Parker on the Web Info

Today I received some information about Parker on the Web that I thought I would share:

Dear Parkerweb User:

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the University of Cambridge and Stanford University are happy to inform you that the Parker on the Web
prototype you have registered to use will soon be replaced with an entirely new edition of the application. The prototype, made available
at the end of 2004, contained just two of the 538 manuscripts in the Parker Library; editions, translations and secondary scholarship about
those two manuscripts; and some descriptive metadata for the full collection. Sometime between 1 October and 15 October 2007, this content
will be entirely replaced with a completely new user interface, vastly enhanced searching and manuscript-viewing capabilities, and enormously
expanded metadata, bibliography and page images for fifty manuscripts. The web address for the new site will be the same as the old:
http://parkerweb.stanford.edu <http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/>. As before, pages that describe the project and the Parker Library will be
available to all site visitors without restriction, and the entire site will be accessible to anyone who registers and accepts an agreement
governing permitted uses. However, since this will be an entirely new application, you will be required to re-register the first time you
logon to the new site. Please note that the new site will replace the prototype, and that the prototype will not be available after the new site has been installed.

Corpus, Cambridge and Stanford continue work, generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, to digitize all of the Parker Library manuscripts, upgrade descriptive metadata, and compile bibliography. The work is scheduled to be finished at the end of 2009. New content will be added to the Parkerweb site periodically. As a registered user of the new site, you will be kept informed about our progress and related matters of interest.

CFP: EARLY MODERN READING: BOOKS, COMMUNITIES, CONVERSATIONS

(Note: I think that someone doing work on early modern women’s reading would be great for this conference)

Newcastle University, UK, 11-12 April 2008
Keynote Speakers:
• Jason Scott-Warren (Cambridge)
• Cathy Shrank (Sheffield)
• Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge)
The history of reading has experienced an explosive growth in recent years. Scholars of early modern England have been at the forefront of research in this area, and studies of the reading practices of a number of notable figures, including Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Ben Jonson, and Sir William Drake, have appeared over the last fifteen years. Historians have gleaned from notebooks and marginalia a model of reading as utilitarian; this values the text primarily as a resource to be mined for information or turns of phrase and applied to the life or writings of the reader or their patron. Such work has offered many important insights, but it has perhaps also narrowed our understanding of the practice of reading and its social and political import. It does not give us a model that is flexible enough to explain the relationship between reading and the development of ‘literary’ form, nor does it recognise the diverse practical, political and social interests which reading may have served.

We invite proposals for conference papers which aim to extend or complicate our understanding of early modern readers and reading practice. This might be understood to include the conversations – or indeed quarrels – which follow particular texts; the act of reading itself as dialogic; readings that ‘go against the grain’; the sense of literary
writings as acts of reading; reading as information gathering and the organization of knowledge; and textual exchange as a form of association, or negotiation, between individuals, communities, and cultures.

Specific subjects which contributors might address include (but are not limited to):
• Paratexts and marginalia
• Rhetoric and imitation
• Translation
• Book and manuscript circulation
• Book ownership
• Reading communities
• Dialogue and civil conversation
• Oppositional reading
• Censorship
• Reading and politics
• Reformation and religious controversy
• Education and reading
• Scientific reading
• Information management
Please send proposals (100 words) by 7 December 2007 to: Fred Schurink (fred.schurink_at_ncl.ac.uk) or Jennifer Richards (jennifer.richards_at_ncl.ac.uk).

The Rhetoric of Feminine Virtue

Holly Crocker, The Rhetoric of Feminine Virtue: Fashioning Femininity, Stabilizing Masculinity, 1350-1603, PhD Diss. TN: Vanderbilt, 1999.

This dissertation title gave me a near heart attack when I was working on my dissertation prospectus. At the time, I planned to write about feminine virtue from 1350 to 1650. But, then, I changed my period to 1529-1650 and my focus a little bit.

I am not sure why Crocker did not make this into a book; it’s quite interesting.

Here’s the abstract: This dissertation traces connections between conduct materials for women and works by Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare. I argue that these authors use a model of feminine exemplarity to clarify or confirm the noble status of a male character. Although some female characters expose deficiencies in a male character’s gendered performance, these texts diffuse these potential threats to masculine stability by deploying the rhetoric of feminine virtue. Women become the measure of masculine worth, and a woman’s performance of femininity, these texts suggest, becomes an important component of masculine status. Focusing particularly on The Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde, The Faerie Queene, and The Taming of the Shrew , I situate my argument in relation to cultural expectations which seek to control the category of exemplary femininity to stabilize the positions of both women and men in late medieval and early Renaissance cultures.

CFP: APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture

from their blog:

Volume 1: Genres and Cultures

Submission Deadlines: October 1 (Abstracts); November 15 (Conference Papers)

Conference Dates: December 1-2, 2007

Publication Date: March 1, 2008

Call for Papers: The inaugural issue of Appositions: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture seeks conference papers (critical, scholarly, theoretical) examining relationships between literary texts and social contexts that hinge upon the significance of genres and forms of discourse. How and why do literary genres emerge and change within and against fields of cultural production? Or, alternately: how and why do social discourses shape distinctive modes and forms of literary art? Or, antithetically: how and why do literary works evade generic/modal classifications and cultural narratives? Beyond such chiastic formulations, what other factors (e.g., audience, gender, identity, occasion, politics) also contribute to the synergy between genres and cultures? Comparative, interdisciplinary, and trans-historical papers are encouraged. Panel proposals are also invited.

Limitations: No image or sound files. Abstracts (200 words). Conference papers (2,000 words). Journal articles/essays (3,000 words). New work. No simultaneous submissions.

Guidelines: Selected papers from the digital conference (December 1-2, 2007) will be considered for publication (as articles/essays, revised and expanded) in the electronic journal, Appositions, which will launch on March 1, 2008.

Conference Location: http://appositions.blogspot.com/

Electronic Submissions: Abstracts to showard@du.edu by September 1; completed conference papers, by November 15.