2023

Tuesday, 28 February

6.30 pm Arts Lecture Room 5, UWA

AGM (6.30 pm) and Public lecture (7.00 pm) 

The 2023 Annual General Meeting of the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group Incorporated will be held at 6.30 pm, Tuesday, 28 February.  The venue is Arts Lecture Room 5 (ground floor), Arts Building, University of Western Australia.

Following the close of the meeting, Professor Susan Broomhall will speak on Writing women into the history of Joseon Korea 1392-1910. This talk explores both the historical and historiographical challenges of developing a biographically-oriented history of women in Joseon Korea, a period that extends from Europe’s late fourteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The Joseon period was deeply informed by Neo-Confucian values and practices, which shape how we can understand women’s lives as a cohort and as individuals, and their participation in society, from the extant sources. This talk will highlight examples of women whose voices and activities demonstrate the wide range of opportunities and choices that women negotiated, in political life, the spiritual world, intellectual culture and creative production.

Susan Broomhall is Director of the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University. She researches women and gender in the early modern world and recently completed Encounter, transformation and agency in a connected world: Narratives of Korean Women, 1550-1700 for Routledge.

Wednesday, 15 March

David Holthouse, PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia and PMRG member – Conspicuous Serration of Blades

6.30 pm Arts Lecture Room 5, UWA

Download David Holthouse – Conspicuous Serration of Blades – Abstract and Bio

 

Wednesday, 5 April

Emeritus Professor Richard Read, the University of Western Australia and PMRG member – Gian Lorenzo Bernini: sculptor, architect and creator of Baroque Spectacle

6.30 pm Arts Lecture Room 5, UWA

Abstract

Perhaps last of the great Renaissance ‘uomi universale’, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was, like Michelangelo, primarily a sculptor, celebrated for his convincing illusionism and psychological impact in furthering the cause of the Catholic Counter Reformation, yet his enormous productivity as an architect and creator of theatrical settings did much to give seventeenth-century Rome its Baroque visual character. Charting the virtuosity of his early classicizing works, the lecture will compare the contrasting semiotics of quattrocento and seicento sculpture and the divergenes between his architecture and that of his brilliantly idiosyncratic rival Donato Bramante.

Link to Richard Read’s bio

Friday, 21 April

Book Launch of ‘Hamlet in the Twenty-First Century’ edited by Victoria Bladen (University of Queensland) and Yan Brailowsky (University of Paris, Nanterre) with Dr Victoria Bladen by Emeritus Professor Christopher Wortham

Launch 4.00 pm UWA Shakespeare Garden (Arts Building behind the New Fortune Theatre)
Drinks 4.30 pm The University Club

Please RSVP for catering to [email protected]

Dr Victoria Bladen teaches in literary studies and adaptation at UQ. Her publications include: Hamlet in the Twenty-First Century (Belin / CNED, for the French agrégation, 2023). Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature (Routledge, 2022); seven Shakespearean text guides in the Insight (Melbourne) series, including The Taming of the Shrew (2021); and six co-edited volumes, including Onscreen Allusions to Shakespeare: International Films, Television, and Theatre (Palgrave 2022), Shakespeare and the Supernatural (Manchester UP 2020), and Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear (Cambridge UP 2019). Current projects include the co-edited volumes Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2023).

Download Flyer – Hamlet 21st Century – book launch – Bladen and Brailowsky eds – 21 April 2023.

Link to Victoria Bladen’s publications list https://communication-arts.uq.edu.au/profile/823/victoria-bladen

Wednesday, 17 May

Emily Chambers, PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham and PMRG Secretary – Elite Female Connections and Influence in Mid-Tudor England.

6.30 pm, Arts Lecture Room 5, UWA

Download Emily Chambers – Elite Female Connections and Influence in Mid-Tudor England – Abstract and bio.

Friday, 2 June

Conference Masterclass for Undergraduate and Postgraduate Students

Join us for a free masterclass on developing conference skills and abstract writing,
with the ultimate goal of presenting a paper at PMRG’s annual conference in October!

9.15–2.00, Woolnough Lecture Theatre, Geography Building, UWA

Download the PMRG Conference Masterclass 2023 Flyer

Register for the Masterclass https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/pmrg-conference-masterclass-tickets-627507611157

Wednesday, 19 July

Anna Quercia-Thomas, PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia – Mobilizing Emotion through Structures of Male Friendship in Shakespeare.

6.30 pm, Law Lecture Room 1, UWA

Download Anna Quercia-Thomas poster July 2023 .

Thursday, 17 August

Linda Zampol D’Ortia (Australian Catholic University and Ca’Foscari University of Venice) will talk on Unloving Mothers. Infanticide in the Sixteenth-Century Jesuit Mission in Japan.

This paper analyses the knowledge that the Catholic missionaries of the Society of Jesus created about practices of abortion and infanticide in late Sengoku Japan, and how it was circulated in Europe. It examines the causes that the missionaries identified behind these practices and the solutions they offered to counter them, to understand how Jesuit discourses on the matter related to the mission’s building and control of new Christian communities in the country.

Linda Zampol D’Ortia is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at the Australian Catholic University, where she is developing a project on the role of emotional practices in the early modern Jesuit missions in Asia. She has held research fellowships at Ruhr Universität Bochum, the National Library of Australia, and the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. Her research interests include Christianity in Japan, early modern Catholic missions, gender history, the history of Asia–Europe contacts, materiality, emotions, and failure studies.

6.30 pm, Arts Lecture Room 4, UWA.

Download a flyer here.

Tuesday, 22 August

Andrew Broertjes (The University of Western Australia) – ‘Reflecting on Richard: Some Thoughts on Richard III on the Anniversary of his Death’.

6.30 pm, Law Lecture Room 1, UWA.

Download a flyer here.

Wednesday, 20 September

Emeritus Professor Richard Read (The University of Western Australia) will present a paper –  ‘Reformation and Counter-Reformation Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe’.

This paper provides an overview of the geographical, political and religious formations of Southern and Northern Europe in the seventeenth century, which helps to explain the conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation art in several countries, particularly Holland and Italy. At this time Northern Europe was in turmoil due to the Protestant Reformation, the Dutch struggle for political independence from Catholic Spain and the revolution in England. Cutting across religious distinctions between Protestant Holland and England on the one hand, and Catholic France and Italy on the other, are tensions between the aristocratic court cultures of France, England and Italy and Dutch mercantile bourgeois culture. These tensions prompted the emergence of the Modern System of the Arts, an aristocratic backlash to rising bourgeois and scientific values that drove a wedge between secular art opposed to idolatry and religious art celebrating Catholicism and absolute monarchy. Thereafter European art would never convincingly depict a singular, unconflicted world view.

6.30 pm, Arts Lecture Room 4, UWA.

Download a flyer here.

Saturday, 21 October

2023 PMRG Conference: Fate and Fortune

Details here.

Wednesday, 29 November

John Haycraft (UWA) will present a paper, ‘History, Philosophy, and the Problems of Western Aesthetics’.

Histories of European aesthetics are often written with a quite singular focus upon how philosophical concepts are transmitted and modified across time. However, this approach can occlude the important influence of non-philosophical factors upon the historical development of aesthetic ideas. Beginning with a discussion of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s seminal essay ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, this lecture provides an outline of how factors as diverse as cosmology, artistic trends, and educational ideals have affected aesthetic speculation in the West from the Greeks to the early modern period.

John Haycraft holds a BA from the University of Western Australia in Philosophy, Politics, and Latin Language & Literature. He is currently completing an Honours degree in history with a thesis upon the history of British aesthetics.

6.30 pm, Arts Lecture Room 4, UWA.

Download a flyer here.

Friday, 8 December

There will be an informal end-of-year picnic for members and friends, who are asked to bring a plate, drinks and good cheer!

From 6.00 pm, Matilda Bay foreshore, just to the left (when facing the river) of the Bayside Kitchen kiosk.