BMS Spring Meeting 2019: Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Spring 2019 meeting of the British Milton Seminar will be held on Saturday 16 March 2019.

Venue: TBC.  There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm, and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm.

We currently intend that each session will have two papers (of approx. 25-30 minutes each), for which proposals are invited.

Please send proposals to Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk) and Professor Sarah Knight (sk218@leicester.ac.uk) by no later than 31 January 2019.

Hugh Adlington and Sarah Knight

Joint Conveners

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British Milton Seminar, 20 October 2018: Programme

BMS 58

Saturday 20 October 2018

Venue: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston campus (Rodney Hilton Library: Room 335, Arts Building) – please below for directions.

There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm.

Programme:

11.00-12.30

Mario Murgia (National Autonomous University of Mexico), ‘“He also saw rich Mexico.” A 19th-century, Spanish-speaking John Milton’;

Nick McDowell (Exeter), ‘Refining the Sublime: Edward Phillips and the Failure of a Miltonic Education’.

2.00-4.00

Robert Stagg (Oxford), ‘Milton’s “bondage of rhyming”: a longer history’;

Rosamund Paice (Portsmouth), ‘Gardeners’ World: Companionship and Retreat in Milton’s Eden’.

Directions

The Rodney Hilton Library (Room 335) is on the third floor of the Arts Building on the Edgbaston campus of the University of Birmingham.

For directions to the Edgbaston campus, please see: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/contact/directions/getting-here-edgbaston.aspx

For a map of the Edgbaston campus (the Arts Building is marked as R16), please see: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/university/edgbaston-campus-map.pdf

For further information about the British Milton Seminar, please contact either:

Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk) or Professor Sarah Knight (sk218@leicester.ac.uk).

Hugh Adlington and Sarah M. Knight (Co-convenors)

Public lecture: Seeing Milton’s Voice: Illustrations to Paradise Lost; a social history of Great Britain

Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE.

Free public lecture. 06 November, 2018:  13.00-14.00

https://www.sal.org.uk/events/2018/11/seeing-miltons-voice/

Seeing Milton’s Voice

Illustrations to Paradise Lost; a social history of Great Britain

Howard JM Hanley, FSA

Sadly, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is now a classic; the kiss of death! But not always. Quite the contrary, for Paradise Lost was in almost every English household for more than 200 years after its publication in 1667 with hundreds of editions published, at least sixty between about 1770 and 1825 alone. The publishers made Milton a Personality: a figure larger than life who fought battles for the common man and whose English prickliness acted as a bulwark against decadent, dangerously Catholic, continental Europe. To lower the bar, Milton emerged as a patron saint of marriage (despite his record on that score), and was cited as an authority on landscape gardening, cookery, astronomy and military equipment. And to lower the bar further, Paradise Lost was so well-known that John Cleland could quote from it in his lascivious, pornographic Fanny Hill.

The idea of the lecture is to show how this publication phenomenon came about and how it gave rise to an astonishing outpouring of Miltonic themes in the visual arts, of which the illustrations to Paradise Lost were a major segment. Moreover, the evolution of the illustrations’ iconography reflects a history of what people thought of themselves as society moved from the gothic age to the industrial age. The work of many artists – including Hogarth, Turner, John Martin, Fuseli, Romney and Blake – make this point.

Lecture begins at 13.00. Doors open at 12.30.

Public Lectures are free and open to the public, but space is limited and reservations are strongly recommended. To book online, simply open the link https://www.sal.org.uk/events/2018/11/seeing-miltons-voice/ and click Reserve [https://www.sal.org.uk/events/booking/?id=16545].

British Milton Seminar, 20 October 2018: Programme

BMS 58

Saturday 20 October 2018

Venue: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston campus (Rodney Hilton Library: Room 335, Arts Building) – please below for directions.

There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm.

Programme:

11.00-12.30

Mario Murgia (National Autonomous University of Mexico), ‘“He also saw rich Mexico.” A 19th-century, Spanish-speaking John Milton’;

Nick McDowell (Exeter), ‘Refining the Sublime: Edward Phillips and the Failure of a Miltonic Education’.

2.00-4.00

Robert Stagg (Oxford), ‘Milton’s “bondage of rhyming”: a longer history’;

Rosamund Paice (Portsmouth), ‘Gardeners’ World: Companionship and Retreat in Milton’s Eden’.

Directions

The Rodney Hilton Library (Room 315) is on the third floor of the Arts Building on the Edgbaston campus of the University of Birmingham.

For directions to the Edgbaston campus, please see: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/contact/directions/getting-here-edgbaston.aspx

For a map of the Edgbaston campus (the Arts Building is marked as R16), please see: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/university/edgbaston-campus-map.pdf

For further information about the British Milton Seminar, please contact either:

Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk) or Professor Sarah Knight (sk218@leicester.ac.uk).

Hugh Adlington and Sarah M. Knight (Co-convenors)

University of Toronto, 17th Century English Literature – Canada Research Chair (Associate / Full Professor)

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

17th Century English Literature – Canada Research Chair (Associate / Full Professor)

The Department of English at the University of Toronto, St George campus, invites applications for a tenure-stream appointment in the field of 17th Century Literature and Culture; a strong interest in Milton would be an advantage. The appointment will be at the rank of Associate or Full Professor and will begin on July 1, 2019.

Please click below for further details:

17th Century English Literature – Job 1803203

BMS Autumn Meeting 2018: Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Autumn 2018 meeting of the British Milton Seminar will be held in Birmingham on Saturday 20 October 2018.

Venue: TBC.  There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm, and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm.

We currently intend that each session will have two papers (of approx. 25-30 minutes each), for which proposals are invited.

Please send proposals to Professor Sarah Knight (sk218@leicester.ac.uk) and/or Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk) by no later than 31 August 2018.

Hugh Adlington and Sarah Knight

Joint Conveners

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, 1931-2018

We pass on the sad news that Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, renowned Miltonist and William R. Kenan, Jr. Research Professor of History and English Literature at Harvard University from 1983 to 2010, passed away on Friday 2nd March.

Messages of condolence can be sent to her son,

David Lewalski

166 University Avenue

Providence, RI 02906 USA

Contributions in her memory can be made to Doctors Without Borders or the Rhode Island Philharmonic. Barbara also supported the Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, and Planned Parenthood.

A remembrance service is planned for Monday, March 12, at 4:00 p.m., at Monahan, Drabble and Sherman Funeral Home, 230 Waterman Street, Providence RI.  Calling hours are from 1-4.

7th Annual Milton Lecture: Milton v. The New Science, 15 March 2018

7th Annual Milton Lecture

‘The Starry Messenger: Milton v. The New Science’

Dr William Poole, Fellow of New College, Oxford

6 pm, Thursday 15 March 2018

Mercers’ Hall, Ironmonger Lane, EC2V 8HE (Tube St Paul’s or Bank)

Reservation essential: Call 01895 831774 or email keith.sugden@hotmail.co.uk

Click here for the event poster: 7th Annual Milton Lecture

Birmingham City University, Guest Seminar: ‘Apt Numbers: On Line Citations of Paradise Lost’, David Currell

Birmingham City University, School of English Guest Seminar

Wed 21 Feb 2018, 4.30 pm, C423

‘Apt Numbers: On Line Citations of Paradise Lost‘, by Dr David Currell, American University of Beirut

Abstract ‘Apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another’: so Milton describes the features of his verse line in Paradise Lost. This presentation considers how practices of citation and extraction engage the epic as a lineated text, in ways that typically interrupt or ignore its usual linear publication. Looking at the OED, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Twitter, and connecting the logic of these textual spaces to practices already established in the early modern period (namely, ‘consultation reading’ and commonplacing), I consider the evolving history of line citations and online citations of Paradise Lost. Taking the lead from Milton’s own phrasing, but shifting from prosody to data visualization, I close with some ideas and open questions about a quantitative approach to the reception history of literary works.

Bio David Currell is Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Beirut. He works especially on classical reception (the focus of his long-term project, Epic Satire, and of essays in Shakespeare Survey and Critical Survey) and on the global reception of Milton (represented by essays in English Studies and the collection Fall Narratives). With Islam Issa he is coediting the collection Digital Milton.

School of English

Birmingham City University

The Curzon Building

4 Cardigan Street

Birmingham B4 7BD

British Milton Seminar, Special Session: ‘Milton and Difficulty’

BMS 57

Saturday 10 March 2018

Venue: **PLEASE NOTE** University of Birmingham, Edgbaston campus (Peter Gelling Library: Room 315, Arts Building) – please below for directions. There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm

This special session of the BMS is the first in a series of events in 2018 co-organised by Hannah Crawforth (KCL) and Sarah Knight (Leicester) around the subject of difficulty in early modern literature. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of George Steiner’s influential essay ‘On Difficulty’ (1978), an attempt to provide a taxonomy of difficulty and to argue for its central importance in literature and philosophy. Steiner’s essay discusses several early modern authors and their classical and continental models, including Dante, Horace, Spenser, Chaucer, Ovid, Shakespeare and Milton.

The term is variously used in early modern English, as we might expect. Thomas More suggests that the ‘dyffyculte’ of St Paul’s ‘wrytyng’ leads readers to find ‘sumtyme some mater of contencyon’ (Supplication of Souls; 1529), while in The art or crafte of rhetoryke (1532), Leonard Cox states that ‘all excellent & commendable thyng be hard & of difficulty’. In Of Education (1644), to choose just one example, Milton writes of learning other tongues that ‘if the language be difficult, so much the better’, and of the riches available to students once they have mastered Greek and Latin, ‘the difficulties of grammar being soon overcome’.

We hope to stimulate discussion of the topic of Milton and difficulty in a broad and varied sense.

Our aim is to try to deepen understanding and discussion of ‘difficulty’ as an aesthetic, critical and ideological category in early modern literature and thought. We encourage all participants to read Steiner’s essay beforehand: it was published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36.3 (Spring, 1978): 263-276. We also encourage participants to consider their own examples of difficulty in Milton, and to bring those along to the seminar to discuss with the group.

11.00-12.30    

Sarah Knight (Leicester)

Peter Auger (Birmingham)

2.00-4.00        

Hannah Crawforth (KCL)

Joe Moshenka (Cambridge)

Paul Hammond (Leeds)

Directions

The Peter Gelling Library (Room 315) is on the third floor of the Arts Building on the Edgbaston campus of the University of Birmingham.

For directions to the Edgbaston campus, please see: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/contact/directions/getting-here-edgbaston.aspx

For a map of the Edgbaston campus (the Arts Building is marked as R16), please see: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/university/edgbaston-campus-map.pdf

For further information about the British Milton Seminar, please contact either:

Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk) or Professor Sarah Knight (sk218@leicester.ac.uk).