The GEMS Seminars provide the opportunity to members of our research group and other scholars with an interest in the early modern period to meet and discuss current research issues. In the schedule (see menu) you will find two categories of these meetings. First there are the Ateliers during which GEMS-members or guests present their research projects, recent publications or ideas for future projects. Secondly we will have three meetings this academic year with specialists of the early modern period who will introduce to you the work of a famous scholar by whom they are inspired in their own scholarly work (Inspired by…). People who are interested to spotlight his or her current or future research projects during one of these meetings are cordially invited to get in contact with the organization (andrew.bricker@ugent.be).
On 4 May (2pm, Library lab Magnel), Marius Buning will give a talk that may be of interest to GEMS members:
Controlling information flows: Printing privileges in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic
This paper presents an analysis of printing privileges in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. It investigates the impact these privileges had on the dissemination of information, the development of the Dutch printing industry, and the types of publications that were produced. Whereas privileges are often seen of legal means that were primarily important for the local market, this paper will show that the ‘local’ cannot be seen in isolation from intra- and pan-European connections. It thus ties in with a broader discussion of the relationship between knowledge and power in the early modern period, and provides a good starting point for understanding the framework and objectives of the ERC-funded project Before Copyright, which I am currently leading at the University of Oslo.
Biography
Marius Buning (Ph.D, European University Institute, 2013) is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests focus on the nature of intellectual property and the role of the state in shaping notions of scientific and technological progress. Since 2022, he is the PI of the ERC project “Before Copyright: Printing privileges and the politics of knowledge in early modern Europe”.
The Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw is organizing a webinar series that may be of interest to GEMS’ers: “Vroegmodern Babylon? Meertaligheid en vertalen in de Nederlanden in de achttiende eeuw.”
For the “Inspired by…” event, GEMS has invited students to reflect on what or who inspires them in their research for their master’s thesis. The event will take place on the 25th of April, starting at 2pm, in the “Loveling” library lab of the Faculty Library (Rozier 44). Students will give twenty-minute presentations, after which there will be time for questions. This will be followed by a reception, starting around 5pm.
Here’s an overview of the presenters and their abstracts:
Cato Rooryck – Questions of Reconciliation and Indigeneity in Contemporary Australian Adaptations of Macbeth and The Tempest Responding to recent debates about the contemporary relevance of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as concerns about decolonizing the Western canon more broadly, my thesis will look at how contemporary Indigenous theatre practitioners in Australia engage with Macbeth and The Tempest. In doing so, it builds on the work of scholars such as Elizabeth Schafer (2003) and Emma Cox (2004, 2011), who have pointed to convergences between Shakespeare and Indigeneity in Australia – a phenomenon which international scholarship has failed to pay due attention to. More specifically, I will look at the role of the witches in Macbeth and Caliban and Ariel in The Tempest – which both pose a challenge for contemporary directors – in the negotiations of Indigenous identities in recent Australian adaptations. In my presentation, I will reflect on some insights and passages by Indigenous(-Australian) scholars and writers that have inspired me to combine my interest in Shakespeare, which goes back to my bachelor paper, with my interest in Indigenous studies, philosophies, and cultures. I will consider how my introduction to Aboriginal literature and scholarship by authors such as Kim Scott has challenged me to further my thinking about Shakespearean drama (and its role as the showpiece of the Western literary tradition – and its long history of exclusion) and its contemporary relevance. In particular, I will also discuss Kylie Bracknell’s Hecate (2020) – “the first adaptation of a complete Shakespearean work presented entirely in one Aboriginal language of Australia” (Bracknell et al. 2021), which was the first Aboriginal Shakespeare adaptation I encountered and is central to my thesis.
Amber Kempynck – Warning: Complex Female Protagonist. Redefining Unlikability and Passivity as Feminist Resistance and Female Agency in Millennial Women’s Writing In contemporary women’s writing, there is an influx of complex, “unlikable” female protagonists. This gives rise to two discourses: one about the genre these novels have established, namely “millennial fiction”, and another about the feminist thought they convey, called dissociative feminism. These discourses maintain that the female protagonists are unjustifiably passive and that their behavior is “damaging to the entire feminist movement” (Peyser). This thesis examines these discourses and shows through the analysis of four contemporary novels – Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017), Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (2020), and Lisa Taddeo’s Animal (2021) – that the female protagonists do have reasons for their nihilistic attitudes and are not passive but act with agency. In addition, the novels send a feminist message, as they resist normative femininity, highlight the female experience, and discuss taboo subjects related to womanhood.
Elisabeth Goemaere – Postcolonial Studies and Medieval Anglo-Irish Literature ““Do They Not Still Acknowledge That Submission?”: Figurations of the Irish ‘Other’ in Early-Colonial British Literature. My MA thesis explores the use of ethnic and gendered stereotypes in English literature during two significant periods of Ireland’s early history as a colony: the arrival of the Normans (c. 1169) and the Elizabethan Conquest (c. 1534-1603). The thesis examines how British writers used stereotypes to justify the Anglo-Norman civilising mission, and to metaphorically express both Anglo-Norman and Irish colonisation-related distress. Gender anxieties are prevalent in these texts, and sexual differences occur as a metaphor for political, ethnic, and religious distinctions. The thesis uses medieval accounts of Ireland to explore how Irish inhabitants were demonised through tropes of savagery, monstrosity, and sexual deviance. My study aims to contribute to our understanding of conquest, identity, and societal change in the Middle Ages and suggests that questioning medieval figurations of the Irish Other leads to a more accurate portrayal of one of Britain’s first colonies. Inspiration: postcolonial studies. Overall, my analysis focuses on rhetorical devices that reflected upon and actively shaped medieval Britain, such as debasing the other, (re)negotiating one’s own identity, and affirming or adopting the white man’s burden. These mechanisms have often been considered in postcolonial studies, which is my main framework. The Anglo-Irish contact can be regarded in colonial terms, and the resulting tensions can hence be understood through concepts as Homi Bhabha’s mimicry and hybridity, Franz Fanon’s take on alienation, and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Mainly this study field has prompted me to rethink my own (limited) knowledge of medieval Britain and its reflection in contemporary literature.”
Milan Francis – Decolonizing colonial history: The Túpac Amaru Revolution and the Silencing of indigenous culture A recent restoration of a Christ painting “El Señor de los Temblores” revealed its original content: an indigenous noblewoman proudly dressed in traditional Incaic dress. The painting dates to the late 18th century and was overpainted in the aftermath of the Túpac Amaru Revolution (1780-83), the largest indigenous revolution in Andean colonial history, hiding its ‘potentially subversive’ message. The original content, its erasure, and its recent restoration tell the story of power and production of colonial history. This story also represents the process of Silencing that has characterized historiography on the Atlantic Age of Revolutions since its inception. Inspired by Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s now classic study on the Haitian Revolution, which demonstrated how the Silencing of this other non-European revolution did not reflect its unimportance or irrelevance, but rather, a denial of its radical implications. Likewise, the Silencing of of the Túpac Amaru Revolution is no coincidence, and can be traced back to the cultural genocide imposed on indigenous people after it was defeated: prohibiting indigenous clothing, language, traditions and art. If this prohibition tells us anything, it is the importance of material and visual culture in the study of this indigenous revolution, and indigenous culture more broadly. By incorporating decolonial theory, this thesis will attempt to study this indigenous revolution on its own terms: by complementing written sources with a focus on visual culture and public spectacle. By integrating indigenous forms of knowledge, this project will explore the possibility of (anti-)colonial history beyond its Silencing of indigenous culture.
Goede en verkeerde hartstochten, anoniem, naar Otto van Veen, 1590 – 1632
This spring school is organised by GEMS, UGent Doctoral School AHL and the Huizinga Institute. It stimulates contacts and exchange between Dutch and Flemish junior scholars in the field of cultural history. The course will mainly focus on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, but students working on Antiquity or the Modern Period can attend as well.
Abstract This course is about the History of the Emotions, a flourishing research field that connects different disciplines within the humanities. At least five of these disciplines will be represented in this course: cultural history, economic history, political history, literary studies and art history. The aim of the course is not to provide an introduction in the field but to deepen the participants’ knowledge of four topical angles through which emotions in history can be studied.
Topic The history of the emotions has long been on the investigation of emotional norms, regimes, and communities, with the pioneering work of scholars such as Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy. Ten years ago, Monique Scheer introduced the idea of ‘doing emotions’, paying more attention to the performative aspect of emotional language, as well as cognitive processes and the idea of embodied knowledge. Other scholars focused explicitly on the role of emotions in processes of knowledge acquisition, and on emotions as a form of knowledge. More recently, special attention has also been paid to the interrelationship of economy and affect (Leemans & Goldgar) and to affective experience in relationship with interculturality and processes of social bonding and embeddedness, i.e. the closeness of interpersonal relationships (Verberckmoes). The political management of emotions as it was studied by William Reddy and Ute Frevert has become a topic of interest for scholars who are interested in powerful emotions in historical emotional regimes or he opposite of that (as studied by scholars like Xine Yaoh): a history of feeling nothing or unfeeling (Pahl). Also the role of literary fiction gets to the fore in recent studies, like in regard to fictional characters as emotional selves (Brandsma & Larrington).
Objectives This course takes te aforementioned four recent lines of research and the concepts associated with them as a starting point: economy, politics, community and self. Four specialists will reflect from their scholarly background (cultural history, economic history, political history, literary studies, art history) on how they define and apply the above-mentioned concepts in their own research. An accompanying reading list gives rise to further reflection and discussion with the participants. This will offer students a steppingstone to think these concepts through in relation to their own work. Through short pitches the attending PhD students will reflect on the possibilities and difficulties of working with the same concepts in their own research projects. More informal talks about the history of the emotions will be possible during two thematic walks through Ghent, combined with a visit of one of the city’s heritage institutions. Doing so, the participants will also become acquainted with ongoing research at Ghent University about the history of the emotions, which will be linked to urban history for this occasion.
Tentative programme Session I: Walk through Ghent: Medieval literature & emotions. Guide: Youri Desplenter (Ghent University)
Session II: Politics of Emotions. Lecturer: Kerstin Maria Pahl (Berlin)
Session III: Politics of Emotions. Lecturer: Kerstin Maria Pahl (Berlin)
Session VI: Walk through Ghent: Emotions and Iconoclasm in 1560). Guide: Kornee van der Haven (Ghent University)
Session VII: Emotional Communities and Embeddedness. Lecturer: Johan Verberckmoes (KU Leuven)
Session VIII: Literary Fiction and the Emotional Self. Lecturer: Frank Brandsma (Utrecht University)
Session IX: Emotional Selves & Embeddedness. Lecturer: Johan Verberckmoes (KU Leuven) & Frank Brandsma (Utrecht University)
Registration Registration is free of charge for members of the Huizinga Institute- and the Doctoral School of Arts, Humanities and Law of Ghent University.
Digital lecture by Giulia Torello-Hill (University of New England, AUS) & Andrew Turner (University of Melbourne, AUS) on Judocus Badius’ (1462-1535) Lyon Terence
Abstract
The Lyon Terence, edited by the Fleming Jodocus Badius Ascensius in 1493, was the first printed edition of the plays of Terence to include a full cycle of woodcut illustrations. Illustrated manuscripts of Terence from the Middle Ages are well known and have been studied extensively, but the Lyon Terence has been unjustly overlooked.
This paper builds on the recently published The Lyon Terence: Its Tradition and Legacy (Brill 2020) to look closely at the interplay between woodcut illustrations and commentary. Although the identity of the artist who oversaw the design of the Lyon Terence’s iconographic plan is unknown, close correspondences between the commentary and the illustrations suggest a symbiotic dialogue between artist and editor.
Badius was already an authority on Terence—in 1491 he published an innovative edition of Terence and his late-antique commentator Donatus. Donatus’ brief notes on delivery of specific lines are usually taken as pedagogical advice on diction. Instead, this paper contends that, under the supervision of Badius, the artist of the Lyon Terence visually interpreted Donatus’ prescriptions as encompassing gestures, gaze orientation and bodily movement, following the consolidated tradition of Quintilian.
Arguably, the Lyon Terence could elicit in the Renaissance reader a different level of engagement, providing a detailed linguistic and cultural explanation of Terence’s text to the learned audience, while in turn offering a pictorial narrative to the leisured reader, who could see the plot unfolding before his very eyes.
Speakers
Dr. Giulia Torello-Hill is a Lecturer in Italian at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia. She specialises in the reception of classical drama in the Renaissance. Her research explores the interplay between exegesis of ancient texts, iconographic tradition and performance practice in Renaissance Italy. She has held fellowships from Villa I Tatti the Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence (2015-16) and the Renaissance Society of America and Kress Foundation (2018). She has recently co-authored with Andrew Turner The Lyon Terence: Its Tradition and Legacy (Brill, 2020) and has embarked on a new collaborative project on drama, music and orality in Renaissance Ferrara.
Dr. Andrew Turner is a researcher at the University of Melbourne, where he lectures on Latin literature. His research focuses on the transmission of Latin texts in the Middle Ages, and in 2011-12 he was a visiting fellow at the Flemish Academic Centre in Brussels, where he undertook a study of classical literary scholarship in mediaeval Flanders. His most recent research has focused the commentary traditions on the classical dramatists Terence and Seneca; besides his extensive work with Giulia Torello-Hill, he currently is part of a major research project on the first mediaeval commentary on Seneca’s dramas by Nicholas Trevet.
Organisation
This digital lecture is organised by the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (HPIMS) and the Group for Early Modern Studies (GEMS) at Ghent University (BE). It open to all, but for digital security reasons we do ask registration with email by October 6th 2021 at the latest. For registration and info, simply get in touch with Dr. Stefan Meysman.
Joyous Entries and Local Lordship in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands (6 May 2021)
by Klaas Van Gelder (Rijksarchief Gent/Universiteit Gent)
Abstract:
This presentation analyses a set of 80 seigneurial joyous entries ranging from 1433 until 1793. Princely joyous entries and inaugurations have received incessant scholarly attention ever since the Cultural Turn and the resulting understanding of ritual and ceremony as forms of communication and symbolic negotiation. In several parts of medieval and early modern Europe, similar solemnities also took place in villages and small towns on the level of the seigneury. This was also the case in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands, with a particularly strong tradition in Brabant. Local lords and ladies held joyous entries in their seigneuries, issued liberty charters, swore to uphold local rights and privileges, celebrated masses and Te Deums, enjoyed banquets with local dignitaries, and plunged the village or town in a festive atmosphere. This article argues that these solemnities were structural components of the seigneurial landscape, and carried legal and political meaning. They are also gauges for power relations between the lord, local office-holders and villagers, although the collected data only allows us to draw preliminary conclusions about how these power relations developed over time.
In this talk I will present my recent publication, The Court and Its Critics (University of Toronto Press, 2020) and my attempts to re-assess the long-neglected genre of works against courts and courtiers. Critiques of courts and courtiers were for a long time considered nothing more than futile outlets, composed by employing recurring sets of meaningless topoi. I argue instead that anti-courtly discourse furnished a platform for discussing some of the most pressing questions of Renaissance Italian society, such as subjectivity and self-fashioning, gender and identity, social mobility, the possible role for the intellectual in the political and social spheres, and a sense of anxiety related to foreign occupation of the Italian peninsula.
This presentation analyses a set of 80 seigneurial joyous entries ranging from 1433 until 1793. Princely joyous entries and inaugurations have received incessant scholarly attention ever since the Cultural Turn and the resulting understanding of ritual and ceremony as forms of communication and symbolic negotiation. In several parts of medieval and early modern Europe, similar solemnities also took place in villages and small towns on the level of the seigneury. This was also the case in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands, with a particularly strong tradition in Brabant. Local lords and ladies held joyous entries in their seigneuries, issued liberty charters, swore to uphold local rights and privileges, celebrated masses and Te Deums, enjoyed banquets with local dignitaries, and plunged the village or town in a festive atmosphere. This article argues that these solemnities were structural components of the seigneurial landscape, and carried legal and political meaning. They are also gauges for power relations between the lord, local office-holders and villagers, although the collected data only allows us to draw preliminary conclusions about how these power relations developed over time.
Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century authors such as Montaigne, Descartes, Shakespeare, and John Donne described doubt as an unsettling and disquieting condition, often experienced in the seclusion of one’s chamber. As such, doubt was often perceived as a corrosive power, able to dissolve at the same time the world as one is accustomed to knowing it, and the very idea of one’s self. I will argue instead that in the first half of the sixteenth century doubt could be, and indeed was, a social experience. While scholars have often explored doubt within heterodox circles, doubt could be part of other, more complex social experiences. Academies, real or virtual, games of chance, books of ‘doubts’ fostered forms of sociability that brought together, at least potentially, men and women from all walks all life. A polysemic word, ‘doubt’ could elicit diverse intellectual and emotional responses, thus proving an unexpected, even reassuring form of social entertainment.
We are delighted to announce a partnership between GEMS and the Edinburgh Early Modern Network. This partnership will be a lasting bond of critical investigation, collaboration and friendship between our two vibrant communities in Gent and Edinburgh.
As one of the first events of what will surely be the start of a long friendship and collaboration, on Tuesday the 9th February at 5.15pm (Edinburgh) / 6.15pm (Ghent), we are thrilled to bring together two scholars Renée Vulto and Nathan Hood for two 20-minute papers on the theme of Early Modern Oral Cultures and Communities.
Dr Nathan Hood is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh. His paper is entitled ‘Songs of the Heart: The Emotional Power of Psalm-Singing in Scottish Protestantism 1560-1640’.
Renée Vulto is a doctoral researcher at UGent. Her paper will be on ‘Singing the Revolution: Celebratory Songs in the Batavian Republic (1795-1799)’.
GEMS 
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