ORGANISATRICE :

Aurelie Griffin

PRÉSENTATION :

CALL FOR PAPERS PEMS/ LRS
One-Day Joint Conference 21 November 2025 Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris “Informal Forms” The Paris Early Modern Seminar and the London Renaissance Seminar invite contributions for their next joint conference, to be held at Université Sorbonne  Nouvelle on 21 November 2025. How are we to understand the relationships between formal and informal forms? In sixteenth and seventeenth-century Anglophone and European writing and, indeed, in visual and material culture, the emphasis on highly wrought and final form coexists with forms, modes and genres that are subject to mission creep, rewriting, reordering, re-use and other forms of movement into informality. Indeed, often it is only possible to contextualise or understand wrought forms by using the more informal, intertextual or associated forms that such complete forms seem to disavow. Relationships between formal and informal forms are everywhere. Thus, if a portrait is (often) a finished object, it can nevertheless be much more deeply intelligible if set alongside account  books, notebooks, poems letters or even – in the case of Artemisia Gentileschi – a court case. If a sonnet or love lyric is a final product, then it might be copied, rewritten, extracted by Tottell or otherwise repurposed. If a Midsummer Night’s Dream is an intricate comedy, it is intertextual with materials from far across culture, remade from other forms. Moreover, many forms – journal, diary, meditation, parish record – have ab initio highly flexible horizons of expectation and understanding and might be written, rewritten and re-ordered as priorities  change. Moreover, as time passes the material form of texts is changed – they are rebound, re-shaped, menaced by damage, iconoclasm, decay. This symposium invites you to take your own research area and consider the relationships that might be covered by the term  “informal forms” in early modern culture – the connection of drafting to completion; the removal or return of details, copying, redaction and missing pages. We would like you to speak on any aspect of these relationships that work for you from a beautiful gold cup delivered with an annotated or scrappy letter, a diary, commentary a painting’s owners’ documents versus the image. Any or all of these can fit the brief. Papers will be between 15 and 20 minutes (length tbc) and we welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages. We are keen to have abstracts from historians, art historians and literary scholars.

Please send an abstract of 150-200 words to s.wiseman@bbc.ac.uk and aurelie.griffin@sorbonne.nouvelle.fr by June 30, 2025. Topics we are interested in might include, but are not limited to:

• ‘Sets’ of texts both formal and informal
• Texts that have been deformed, wrecked and reformed
• Texts that ‘explain’ more final and formal forms.
• Informal forms and intertextuality or circulation
• Informal forms and authorship
• Informal forms and gender • Literary forms.

Keynote speakers:

• Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (University College London)
• Adam Smyth (Balliol College, Oxford)