renaissance

MAPACA (Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association) 2017

28th Annual Conference

Philadelphia, PA

November 9-11, 2017

Medieval and Renaissance (formerly called “Beowulf to Shakespeare”)

The wealth of material found in the Middle Ages and Renaissance continues to attract modern audiences with new creative works that make use of medieval and/or early modern themes, characters, or plots. This is a call for papers or panels dealing with any aspect of medieval or Renaissance representations in popular culture.  Topics for this area include, but are not limited to:

RSA 2018 - New Orleans

Beyond Surface: Interrogating the Early Modern Wall and Page

English: The Journal of the English Association (Oxford UP) seeks reliable book reviewers.  Please email the Reviews Editor, Dr Adam Hansen (adam.hansen@northumbria.ac.uk) with your CV (2 pages maximum) and a brief (100 words) statement of areas of interest or expertise.

William Shakespeare’s oeuvre is comprised of multiple forms, including the play, the sonnet, and the narrative poem and spans a wide variety of genres, including comedy, tragedy, history, epic, and romance. Because of his contributions to the western canon, modern scholarship tends to focus on Shakespeare the writer. Yet, we often forget another aspect of his literary life: Shakespeare the reader. In crafting his work, Shakespeare borrows heavily from Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance literature of all genres, including poetry, epic, drama, and prose fiction, and incorporates references to mythological, religious, rhetorical and philosophical texts throughout his works.

This panel will explore women’s involvement in the death and memorial practices of the early modern world. While early modern women were actively involved in the processes that surround death and dying, they are curiously absent from prescriptive advice in ars moriendi treatises of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, which typically feature a dying man surrounded by a retinue of male advisors and friends. This exclusion creates a disjunction between the representation and the reality of women’s involvement in the rituals of death. This panel will begin to piece apart this disjunction by examining the following questions: What roles did women perform in the rituals of dying, and how were their actions represented in literature or art?