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Call for Papers: “Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics”
A graduate symposium at Yale University, Oct 2, 2010

The graduate students of the Yale University Renaissance Studies program and affiliated departments are pleased to announce an upcoming graduate symposium, “Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics,” to be held at Yale University October 2, 2010.

Renaissance Studies at Yale is an interdisciplinary program involving graduate students of philosophy, history, art history, classics, Italian, French, Spanish, English, and comparative literature. In that spirit of collaboration, we encourage graduate student papers which address questions of ethics, honor, and virtuous behavior in the Renaissance broadly considered, even if they are only loosely connected with Shakespearean studies. The hope is that Shakespeare’s works will serve in this case not as a sole focus, but instead as a case study and point of entry for more general discussions of the peculiarities of competing moral paradigms in the Renaissance.

Topics of special interest include:

- radical Protestantism
- Neostoicism
- Epicureanism
- Montaigne: sources, reception, influence, and imitators
- Machiavelli, Machiavellianism, and the stage Machiavel
- Romanitas
- the possibility of moral self-sufficiency
- Aristotelianism; post-medieval Scholasticism and its discontents
- divine grace and the human will; Augustinianism and Pelagianism
- crimes of passion; legal and philosophical problems of accountability
- conflicts between Christianity and classical ethics
- the moral role of honor
- virtue and the constraints of political obligation
- the influence of classical historians: Plutarch, Tacitus, Sallust, Livy
- the influence of classical literature: Seneca, Virgil, Ovid
- the ethics of rhetoric: Cicero, Ciceronianism, Seneca, Atticism
- Shakespeare’s contemporaries: Jonson, Marlowe, Webster, Chapman

The symposium will feature plenary lectures by Gordon Braden, University of Virginia, on Shakespeare and classical ethics, John Cox, Hope College, on Shakespeare and Christian ethics, and Lars Engle, University of Tulsa, on Shakespeare and Montaigne.

Please send an abstract (approx. 300 words) for a 20-minute presentation to Patrick Gray, Committee Chair, by email to patrick.gray@yale.edu, subject line, “Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics,” by July 1, 2010. Proposals should include the title of the proposed paper, presenter’s name, institutional affiliation, email address, mailing address, and telephone number.

This symposium is made possible by support from the Elizabethan Club of Yale University and the Dean’s Fund at Yale for Student-Organized Symposia.