Repetition governed the rhythms of early modern life through the practices of liturgy and prayer, the rote drills of grammar-school pedagogy, the iterative logic of print, and the rhetorical schemes (anaphora, epistrophe, ploce, tautology) that early modern writers were trained to use. Repetition could consolidate memory and community, generate affect, structure devotion, or signal decorum. Yet it could also misfire—becoming tedious, compulsive, alienating, or a mark of failure, excess, or exclusion. This panel asks what repetition did in early modern literature and culture, and for whom, treating it simultaneously as a stylistic device and a lived cultural practice.

We invite papers that explore the function of repetition broadly defined, and welcome (though are not limited to) the following lines of inquiry:

• How repetition operates differently (or surprisingly similarly) across linguistic, visual, and musical media (oral vs. textual repetition, embodied repetition, visual repetition)
• Bad or ineffective repetition (tedium, failure, and the limits of iterability)
• Repetitive temporalities (liturgical time, seasonal cycle, historical recurrence)
• Repetition and affect (emotional intensification, comforting repetition, grieving
laments)
• Repetition and disability (stutter, echolalia, tremor, the ‘falling sickness’)
• Repetition and ritual (charms and incantations, vows, praying practices)
• Formal resonances (structural recursion, narrative doublings, mirror scenes,
rhyme, alliteration)
• Repetition and myth (Echo, Sisyphus, the Danaids, Penelope)
• Repetition in cultural encounters (Islamic calls to prayer and dhikr, Jewish
shuckling, Irish keening, ‘prayer wheels’, Calumet dance)

Please send paper proposals to J. D. Eynard (je370@cam.ac.uk) and Laura Thorn (lt512@cam.ac.uk) by July 26, including title, abstract (200-word maximum), CV or bio (2 pages maximum), PhD completion year (past or expected), name, current affiliation, and e-mail address. Notifications sent by July 30.