Early Modern Circle
(Photograph: Andrew Stephenson)
The Early Modern Circle is an interdisciplinary seminar open to interested students, academics and researchers. The Circle meets on the third Monday of the month, during semester, at 6:15. Unless noted otherwise, meetings will be conducted in the William Macmahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts.
Convenors
Catherine Kovesi
c.kovesi@unimelb.edu.au
Jenny Spinks
jspinks@unimelb.edu.au
Matthew Champion
mscha@unimelb.edu.au
To be added to the mailing list, please email Andrew Stephenson.
Programme for 2023
20 March
Ines Jahudka, University of Melbourne
Plague, Homicide and Statistics: London's "Searchers of the Dead", 1590–1830
For almost 250 years, causes of death in London parishes were determined by local laywomen. Named “The Searchers of the Dead”, these women were initially created as part of governmental attempts to contain sixteenth-century plague outbreaks. They were charged with examining victim’s bodies for signs of the contagion and reporting their findings to parochial authorities. However, it was not long before parishioners were calling the women to examine any dead body and determine a cause of death.
Several historians have examined the Searchers as a social authority. However, given their role in determining a cause of death, can homicide trial records reveal more about the Searchers’ role in legal medicine and the judicial system? How did they interact with their community, with medical practitioners and with the legal institution itself? Finally, how did their role reflect wider cultural movements such as the professionalisation and commodification of medicine?
Ines Jahudka is a second-year PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She was the 2021 recipient of the Hansen Scholarship in History, as well as the Felix Raab award for her undergraduate essay on European musical tone and globalisation. Her doctoral research expands upon her honours thesis and explores the influence of laypeople in medico-legal decision-making processes following sudden or suspicious deaths in eighteenth-century England. Ines seeks to place the logistics of the post-mortem decision-making process within social and cultural understandings of death, medicine and justice.
17 April
Dr Gerhard Wiesenfeldt, University of Melbourne
Canal Boats in a Very Dutch Space: The Life World of Christiaan Huygens and the Relativity of Motion
Christiaan Huygens’ treatise De motu corporum ex percussione (On the Motion of Colliding Bodies, 1705) is widely considered to be a key work in the development of the classical principle of relativity, the idea that physical laws are independent of the system of reference used to describe motion. Central to Huygens’ approach was a thought experiment contrasting two observers involved in the same experiment, one moving on a boat, the other standing on an embankment.
This talk will relate Huygens’ research to Dutch canal boat travel. Since the middle of the seventeenth century the trekvaart system had provided a reliable means of passenger transportation. Within a few decades, this system displayed core elements of modern mass travel associated with the expansion of the railroad. The central argument of this talk is that the experience of space in the canal boat travel corresponded with Huygens abstract conceptualisation of space in his work on the relativity of motion. In turn, the trekvaart system was embedded in a much older tradition of water management and reconstruction of space in the Low Countries.
Gerhard Wiesenfeldt is a lecturer for History of Science in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. He has worked extensively on the history of physical sciences in the Dutch Republic as well as on the role of experimental sciences at early modern universities. His main research project is focussed on tracing the interrelation between practical mathematics and academic philosophy at the University of Leiden from 1600-1800. One aspect of this focus leads to a study of the epistemological role of family networks in early modern academia.
15 May
Jorgina Català, University of Melbourne
Concealed from the Eyes of the Banquet’s Guests: The Hidden Officers of the Mouth in the Household of Ercole II d'Este
Zoom meeting: Contact Catherine Kovesi c.kovesi@unimelb.edu.au for the link.
This paper is drawn from a comprehensive study of an unexplored aspect of the court of Ercole II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1534–1559), that is, the roles, duties, and organisation of employees known collectively as the “officers of the mouth”; officials devoted to food-related professions inside the Duke’s household. This talk will analyse the contribution these officers made to the efficiency and economic growth of the Duke’s court. Traveling from food markets, wholesalers, and specialist suppliers to the court’s food pantries, credenze and kitchens, the internal structure and characteristics of the "officers of the mouth" will be unfold.
In this way, the contribution of the officers of the mouth to the greatest administrative and economic efficiency that occurred under Ercole will be analysed. The seminar will argue that the ways these officials managed supplies, mastered the art of storing and preserving foodstuffs, and adhered to cleaning and hygiene regimes played a key role in making Ercole II’s court an exemplary one, and contributed to showcasing the duke’s authority over his courtiers and other Italian and international court.
Jorgina Català Jarque submitted her Phd thesis in 2023 at the University of Melbourne. She was the recipient in 2018 of the Richard Gunter Bursaries, the Alma Hansen Scholarship and the Giuseppina
Patiti Tahiri Scholarship, which allowed her to travel to France and Italy to undertake her research. Focused on Food History in the Italian Renaissance, her thesis investigated the roles, duties, activities,
and management of the ‘officers of the mouth’ in the household of Ercole II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, (r. 1534-1559). Her work illustrates for the first time the internal logistics of this ducal household while
also revealing understudied administrative structures of a mid-sixteenth-century Italian court.