Exploring Entangled Histories: Britain and Europe in the Age of the Thirty Years’ War, c.1590-1650

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Creating Exploring Entangled Histories: Britain and Europe in the Age of the Thirty Years’ War, c.1590-1650

A Folger Institute Conference to be held on 12-14 April 2018

On his deathbed, Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt famously declared that the “silver sea” around the “precious stone” of England served “in the office of a wall / Or as a moat defensive to a house.” But the seas that separate the British Isles from the European Continent have long been bridges as well as walls, connective tissue as well as defensive moats. Four hundred years after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, and two years after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, this conference inverts Gaunt’s prophetic inspiration to consider the entangled histories of the British Isles and the European Continent from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Paying particular attention to the transnational movement of people, texts, objects, cultural forms, information, and ideas, invited speakers will examine how European entanglements shaped individual and collective experience, and influenced the course of early modern political, social, literary, and artistic history.

Organizer: Alastair Bellany is Professor of History at Rutgers University and author, with Thomas Cogswell, of The Murder of King James I (2015). His research focuses primarily on the political culture of early modern England, in particular the histories of media, popular politics, and the image of the early Stuart court.

Provisional Program (all presentation titles and abstracts are subject to change)