renaissance

We seek papers to round out an exciting collection of essays on the subject of “food and feast in premodern outlaw tales.” Although we are happy to consider abstracts on Middle English outlaws, we are especially interested in work that considers topics related to food and/or feasting in the following areas: pre-Conquest English, medieval Scandinavian, medieval continental, or early modern outlaws in history, literature, and/or culture. We welcome essays from any discipline. Please send an author bio and abstract for a 6,000-8,000 word essay to Melissa Ridley Elmes at MElmes@lindenwood.edu by August 1, 2017.

In light of expanding literary theories contributing to a better understanding of emotions and affects in literary texts, this panel will provide participants with an opportunity to discuss various new and important perspectives on the representation of emotions in Italian literature and art.

Proposals that analyze early modern through contemporary Italian literary production are welcome. We seek papers exploring the manner in which writers convey emotions to their readers, to the literary community of their day and, to their society at large.

or Early Modern Women, the very act of seeing or being seeing was fraught. Whether in their domestic roles or later as they first appeared on English stages, much was talked about the gaze of the early modern woman and the sway she held over others' gazes. Whether she was catching the eye of a potential lover or looking longingly after her children, her freedom, her future, the language of sight surrounds these women. This panel will look for papers exploring the theatrical power within these depictions of women seeing and being seen. The performative nature of being a woman who must appear chaste while remaining sexually desirable.

The council of Trent marked a milestone for Spanish diplomats and Churchmen. What has been often perceived as a change of paradigm in the theological and political protocols, was also a site for the creation of knowledge. As Spanish diplomats and churchmen gathered at Trent with their pairs from all the continent, medical, literary and philosophical ideas traveled hundreds of miles across borders and seas -- in the form of adaptations from antiquity, illustrated codices from the New World or revolutionary texts. This panel aims at examining the ways in which the council fostered early modern science and the liberal arts. 

Every play imagines its own world—but the worlds they imagine must in some way connect with their audience. This panel invites perspectives on early modern English drama that considers the balance between these two poles: the imagined world of the setting and its connection to the surrounding culture in early modern England. This balance is particularly important in early modern English drama for both historical reasons—an increased awareness of other worlds and their different reality within the expanding cultural purview of the early modern English—and literary ones—since so much criticism of these plays has focused on their relation to early modern England itself to the exclusion of their frequently quite disparate settings.