Early Modern Circle 2024
18 March
Three Early Career Researchers and their Research Projects: Presentations and Roundtable
Dr Nat Cutter
Merchant Networks in Ottoman Tunis, 1675-1715: Wheat and War
Nat Cutter is the Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne. His research on early modern British-Maghrebi relations, media history, and digital humanities has appeared in Cultural and Social History, Renaissance Studies and Gender & History, and won the 2021 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize. He is currently completing a monograph on the experiences and influence of English-speaking merchant communities in the Ottoman Maghreb.
Dr Shannon Kuziow
Marian Devotion in Early Modern Rome and Nineteenth-Century Australia
Shannon E. Kuziow is a Teaching Associate in History at the University of Melbourne and recipient of an Early Career Grant. She previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Australian Catholic University with forthcoming articles in Renaissance Quarterly and Sixteenth Century Journal. She is completing a monograph on miracle-working images in Renaissance Tuscany.
Dr Charlotte-Rose Millar
Ghosts, Emotions, and Supernatural Space in Early Modern England
Charlotte-Rose Millar is Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne and a recipient of a Melbourne Research Fellowship. Her first book, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England was published by Routledge in 2017. She is currently working on a new book for Manchester University Press: Haunting Emotions: Space and the Supernatural in post-Reformation England.
15 April
Dr Lana Stephens, Australian Catholic University
Pre-existence in Renaissance Florence: Ficinian Perspectives on the Origins of the Soul
The contributions of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) to the intellectual legacy of the Italian Renaissance cannot be overstated; Ficino’s name has become synonymous with Florentine Neoplatonism, and his philosophy of love and defence of the immortality of individual souls has made Ficino one of the most renowned thinkers of the fifteenth century. This paper examines a critical, yet neglected aspect of Ficino’s thought, namely, his revival of the heterodox doctrine of the soul’s pre-mortal existence and its place in his programme of religious renewal. Studying the transmission of this idea among Florentine socio-intellectual networks, this paper demonstrates the pivotal role that Ficino’s endorsement played in its dissemination. To highlight the unique spiritual significance of pre-existence for Ficino and his followers, this paper will analyse Ficino’s 1457 epistolary treatise, the De divino furore (On Divine Frenzy). Tracing the recurrence of this text in several commonplace books, or zibaldoni, this paper illuminates how Ficino’s theology and message of renewal was diffused in vernacular discourse.
Lana Stephens is an early career researcher specialising in the religious and intellectual cultures of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy. She received her PhD from the Australian Catholic University in 2023 and a monograph based on her doctoral research is currently under consideration by Cambridge University Press. It examines the ancient Neoplatonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul in the thought of Marsilio Ficino and his circle.
19 August
Professor Ulinka Rublack, University of Cambridge
PUBLIC LECTURE: The Triumph of Fashion: A Global History
16 September
Venue: Room 361, Level 3, Arts West
Dr Paige Donaghy, University of Melbourne
False Conceptions, Mooncalves and Moles: Women’s Experiences of False Generation in Early Modern England
In early modern England, pregnant women sometimes gave birth to formless lumps of flesh, instead of foetuses. These lumps formed part of a broad category of ‘false’ generation, such as “false conceptions”, “moles” or “mooncalves”. Women who experienced false generation often mistook this for true conception, because it produced similar signs of pregnancy. Moles and mooncalves were thought to be harmful to women’s bodies and fertility, but they could also disrupt family lineages and royal succession.
This paper aims to show that false forms of generation shaped early modern ideas about pregnancy and reproduction in ways that historians have overlooked. From popular culture, infanticide trials, to natural philosophy and medicine, false generation was a significant part of English ideas and experiences of reproduction. In this paper, I focus on English women’s experiences of false conceptions and moles, to highlight the ways in which they responded to such experiences, and made sense of them.
Dr Paige Donaghy (she/her) is an award-winning early career researcher who studies the history of reproduction, medicine and sexuality in Europe ca. 1500 to 1800. She recently joined the University of Melbourne as a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship, in SHAPS, researching the history of medicine, gender and obstetric violence. Donaghy completed her PhD at the University of Queensland in 2022, which investigated the history of false generation (such as false conception and pregnancy) in early modern Europe. This research is being developed into a monograph, under contract with Durham University Press’s “Science in Culture” series. Donaghy has also published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Social History of Medicine, and Isis.
21 October
Venue: William Macmahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts.
Professors Véronique Duché, Charles Zika, both University of Melbourne and David Garrioch, Monash University
The Legacy and Impact of Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023): A Roundtable Discussion
This meeting of the Early Modern Circle will be a roundtable discussion about the life and legacy of the late great historian Professor Natalie Zemon Davis. A pioneer in the fields of early modern cultural and social history, Davis was known for her sensitive investigations into the lives of women, artisans, and labourers, as well as her innovations in global history and historical method.
18 November
Venue: Room 556 Arts West, North Wing
Dr Leigh Penman, Monash University
Sons of the Indies: The Ambonese Embassy to the United Provinces (1621-1630) in European History and Imaginary
In the summer of 1621, a strange embassy arrived at the court of Maurits of Orange at The Hague in the United Provinces. Rather than diplomats, it consisted of five boys from the island of Ambon in the eastern reaches of the Indonesian archipelago, the heart of the spice islands. The boys had been sent to the Netherlands by the royal houses of Ambon and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) on the island. Their mission in the United Provinces was not to negotiate treaties, but rather to study Calvinist theology so that, in the fullness of time, they could return to their homeland and spread the light of true Christianity among their countrymen.
This paper outlines the ambitions and surprising outcomes of this extraordinary embassy in Ambon and Europe. Drawing on recent scholarship on early modern projects, it considers the embassy as an intervention into the 'riskscape' of early modernity, that entangled ambitions mercantile, religious, diplomatic, and political. It also shows the competing stakes at play in the success of the enterprise.
Leigh Penman is a Research Fellow at Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University. He is the author of Hope and Heresy (2019), The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism (2020), Prophecy, Madness, and Holy War in Early Modern Germany (2023), and articles on aspects of early modern European history and historiography.