The Paris Early Modern Seminar is proud to host the first seminar for the International Consortium of Centres for Early Modern Studies (ICCEMS).
This seminar will be led by Dr. Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Paris-Nanterre), Prof. Ladan Niayesh (Université Paris-Cité) and guest editors on Brepols series “Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Britain“.
Abstract
In this presentation, we would like to introduce the series we co-edit with Brepols publishers, “Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Britain” (https://www.brepols.net/series/PEEMB). The aim of this series is to investigate polyglot practices in early modern English literary texts by crossing perspectives in a transdisciplinary approach. Volumes in the series analyse how an English linguistic, but also social and political, and more generally cultural, identity is built by means of contact and interaction with other languages, through borrowings and translations.
We will present briefly volume 1, which was published in 2022, volume 2, which will come out later this year, and volume 3, in preparation. We will then open a discussion with the group about what polyglossia means for us who work in early modern studies, how it can help us think the triangulation between languages, lands and nations in an era of commerce, colonisation and conflict, and in particular the place of English and England within the British Isles and beyond, put in geographical and linguistic perspective with other languages and nations, near and far.
About the Speakers
Laetitia Sansonetti is Senior Lecturer in English (Translation Studies) at Université Paris Nanterre and a junior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. Her research bears on the reception of classical and continental texts in early modern England, language learning, poetry and rhetoric and questions of authorship and authority. Her current research project on translation and polyglossia in early modern England (https://tape1617.hypotheses.org/) is funded by a five-year grant from Institut Universitaire de France.
Ladan Niayesh is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Paris (ex-Paris Diderot) and a member of the LARCA research centre of the CNRS (UMR 8225). Her research focuses on Early Modern travel writing and travel drama, more specifically in connection to Muscovy and Persia. Her latest publications include Three Romances of Eastern Conquest (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Eastern Resonances (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), coedited with Claire Gallien. She currently coedits the Persian travels of the Sherley brothers with Kurosh Meshkat and Alasdair MacDonald for the Hakluyt Society.
Other speakers will include:
Charlotte COFFIN is Senior Lecturer in early modern English literature and culture at Université Paris-Est Créteil and a member of Institut des Mondes Anglophone, Germanique et Roman (IMAGER). Her research focuses on the reception of classical texts in early modern England and the uses of classical mythology in drama by Shakespeare, Heywood and their contemporaries. She is interested in matters of circulation, intertextuality, book history and theatre history. Recent publications include five entries for the Arden dictionary of Shakespeare’s classical mythology (forthcoming in 2024), a chapter in Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition (Manchester University Press, 2021) and a special issue of Études Épistémè on The Politics of Form in Early Modern Europe (2021), coedited with Paloma Bravo and Séverine Delahaye-Grélois. She also coedited Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester University Press, 2017) with Janice Valls-Russell and Agnès Lafont.
Chloë HOUSTON is Associate Professor of Early Modern Drama in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. Her research focuses on the portrayal of cultural and religious difference in early modern literature and performance, and she has published a number of articles on the representation of Persia in English plays and travel writings in the early modern period. Her latest monograph, Persia in Early Modern English Drama, 1530-1699: The Imagined Empire, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023.
Agnès LAFONT is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Studies at Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 and a member of the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’âge Classique et les Lumières (UMR 5186 CNRS). She works on the reception of classical myths in Renaissance poetry, drama (in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries John Lyly, George Peele and Christopher Marlowe), and mythography. She studies the ways in which direct and indirect circulations of classical models (mostly Ovidian) shape English reception from the 1550s to the 1620s. She wrote her unpublished PhD on the myth of Diana in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (‘Visages de Diane dans le théâtre élisabéthain et jacobéen (1560-1616)’) and has published several articles on mythology. She edited Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture (Routledge, 2013), co-edited (with J. Valls-Russell and Ch. Coffin), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Manchester University Press, 2017), and co-edited (with M.-P. Noël and P. Pontier), ‘Autour des mythes de Thésée et de Perséphone. Tradition, Transferts, Transmissions (Antiquité-XVIIe siècle)’ (Les Cahiers du Théâtre Antique 22, 4, 2021). She is currently preparing the edition of The Maid’s Metamorphosis (Anonymous, 1600) for Manchester University Press. She is assistant editor for Cahiers Elisabéthains.
Rémi VUILLEMIN is Senior Lecturer in early modern English literature at Université de Strasbourg. The author of a monograph on Michael Drayton’s sonnet sequences, Le Recueil pétrarquiste à l’ère du maniérisme: poétique des sonnets de Michael Drayton, 1594–1619 (2014), his work bears on the early modern English sonnet, its reception past and present, and early modern poetic theory. Recently, he has co-edited two collective volumes, The Early Modern English Sonnet (Manchester University Press, 2020), and Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England (Brepols, 2022). He has just finished writing a monograph on the framing of lyric collections.
This online seminar will take place on 16 May, 10am-11.30pm CEST (UTC +2). Register to attend.
