Sites of Cultural Stress from Reformation to Revolution (NEH Institute)

Directed by Claire Sponsler, Professor of English at the University of Iowa

June 21 through July 23, 2010

This NEH Summer Institute for College and University Faculty offered a comparative study of ritual and ceremony across related European cultures from 1300 to 1700. It built on anthropological theories of the ubiquitous role of ritual and ceremony and the impact of that work in performance studies. Testing assumptions about influence and exchange among national traditions and local contexts, it sought a new understanding of the processes and effects of cultural hybridity and assimilation.

Source Call Number: ART Box R763 no.23: Nuoua et essatta pianta del conclaue con le funtioni e ceremonie per l'elettione del nuouo pontefice fatto nella sede vacante…

Beginning with an exploration of the theories and definitions of “ritual,” each subsequent session advanced topically, chronologically, and geographically while touching on the implications of ceremony and ritual in religious, domestic, and secular contexts. Throughout the institute, participants used the Folger’s collections. They first read about ceremonies and liturgical performance through medieval authors including Hildegard of Bingen and Chaucer. Rituals surrounding motherhood and birthing practices, specifically the childbed, were also examined as sites of domestic ritualistic performance. Moving into the civic sphere, the session topics included records of Lord Mayor shows, pageant plays, royal entries, and other public ceremonies. The institute concluded with representations of ceremony on the early modern stage through histories and tragedies, discussions of the materials of ritual, and sites of pilgrimage.

Materials and Products

The syllabus is available here.

While the website is no longer supported, it has been archived: Institute Website: Ritual and Ceremony

A PDF of the website's pages with the participants' interpretive essays.

A PDF of the original promotional flyer.

Source Call Number STC 20488: Histoire de l'entree de la reyne mere du roy tres-Chrestien, dans la Grande-Bretaigne. Enrichie de planches. Par le Sr. de la Serre, Historigraphe de France.

Participants

(All affiliations are as of the program's date)

Bernadette Andrea, Professor of English, University of Texas, San Antonio

Christopher J. Bilodeau, Assistant Professor of History, Dickinson College

Rachel L. Burk, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Tulane University

Peter Craft, PhD Candidate in English, University of Illinois,Urbana-Champaign

J. Caitlin Finlayson, Assistant Professor of English, University of Michigan, Dearborn

Elina Gertsman, Assistant Professor of Medieval Art, Case Western Reserve University

Marcia B. Hall, Professor of Art History, Temple University

Matthew C. Hansen, Assistant Professor of English, Boise State University

Kenneth L. Hodges, Associate Professor of English, University of Oklahoma

John M. Hunt, Term Assistant Professor of History, University of Louisville

Matthew W. Irvin, Assistant Professor of English, Sewanee The University of the South

Nancy J. Kay, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art History, Merrimack College

Andrew D. McCarthy, Assistant Professor of English, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

Cynthia Nazarian, Assistant Professor of French and Italian, Northwestern University

Patrick O’Banion, Assistant Professor of History, Lindenwood University

Stephanie M. Seery-Murphy, Lecturer in History, California State University, Sacramento

Christopher Swift, PhD Candidate in Theatre Studies, City University of New York, Graduate Center

Lisa Voigt, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University

Anne E. Wohlcke, Assistant Professor of History, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Suzanne M. Yeager, Assistant Professor of English and Medieval Studies, Fordham University

Faculty

Source Call Number Z.e.4 Map case: St. Stephen's day hymn

(All affiliations are as of the program's date)

Ian Archer, Keble College, Oxford

Lawrence M. Bryant, California State University, Chico

Barbara Fuchs, UCLA

Gail McMurray Gibson, Davidson College

Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia

Roslyn L. Knutson, University of Arkansas, Little Rock

Joseph Roach, Yale University

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, Exeter College, Oxford

Michael Wintroub, University of California Berkeley

Barbara Wisch, SUNY Cortland

Website Production

Claire Sponsler, Advisory Editor

Kathleen Lynch, Editor

Owen Williams, Associate Editor

Adrienne Shevchuk, Production and Managing Editor

Allison Isberg, Editorial Assistant

Swim Design, Design and Development

Julie Ainsworth, Folger Shakespeare Library Photographer

Source Call Number V.b.74: Armorial of English families

Folger Institute Staff

David Schalkwyk, Chair

Kathleen Lynch, Executive Director

Owen Williams, Assistant Director

Adrienne Shevchuk, Program Assistant

Matthew Carr, Intern

For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.

Hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library. For more information about current summer seminars, please visit the National Endowment for the Humanities website.

NEH Summer Institute

Center for Shakespeare Studies

June 23 through July 31, 2003

Institute Website (Archived): Website saved as PDF

Promotional Materials

Directed by David Cressy, Professor of History, Ohio State University, and Lori Anne Ferrell, Claremont Graduate School                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Today's college and university teachers and their students require fresh investigations into the nature and causes of the foundational liberties that we still describe as our cultural inheritance from the English Reformation and Revolution: new work that reopens the question whether pressures for those familiar modern freedoms of religion, the press, and the franchise could be said to have caused them or be caused by them; new studies that scrutinize the very meaning of those contentious terms Reformation and Revolution. In sum, they need new investigations that offer up the charged relationship between religion and politics as a rich case study of the causes and effects of social crisis. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the summer of 2003, "Cultural Stress from Reformation to Revolution" tackled these investigations. Over six weeks, we isolated four critical sites of cultural contact in early modern England: Church, Court, Stage, and Parliament—the realms of governance, religion, and culture. In each case we returned to the primary sources that testified to a society in increasing crisis, attempting to decode such specific elements of that evidence as its symbolic vocabulary, mode of communication, occasion taken, audiences addressed, and even socio-geographical coordinates.

Our aim was to provide a complex and nuanced picture of a society in crisis, and so we moved beyond the boundaries set by any single genre or even medium of transmission. Opening up the teeming early modern world of communication, we explored more fully and thoroughly the stresses that threatened a rapidly changing and well-informed English society between the accession of Elizabeth Tudor and the interregnum years of revolution. In a contested religious culture, in which Roman Catholicism was demonized, uniformity to the Church of England mandated, and most kinds of protestant dissent officially discouraged, an almost bewildering variety of highly coded conversations took place, both mainstream and subaltern, and in familiar and not-so-familiar, arenas. We aimed for a productive disruption of received answers about the causes and effects of social upheaval, and we recovered a more complete portrait of a society coping with its own uneasy perception that theirs was a world in flux and forever changed.

In so doing we also performed a self-reflexive examination of Cultural Studies, still a relatively young discipline, but open to change and poised to fulfill its promise. The idea of "interdisciplinarity," so revolutionary a few decades ago, is now firmly incorporated into college syllabi. But studies that unite fields like History, Literature, Religion, and Art History under the rubric of "textual" or "contextual" analysis faced more penetrating methodological scrutiny, as our participants and lecturers—all associated with one or more of these fields—put concepts like the text to the test. As the essays on this site explain, text can no longer function as a convenient shorthand for the complex notion of communication. We explored investigative vocabularies for the visual, the acoustic, the spatial, and the performative and as a result took new hard looks at the history of community and experience, commodity and meaning-making.

Visiting Faculty included: Sharon Achinstein (University Lecturer in English and Fellow and Tutor at St Edmund Hall, Oxford), Alastair Bellany (Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University), Thomas Cogswell (Professor and Chair of History, U.C. Riverside), Chris Kyle (Associate Professor of History, Syracuse), Diarmaid MacCulloch (Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford), Lauren Shohet (Assistant Professor of English, Villanova University), Alexandra Walsham (Senior Lecturer in History, University of Exeter), Tom Webster (Lecturer in History, University of Edinburgh), and Paul Yachnin (Professor of English, McGill University).

For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.