Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections, 1545-1659 Phase 1, ‘Works’

This seminar is organised by TextDiveGlobal, a project funded at the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London, by the ERC Advanced Grant scheme. It is hosted by CREMS at the University of York, and will take place as a hybrid event in the Treehouse space of the Berrick Saul Building and online. It is open to all TextDiveGlobal project members and network participants, and to other invited scholars.

If you are interested in receiving an invitation to attend this seminar, either in-person or online, please write to us at textdiveglobal@qmul.ac.uk by Friday 15 March.

If you would like to join our network, please fill out the form here.

TextDiveGlobal works in 5 year-long phases towards the first literary history of early modern Europe and its global connections, to be published by Oxford University Press as: Europe in the World: A Literary History, 1545-1661, ed. Warren Boutcher (PI). The theme concerns forms of textual diversity and of diversity represented or managed by texts. Each phase brings together a group of scholars from different disciplines and specialisms to work on multilingual textual corpora from the period, assembled on one of four inter-related principles.

Phase 1 of the project (2022) is on ‘Works’. The selection of corpora aims to balance what are still considered European canonical works of wide reach and dissemination with works informed by identities, spaces or languages considered marginal or peripheral in traditional European literary history. So on the one hand we will consider works by Teresa de Avila, Plutarch, Ovid, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Bandello; on the other hand, a neo-Latin pedagogical work, texts of an English Catholic author, the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, a corpus of Italian Protestant refugee literature, Ragusan and Hungarian epics of limited dissemination, and a set of manuscript Peruvian chronicles.

What is the relationship between a diverse textual corpus and the ‘work’ or set of ‘works’ it is understood to represent? How do these texts and works reflect and shape the diverse spaces and peoples involved in their production and circulation? Whose work are they? What kinds of ‘authorship’ are involved and what does–or does not –give them the status of ‘works’?

The contributors to the seminar are:

• Marie-Alice Belle (Montréal);
• Anston Bosman (Amherst);
• Danielle Clarke (UC Dublin);
• Simon Ditchfield (York);
• Shanti Graheli (Glasgow);
• Ivan Lupić (Stanford);
• Nicholas Rashad Jones (UC Davis);
• Alessandra Petrina (Padua);
• Diego Pirillo (Berkeley);
• Lisl Schoepflin (Getty Institute);
• Fred Schurink (Manchester);
• Alan Stewart (Columbia);
• Máté Vince (QMUL).