When: Thursday 19 and Friday 20 February, 2026
Where: National Library of Australia , Conference Room (Level 4)
Registration: A limited number of registrations are available for non-presenting participants. Please email admin.cems@anu.edu.au to register your interest in attending. Please note that the manuscript viewing session is only open to presenting participants.
Cross-disciplinary scholarship is demanding; it requires methodological sophistication and innovation, knowledge of a broad range of primary and secondary texts, and a scholarly capacity for risk and innovation. This ANZAMEMS/CEMS symposium for higher degree and early career researchers draws upon the groundbreaking cross-disciplinary work in early modern studies by Professor Lorna Hutson, Merton Professor of English at the University of Oxford, who will visit the ANU Centre for Early Modern Studies in February 2026. Over two days, Australian and New Zealand postgraduate students and early career researchers with an interest in cross-disciplinarity in early modern and medieval studies will network and share their research with peers and senior scholars in the field and enhance their skills in cross-disciplinary research under the guidance of leading scholars.
The seminar program incorporates consultation of the NLA’s medieval and early modern collections, a public talk by Professor Lorna Hutson, three hands-on workshops with Prof Lorna Hutson, Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch (Dean of Research Strategy, University of Divinity) and Dr Una McIlvenna (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in English, ANU), and three panels of papers by the seminar participants.
Seminar Program
Thursday 19 February
1:30 – 2:00: Meet and greet, NLA Foyer
2:00 – 3:00: NLA rare books and manuscripts session (seminar presenters only), Special Collections Reading Room (level 1)
Please note that non-presenting attendees to the seminar are not able to participate in the manuscript viewing sessions owing to limitations on the number of participants permitted at NLA manuscript viewings.
3:00 – 4:00: Panel 1, Conference Room (level 4)
Chair: Rosalind Smith
Yannic Bietz, Studying Tudor Queens Consort through their Heraldry
Ruby Lowe, Who was Margery Mar-Prelate?
Steve Rohan-Jones, The Sword of Justice – The Just Rule of Henry IV?
Madeline Sargeant, Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the Study of the Supernatural and the Miraculous in Early Modern Ireland
4.15 – 5.15: Workshop 1 with Una McIlvenna, “Using Songs as Sources in Early Modern Research”
6:00 – 7.30: Public lecture with Prof Lorna Hutson, “England’s ‘island nationhood?’,” NLA Theatre
7:45: Dinner
Friday 20 February
9:00 – 10:00: Panel 2
Chair: Una McIlvenna
Meg Challis, Sweet-Bitter Sappho: The Poetic Reception of Sappho in Early Modern England
MacKenzie McCowan, The Bard and the Bot: Can Artificial Intelligence Research Julius Caesar?
Elizabeth Newton-Jackson, “I did musie my selfe”: Practising Experimental History through Wool Processing
Victoria Munn, “These counterfeit flames”: saffron and the science of beauty in early modern Europe
10:00 – 11:00: Workshop 2 with Lorna Hutson, “Different Varieties of Cross-Disciplinarity”
11:00 – 11.30: Morning tea
11:30 – 12.30: Panel 3
Chair: Megan Cassidy-Welch
Clare Davidson, Love as a Cause in Late Medieval England
Chris White, The Meanings of Monsters: Using Interdisciplinary Approaches to Better Understand Medieval Wonder
Alexandra Forsyth, ‘Without issue of the royal house of France’: Death of Margaret of Scotland (1424-1445), a Childless Dauphine
Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan, Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Religious Change in Premodern Indonesia
12:30 – 1:30: Lunch
1:30 – 2:30: Workshop 3 with Megan Cassidy-Welch, “Social Sciences and Histories of Medieval Homelessness: Synergies and Opportunities for Understanding ‘Lived Experience’”
2:30 – 3:00: Afternoon tea
3:00 – 4:15: Panel 4 & Final Remarks
Chair: Lorna Hutson
Kristie Flannery, The Miracle of the Crab and the Conquest of the Sea
Katherine Mair, Evil Eye Lore and the Existential Bodyguards in Pictures of the King’s Children
Suzi Nolan, Devotion in conflict: Andrea Vanni’s Catherine and her Devotee in the Lived Religious Experiences of her Followers during Times of War
Abstracts
Yannic Bietz (Adelaide University)
Studying Tudor Queens Consort through their Heraldry
Over recent decades, heraldry has been undergoing a transformation from an antiquarian topic of interest into a fruitful field of historical study. More than a mere identifier of objects or a simple reflection of complicated ideas, many historians now recognise the significant and constructive role of heraldic devices in medieval and early modern society. The presence of heraldry in art, architecture, fashion, literature, pageantry, and oral culture encourages a cross-disciplinary approach to understand this visual language.
This paper will illustrate how an analysis of heraldry can provide further insights into the Tudor court and the six queens consort who were married to Henry VIII. These six women were frequently represented and surrounded by heraldic iconography, providing them with many opportunities for interacting with it. While an art historical approach might assess the intentionality within individual pieces, a focus on literary material can reveal the ways they were used and perceived. The study of heraldry draws on both approaches and thus offers a glimpse into the personal and material world of a Tudor queen consort, as well as the social and political reality which they inhabited.
Meg Challis (University of Melbourne)
Sweet-Bitter Sappho: The Poetic Reception of Sappho in Early Modern England
Although the fragments of Sappho were widely available in print as early as the 1560s, no English translations of her poems were published until 1711. Across the intervening decades, however, several male authors adapted or embellished aspects of Sappho’s poetry and personal mythos in their original works. In this paper, I will explore how these poets and playwrights acted as intermediaries between the inaccessible classical text and the general public with the primary aim of assimilating the past into contemporary socio-political structures. I will do this through three primary case studies: John Lyly’s (1584) Sapho and Phao, John Donne’s (c. 1599) Sapho to Philaenis, and Pope’s (1707) Sappho to Phaon.
These three texts, despite the relative availability of Sappho’s corpus during the period, also appear to rely more heavily on her reception by male Roman authors than the authentic text, adding yet another layer of mediation. As a result, I will argue that the public perception of Sappho in early modern England was primarily shaped by anachronistic inventions that had little to do with Sappho as a historical figure and often discredited rather than upheld her ancient reputation as a pre-eminent poetess.
Clare Davidson (Australian Catholic University)
Love as a cause in late medieval England
This paper shows how fourteenth-century beliefs about love can help reframe traditional narratives about late medieval history, and specifically, civil unrest in London in the 1380s. I will discuss developments in legal procedure and the law of corporations that suggest the formal significance of love as a cause, explaining the meaning of this in relation to a broader cultural framework that is drawn from biographical and other historical writing, as well as imaginative literature. This framework provides a point of cultural comparison to assess various approaches to love in late medieval society. I will highlight some of the ways that theories of emotion have developed our knowledge of medieval culture and experience, while generating new questions about scope and historical methodology. Engaging with analytical traditions drawn from the academic fields of history and literature alongside fourteenth-century ideas about love will allow me to argue for the utility of theorising love as a cause in various late medieval English social, cultural, and political contexts.
Kristie Flannery (Australian Catholic University)
The Miracle of the Crab and the Conquest of the Sea
The Navarre-born Francisco Javier (1506-1552) devoted more than a decade of his life to evangelizing across the Indo-Pacific world. One of the founders of the Jesuit missionary order, the spiritual conquistador is credited with converting tens of thousands of people to Catholicism across Southern India, the Maluku islands, Japan, and China, and is recognized as a Saint in the Catholic Church. Early modern narratives of the saint’s life recount many miracles – extraordinary events that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws and are therefore attributed to divine agency. This paper examines the plural meanings of the miracle of the crab, which was one of the most widely known and celebrated supernatural episodes associated with Javier in the in the early modern world, albeit one that is little known today. Inspired by new studies of the Iberian world that center more-than-human subjects, it considers the crustacean’s agency, the miracle’s role in the creation of Catholic imperial marine imaginaries and the idea of a conquered sea, and its ‘hidden transcript’ of Indigenous resistance to European authority.
This analysis draws on multiple sources. I combine ‘traditional’ materials for the study of the global Spanish empire including printed books, and visual and material culture, with the body of the charybdis feriata or the crucifix crab which was said to have been transformed by the Catholic miracle. Here a story and a species extracted from the ocean challenges conventional accounts of empire and evangelization in the early modern Indo-Pacific world. This paper is interdisciplinary in its exploration of the Ocean as an archive, and its engagement with scholarship in the history of the Spanish empire, Spanish literary studies, Art History, and the Blue Humanities.
Alexandra Forsyth (Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland)
‘Without issue of the royal house of France’: Death of Margaret of Scotland (1424-1445), a Childless Dauphine
Fulfilling one’s dynastic duty through producing legitimate male heirs has long been understood as the key aspect of a queen or princess’ role in the French royal court. The birth of a male heir signified peace and prosperity for the kingdom, as there would be an undisputed line of succession over three generations, whereas the absence of legitimate heirs had the potential to destabilise polities. As only three of the ten Valois dauphines active between 1350 and 1559 had children during their tenure in this role, it is hardly surprising that fear of dynastic failure shaped the expectation and representations of these women. Yet, it has only been in recent decades that scholars in history, art history, and literary studies have begun to fully explore representations of childless royal couples. Despite their important position in the court, limited attention has been given to the dauphines and the dynastic burden these young women bore.
In this paper, I argue that the afterlife of Margaret of Scotland reveals the centrality of a dauphine’s reproductive capacity and its connection to the political body. Margaret’s death on 16 August 1445, at the age of 21, shocked the royal family, court, and chroniclers. Contemporary sources including poetry and legal depositions reveal the politically charged nature of discussions of her childlessness. Her final months, and indeed the months following her death, were shrouded with political intrigues centred on her childless state. The story of Margaret’s life and death illustrates the political turmoil that stemmed from the absence of heirs, an issue that threatened early modern European dynasties.
Ruby Lowe (University of Melbourne)
Who was Margery Mar-Prelate?
During the flood of print in early 1640s England, a set of radical pamphleteers created a secret publishing and distribution network with a new imprint at its centre, which they provocatively called the Margery Mar-Prelate press. Developing out of the anti-clerical 16th-century Martin Mar-Prelate controversy, the Margery Mar-Prelate pamphlets extended their predecessors’ claims against church hierarchy into fully developed arguments for “general liberty” and “freedom of speech.” While the Margery pamphlets have long been recognised for their political innovations (Christopher Hill, 1982; David Norbrook, 1999; Joseph Black, 2008; David Como, 2018), the significance of these anonymous works being published under the name of a woman has not been addressed.
By borrowing from a long history of scholarship on women’s writing which addresses the politics of anonymity and pseudo-anonymity (Virginia Woolf, 1929; Marcy North, 1994; Rosalind Smith, 2022), this paper will ask what happens when Margery Mar-Prelate is considered as a figure unto herself who voiced the most radical political arguments of the 1640s, if not the 17thcentury in its entirety. While many of the Margery pamphlets have been attributed to male authors from Richard Overton to John Milton, I will argue that the erasure of the names of these authors was not incidental but vital to their political project of levelling English society. The act of replacing “Martin” with “Margery” registered the upswell in women speakers, stationers, and authors in this moment as it enabled the pamphleteers to extend radical arguments that “God was no respecter of persons” to their very end point: a democratic model of freedom of speech.
Katherine Mair (University of Newcastle)
Proposed Paper Abstract: Evil Eye Lore and the Existential Bodyguards in Pictures of the King’s Children
In the voluminous art historical literature dedicated to Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656, Museo del Prado), little has been said about the two people with dwarfism in the foreground despite their prominent positioning alongside the Spanish infanta. Yet throughout history small statured individuals have been associated with the power to deflect the evil eye because their physical difference naturally attracted the gaze. Despite the existence of a vast body of literature on the evil eye belief complex from scholars in fields such as anthropology, folklore, theology, archaeology, classic studies, and even medicine, little of this has been drawn on by art historical scholars in their discussions of Habsburg court portraits that feature small statured people with regal siters.
Making the invisible visible, however, images of king Philip IV’s children bring evil eye lore into plain sight through compositional formulas and symbolic devices that were repeated with astonishing frequency. Drawing on extensive cross-disciplinary research into the above-mentioned fields, in addition to research from the fields of disability studies and literary studies, this paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of key images from the Spanish Habsburg court in relation to the evil eye and the material and cultural practices associated with this deep-rooted belief complex.
MacKenzie McCowan (University of Sydney)
The Bard and the Bot: Can Artificial Intelligence Research Julius Caesar?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming an unavoidable cornerstone of teaching and learning—amid concerns about the helpfulness and harmlessness of AI frameworks, it is unclear whether this is for the better or the worse. In pursuit of the “better”, this paper is focused on investigating AI options for researching and learning about Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to understand (and perhaps construct) the most beneficial approach for educators and students. I will present a case study comparing three AI “solutions” for Shakespearean research: Gemini’s Pro 3 model, Caleb Cedrone’s “William Shakespeare” model (developed through ChatGPT), and a self-developed customised AI program. Guiding each model to analyse and teach different passages from Julius Caesar, I will argue for different methods of prompting, design, and governance to enhance the helpfulness and harmlessness of Shakespearean research.
Victoria Munn (Victoria University of Wellington)
“These counterfeit flames”: saffron and the science of beauty in early modern Europe
In 1671, the German physician and naturalist Johann Ferdinand Hertodt published Crocologia, a study of saffron and its therapeutic uses that crowns saffron ‘the king of plants.’ Hertodt’s focused publication draws on classical, folkloric and biblical references to saffron, and foregrounds the crocus’ diverse uses, spanning medicine, cookery and beauty practices. Indeed, among the thousands of printed and manuscript hair dye recipes that circulated in early modern Europe, saffron was a recurring colourant from which authors promised ‘golden’ results. Taking inspiration from the interdisciplinary lens of Hertodt’s Crocologia, this paper examines the use of saffron in early modern hair dyeing practices’, foregrounding intersections with early modern scientific, artisanal and artistic knowledge and drawing broader epistemic conclusions about beauty culture in early modern Europe. It considers the varied, often fraught cultural connotations associated with saffron’s use as a dyestuff, and their manifestation in broader moralising opprobrium about women’s use of cosmetics. Finally, by engaging with modern scientific knowledge this paper identifies the sound chemical principles underpinning many early modern hair dye recipes – including those that use saffron – and demonstrates that, far from experiments in sympathetic magic, they worked.
Elizabeth Newton-Jackson (University of Auckland)
“I did musie my selfe”: Practising Experimental History through Wool Processing
The diary of Margaret Hoby (1570-1633) has long been read as a record of early puritan practice, yet it also provides an expressive account of textile materiality. Margaret notes her habitual needlework, and engagement with textile processes that exemplify her close involvement in the husbandry of Hackness Hall, her estate in North Yorkshire. Across entries that trace her sustained labour from the rearing of animals to the cultivation of textile fibre, Margaret records the purchase and sale of sheep, her supervision of the clipping of their fleece, and her labour to sort, spin, wind and dye wool. To materialise aspects of Hoby’s written experiences, I undertook my own project of wool processing, spinning, and dyeing. This project was informed by Hilary Davidson’s “embodied turn” and advocacy of making as a methodology. Alongside Hoby’s diary I consulted contemporary instructional and botanical texts including Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife (1615) and John Gerard’s History of Plants (1597). Combining literary analysis, material culture studies and experimental history, I argue that Hoby’s active role in wool production reflected her authority in estate management and her embodied connection to her land. By using my own hands and body in this research I foreground the varied sensory aspects of making, arguing that the physicality of these processes, as well as their literary records, communicate experiences of domestic life and womanhood in early modern England.
Suzi Nolan (University of Notre Dame Australia)
Devotion in conflict: Andrea Vanni’s Catherine and her Devotee in the Lived Religious Experiences of her followers during times of war.
This paper examines how devotees of Catherine of Siena experienced and engaged with her images in times of war, focusing on Andrea Vanni’s fresco Catherine and her Devotee (c.1380). The image was re-interpreted and re-used in modern wartime contexts, notably during Mussolini’s Italian campaign in Ethiopia (1935-1936) where it was reproduced for altars in Ethiopia, and during the Second World War when it appeared on the cover of Italian soldiers pocketbook. Given that the milieu of war often produces feelings of anxiety, vulnerability and fear, the repeated mobilisation of this image suggests that both St. Catherine and Vanni’s image, held particular significance for her followers. This paper explores how the image might have produced embodied religious experiences for the faithful and functioned as emotional, cognitive and sensory stimuli through embodied acts of piety on battlefields, in chapels or other devotional sites during wartime.
Methodologically it combines Gillian Rose’s critical visual methodology (CVM) with lived religion and the framework of 4E cognition. CVM enables a holistic analysis of the artwork itself, its production, circulation and audience, with particular attention on circulation. The lived religion approach and the History of Experiences (HEX) framework further illuminate how individuals and communities interpreted, felt and socially constructed experiences of the sacred in wartime.
Steve Rohan-Jones (University of Queensland)
The Sword of Justice – the just rule of Henry IV?
American political scientist Kenneth Waltz pioneered the concept of the three levels of international relations: individual, state and systemic as a method of analysis. The systemic or third level is anarchic in nature whereby there is no overarching power exerting top-down control on states and individuals. Shakespeare’s Henry IV operates in such anarchy, arguably at the system and state level, and as king within this environment is expected to deliver just rule, peace and stability. Kings held legitimate authority to make war and according to just war theory, both modern and early modern, required a just cause to do so. Just cause could take the form of punishment or retribution against past wrong-doers, for the prevention of likely harm or a response to aggression against a ruler’s realm. This paper examines Shakespeare’s representation of just cause and just rule by Henry IV. I argue that the king’s individual level determination of just cause within an anarchic international system impacts both the body politic (state) and the body natural (king) of the ruler. The body of the king provides a vehicle for the delivery of justice within the kingdom where maintaining peace and order is linked to notions of just rule.
Madeline Sargeant (Australian National University)
Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the Study of the Supernatural and the Miraculous in Early Modern Ireland
The scholar of the medieval and early modern period will always be acutely aware of the centrality of religion in the lives of the people and communities they study. Yet, we may be less conscious of the cross-disciplinary measures that we employ and deploy to understand and communicate the religious worlds of those we study. Applying the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the reports of “blood miracles” which stemmed from the violence as a case study; this paper will discuss how the employment of biblical and antique models embodies a form of cross-disciplinary study. Scholars of the European, Christian medieval and early modern world constantly engage with biblical studies and theological studies to undertake their research. Drawing from my own research I will discuss how I have engaged with scholarship from religious studies, but also deeply engaged with hermeneutical and liturgical texts beyond the Bible to make sense of the miracles I study. This paper considers how postgraduate scholars and early career researchers who have been educated within a secularised education system engage with religious history and seeks to open a dialogue about how we engage with religious histories through cross-disciplinary means.
Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan (Australian National University)
Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Religious Change in Premodern Indonesia
How can we use cross-disciplinary approaches to tell the history of religious transformation? This paper considers how different kinds of evidence and method in the study of premodern religion rub up against each other, talk at cross-purposes, and interweave in tentative ways. It focuses on the premodern Indonesian archipelago, where drastic changes of religious identity, belief and practice have occurred, particularly between the 15th and 17th centuries. The documentary evidence for these transformations is extremely thin and highly diverse, requiring us to work across many languages, scripts, traditions and scholarly methods. The paper examines how the disciplines of archaeology, art and architectural history, philology, epigraphy, oral history and anthropology can reveal different aspects of the problem. At the same time, the various pieces of evidence leave many gaps and give conflicting impressions that do not necessarily cohere into a single narrative. The paper grapples with the question of religious change in premodern Indonesia, by attempting to use a cross-disciplinary approach while reflecting on the difficulties of such an attempt.
Christopher White (University of Queensland)
The Meanings of Monsters: Using Interdisciplinary Approaches to Better Understand Medieval Wonder
While they may at first appear to be little more than fantasies, medieval wonder tales are complex, symbolically-dense cultural products which reward close investigation. By turning to methods from fields such as sociology, anthropology, and the digital humanities, medievalists can extract much more information from these narratives than is possible through traditional historiographical methods.
This paper will demonstrate how an interdisciplinary approach can be employed in a close-reading of the werewolf narratives of Gerald of Wales (c. 1146–1223), Gervase of Tilbury (c. 1150–1220), and Marie de France (fl. 1160–1215), highlighting how the methodologies of these fields can be used to deepen our understanding of those who composed these texts, their audiences, and their societies.
By employing methods found in approaches such as Social Network Theory, Geertzian “thick description”, and semiotics, this paper will argue that medieval writers engaged with a shared understanding of meaning, and will show how an interdisciplinary approach enables a better understanding of medieval social and textual transmission networks. It will also show how these narratives were modified and deployed by medieval writers, and how the “peripheries” of the medieval Latin West, such as Ireland and the British Isles, were central to the normalising mission the medieval Church.
Workshop Convenors
Professor Lorna Hutson is Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She has taught at the Universities of St Andrews, the University of California, the University of Hull and Queen Mary University. Her books include Thomas Nashe in Context, The Usurer’s Daughter, The Invention of Suspicion and Circumstantial Shakespeare. With Victoria Kahn she edited Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe. She is editor of the Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature 1500-1700. She has held Guggenheim and Leverhulme fellowships, given the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures (2012) and was Alice Griffin Shakespeare Fellow, University of Auckland (2012).
Lorna’s work has explored connections between legal and poetic thinking. The Invention of Suspicion traced innovations in English Renaissance dramaturgy to legal models of evaluating narrative probability, a topic further pursued in Circumstantial Shakespeare. England’s Insular Imagining explores the real-world effects of the poetic, legal and cartographic artifice of England’s imagined island geography. She is currently working, with Katrin Ettenhuber, on a project involving the rethinking of premodern probability.
Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch FAHA FRHistS is the Dean of Research Strategy at the University of Divinity. Her area of research is the cultural and social history of the Middle Ages and her research has contributed to the history of the crusades, memory and history, and medieval Cistercian monastic life. She is the author of Monastic Spaces and their Meanings (2001), Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination (2011), War and Memory at the time of the Fifth Crusade (2019) and Crusades and Violence (2023). She has served as President of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Head of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies (Monash University), Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry (University of Queensland) and was the first woman to hold the McCaughey Chair in History at the University of Queensland. She is an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was elected to fellowship of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2023. Her current research concerns ideas of spiritual health among pilgrims to the holy land in the high Middle Ages, and she is also developing a large-scale project on ideas and experiences of home and homelessness across time.
Associate Professor Una McIlvenna is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2023-2027 and Associate Professor in English at the Australian National University. Her research interests lie in the fields of early modern cultural and literary history, and she is particularly interested in the tradition of singing the news. Her most recent book, Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900, looks at the fascinating and long-lived tradition of execution ballads. These songs told the news of crime and their usually ghastly punishments in sensationalist and graphic terms. The book won the 2023 Katharine Briggs Award from the Folklore Society and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s General History Prize. It is accompanied by her digital platform, Execution Ballads. Her first book, Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores the real-life scandals that rocked the court of Catherine de Medici, the queen mother of France during the Wars of Religion. It debunks the myth of Catherine’s ‘flying squadron,’ and shows how women have been collectively slandered for centuries.