Time: Wednesday 15 March; 12:00
Place: LOCKE611 and ZOOM
Professor Sarah Ross (Victoria University of Wellington):
Abstract: Recent considerations of Renaissance humanist education—how the writers and thinkers of the Renaissance learned their trade—have been dominated by examinations of “Shakespeare’s Schoolroom”: the grammar schools of the late sixteenth century. Girls and women, however, were excluded from grammar schools, as well as from universities and Inns of Courts, the key institutions of rhetorical training and textual circulation and exchange. So how did early modern girls and women learn to write literary and other texts and to engage in the intellectual cultures of the period? What was their rhetorical training, and how distinct was their rhetorical habitus?
This seminar focuses in on one archive of early modern girls’ and women’s education: songbooks in print and in manuscript that were used in domestic musical tuition and performance. It asks what these songbooks tell us about the lyrics that girls learned to sing, the characters they learned to impersonate, and the kind of education they were receiving in the elite homes of early seventeenth-century England and Scotland. More broadly, it provides one methodology for looking to alternative archives for alternative histories of historical cultural engagement and cultural capital.
Sarah C. E. Ross is Professor of English at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. She has published widely on seventeenth-century poetry, politics, women’s writing, and textual exchange in the English Civil Wars. She is currently working on the John Emmerson Collection of Civil War materials at State Library Victoria.
ZOOM: https://canterbury.zoom.us/j/93339356221
Meeting ID: 933 3935 6221
