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Shadows in the Water: Overreading (in) the Renaissance


Federico Barocci, Quintilia Fischieri, c. 1600. Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, USA.

Thursday 8 May 2025, 6.00PM

Speaker(s): Elizabeth Swann, University of Durham

Thomas Traherne’s poem ‘Shadows in the Water’ describes a “sweet mistake” of the speaker’s childhood: the notion that the reflected images he sees in puddles are glimpses of “another World”. For the speaker, this naïve sensory and interpretive blunder precipitates mystical insight: the images foreshadow heaven, indicating his election. Taking Traherne’s work as a focal point, but also ranging across early poetic and rhetorical theory and Reformation and post-Reformation hermeneutics, this essay offers a brief history of overreading in the Renaissance that emphasizes both its entwinement with excess and error, and its theological and literary value as an intentional interpretive strategy. To conclude, I suggest that the example of Traherne invites us to pay a renewed attention to the pitfalls and possibilities of over-reading as a scholarly and pedagogical tool in the twenty-first century, offering a tentative defence of this perilous but productive mode of interpretation.

Elizabeth Swann is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies at Durham University. Previously, she has held posts at Cambridge University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and she completed her PhD at the University of York in 2013. Recent publications include Science as Child’s Play in Early Modern England: Innocence, Experience, Experiment (Palgrave Pivot, forthcoming in Feb 2025) and Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2020), as well as an edited volume (with Subha Mukherji), The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Refreshments (tea and coffee) provided 15 minutes before the advertised start time. All welcome!

This event will be followed by the CREMS Summer party with refreshments and canapés.

Register to attend online

Location: The Treehouse, Berrick Saul Building

Admission: In-person and online