By Helena Berry @HelenaSBerry ‘An insatiable pouch is a pernicious sink, and the fountain of all diseases, both of body and mind’ - Robert Burton1 The year 2020 has put bodyweight under increased scrutiny. Access to the supermarket became uncertain for many with the arrival of the lockdown, coinciding with the launch of the government’s …
Continue reading Ursula’s Fat Body and the Marketplace in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614)
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By Annabelle Stephenson @AnnabelleJane15 ‘And so it goes with contraries; the one glosses the other, and whoever wants to define one of them must bear the other in mind, for otherwise, it is impossible to offer any definition at all. For whoever does not have knowledge of the two will never know the difference between …
Continue reading Encountering Monumental Stone Women at Magdeburg Cathedral
by Kat Addis Where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality which can afford to destroy so many? – James Baldwin, 1966[1] The famous Elizabethan pronouncement on slavery – ‘That England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breath in’ - has also been the most misleading. It is often remembered as …
Continue reading Constructing Whiteness as Freedom in Elizabethan England
by Florence Hazrat Tucked away in the depths of the Bodleian Library is a curious volume of miscellaneous early modern writings whose linguistic diversity – ranging from Italian, to French, English, Portuguese, and Dutch – mirrors its diversity of content: observations on the political apathy of the French, an Italian travel diary, a treatise on …
Continue reading Points of Contention: Parentheses in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia
by Charlotte Potter September means the return of everyone’s favourite comfort food programme, The Great British Bake Off! Watching the new batch of bakers getting creative in the tent, I started to wonder what a seventeenth-century Great British Bake Off might look like. A recipe book from 1692 belonging to Hannah Bisaker, which is held in the Wellcome …
Continue reading Pasties, Pies and Play in the Seventeenth-Century Kitchen
As an eternal glutton for punishment, I was researching in the Archive Reading Room in the Houses of Parliament in January earlier this year. In the list of Petitions to the House of Lords in my period of research, there was one particular Petition which stood out from the others. Amidst the multitudes of petty …
Continue reading Persian Petitioning and Serendipitous Research
Wednesday 6 February: Katherine Ibbett (Oxford), ‘Surface Writing: On the Seventeenth Century Saint Lawrence River’. 5pm, Silverstone 309 Wednesday 13 February: Emma Whipday (Newcastle), ‘“You see my sister’s yet at my dispose”: Brothers and Sisters on the Early Modern Stage’. 5pm, Silverstone 309 Monday 25 February: Work in progress: Flora Dennis, Nicole Mennell, Joanne Paul. …
Readers of early modern literature are well acquainted with the fool type, a stock character that is frequently to be found in the drama of the period and is generally renowned for his merrymaking and, in some cases, wise witticism. And yet, because he was a ‘fool’ there must have been some points of contact …
Continue reading The Fool and the Law in Early Modern England
Here at CEMMS we have just set up what promises to be an exciting and fruitful new partnership with University College Dublin (UCD). The Sussex-UCD partnership is funded by The International Research Partnerships and Network Fund at Sussex, and the School of English at UCD. It is for three years in the first instance but may …
Continue reading New Partnership with University College Dublin
This blog post was written by Sussex PhD student Nicole Mennell. Nicole's works explores the connections made between figures of sovereignty and animals in early modern drama. She has interned with the National Portrait Gallery where she conducted research for a future exhibition on pets. Nicole is also the co-founding editor of Brief Encounters, an open-access …
