Myself when Young: Becoming a Musician in Renaissance Italy—or Not

In his Lives, Giorgio Vasari mentions many artists who were talented at music when they were young, prominently Giorgione and Sebastiano del Piombo. Benvenuto Cellini resisted his father's pressure to choose music. Why? How rewarding was a musical profession in Renaissance Italy? It could be very lucrative, both for town musicians such as Cellini's father and for castratos. Moonlighting for banquets, dances, even spying, could bring in additional income. For gentlemen, music was a necessary social grace; they had private tutors, such as Silvestro Ganassi dal Fontego, who was himself a painter as well as a printer. Amateurs could learn from cathedral choirmasters, who were often music theorists, the pinnacle of the profession. The theorist Pietro Aaron, choirmaster at Imola Cathedral, then tutor to the sons of Sebastian Michiel, Grand Prior of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in Venice, had a wide acquaintance among humanists, noblemen and other musicians, and his letters open a window on the life of a musician. Among his many professions, the writer Antonfrancesco Doni counted music; a madrigal he wrote in 1560 is included in an appendix. The ability to improvise verses and music was much prized, ranging from star performers such as Serafino Aquilano to amateurs such as Niccolò Machiavelli. Portraits of musicians are discussed; they offer important evidence but are difficult to interpret. The theorist Lodovico Zacconi concluded in 1592 that being a musician was not only an honourable and lucrative profession but an enjoyable one.

More than ‘skimble-skamble stuff’: the Medieval Welsh Poetry Associated with Owain Glyndŵr

In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Hotspur refers to the partiality of Owain Glyndŵr (Glendower) for prophecies, which he characterises dismissively as ‘skimble-skamble stuff’. Whilst there is a virtual scholarly consensus that Glyndŵr inspired prophecies and utilised them, no verse prophecies certainly dateable to the revolt have survived, and the poetry surveyed in the lecture consists of eulogies by high-status poets, all but one of them composed before the outbreak of the revolt in 1400. Though used as a source by the historians J. E. Lloyd and R. R. Davies in their volumes on Glyndŵr, this corpus of poems is for the first time examined in detail in English as a discrete group, one that now includes a unique poem – a hybrid displaying elements of eulogy and of vaticination – composed during the revolt and restored to the canon of Glyndŵr poems since the two historians wrote. The poems, some of which are of Scottish interest – they reflect Glyndŵr's participation in Richard II's invasion of Scotland in 1385 – are examined in historical context and in relation to medieval Welsh poetic convention. Drawing on R. R. Davies' perception of post-Conquest Wales as an English colony, insights derived from modern postcolonial criticism are applied to the depiction of Owain in some of the poems, revealing their value in charting his evolution from a seemingly conformist ‘colonial mimic’ to the leader of a national revolt.

Between One and Many: Multiples, Multiplication and the Huayan Metaphysics

Modern art history practice often treats Buddhist icons or ritual objects as unique objects, focusing on their originality and uniqueness. This text investigates how the paradoxical Buddhist doctrine of ‘the one and the many’ was translated into visual language through manipulation of the relationship between copies and the original. It analyses the different tactics and strategies formulated around given socio-historical frameworks to visualise the notion of infinity, and ultimately the structure of the universe, and suggests that multiple copies of a single design were more potent a vehicle than single objects in expressing ideas related to the Buddhist metaphysics.

Many-Coloured Glass, Aerial Images, and the Work of the Lens: Romantic Poetry and Optical Culture

This lecture argues that new optical experiences created by the lens and what we now call the virtual image were the foundation alike of ‘high’ science, associated at this historical moment with the telescope, and popular spectacle. They precipitated and renewed an enquiry into the nature and status of the image (always incipient in poetics) as the technologies of the phantasmagoria, the kaleidoscope and the diorama penetrated deep into the poets' worlds and words. The projected image, without a correspondence in reality, was a troubling aspect of this modern technology, provoking new understandings of materiality and immateriality. Colour, reflection and refraction became central concerns as a corollary of the debate. Some poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Amelia Opie, Keats, Shelley) assimilated this imagery into their work, albeit skeptically. Others (Charlotte Smith, Blake) violently resisted it. The lecture looks closely at image-making in poetic language, and argues that there were both ontological and political stakes in this enquiry.

Pope’s Ethical Thinking: Passion and Irony in Dialogue

This lecture examines Alexander Pope's depictions of passion and sentiment in a range of early writings, including his ‘Prologue’ to Addison's Cato, Eloisa to Abelard and An Essay on Man. It then shows how often Pope belittled his own forays into affectivity and relates that tendency to a wider interest in ‘sceptical perspectivism’. The presence of the latter is traced in other works such as John Gay's Trivia, Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics, all of which – the last especially – are invoked to explain the dialogic methods employed in Pope's Rape of the Lock and his Dunciad Variorum. Finally, the argument suggests that, despite suffering a loss of self-confidence in the mid-1730s (evident in the Epistle to Arbuthnot), Pope was able to recover his satirical idiom precisely by fusing his passionate and dialogic concerns in the Epilogue to the Satires of 1738.

Audience‐Actor Boundaries and Othello

This lecture explores the boundaries between audiences and actors, and what happens when audiences interact with actors and their characters. Its illustrative case is Desdemona's response to Othello. When Desdemona marries Othello she crosses the boundary from audience world to the world of fiction (the world of epic hero, adventure stories, travel narratives). In so doing, she initiates a structure in which things that should be kept separate merge: genre (comedy and tragedy), language (the play has more compound words and paradoxes than any other), characters, plots. The mergings are consistently coded as theatrical: this is a tragedy of theatre boundaries gone wrong. Psychologist Edward Bullough's argument from 1912 about distance in the theatre provides the theoretical framework for this lecture to explore the problems when audiences do not keep stage.

A Protestant or Catholic Atlantic World? Confessional Divisions and the Writing of Natural History

Some competition was associated with all European voyages of discovery, whether considered in an intellectual or a nautical sense, but the character of the competition became confessional as the contest between states over resources to be exploited gave way to disputation between denominations over how souls might best be saved. This happened when, in the late sixteenth century, Protestant publicists began to disparage the colonial endeavours that the Spanish and Portuguese authorities had been engaged upon for more than a century, and when they resolved to start the colonial process all over again, with a view to making the Atlantic World a Protestant rather than a Catholic space. This was to be achieved both by releasing what remained of the Native American population in Central and South America from Spanish tyranny, and by establishing Protestant colonies to evangelise the native populations in extensive areas of America to which the Iberians had no more than titular claims. A comparison between French and English colonial undertakings in the West Indies, and between the literatures associated with these endeavours over the course of the seventeenth century, establishes that these Protestant ambitions proved as elusive in practice as they had been myopic in theory. The conclusion seeks to explain why colonial efforts in which Catholic religious orders were involved proved more capable of linking scientific investigations with missionary concerns than was possible in colonies that were self consciously Protestant.

Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700–1200)

This paper uses the proxy evidence of relic inventories and labels to explore the role of relics in medieval Christianity. By means of an examination of their material nature, it argues that their primary characteristics were their fragmentary and often amorphous nature; their lack of intrinsic identification; and their easy portability. By emphasising that relic collecting was a habit that contributed to establishing religious identities and affiliations, the paper clarifies relics' role in relocating knowledge of Christian history into the homes and churches of medieval Europe. Finally, having noted that their dissemination followed established networks of travel and communication, it emphasises that relics rendered the essentials of Christianity tangible and portable.