Hands & Performance ‘Gestures of writing: hands and minds’

11 March 2019

11am-3pm, Maison Française d’Oxford

Making, writing, pointing, demonstrating, feeling, representing… hands work hard in early modern texts. This workshop, one in a series of interdisciplinary sessions, will consider the intersecting uses and meanings of hands in different writerly contexts. From ‘writing as reaching’ in Renaissance poetry to the pragmatics and material history of scientific and technical textual composition in the Enlightenment, we will continue to explore the language and imagery of grasping, handling, and manipulating in the early modern period. 

Programme:

11am: Welcome 

11.10: Matthew Landrus, (Wolfson College and History Faculty, Oxford):

‘Hands in the Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi’

11.40: Olivia Tolley (St Catherine’s College and Modern Languages Faculty, Oxford): ‘Grasping in the dark: writing as reaching in Scève’s Délie (1544)’

12.20: John Christie (History Faculty, Oxford):

‘Performance and gesture in the poetry of Anna Letitia Barbauld’

1pm:    Lunch

1.40:    Marie Thebaud-Sorger (CNRS, Paris, and Maison Française d’Oxford):

‘“Smart hands”: a brief historiographical outline’  ( C. Jacob, éd. Lieux de savoirs 2. Les mains de l’intellect)

2.20:    Rachel Hindmarsh (Trinity College and Modern Languages Faculty, Oxford):

“Groping hands, curing hands in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel“

3pm  discussion future direction of the workshop

 

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