Séminaire conjoint Modernités 16 – 18 et le Paris Early Modern Sermin,
Vendredi 14 avril 2023, 16 h 30 – 18 h 00, Maison de la recherche, salle D 323
Janelle Jenstad (University of Victoria): “Early Modern Stage Directions and the Encoded Playbook: Text or Markup?”
(discussant: Line Cottegnies, Sorbonne Université)
Abstract:
How we encode, render, and count stage directions in a digital edition depends on the relationship between stage directions and the rest of the text. Are stage directions paratexts or are they part of the text of the playbook? What information do we need to capture when we encode stage directions? Where and how should we display them in our digital interface? And how should we number them in order to make them linkable and citable? This paper begins by showing the shifting placement of stage directions relative to the text block in the period 1500 to 1700 and briefly summarizing the recent burst of scholarship on stage directions, their purpose, authorship, and intended user. Then the paper turns to the challenge of encoding stage directions in the XML markup language of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and reflects on the applicability of the <stage> element specification to early modern drama. Finally, the paper turns to how the Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) project proposes to handle the rendering and numbering of stage directions both in our digital editions and in the LEMDO Hornbooks print-on-demand series. (This paper draws on research jointly conducted with Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award student Mahayla Galliford.)
Bio:
Janelle Jenstad is Professor of English at University of Victoria. She directs The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) and Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO), and co-coordinates The New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE) and Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE). With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). With Kaethler, she is co-general editing the MoEML Mayoral Shows Anthology (MoMS). She is editing in particular John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 and 1633 texts) for MoEML; The Merchant of Venice with Stephen Wittek for the NISE; and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, ScholarlyEditing, and Digital Studies/Champs Numeriques. Chapters appear in Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge).
Nous avons le plaisir de vous inviter au prochain séminaire de l’Axe Modernités 16 – 18 sur « Poétiques et politique de l’arbre à la première modernité » qui se tiendra le LUNDI 3 AVRIL prochain à la maison de la recherche (28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris), de 14 h 00 à 16 h 00 en Amphi Molinié.
Nous y entendrons les deux interventions suivantes:
Keith Pluymers (Illinois State University), “Imperial Visions and Colonial Omission in John Evelyn’s Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions (1662)” (à distance)
Et
Victoria Moul (University College London), “Cowley’s trees: assessing style, genre and tone in seventeenth century Latin poetry” (en personne)
(Discutant: Alexis Tadié)
Lien zoom:
Participer à la réunion Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86738621199?pwd=WVZTUEJXekYzcmZJckl6eTdvS0ZFUT09
En espérant vous y retrouver nombreux,
Bien cordialement,
Line Cottegnies, Anne-valérie Dulac et Alexis Tadié
Keith Pluymers
Bio: Keith Pluymers is Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He completed his PhD in 2015 at the University of Southern California and was a postdoctoral instructor at Caltech prior to joining ISU. His first book, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic came out with the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021 and has won the John Ben Snow Prize for best book on British history prior to 1800 from the North American Conference on British Studies. He is currently working on a book project titled “Water, Steam, and Philadelphia’s Eighteenth-Century Anthropocene” that examines the development of Philadelphia’s municipal water system in the long eighteenth century and the climate and environmental histories that shaped it.
Abstract: In the first two editions of his In the first two editions of Sylva (1664 and 1670) John Evelyn described himself as the first person to think systematically about England’s forests and trees at a moment of scarcity and crisis. This, however, was a self-conscious promotional flourish—Evelyn had seen and engaged with robust discussions about woods and trees in England and its colonies in the years prior to publication—but it allowed him to approach imperial expansion and the management of woods as a new question facing England, rather than one to which there were several ongoing answers. Evelyn’s inclusions and omissions around colonial forestry and timber projects were essential to his imperial political ecology—one in which colonies were luxuries rather than necessities.
Victoria Moul
Bio: Victoria Moul is Reader in Early Modern Latin and English at University College London. She has published widely on classical, early modern and modern poetry in English and Latin, with particular expertise in the bilingual literary culture of early modernity. Her most recent book in this field is A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Literary Culture in Early Modern England, published last year by Cambridge University Press.
Abstract: Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex, the ’Six Books of Plants’, published in its final form in 1668, shortly after Cowley’s death, was by far his most ambitious work but is today by far the least read. Containing, among many other topics, discussions of the best forms of government, the plants of the New World, the superiority of America over Europe and the ethics of abortion, all delivered by personified plants, it is a remarkable work by any measure. Its length, Latinity and sheer strangeness, however, have largely excluded it from serious critical consideration. This paper will use the last two books, on trees, to consider how we can approach and make sense of large-scale Latin poetry of this period, with particular attention to the central literary criteria of style, genre and tone.
Le Workshop sur “The Imagination of trees in pastoral and after”, Amphi Molinié est reporté à la journée du 08 juin à cause des grèves.
Sophie Chiari (Université Clermont-Auvergne): “Charcoal and Forest Management: Energy Crisis in Shakespeare’s England”
Aurélie Griffin (Université Sorbonne nouvelle): “The Tree of the Muses in Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’”
Line Cottegnies (Sorbonne Université): “Early-modern Prosopopeias of trees and Margaret Cavendish’s ‘A Dialogue between an Oak and a Man cutting him down’”
Textual Urns-Form and Materiality of Commemorative Writing in Early Modern England
POSTGRADUATE AND EARLY CAREER WORKSHOP & SEMINAR
Friday 28 October
13:30-17:00
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
This day explores the form and fabric of commemorative writing. It provides a forum to discuss texts of remembrance in the broader context of Early Modern England and recent interest in the materiality of the text. We aim to investigate the social, political and religious work performed by a poetics of memory and grief across material forms. It consists of a postgraduate and early career workshop followed by talks by two leading scholars working in the field to formulate new approaches. Both are open to all.
14:00-15:30 Postgraduate and Early Career Work in Progress Presentations and Discussion
15:30-16:00 Tea, Coffee and Biscuit Break
16:00-16:30 Patricia Phillippy (Coventry University), ‘“Soe darke in in the morning”: Remembrance and Climate in Alice Thornton’s Autobiographical Manuscripts’
16:30-17:00 Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille (Université de Rouen Normandie), ‘Commemorating the Christian martyr and the Civil War hero in Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson’
17:00 Discussion, Drinks and Nibbles
This event is hosted by the LRS and VALE (Voix Anglophones Littérature et Esthétique Research Group, at Sorbonne Université). It is organised by Emma Bartel (Sorbonne Université) and Eva Lauenstein (Birkbeck). We are kindly supported by a Society for Renaissance Studies Small Conference Grant. For any questions, please contact e.lauenstein@bbk.ac.uk.
Veuillez trouver ci-joint le programme du colloque sur “Sports and Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century” qui se tiendra à la Sorbonne le 13 et le 14 octobre (Salle des Actes).
Au plaisir de vous y retrouver.
Bien cordialement,
Caroline Bertonèche et Alexis Tadié
Sports and Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century
Conference program
13-14 October 2022
Sorbonne Université, Salle des Actes
13 October
9:45: Welcome and opening remarks
10:00: PLENARY LECTURE
Simon BAINBRIDGE (Lancaster University)
‘A group… of apparently aerial beings’: Sociability on the British Summit in the Long Eighteenth Century
Coffee break
11:30: First session: Outdoors, Sociability and Individuality
CHAIR: Kimberley PAGE-JONES (Université de Bretagne Occidentale)
11:30-12:00
Meiko O’HALLORAN (Newcastle University)
Scaling Ben Nevis: Keats Among the Clouds
12:00-12:30
Claire WROBEL (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas)
Between Solitude and Sociability : Mountaineering in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest(1791)
12.30-13.00: Discussion
13.00: Lunch
14:00: Second session: Building Sociability through Sports
CHAIR: Marc PORÉE (École normale supérieure-PSL)
14:00-14:30
Benjamin JACKSON (University of Birmingham)
‘The Gentleman Sportsman’: Blood Sports, Sociability, and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century England
Victoria Bladen (University of Queensland, Australia), “The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Renaissance culture“
Across early modern European culture grew a complex language of trees that surrounded the concept of the tree of life. It was articulated in a variety of media and forms: illuminated manuscripts, woodcuts, paintings, mosaic, fresco, sculpture, and pageantry. Arboreal motifs and metaphors were a significant vehicle for expressing ideas of spiritual knowledge and articulating religious ideology. The sources for arboreal iconography lay in biblical text however the meanings that were read from these images extended beyond the textual metaphors to intersect with social ritual, folklore, and the cult of the cross. We will also see how unsettling forces of otherness lay embedded within such arboreal iconography, particularly apparent in the figure of the Green Man. This paper maps key ideas surrounding the tree of life and its arboreal aesthetics in Renaissance culture, highlighting recurring motifs and ideas, and demonstrating its double nature whereby orthodoxy was shadowed by the Other.
Armelle Sabatier (Université Paris Panthéon Assas), “Stones, Trees and Wood – Envisioning Garden Statuary in Shakespeare”
This paper aims at studying some of the uses of trees in early modern garden statuary. In addition to the well-known art of Tudor topiary, trees could then function as ornaments for statues made of stone or could also be integrated into the highly sophisticated display of animated statues in Jacobean gardens. By focusing on two plays by Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing and The Winter’s Tale, this presentation will tackle the main aesthetics issues of the role of trees in gardens as staged by Shakespeare. Starting with the question of trees as theatrical properties, this study will explore the cultural but also philosophical evolution of the representations of trees and wood in Shakespeare’s later plays, more precisely when these elements are integrated in garden statuary.
Chantal Schütz (École Polytechnique, Paris), “Of trees and lutes: yew, ebony, spruce and rosewood in resonance”
Almost all early modern musical instruments rely on wood, be they wind or string instruments, percussions or keyboards. Among them, the lute is remarkable since it combines several different essences to produce a rich and eloquent compound that some authors have even regarded as a mouthpiece for the trees from which they are issued, identifying a deep connection between the music produced by the instrument and the primal power of the natural element whose destruction was necessary to create the human artefact. The complexity of the instrument also exposes the economic circuits involved in obtaining the types of wood necessary for the instruments, and hence its composite identity: Italian, Bavarian and exotic woods, sometimes combined with ivory or other precious materials. Finally, the very shape of the instrument, particularly in later developments such as the theorbo, refers, like recorders and other elongated wind instruments, to the shape of the tree or branch that produced them, making it, in effect, a piece of speaking/singing wood. The lute thus constitutes a perfect example of hybridity in the artistic uses of wood and trees, put in the service of personal expression yet always recalling its connection to the natural world, emphasized in particular by the fact that the strings necessary to make the instrument resonate are manufactured from the guts of animals (mostly sheep). The apparently trivial nature of the materials used to create heavenly harmonies was not lost on authors who, like Shakespeare, noted and interrogated this incongruity, seeing in it a relevant epitome of human contradictions.
Nicolas Thibault (Sorbonne Université), “The tree that hides the man: manipulating and reassigning royal symbols in Thomas of Woodstock”
“The huge greate Oke was once a plant.” This observation, found in Timothy Kendall’s anthology Flower of epigrammes (1577), seems to state the obvious: trees do grow out of smaller (and frailer) plants and are subject to time. Yet this image is far from the emblematic representation of the oak, inherited from the Bible, which was often used in early modern poetry or political theory. Traditionally, the oak was the tree of Jupiter and connoted strength, immutability, and majesty, thus making it an ideal royal symbol (with the cedar). However, as Andrew McRae notes, “the politics of the oak—and of trees more generally—were [then] by no means as settled as it would become in a later period.” (2012) This then allowed for all sorts of rhetorical and semantic play, in particular in late Elizabethan history plays which depict the troubled reigns of contested kings. With a focus on the anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock (c. 1591-1595), I would like to explore how royal symbols such as the oak (and the cedar) are manipulated and subverted on stage. Like Kendall’s epigram, the play insists on the precarious nature of trees, both real and symbolic, showing how inadequate and artificial rhetorical tropes can be. Deprived of its emblematic and specific quality, the actual tree reappears behind the symbol. That symbol can then be reassigned to other potential candidates, which allows the play to challenge essential tenets of royal orthodoxy such as the king’s uniqueness.
Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (ENS LSH, Lyon): ““The Ecco of the woods”: Woodlands as the theatre of the colonial enterprise in Virginia and New England”
Trees occupy a central space in early modern travel, exploration and trade. A good indicator of a country’s riches and economic potential, the thick woodlands of America were also a highly disputed ground in Indian and English face-offs and an obstacle to observation and exploitation. The desire to cleanse away the woods – to convert them into fruitful meadows while securing their coveted primary resource – did not however erase their poetic and metaphorical dimension : in John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) and A Description of New England (1616), the woods become a space of performance. More than a simple background or a pastoral setting, they set the stage of the colonial enterprise : they were a site of reinvention on an individual and a collective level and a few wooden objects created a dramaturgy of power which pitted two different ecosystems against each other.
Justin Begley (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich), “Animalis Arbores: The Case of Nehemiah Grew’s Trees”
At first glance, animals and trees have little in common. Animals are mobile creatures that eat, breathe, and mate, while trees are immobile and do not visibly engage in any of these behaviours. In seventeenth-century England, however, naturalists began to recognise that animals and trees are not so different after all. With a focus on the botanist and Secretary of the Royal Society, Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712), my paper will explore some of the ways in which trees were reimagined during the period in question. As I will seek to show, with his careful anatomical research and creative application of plant-animal analogies, Grew revealed that plants, much like animals, are living and active beings, which consume food, intake air, and engage in sexual intercourse. By making these largely invisible vegetative functions palpable, Grew, in turn, challenged long-held ideas about plant life and the scale of nature.
Laurent Folliot (Sorbonne Université), “Parasitical Beauty: The Materiality of Trees in Picturesque Discourse”
Theorists of picturesque beauty, such as William Gilpin in his Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791) and Uvedale Price in his Essay on the Picturesque (1794), tend to promote ways of looking at trees and woodland that are comparatively free from utilitarian or edifying considerations, tonal harmony and textural effects being the primary concern of painters and connoisseurs alike. However formalistic such an approach may appear, the picturesque emphasis on detail renews the perception of trees by stressing their materiality: they are worth looking at, not merely as parts of a whole (the forest landscape), but also because of their singularities, of their knots and knobs, their lividities and discolourations, even their excrescences and parasites. In other words, the late eighteenth-century imagination is fascinated with trees because they offer a tangible picture of organic life in its endurance and transience—warts and all.
Nicolas Bourgès (Sorbonne Université), “Trees as vehicles for reflection about nature and time in the poetry of William Cowper (1731-1800)”
In his poems William Cowper alludes to different types of trees, the meaning of which can be interpreted in two ways. In The Task (1785), the longest poem he wrote, they are used as symbols enabling the poet to contrast natural beauty and harmony to urban development. He also invites the readers to question their relationship to the environment through observing and describing how animals use trees, their natural habitat. Another central aspect of his poetical works is the association between trees and time: The Poplar Field (1784) and Yardley Oak, an unfinished poem from 1791, both include a philosophical dimension that questions the link between persistence and change. Cowper’s allusions to trees also reflect his interest in gardening – which he practiced while living at Olney (Buckinghamshire) – and refer to Weston Park, a nearby property which is now destroyed, and where the poet found inspiration. Analysing the role of trees in Cowper’s poems gives one the opportunity to draw parallels with visual arts, including echoes to the concept of the Picturesque. Thus he can be considered as a writer bridging the gap between Augustan and Romantic poetry.
Suite au report de la séance du 24 mars, nous avons le plaisir de vous inviter au prochain séminaire de l’Axe Modernités 16-18 sur la thématique “Usages de l’arbre à la première modernité” où nous entendronsAnne-Marie Miller-Blaise, (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), pour une intervention intitulée:
“Trees of Life and Trees of Knowledge: from Leaf to Page in Early Modern Protestant England”
Le séminaire aura lieu le jeudi 12 mai à la Maison de la recherche de Sorbonne Université en salle S. 001, de 17 h 30 à 19 h 00 et par zoom (voir le lien ci-dessous).
A l’issue du séminaire, nous vous proposons, pour celles et ceux qui le peuvent, d’aller prendre un verre pour célébrer la fin du semestre. Bien cordialement, Line Cottegnies (et pour Anne-Valérie Dulac et Alexis Tadié)
Chères et chers Collègues, Chères doctorantes, chers Doctorants,
Nous avons le plaisir de vous inviter à un séminaire hors thème de Modernités 16-18 le MARDI 22 mars, de 17 h 30 à 19 h 30, où nous entendrons les deux interventions suivantes. Le séminaire se déroulera à la maison de la recherche, en salle S. 002, ainsi que par zoom :
Participer à la réunion Zoomhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/83241024850?pwd=dXBYSzJKT3FGVXBoRThtSVdCODdtZz09 ID de réunion : 832 4102 4850Code secret : 570159 22/03/2022, S. 002, 17 h 30:
Lesley Carvello (University of Sussex), « Multiple Perspectives: Declamation in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. »
Examining the employment of classical rhetoric in early modern drama, this exploration of Shakespeare’s use of rhetorical techniques to develop, maintain and question multiple perspectives in Julius Caesar considers Elizabethan understanding of declamation.
Et Robert Stearn (Birkbeck College), “Pricking and Droning: Early Modern Servants and the Production of Atmosphere”
This paper begins by investigating sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handbooks for servants and employers, in order to explore how emotions were understood as objects of skill in non-elite contexts. It traces a trajectory in the rhetoric of servant handbooks, c. 1550–1700: while repeating the same set of scripturally derived servant virtues, these texts increasingly emphasised the tactical aspects of servants’ work and localised the evaluation and motivation of that work in employers’ socially validated expectations. Rather than understanding servant fidelity as mere performance, however, late seventeenth-century handbooks turned the dispositions and emotions of servants into objects of skill. These prescriptive works thus attest to a twofold vernacular account of servant skill, encompassing both servants’ practical household competencies and also a prior skill which included elements of what might now be called emotional labour. The paper then uses this body of prescriptive literature to interpret seventeenth-century uses of the word ‘drone’. A derogatory term of social description, ‘drone’ had three meanings in the seventeenth century: a monotonous noise or indistinct, irrational speech; a stingless bee superfluous to the hive’s division of labour; an idle person who contributed nothing to the community but lived off others’ work. Using the twofold account of skill outlined in part one to focus on the psychological dimension that the term ‘drone’ developed over the seventeenth century, the paper suggests that the insult picked out those who failed to develop an aptitude for skilled self-government. Finally, combining this investigation of the sonic, social, and entomological meanings of ‘drone’ with evidence drawn from autobiographical writing, the paper argues that, for some employers, what seventeenth-century domestic servants produced was an atmosphere.
Short biographies
Lesley Carvello: Having previously studied at Bristol University, RADA, Cambridge University and King’s College London, Lesley Carvello is currently a doctoral researcher at Sussex University working on a PhD in Rhetoric and Shakespeare under the supervision of Professor Andrew Hadfield.
Robert Stearn recently completed his PhD in English at Birkbeck, University of London. His thesis, ‘Managing Skill, 1680–1730: Domestic Service and the Forms of Practical Knowledge’, argued that the institution of domestic service offered diversely situated writers ways to think about skill as a component of antagonistic everyday social relations. He is currently revising his thesis for publication and writing an article about the diaries of Sarah Cowper (1644–1720), which explores metaphors of abrasion as a way of describing what it was that early modern servants produced.
La prochaine séance du séminaire Modernités 16-18 portera sur la thématique “Usages de l’arbre à la première modernité”. Attention, date exceptionnelle: le séminaire aura lieu le VENDREDI 18 février, de 14 h à 15 h 30.
Nous aurons le plaisir d’entendre:
Anne-Valérie Dulac (MCF Sorbonne Université, en délégation CNRS auprès du LARCA et de la Maison Française d’Oxford),
pour une intervention sur:
“England’s ‘Ragged Regiment’: Memorial Figures in Wood for Kings and Queens”
Attention! Exceptionnellement, et en raison de la situation sanitaire, cette séance se tiendra en ligne uniquement: lien zoom ci-dessous.
Heure : 18 févr. 2022 02:00 PM Paris
Participer à la réunion Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87649858967?pwd=dTlGQW1VdGtwSStRczdaNk1Tb0thUT09
ID de réunion : 876 4985 8967 Code secret : 850292
SUITE DU PROGRAMME
11 mars, 9 h -17h 00: Journée d’étude hors thème, “Genre Trouble in Early Modern England”, avec Queen Mary University, EN LIGNE (organisation : Emma Bartel). Programme ici.
22 mars, 17 h 30-19 h 30: Séminaire hors thème: Lesley Carvello, « Multiple Perspectives: Declamation in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. » et Robert Stearn (Birkbeck College), tba.
24 mars: Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Sorbonne Nouvelle, “The cross taught all wood to resound his name”: The Tree of Life, Trees, and Life in the Early Modern Christian Imagination.
12 mai Alexis Tadié, Sorbonne Université, “Autour de John Evelyn’s Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propogation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions (1662)”.
Queen Mary University of London and Sorbonne Université
Friday 11th March 2022, 9:00-17:00 GMT – Online
Keynote: Kathryn Murphy (University of Oxford)
We are pleased to announce that our online conference “Genre Trouble in Early Modern England (1500-1800)”, co-hosted by Queen Mary University of London and Sorbonne Université (VALE), will take place on Friday 11th March, 9:00-17:00 (GMT). If you would like to attend, please register here: https://tinyurl.com/genre-trouble.
Please find attached the poster and the programme below.
Dans une récente monographie consacrée à l’arbre de vie et à l’esthétique sylvestre dans la littérature anglaise de la première modernité, Victoria Bladen souligne l’hybridité essentielle des usages littéraires et symboliques de l’arbre : “[Early modern] writers drew on the motif and its rich language of trees to articulate spiritual and political states and to create hybrid terrains in their work that intersected material spaces with landscapes of the mind.”[1]
C’est à cette intersection que nous proposons de réfléchir dans le cadre du séminaire Modernités 16-18 (https://earlymodern.hypotheses.org/) et des événements associés. L’arbre, tout autant que la matière qu’il produit, le bois, sont toujours déjà investis d’un substrat symbolique dont les ramifications et les racines sont nombreuses. À cet égard, l’opposition entre l’arbre et le bois est loin de se réduire à une opposition entre animé et inanimé : en effet, ne parle-t-on pas de bois mort ou vivant ? Si l’arbre puise encore très largement à un arrière-plan et un héritage biblique et théologique, mythologique et folklorique, philosophique et littéraire multiséculaire, la période voit toutefois de profonds changements s’opérer dans la perception, la compréhension, l’utilisation symbolique et matérielle et, au final, l’exploitation des arbres. Outre les mutations socio-culturelles et économiques qui caractérisent la période (transformation des paysages, enclosures, réquisitions, destructions des parcs aristocratiques et des réserves de chasse, rationalisation dans l’exploitation des forêts), les XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles correspondent également à un changement plus vaste des sensibilités vis-à-vis de la nature et du végétal. Ces glissements s’expriment dans le renouveau du questionnement autour de la place de l’homme dans la nature et dans la Création – on songe ici par exemple au tournant cartésien et ses échos outre-Manche –, en même temps que dans le développement de l’expérimentalisme et l’observation scientifique. La période voit ainsi l’essor de de la science botanique et les progrès de la classification des arbres, avec tous les bouleversements induits par l’entreprise coloniale (découverte, exploitation et importation d’espèces).
L’arbre demeure également une métaphore et un outil épistémologiques, tout en acquérant des usages et sens nouveaux : on songe ici par exemple au ramisme, aux arborescences qui précèdent de nombreux traités, aux évolutions de la généalogie, aux évolutions du modèle de l’arbre dans la pensée politique ou bien encore à la « sylva » comme genre discursif.
La journée d’étude du 23 juin 2022 tentera de cerner sur ce que l’on peut identifier comme une révolution du regard sur l’arbre et le bois à la première modernité (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles), pour mettre en évidence la manière dont, à partir d’apparents invariants dans les héritages symboliques, l’arbre se transforme dans les productions culturelles, pour se voir progressivement approprié dans sa singularité – l’arbre et non plus la forêt – et investi de nouveaux sens, plus polysémiques et ouverts sur les problématiques de la modernité. À partir des questions de l’arbre, on se propose de penser en particulier les mutations épistémologiques et esthétiques qui engagent les rapports de l’humain et de la nature (avec l’émergence d’une conscience pré-écologique, mais aussi pré-romantique) et ceux de l’humain et de la matière, à travers les productions artistiques et artisanales.
Les contributions à la journée pourront aborder les thèmes suivants.
L’arbre et l’imagination : l’évolution des représentations, du symbolisme et des fonctions de l’arbre et des arbres dans la littérature (théâtre, pastorale, littérature gothique ou romantique…) ; les transformations des héritages religieux, folkloriques, mythologiques, symboliques ; l’arbre comme objet esthétique ;
Les représentations graphiques et picturales de l’arbre et leurs évolutions (tableaux, traités, illustrations, peinture, iconographie en général) ;
Les questions sociales, économiques et culturelles concernant la transformation du rapport à l’arbre dans la société (transformation des paysages, de l’environnement, l’exploitation forestière, la législation forestière, les traités sylvicoles, la question des chasses, les parcs, commons, espaces publics et privés…) ;
L’arbre et la politique : les enjeux de l’appropriation et de la possession de l’arbre (en période révolutionnaire notamment) ; l’arbre dans les modèles politiques… l’arbre et la définition de l’identité nationale, sociale, individuelle, genrée…
L’arbre et le voyage, les voyages de l’arbre : l’arbre et l’entreprise coloniale, arbres dans les récits de voyage, arbres nouveaux et développement d’une pensée de « l’exotisme » ; arbres fantastiques et imaginaires ;
L’arbre et les sciences modernes : l’évolution des classifications, le développement de la science botanique ; l’arbre et l’expérimentalisme ;
L’arbre et / dans la philosophie : l’arbre dans l’herméneutique (table des matières à arborescence, l’arbre comme modèle de développement épistémologique, arbre de la philosophie, arbre de la connaissance, arbre encyclopédique, arbre généalogique, arbor juridictionis ) ; les anthologies de Sylva…
L’arbre et la matière : rapport du bois à l’arbre et spécificités des espèces, métiers du travail du bois, évolution du travail du bois, concurrence de nouveaux matériaux
L’arbre dans les arts (objets d’arts, sculpture sur bois, art topiaire…) ; l’arbre et le jardin…
Representing Recent and Immediate History on the Early Modern and Contemporary British StagesSous la direction de Elisabeth Angel-Perez, Line Cottegnies et Virginie Yvernault Informations sur cette image Crédits : Nicolas Joubard.FrançaisEnglish
Ce numéro thématique de la revue Sillages critiques réunit une sélection de textes issus des travaux du projet Émergence ClioS (de Sorbonne Université), co-piloté par Line Cottegnies et Elisabeth Angel-Perez, et qui a porté, entre 2019 et 2021, sur le théâtre d’histoire immédiate sur la scène britannique de la première modernité et de la période contemporaine. Il s’agissait de réfléchir à la nature spécifique de ce théâtre de temps de crise qui s’approprie l’histoire « contemporaine », qu’elle soit récente ou immédiate, en faisant appel à des spécialistes de théâtre des deux périodes considérées.
Le thème retenu pour le séminaire commun “Modernités 16-18” à compter de septembre 2021 est “Usages de l’arbre dans l’Angleterre de la première modernité”.
Le programme des séances du séminaire et des événements scientifiques associés sera prochainement communiqué sur notre site.
———- Texte de cadrage et appel à communications pour la journée d’étude du 23 juin 2022:
Thème : Usages de l’arbre à la première modernité (Early-modern uses and appropriations of the tree), 2022-2023
Dans une récente monographie consacrée à l’arbre de vie et à l’esthétique sylvestre dans la littérature anglaise de la première modernité, Victoria Bladen souligne l’hybridité essentielle des usages littéraires et symboliques de l’arbre : “[Early modern] writers drew on the motif and its rich language of trees to articulate spiritual and political states and to create hybrid terrains in their work that intersected material spaces with landscapes of the mind.”[1]
C’est à cette intersection que nous proposons de réfléchir dans le cadre du séminaire Modernités 16-18 (https://earlymodern.hypotheses.org/) et des événements associés. L’arbre, tout autant que la matière qu’il produit, le bois, sont toujours déjà investis d’un substrat symbolique dont les ramifications et les racines sont nombreuses. À cet égard, l’opposition entre l’arbre et le bois est loin de se réduire à une opposition entre animé et inanimé : en effet, ne parle-t-on pas de bois mort ou vivant ? Si l’arbre puise encore très largement à un arrière-plan et un héritage biblique et théologique, mythologique et folklorique, philosophique et littéraire multiséculaire, la période voit toutefois de profonds changements s’opérer dans la perception, la compréhension, l’utilisation symbolique et matérielle et, au final, l’exploitation des arbres. Outre les mutations socio-culturelles et économiques qui caractérisent la période (transformation des paysages, enclosures, réquisitions, destructions des parcs aristocratiques et des réserves de chasse, rationalisation dans l’exploitation des forêts), les XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles correspondent également à un changement plus vaste des sensibilités vis-à-vis de la nature et du végétal. Ces glissements s’expriment dans le renouveau du questionnement autour de la place de l’homme dans la nature et dans la Création – on songe ici par exemple au tournant cartésien et ses échos outre-Manche –, en même temps que dans le développement de l’expérimentalisme et l’observation scientifique. La période voit ainsi l’essor de de la science botanique et les progrès de la classification des arbres, avec tous les bouleversements induits par l’entreprise coloniale (découverte, exploitation et importation d’espèces).
L’arbre demeure également une métaphore et un outil épistémologiques, tout en acquérant des usages et sens nouveaux : on songe ici par exemple au ramisme, aux arborescences qui précèdent de nombreux traités, aux évolutions de la généalogie, aux évolutions du modèle de l’arbre dans la pensée politique ou bien encore à la « sylva » comme genre discursif.
La journée d’étude du 23 juin 2022 tentera plus spécifiquement de cerner sur ce que l’on peut identifier comme une révolution du regard sur l’arbre et le bois à la première modernité (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles), pour mettre en évidence la manière dont, à partir d’apparents invariants dans les héritages symboliques, l’arbre se transforme dans les productions culturelles, pour se voir progressivement approprié dans sa singularité – l’arbre et non plus la forêt – et investi de nouveaux sens, plus polysémiques et ouverts sur les problématiques de la modernité. À partir des questions de l’arbre, on se propose de penser en particulier les mutations épistémologiques et esthétiques qui engagent les rapports de l’humain et de la nature (avec l’émergence d’une conscience pré-écologique, mais aussi pré-romantique) et ceux de l’humain et de la matière, à travers les productions artistiques et artisanales.
[1] Victoria Bladen, The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature, New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022.