Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Early Modern Circle

Convenors:

Julie Davies - daviesja@unimelb.edu.au
Catherine Kovesi – c.kovesi@unimelb.edu.au
Andrea Rizzi - arizzi@unimelb.edu.au

The Early Modern Circle is an informal, interdisciplinary seminar group open to interested students, academics and researchers. Drinks are provided and a gold coin donation helps to make this possible.

The group meets at 6:15 on the third Monday of the month, unless noted otherwise below.

To be added to the mailing list, please email Andrew Stephenson - andrewws@ unimelb.edu.au.

Archive of past papers.

Programme for 2013

18 March

Atrium Meeting Room (room 213), first floor, Old Arts

Prof. Claudia Jarzebowski, Freie Universität, Berlin

Of Toads and Tears: How Children Suspected of Witchcraft Perceived the World Around Them in 17th-century Germany

Children’s voices have hardly been heard in history and historiography. Recently historians have begun to reread sources in order to rewrite the history of children and childhood. In line with this work this paper seeks to demonstrate how children can be embraced as agents in history.  Children suspected of witchcraft were required to present their worlds and perceptions thereof to an audience which was at times interested, but increasingly reluctant and which included hostile neighbours, family members, friends and, last but not least: official interrogators. The children’s stories changed depending on who was listening. However, the persistent narratives behind them alluded to the children’s social and magical environments. This paper will expose some of those narratives and relate them to the children’s realities across imagination and ‘reality’. In so doing I hope to contribute to the history of childhood as much as to the history of the ‘witch-craze’.

 

15 April

Atrium Meeting Room (room 213), first floor, Old Arts

Heather Dalton, University of Melbourne

With Pen and Needle: The Importance of Creativity and Knowledge in a Sixteenth-century Cosmopolitan Trading Family

When Elizabeth Lucar died on October 29 1537 her husband commissioned a ‘very fair Stone’ in her memory and had it placed in the ‘South Ile and Body’ of Saint Laurence Poultney in 'Candelwyk Street' in the City of London. Elizabeth was the daughter, niece and wife of prominent Merchant Taylors who built fortunes trading in the Mediterranean and with Spain’s Atlantic settlements. The epitaph on this ‘fair stone’ was unusual for the period because, although it placed Elizabeth in relation to her father and husband, it did not expand upon her lineage, praise her as a good wife in conventional terms, nor mention the four children she bore in less than five years of marriage.

Her husband, Emanuel Lucar, chose to showcase his family’s status and values through his wife’s needlework, musical, mathematical, linguistic and calligraphic skills, and her ability, on ‘reading the Scriptures, to judge light from darke’.  He remembered her as a multilingual, numerate woman - ‘a very perfect creature’.

In my paper I place Elizabeth’s epitaph in context; exploring the complex world of faith, creativity, translation and knowledge exchange in an international trading network during a period of religious change.

Sarah Randles, University of Melbourne

'The pattern of all patience': Gender and Agency in Early Modern Model Books for Embroidery

Elizabeth Lucar, the subject of Heather Dalton’s paper, is praised in her epitaph in terms of her skill at needlework:
                                She wrote all Needle-workes that women exercise
                                With Pen, Frame, or Stoole, all Pictures artificiall.
                                Curious Knots, or Trailes, what fancie could devise,
                                Beasts, Birds or Flowers, even as things natural.

This paper will place Lucar’s work in the context of the history of early-modern embroidery, and in particular in terms of the pattern or model books, which proliferated from the sixteenth century onwards. These books were aimed primarily at an audience of leisured women, providing patterns, though not instructions, for popular types of embroidery and lace. The books frequently also included verses extolling the benefits of needlework in inculcating virtue. The paper will examine the role of women as designers and embroiderers and consider the place of creativity in their work, as well as the way that needlework was used in the construction of morality and of gender.

 

20 May

Atrium Meeting Room (room 213), first floor, Old Arts

Dale Kent

The Rise of Collecting in the Renaissance: Cosimo de' Medici and His Sons

This paper was written as a contribution to a recent symposium on "Bankers as Collectors" held at the Frick Museum and sponsored by its Center for the History of Collecting, invoking Henry James' phrase, "there was money in the air...for the most exquisite things." Of course the princes of Europe had always spent lavishly on exquisite things to enhance their environments and reputations. But it was in the republic of Florence in the fifteenth century that a critical mass of elite merchants and bankers first overcame medieval moral scruples about usury, the essential precondition of the accumulation of wealth in business, giving rise to a whole class of patrons and collectors competing with one another to acquire exquisite things.

My paper concerns the collections  of Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464) and his sons Piero and Giovanni, who died respectively in 1469 and 1463. Medici collecting was inextricably entwined with their artistic, political and personal patronage and their activities as bankers. Many of their acquisitions were made with the assistance of employees of the Medici bank, which in the mid-fifteenth century had  branches or affiliates in 19 cities, including all the major Italian centres and extending as far as London, Bruges, Lyons, Barcelona and Rhodes.  As the century progressed, and Rome and Naples became recognized marketplaces for collectors, the Medici relied increasingly on professional dealers.

 

17 June

Atrium Meeting Room (room 213), first floor, Old Arts

To be confirmed

 

19 August

Seminar Room 2 (room 209), first floor, Old Arts

Jenny Spinks, University of Manchester

Signs that Speak: Reporting the 1556 'Charles' Comet Across French and German Borders
 

16 September

Seminar Room 2 (room 209), first floor, Old Arts

Michael Wyatt, Stanford University

Title TBC
 

21 October

Seminar Room 2 (room 209), first floor, Old Arts

Dr. John S. Wilkins, University of Sydney, University of Melbourne

The Theological and Philosophical Origins of the Concept of Biological Species from Athanasius Kircher to John Ray
 

18 November

Seminar Room 2 (room 209), first floor, Old Arts

Gerhard Weisenfeldt, University of Melbourne

The Rituals of Early Modern Academia: Explorations of Neglected Writings

 

Previous Papers for the Early Modern Circle

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

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