ANU’s Humanities Research Centre and Centre for Early Modern Studies

present

Manuscripts and Early Modern Identities

An afternoon symposium to be held on Thursday, 15 August 2024

in the Ian Proudfoot Room (E4.44), Baldessin Precinct Building, ANU

Register here: https://hrc.cass.anu.edu.au/events/manuscripts-and-early-modern-identities

ABSTRACTS AND BIOS

Helen Fulton: “Sir John Prise and Manuscripts on the Medieval March of Wales”

Sir John Prise (c. 1501-1550) was a writer and book collector who worked for Thomas Cromwell and helped to close down many monastic libraries around the Marches and south-west England during the dissolution of the monasteries. The books he salvaged from these libraries, most of which would have been scrapped otherwise, formed the basis of his extensive personal library of more than 100 items. This paper explores Prise’s collection and how he made use of it to write his ‘Defence of British History’.

Helen Fulton holds the Chair in Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. She previously worked at the University of Sydney, where she did her PhD, and has held professorships at the universities of Swansea and York. She has published widely on medieval Welsh and English literatures and their political and social interconnections. She is currently working on an edition of medieval Welsh political poetry, and she is the principal investigator on a major project called “Mapping the March:Medieval Wales and England, c. 1282–1550”. This five-year project was selected for funding by the European Research Council and is funded by the United Kingdom Research Institute (UKRI).

Tania M. Colwell: “Jeande Créquy, Romance, and Crusade: Crafting and Performing the Self in BL, Harley MS4418”

This work-in-progress paper applies Pamela Sheingorn’s concept of manuscript reading as a performance to analysis of Burgundian courtier, Jean V de Créquy’s (c. 1396–1473)patronage of the prose Roman de Melusine. Surviving as British Library,Harley MS 4418 (c. 1450–1455), Jean’s richly decorated copy of the romance is unique among the Melusine corpus for its heightened emphasis on the crusading adventures of the eponymous fairy’s Lusignan offspring. By contextualising Créquy’s engagement with this volume in light of a range of interests and anxieties then occupying ducal Burgundy, this paper proposes that the Harley MS offered Jean an opportunity to construct, display, and enact the character of a pious crusader at a time of intensified concern with the Ottomans’ westwards expansion.

Tania M. Colwell is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe, specialising in the cultural and social history of France and England. She is interested in the ways that cultural production,especially manuscript and early book culture, contributed to identity formation across the period. She has published on a range of themes emerging from this work, including gender, patronage, politics and governance, the marvellous and monstrous, crusades, emotions and intercultural encounter. Her paper for the HRC workshop is part of a wider monographic project exploring the manuscript audiences and reception of the French Romans de Melusine, c.1380–1530.

Rosalind Smith: “Love in the Margins”

This essay traces early modern women’s experience of amatory love that can be found in the margins of books, through marginalia written by women of differing levels of literacy, education and rank in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. Marginalia provides a new and relatively unstudied corpus of visual and textual material by early modern women: evidence of women’s book ownership and reading as well as a rich resource for forms of writing often unconnected from the text in which they are found. Drawing from a database of over 2000 examples of early modern women’s marginalia, I suggest that these marks allow us to newly assess how we understand amatory love to be read, interpreted,represented and experienced by early modern subjects. Is love ‘not love’ for these women writers as it is for the elite male writers educated in the humanist schoolroom? How do we analyse and understand marginalia about love when the contexts surrounding writer and text are elusive, and the writing itself is fragmentary? Fascinating evidence in their own right of reading and writing practices, amatory marginalia provide a new perspective on a fundamental but largely understudied emotional experience for both women and men in the early modern period.

Ros Smith is Chair of English and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at ANU. She has published widely on gender, form and politics in early modern women’s writing, including Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing, Early Modern Women’s Complaint and a forthcoming co-authored book with OUP: Early Modern Women’s Complaint Poetry. She is a current ARC Future Fellow working on a project on early modern women’s marginalia, general editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, and general editor, with Professor Sarah Ross, of the journal Parergon. Her work also incorporates large scale digital projects, including most recently the Beyond the Book digital exhibition, produced in collaboration with State Library Victoria as part of an ARC Linkage grant, and the Early Modern Women’s Complaint Poetry Index, which won the Renaissance Society of America Digital Innovation award in 2022.

Geraint Evans: “Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni and the publication of William Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle”

Sir John Salusbury (1566-1612) is an intriguing figure who is visible in two cultural worlds in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. He studied at Jesus College, Oxford and the Middle Temple and later spent time at court as an Esquire of the Queen’s Body. He wrote poetry in English and supported the publication of a number of books in London in the1590s and 1600s. At the same time, his home at Lleweni in Denbighshire was one of the great gentry estates of north Wales and Salusbury continued the family tradition of supporting Welsh humanist scholarship and Welsh poetry. The manuscript record of one series of Christmas feasts at Lleweni in 1595 lists thirteen Welsh poets and musicians who were in the house as part of the celebrations.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Salusbury’s literary career is his connection with the publication of Love’s Martyr in1601, a long poem by Robert Chester to which are added shorter poems by other writers including Ben Jonson, George Chapman and William Shakespeare. The book is dedicated to Salusbury and his wife Ursula and is mainly remembered today because it contains the first appearance in print of Shakespeare’s metaphysical poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle”.

This paper will examine some of the Welsh context of Love’s Martyr by exploring the cultural life of the Lleweni estate during Sir John Salusbury’s lifetime, including Salusbury’s connection with Welsh language writers such as Henry Perry, Simwnt Fychan and Huw Pennant, English language writers such as Ben Johnson and Robert Chester and those who may have written in both languages, such as Salusbury’s neighbour Robert Parry.

Geraint Evans teaches in the Department of English at Swansea University and is a member of the Centre for Research into the English Language and Literature of Wales (CREW). He is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature (CUP, 2019) and co-editor of Mapiau Hanesyddol o Abertawe a’r Mwmbwls [Historical Maps of Swansea and the Mumbles] which was published by the Historic Towns Trust in 2023.