Online public lecture: ‘The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Renaissance culture’ (Speaker: Dr. Victoria Bladen, UQ)

PMRG’s first event of the year will be the first of two lectures by Dr. Victoria Bladen, who teaches in literary studies and adaptation at the University of Queensland.

The first talk will be Zoomed live from Brisbane on Wednesday March 10 at 4:30pm (AWST), but will be recorded for ease of access for all PMRG members. This is an event organised by the Sydney group (SMRG) and the first of PMRG’s Guest Speaker events for 2021. There will be a second lecture in April/May for PMRG (details to be announced).

Here are the details for the first talk on March 10:

The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Renaissance culture

Across early modern European culture grew a rich and complex language of trees that surrounded the concept of the tree of life. It was articulated in a variety of media and forms: illuminated manuscripts, woodcuts, paintings, mosaic, fresco, sculpture, and pageantry.  Arboreal motifs and metaphors were a significant vehicle for expressing ideas of spiritual knowledge and articulating religious ideology. The sources for arboreal iconography lay in biblical text however the meanings that were read from these images extended beyond the textual metaphors to intersect with social ritual, folklore, and the cult of the cross.  We will also see how unsettling forces of otherness lay embedded within such arboreal iconography, particularly apparent in the figure of the Green Man. This paper maps key ideas surrounding the tree of life and its arboreal aesthetics in Renaissance culture, highlighting recurring motifs and ideas, and demonstrating its double nature whereby orthodoxy was shadowed by the Other.


Dr Victoria Bladen teaches in literary studies and adaptation at The University of Queensland, Australia and has twice received a Faculty award for teaching excellence. Her publications include six Shakespearean text guides in the Insight (Melbourne) series, including The Merchant of Venice (2020) and Much Ado About Nothing (2019), and five co-edited volumes, including Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear (Cambridge UP 2019), and Shakespeare and the Supernatural (Manchester UP 2020). Her forthcoming monograph The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature will be published by Routledge in their World Literature and the Environment series.

Victoria’s presentation will be at 4:30pm Perth time, 6:30pm Brisbane time and 7:30pm Sydney time.

For Zoom details please contact the PMRG Secretary: [email protected].

PMRG AGM 2021

The 2021 Annual General Meeting of the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group Incorporated will be held on Monday, 15 March 2021, at 6:30pm at The University of Western Australia (Arts Building, ALR 8). The formal part of the meeting should conclude by 7pm.  We will then have a presentation from one of our founding members, Emeritus Professor Chris Wortham. Chris’s topic is ‘Shakespeare and the Forest of Arden’. 

Nominations are now open for people who wish to become a member of the PMRG Committee or wish to nominate for the positions of President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer.  The final date for nominations is Monday, 15 February 2021. Nominations should be sent to the PMRG Secretary: [email protected].

PMRG Annual Quiz Night postponed until 2021

Due to current circumstances, PMRG’s fundraiser, the Annual Quiz Night has unfortunately had to be postponed until 2021. 

Full details about next year’s Quiz Night will be posted on the PMRG website and Facebook account in 2021.

Should you wish to donate to PMRG, please contact the Secretary for more details. Donations are used to fund travel bursaries to allow postgraduate students and early career  scholars to attend the PMRG Conference.

AGM 2019 and Public Lecture ‘ “Go Draw Your Gourds!”: Some Editors and Readers of Cassius Dio in the 15th and 16th Centuries’

This year’s PMRG Annual General Meeting will be be held on Monday 18 March 2019. The meeting will begin at 6pm, in Arts Lecture Room 8 (first floor, Arts Building), UWA.The meeting will be followed, at approximately 6:30pm, by the 2019 AGM Lecture by Dr Chris Mallan (UWA): ‘”Go Draw Your Gourds!”: Some Editors and Readers of Cassius Dio in the 15th and 16th Centuries.’

Chris Mallan is a Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Western Australia. Chris’ research focusses on Greek Historiography under the Roman Empire and the reception of this tradition in Byzantium. He is currently working on a Commentary on Books 57 and 58 of Cassius Dio’s Roman History for OUP. Before joining UWA in 2018, Chris held teaching posts at St Benet’s Hall (Oxford) and the Queen’s College (Oxford).

This lecture examines the evidence for the transmission and reception of Cassius Dio’s Roman History in Western Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. The first part will focus on the editorial history of the Roman History leading up to the publication of the editio princeps in 1548. The second part will examine the marginalia corresponding to excerpts from Dio’s history in Sir Thomas Smith’s copy of Erasmus’ Scriptores Historiae Augustae (Queens’ College Cambridge F.2.15, pp. 131-147).

This is a free event, to which all are welcome. RSVPs are not required.

Image: ‘Sir Thomas Smyth, 1513 – 1577. Secretary of State and Diplomatist’ by Jacobus Houbraken. From https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/39680/sir-thomas-smyth-1513-1577-secretary-state-and-diplomatist-1743)

AGM 2018 & Public Lecture: ‘Music, Magic and Meraviglia: The Politics and Poetics of Festival in Medici Florence’

This year’s PMRG Annual General Meeting will be be held on Thursday 1 March 2018. The meeting will begin at 6pm, in Arts Lecture Room 5 (G.61, ground floor, Arts Building), UWA.

The meeting will be followed, at approximately 6.30pm, by the 2018 AGM Lecture. This is a free event, to which all are welcome. RSVPs are not required.

“Music, Magic and Meraviglia: The Politics and Poetics of Festival in Medici Florence”

by Dr Jennifer Halton

The Florentine festival of 1539 has long been noted by scholars as an occasion of historical importance and prestige for the alliance it forged between the Houses of Medici and Habsburg. The musical, architectural and visual programmes for the festival have been understood to be representative of an overt political agenda, bolstering Tuscan and international relations. However, this talk reveals that reevaluating the place of emotions in musical theory and practice can enrich our understanding of the intricate relationship between music, magic and the affective practice of performing meraviglia on the early modern stage. To illustrate this relationship, the talk will draw upon a number of musico-theatrical interludes (composed by Francesco Corteccia and staged by Giovan Battista Strozzi) performed at the Palazzo Medici on 9 July 1539.

Jennifer Halton is a researcher and curator with a diverse interest in collaboration across academia and the arts. She holds a PhD in Musicology from Maynooth University, Ireland, funded by the Irish Research Council. Her PhD thesis, ‘Mapping the Cine-Metropolis: Redefining Festival in Early Modern Florence’ is an interdisciplinary study of the phenomenology of music and space in sixteenth-century Florence. Taking the cultural practice of festivals as a conduit for analysing the relationship between people, place and identity, her research is framed by a methodology grounded in architectural, cultural and film theory. She is the founder of the Metamorphosis Project, an award-winning collaborative of academics and artists in Ireland, and has worked as a guest and educational curator with the Irish Architecture Foundation and the Illuminations Gallery at Maynooth University.

PMRG AGM & Public Lecture: “Love in a Time of War: Correspondence of the French Court in the Last Days of the Italian Wars”

This year’s PMRG Annual General Meeting will be be held on Tuesday 28 March 2017. The meeting will begin at 6pm, in the Austin Lecture Hall (1.59, first floor, Arts Building), UWA.

The meeting will be followed, at approximately 6.30pm, by the 2017 AGM Lecture. This is a free event, to which all are welcome. RSVPs are not required.

“Love in a Time of War: Correspondence of the French Court in the Last Days of the Italian Wars”

by Professor Susan Broomhall

Jean Clouet, Portrait of Anne de Montmorency, c.1530In the last campaigns of the Italian Wars, a conflict that had divided European states for more than fifty years, four key political protagonists in France exchanged letters. French campaigns against Habsburg forces in the north had separated the king, Henri II, from his queen, Catherine de’ Medici, his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, and his chief military advisor, the constable Anne de Montmorency. In doing so, four individuals whose political fates were tightly interwoven in orientation around their monarch took to letters to express their hopes, desires and fears at war.

Susan Broomhall is Professor of History at The University of Western Australia and Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She was a Foundation Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She became an Honorary Chief Investigator in 2014, having taken up an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. She is currently working on a study of emotions in the letters of Catherine de Medici.