News
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
In 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.
Moved Reading: John Studley’s 1566 Translation of Seneca’s Medea
PMRG Quiz Night
The Merry Wives of Windsor, 16-18 February @ UWA
Sprott Fellowship
Applications for the Sprott Fellowship (c.$40,000, for Australian citizens younger than 45 years of age, to facilitate research overseas towards a book on early modern literature/drama) are now due by Tuesday 07 July 2015.
A flyer containing further information can be found here:
http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/award/sernest-sprott-fellowship
Public Lecture: “Where did Margery Kempe Cry?”
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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.
Dr Craig Taylor’s Visit
Sponsored by CMEMS and the Institute of Advanced Studies, Dr Craig Taylor (The University of York) is coming to visit in late June 2014. As well as taking part in the PMRG/CMEMS/CHE Symposium, ‘In Form of War: Emotions and Warfare in Writing, 1100-1820’, we can look forward to a Postgraduate Masterclass on ‘Chivalry’ and a public lecture on ‘The Trials of Joan of Arc’ on 26 June.
IAS/CMEMS Postgraduate Masterclass: ‘Chivalry’
In this masterclass, I will be asking students to consider the fundamental confusions that beset our modern use of the term ‘chivalry’. In general usage, the term now carries a set of romantic connotations that barely reflect neither the reality of aristocratic behaviour during the middle ages, nor the more complex representations offered by medieval commentators and writers. We will therefore consider how far such anachronistic assumptions prevent real engagement with the medieval past, as well as the deeper problem of defining chivalry simultaneously as the textual representation of knightly values and the wider aristocratic culture.
For more details, or to register, see: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/masterclass/taylor
IAS/CMEMS Public Lecture: ‘The Trials of Joan of Arc’
This lecture will explore the two great trials of the celebrated French heroine, firstly at Rouen in 1431 while in the hands of her enemies and then between 1455 and 1456, when a posthumous investigation nullified the verdict of the original trial. Given the rejection of the original trial as a sham, it is natural that modern scholars have offered increasingly sophisticated analyses of the records of Joan’s public and private interrogations at Rouen in 1431; under such careful scrutiny, these sources raise fascinating questions regarding the ‘truthfulness’ of medieval records and of Joan’s story, as well as different kinds of insights into wider questions of religion and gender in late medieval society. Yet the records of the second trial have not received as careful attention, in large part because they remain pivotal to undermining the credibility of the original heresy trial. In this lecture, I will therefore turn the spotlight into the second trial, suggesting new ways in which scholars might approach these familiar records.
For more details, or to book a seat (this is a free public lecture, but RSVPs are requested), see: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/taylor
About Dr Craig Taylor
Craig Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York, and a Fellow of both the Société de l’Histoire de France and the Royal Historical Society. Craig is currently Chair of the Graduate Board of Studies in the Department of History at the University of York, and in October 2014will become Director of the internationally-renowned Centre for Medieval Studies.
His research focuses upon the political, aristocratic and martial cultures of late medieval France and England, and in particular the intellectual and cultural representations of chivalry and warfare in the age of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). His publications include Joan of Arc, La Pucelle (Manchester University Press, 2006), Debating the Hundred Years War: Pour ce que plusieurs (La loi salicque) & A declaracion of the trew and dewe title of Henrie VIII (Camden Series, 2007) and Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France during the Hundred Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Craig is also a co-investigator on a major AHRC-funded project on England’s Immigrants which runs until February 2015. This explores the extensive archival evidence about the names, origins, occupations and households of a significant number of foreigners who chose to make their lives and livelihoods in England in the era of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses. The project will contribute creatively to the longer-term history of immigration to England, and help to provide a deep historical and cultural context to contemporary debates over ethnicity, multiculturalism and national identity.