19:00

Kents Hill Park self-service canteen:

Informal shared supper for all delegates staying overnight at Kents Hill 14-15 May

9:30-10:00

Registration & tea/coffee (provided)

10:00-10:15

Introduction to the 5^th GOTH Symposium: TBC

10:15-11:45

Panel 1: POSTGRADUATE LIGHTNING PANEL(hybrid), Chair: Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde

10:15-10:30: Chair’s Introduction; Report of Convenors, OU monthly GOTH PG Forum (Isabelle Lepore & Antonia Saunders) on the Forum’s activities & research

10.30-11.30: 5-minute PGR lightning presentations by GOTH PG Forum members and invited guest speakers

• ONLINE Jane Barron de Burgh: Jane and John

  The paper concerns gendered names focusing on two examples: Jane and John. I intend to touch on ‘name changes’ as a part of social transitioning which is still a huge factor in passing as a trans person, and is seen as a milestone in a trans person's journey. I will focus on the impact of cultural stereotypes of gendered names and their associations in pop culture, and how this affects people living outside the gender associated with that name. I want to ask: are gendered names a thing of the past?

• Kiera Clark: ‘Something wicked this way comes’: Witchcraft and the Subversion of Female Power in Macbeth

  Throughout history, powerful women have been accused of witchcraft, including during the witch hunts across Europe in the Early Modern period. In Macbeth (1623), the supernatural powers of Hecate and the Witches are used as a metaphor for unrestrained female power and influence. Yet they are more than just supernatural others: they also threaten to subvert male power structures by influencing Macbeth, establishing them as gendered others. They reject traditional gender norms, simultaneously exhibiting male and female characteristics. Further, their power is not tied to femininity, challenging perceptions of what a woman should be. Hecate has limited time on stage yet has a significant impact on Macbeth’s life and downfall. The characterization of Hecate and the Witches highlight social anxieties around women in positions of power beyond their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Their moral ambiguity reflects fears around women who act outside of moral and social constraints. Grounding my approach in feminist criticism, I will perform a close reading of selected passages from the text, focusing on scenes featuring Hecate and the Witches. I argue that by using supernatural powers as a metaphor for female influence, the role of Hecate and the Witches serves as a warning around the destructive nature of unrestrained female power and autonomy. In doing so, Shakespeare explores the tension between women’s perceived power and their subjugation within the patriarchal social structures of Early Modern England.

• ONLINE Shibangi Ghose: Tradition, Authority and Religion: A Study of Old Age in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose

  In 14th century Europe, old age was depicted as the symbol of authority, wisdom and spiritual superiority. However, the onset of old age in people also brought with it immense fear of change and destabilisation of religious and social hierarchies. It also happened to be a time of great political and intellectual upheaval when the Catholic Church began to be threatened by the emerging humanist movement mostly propagated by youths of the age. The novel The Name of the Rose explores similar contesting ideologies between the desire of the older generation to preserve tradition and the desire of the youth to spread knowledge and bring change in society. The portrayal of old age in the novel successfully subverts the conventional reverent attitude towards old age in the medieval society, as an old person is revealed to be the antagonist instead of being the stereotypical guide for the protagonist in the novel. This paper explores the riveting concept of the destructive power of unchecked tradition and religion through a critical analysis of Jorge’s actions as an old person and the lengths that he is ready to go in his willingness to defend his religious beliefs. In addition to that, I will also be discussing about the association of old age in the novel to a rigid adherence to tradition where Jorge’s experiences in life do not result in his wisdom or compassion but instead makes him paranoid and determined to defend his religion and the existing social hierarchy. I will be focusing mostly on the contradictory nature of aging as presented in the novel and explore the implications behind the dichotomy between the youth’s quest for knowledge and the elderly’s desire to resist the unknown in the hope of shedding some light on the multifaceted aspects of aging in medieval society.

• Antonia Saunders: The Merchant of Venice in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington (1817)

  In Harrington, Maria Edgeworth intricately references Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice through various means. These include a discussion of Shakespeare's sources for the play, a contemporary performance of Shylock by a real-life actor, and the use of 'Shylock' as an anti-Semitic insult. This paper explores an additional point of reference, proposing that Edgeworth's Jewish characters serve as a subversion of The Merchant of Venice.

• Isabelle Lepore: A Disappeared Act: Revisiting the Ludum de Sancta Katerina (c.1110 - 1115)

  In this lightning talk, we will whizz through the earliest account of a miracle play in England, the Ludum de Sancta Katerina (c.1110 - 1115), discovering why this play came to be, how it 'disappeared', its producer, Geoffrey de Gorron, and significantly, his connections to women religious. From this we will gain insights into how women’s devotional culture could be perceived and preserved outside of the convent in the twelfth century and begin to understand the impact of the Ludum on studies of gender within medieval theatre for scholars today.

• Katie Robinson: Reclaiming the Abyss: Disability and the Narrative Potential of Cosmic Horror

  This talk explores how disability is represented in cosmic horror, challenging ableist tropes and reimagining disability as a source of agency and complexity. Combining creative writing and critical analysis, my PhD responds to Lovecraft’s fiction to examine how narrative choices shape perceptions of disabled characters.

• Gwyneth Jones: Hybrid Forms: Composite and Crossbred Creatures

  The critical element of my doctoral research is about the form and narrative potential of a literary hybrid, and my creative work is haunted by a fictional hybrid creature. This conjunction has led me to explore some of the questions raised by hybrids, hybridity, and hybridising practices, on which this talk will focus.

• Melanie Taylor: Responses to the domestic in the fiction of Dorothy Whipple

  Dorothy Whipple wrote eight adult novels as well as short stories and children's books between 1927 and 1953. I will briefly look at her portrayals of women's response to the domestic, during a period when expectations of women and their place in society were undergoing rapid change.

• Sarah Bower: The Contrary Hero(ine): A Bird’s Eye View of Capitalism From A Hot Air Balloon

  This lightning talk will take a subversive look at Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey through the lens of female entrepreneurism in the late 1790s.

11.30-11.45: LIGHTNING PANEL Q&A

11:45-12:00

SHORT BREAK

12:00-13:00

Panel 2, Early modern gender and otherness, Chair: Jennie Owen

• Marina Vidas: Portraits of Danish princesses, c. 1580–c. 1670

  This paper will closely examine a selection of portraits, primarily of Danish of preteen princesses, dating from c. 1580–c. 1670 with a view to understanding how the sitters were represented. Painted by foreign artists who found employment at the Danish court, the works that will be discussed represent and extol the daughters of Frederik II of Denmark and Norway (1534–1588), and Frederik III of Denmark and Norway (1609–1670). As will be discussed in the paper, characteristic for the selected portraits is that they do more than render their subject’s physical appearance. Through the depictions of attire, poses, facial expressions, and status symbol objects, such as jewellery, there is a clear representation of the sitter’s gender, lineage, high social status, and character – key manifestations of identity constructs. The representations of princesses will be analyzed and compared to those of their mothers and brothers. Lastly, Queen Charlotte Amalie (1650 –1714), the wife of and Christian V of Denmark and Norway (1646–1699), as a patron and collector will be discussed.

• Nailya Shamgunova: Sodomy, environmental determinism and constructing the 'Other' in early modern England

  This paper analyses the relationship between early modern vernacular English ethnographic discourses and the history of sexuality. It questions whether early modern English texts, both originally written in English and translated from other languages, established a connection between certain peoples and particular sexual behaviours, for example, ‘Turks’ and ‘sodomy’. This paper also examines the extent to which that connection was connected to the specific climates, bodies and environments. In other words, was same-sex activity racialised in European discourses in this period? Using a variety of medical and legal texts and travel accounts, this paper puts in dialogue two seemingly oppositional historiographical traditions - that of history of sexuality, which broadly claims that same-sex activity was seen as a sin anyone is capable of, and that of racial history, which places a particular importance on the early modern period’s role in establishing naturalised and essentialised categories of difference. This paper concludes that although early modern English discourses had the tools to explain particular sexual activities through the frameworks of climate and environmentally determined bodies, very few if any English authors actually did that. Discourses were complicated and not straightforward. However, upon the whole, sexual behaviour was seen as a part of customs and not a bodily determined phenomenon. Still, customs were intimately connected to bodies through the discourse of ‘addiction’ to particular substances and behaviours through repeated action. Custom, in the words of S. Shapin, became second nature, and the concept of addiction played a key role in this process. Through the language of addiction, early modern English texts naturalized ‘sodomy’ as a custom of certain peoples, which contributed to changing ideas of race and human difference in the early modern period.

13:00-14:30

Lunch (in The Hub: lunch vouchers)

14:30-16:30

Panel 3 (hybrid), Library Seminar Room 7 & ONLINE Chair: Chloe Fairbanks

• Jennie Owen: Rewriting Pendle

  Europe in 1612 was an age of widespread superstition. England was under the control of Protestant King James, who was suspicious of both Catholic conspiracy and use of supernatural forces. He wrote his own treatise on witchcraft Daemonologie in 1596. 9 women and 2 men were arrested in the Pendle area accused of witchcraft and murder. 1 died in custody, 1 was found innocent, and 10 were found guilty and hanged in Lancaster. In this presentation, Jennie will explore how these events have been memorialised and commodified into local folklore, comparing the approach to remember the victims of the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, America, which took place in 1692-3, where 19 were executed. Jennie will share her poetic journey travelling the witches’ road, where the Pendle victims were shackled and marched to Lancaster Castle, discussing how these experiences have informed her poetry writing about Lancashire’s oldest and arguably best known traumascape.

• Kate Buis: Early modern fugitive sheets

  This paper examines the earliest known moveable print bodies in the West, the “fugitive sheets”. I use the Italian sheet the Sabio figura (1539) and the British Anonymous sheet “The Woman” (1540) to analyze how these 16th century popular broadsides featuring woodcut male and female figures with superimposed, moveable, paper flap layers of internal anatomy were not just pedagogical toys. Historians of science, technology, medicine, print, and early modern culture, as well as antiquarians and librarians see the fugitive sheets as early modern pedagogical tools that emerged in tandem with the birth of modern Western medicine. My work on the fugitive sheets disrupts that consensus. Using the work of Robin Bernstein, I read the textual and sensorial elements of the fugitive sheets as a “script” which can be performed, altered, improvised and resisted in many ways by its beholder. I aim not to discover what any one individual actually did with a fugitive sheet, rather I look for what the sheets invited or prompted its users to do. I contend this act of scripting is itself a historical event - one that I argue is a redolent primary source from which human bodies, imaginations, and culture, built complex, variable, gendered performances that occupy real time and space. My paper asks: What imagined and enacted performances are scripted through the materiality of the fugitive sheets? How do the fugitive sheets effect a gendered body-to-body experience through performance? I assert the fugitive sheets represent a specific Western bodily imaginary that is foundational to understanding the body as a gendered, medical structure and that they accomplish this through a series of mutually prompted, embedded, scripted gestures, which cause gendered, relational, sensorial, negotiatory, intimate, body-to-body performances to unfold and new bodily imaginaries to form.

• ONLINE Maryam Farahani: Erotic Othering in Perceptions and Visualisations of Oriental Women

  Imbued with ideas of sexuality and gendered aesthetics, Orientalism, I argue, has extensively been regarded for its value-driven textual analytics in the exotic domain. In this work, I focus, rather than exoticism, on eroticism and its othering processes, applied to visualising Oriental women in medieval and early modern periods via epistolary and narrative travel records. My discussion upon eroticism, in its aesthetic direction, proceeds from St Bonaventure’s (ca. 1217-1274) speech perception and visualisation, and their binary relations observed through the pattern of human life. While the essence of such philosophical iteration is placed more broadly within theological aesthetics, I contend that it paved the way to European othering processes in reading the Oriental-Occidental binaries and gendered aesthetics.

  On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology demonstrates primary aesthetic principles that later on inspired early modern philosophies of the beautiful and the sublime. Measure, order, and form – as observed in Bonaventure’s aesthetics – are also perceptive factors that can be observed in letters and narrative records by Lady Wortley Montague (1689-1762) and others, interestingly not far from Bonaventure’s philosophy. I read these comparative examples, exploring how psychological development of the human self relate to such historical paradigms in the Arts. Reiterating, then in its psychological direction, I discuss eroticism in constructing the individual self as William James (1890) differentiated between consciousness and perception. My work, therefore, draws on the relationship between medieval, early modern, and modern ideas around how perception and visualisation can lead to othering processes, rendering the beautiful in masculine-feminine binaries, often animate or inanimate by dehumanization or symbolism.

16:30

Move to The Hub for tea, coffee & informal closing discussion (vouchers)

17:00

Library Seminar Room 6 closes

19:00

Kents Hill Park Hotel self-service canteen

Informal shared supper (delegates not staying at Kents Hill welcome to join)

10:00-11:00

The Hub (tea/coffee vouchers), The collaborative GOTH publication:
meeting for delegates who are (or wish to be) involved.