth Medieval and
Renaissance Group, co-sponsored by the UWA Centre for Medieval and
Early Modern Studies, welcome abstracts (c.200 words) for 20-minute
papers exploring medieval and early modern cultures of technology,
textuality, and materiality, c.600 to 1800 CE. We welcome proposals
for papers (or panels of 3 papers) which consider:

* The social and cultural lives and afterlives of medieval and early
modern material objects
* Manuscripts, inscriptions, illustrations, letters, the printing
press and other medieval and early modern communication technologies
* The production, transmission, and mediation of medieval and early modern texts
* The application and/or impact of modern technologies to medieval and
early modern materials

Abstracts and panel proposals (along with titles and brief bios for
speakers) should be emailed to [email protected] addressed to the
convenors — Professor Andrew Lynch, Associate Professor Anne M. Scott, and Dr Brett D. Hirsch — by no later than 1 September 2013.

Further details
Further details about the conference programme, registration, and
postgraduate travel assistance will be made available on
http://conference.pmrg.org.au/

PMRG Annual General Meeting

The PMRG Annual General Meeting for 2013 is scheduled for Tuesday 26th March 2013, at 7.00PM in Arts Lecture Room 6 (G.62, Ground Floor, Arts Building) at UWA. A public lecture on “Child’s Play and Child Murder: The Emotions of Children in Jesuit Jacob Bidermann’s Latin Epic on the Massacre of the Innocents (1622)” by Professor Yasmin Haskell (ARC Centre for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800 & The University of Western Australia) to follow @ 7.30pm. All welcome!

Public Welfare vs. Private Charity (IAS Public Lecture)

Public Welfare vs. Private Charity: Some Lessons from Medieval and Early Modern Europe

A lecture by Sharon Farmer, Professor of History, University of California Santa Barbara

SharonFarmer

Date: 21 February 2013
Time: 6pm
Location: Webb Lecture Theatre (G21), Geography Building, UWA
Parking: P18 & P19, Fairway entrance 1
Cost: Free, but RSVP essential.

To register a place – click here.

For more information about the lecture, click here.

Christmas Party

Medieval XMAS“Tis the season!

Join us for an evening of merriment at Dell Cottage, St George”s College (on the left as you”re traveling up the main driveway — you”ve gone too far if you reach the online casino archway). The festivities kick off at 6:30 PM, and entry is $10 (which comes with a drink). Bring a plate of food to contribute.

For more information about the event, contact Jo McEwan.