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WSG Workshop 2016: Emma Major, Women and the Bible

The WSG is very pleased to announce that its 2016 workshop will be:

“Women and the Bible: Barbauld and Others”

Keynote Speaker: Emma Major, University of York

Anonymous, The Unitarian Arms, detail, 1792. Satirical print. BM PD 1868,0808.6222. © The Trustees of the British Museum — Anonymous, The Unitarian Arms, detail, 1792. Satirical etching. BM PD 1868,0808.6222. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Date: 11th June 2016

Time: 11am-4.30pm (registration from 10.30)

Venue: Room 264, Senate House, University of London

Cost for attendance (inc lunch & refreshments): £23 (WSG members), £28 (non-WSG members)

To register, Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837 Workshop Registration 2016

All attendees are invited to bring a 5-minute presentation, from any discipline and period covered by the group, exploring any of the following themes:

Gender, the public and the private * Women, publication and anonymity * Women and religion * Women, violence and revolution * Gender and genre * Women and the nation * Preaching women * Women and the Bible * Dissent

For readers who would like to publicise the event, please download the WSG Workshop 2016 and the Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837 Workshop Registration 2016 form.

For further information, see the annual workshop.

Cfp: WSG Seminars 2016-2017

UPDATE: 13 April 2016. We are delighted to announce that a fourth date has been added to our seminar series: we will now also be meeting on 18 March 2017, with a focus on work in progress.

WSG is issuing its annual cfp. Please note potential topics and the change of seminar dates to the 3rd Saturday in each month.

The Women’s Studies Group: 1558-1837 is a small, informal multi-disciplinary group formed to promote women’s studies in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century. The group organises regular meetings and an annual workshop.

WSG membership is open to men and women, graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars. Papers can be any length up to 25 minutes, and can be formal or informal, or even work in progress. The papers are followed by very supportive and informal discussion. Speakers are strongly encouraged to become members of WSG.

Topics can be related to any aspect of women’s studies:

Not only women writers, but any activity of a woman or women in the period of our concern, anything that affects or is affected by women in this period, such as the law, religion, etc
Male writers writing about women or male historical figures relevant the condition of women in this period
Papers tackling aspects of women’s studies within or alongside the wider histories of gender and sexuality are particularly welcome
Topics from the early part of our period are also especially welcome
Work in progress is invited for the March session.

Venue: Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1N 1AZ
Dates: Saturday 17th September, 2016, Saturday 19th November, 2016, Saturday 21st January, 2017, Saturday 18th March, 2017.

We will be allowed into the room at 12.30 pm, to give us time sort out paperwork and technology, but sessions will run from 1.00 – 4.00pm. So please arrive a little early if you can. Please reply to WSG Seminars Organiser Carolyn D. Williams on cdwilliamslyle@aol.com.

Reminder: WSG Seminar Jan 2016

Update: 29 January 2016:

Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances, Chrisy Dennis is unable to give her paper at our seminar tomorrow. The rest of the programme remains unchanged, and we hope to invite Chrisy back to talk on Mary Robinson at a later date. Apologies for any inconvenience.

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The third WSG seminar of the academic year will take place in just over a week’s time at the Foundling Museum. Directions for getting to the Museum can be found here. Doors open after 12.30pm with the session starting promptly at 1, and tea, coffee and biscuits at about 2.30pm. Non-members who wish to attend the seminar are very welcome to come but will be asked to make a small donation for refreshments.

For the January session seminars organiser Carolyn Williams has scheduled papers on queens, singers, and writers. WSG are also very pleased that Chrisy Dennis, who couldn’t make it in November, will present her paper at this session. As ever, attendees are also encouraged to visit the current Foundling exhibition (free!), which in January is about illustrators of orphans from the eighteenth-century to the present day.

Saturday 30th January 2016, 1-4pm, Foundling Museum
Chair: Lois Chaber

Valerie Schutte, ‘Pre-accession Printed Book Dedications to Mary and Elizabeth Tudor’
This paper will offer a comparison of the printed book dedications received by Mary and Elizabeth Tudor before each woman became queen. This analysis will demonstrate how each royal sibling was connected to early book culture and how that interplayed with her course of education.

Brianna Elyse Robertson-Kirkland, ‘Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810) and his female operatic students’
Venanzio Rauzzini, an Italian castrato, was described by The Monthly Mirror in 1807 as ‘the father of a new style of English singing and a new race of singers’, and lists a number of the most esteemed opera singers of the period as his students, including Nancy Storace and Elizabeth Billington.

Sarah Oliver, ‘From Rape to Desire: Mary Hays’s Revision of the Love Theme and Jane Austen’s “New” Heroines’
The discussion argues that fictional representations of female sexual desire were problematic for women writers in the Long Eighteenth Century, until Radical writers including Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays re-worked the theme.

Chrisy Dennis, ‘“We were born to grace society: but not to be its slaves”: Chivalry and Revolution in Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance of the Eighteenth Century (1796)’
Mary Robinson’s Romance, written during a period of anti-revolutionary backlash in England, overtly criticises the patriarchal order that pervades Europe. It offers the reader a new family dynamic – one that is based on equality.

Women’s Studies Group at BSECS 2016

WSG will be at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference in January 2016 presenting the “WSG Panel: Minds, Bodies, and China as Sites of Female Growth, Expansion and Contraction in the Long Eighteenth Century”.

Our three papers consider women in confrontation with the great and the little, and their movements between them, whether mentally, physically, or through material objects. Dr Tabitha Kenlon begins by considering the engagement between gothic novels and other literature of the time, particularly conduct manuals, whose functions they often perform, both extending and restricting women’s boundaries by presenting heroines who defy
and embody social conventions. Just as conduct manuals provided guidelines for young ladies to be recognized as proper women, the gothic novel often features heroines searching for their appropriate place in society. Understanding the connections between
gothic novels and conduct manuals provides a more nuanced and complete picture of the ways texts worked together to construct ideals of female identity in the eighteenth century.

Carolyn D. Williams discusses textual representations of physical size and its bearings on female sexuality. Expansion and contraction are seen both as creating characters who are bigger and smaller than the normal run of human beings, and as the process of changing physical size. Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671) and the anonymous Aristotle’s Master-Piece (first published c. 1680) are cited in a discussion of controversy over the proper size of women’s generative organs. Swift’s Travels (1726), Parts I and II of Thomas

Killigrew’s Thomaso, or, The Wanderer (1663) and Part II of Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1681) are brought to bear on the question whether people of non-standard size are ordinary humans on a different scale, or are monstrous, evil, and bestial. The plays combine both senses of expansion and contraction by introducing two Jewish sisters from Mexico, one a giant and one a dwarf, who wish to be transformed to normal size. Killigrew’s work in particular, where characters undergo magical sex changes that are
accompanied by transformations into giants, reveals a close and complex relationship between size and sexuality requiring further exploration.

When Alexander Pope, in his Epistle to a Lady (1735), described his ideal woman as ‘mistress of herself, though China fall’, he was both punning and reflecting a common eighteenth-century assumption that the passion for porcelain was a major threat to women’s sense of proportion. It is therefore appropriate that Dr Emma Newport’s paper, which concludes this panel, should explore the complex relationship between china the
substance and China the nation in British cultural consciousness. The focus of her research is Lady Banks’s porcelain dairy and the complementary text of her ‘Dairy Book’.
Her achievements re-imagined the aristocratic porcelain dairy as a site of research, of social arts and as a synthesis of male and female collecting practices. They engender both expansion and contraction: as gateway to wider narratives, technologies and aesthetics, but also contracting as the porcelain metonymises these wider representations.

Go to the BSECS website for the full conference programme.

Reminder: WSG November Seminar 2015

The second WSG seminar of the academic year will take place in just over a week’s time at the Foundling Museum. Directions for getting to the Museum can be found here. Doors open after 12.30pm with the session starting promptly at 1, and tea, coffee and biscuits at about 2.30pm. Non-members who wish to attend the seminar are very welcome to come but will be asked to make a donation for refreshments.

For the November session seminars organiser Carolyn Williams has scheduled papers on knowledge work, discipline and rebellion. It promises to be a stirring discussion and will provide an interesting counterpart to the Foundling’s current exhibition, The Fallen Woman in Victorian Britain.

Saturday 28th November 2015, 1-4pm, Foundling Museum
Chair: Felicity Roberts

Tita Chico, ‘Knowledge Seduction’
In this talk, I argue that the circulation of and belief in natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century can be understood through the logic of seduction, a well-established topos in literary history.

Andrew McInnes, ‘Resistant Readers in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess’
This presentation explores how the act of interpretation is portrayed in didactic children’s literature of the eighteenth century, allowing a glimpse of indiscipline in works which have otherwise been read as straightforwardly disciplinary.