5.30pm in the Junior Parlour, T Blue Boar, Trinity College. Please note different time and place on 16th February. 

All are welcome. Wine is served during the discussion of the papers. 

Tuesday 2nd February
Caroline Spearing (KCL), 'The Golden Age in Abraham Cowley's Plantarum Libri Sex'

Like Horace and Virgil, Cowley was writing at the end of a period of civil war and at the beginning of a regime which, though radically different from its predecessor, nonetheless laid heavy emphasis on its continuity with the past. This paper will explore Cowley's use of the trope of the Golden Age in the Plantarum, looking at the ways in which he teases out the ambiguities in its depiction by his classical models to provide a commentary on England's past, present and future.

Tuesday 16th February, ** 3.00pm in the Wren Library, Trinity College **
Nick Hardy (Cambridge)

Intended principally for graduate students interested in working on early modern Latin texts, this session will introduce some of the research methods that can be used in the study and contextualisation of humanistic printed books and manuscripts. Topics covered will include censorship; coterie and manuscript publication; the reconstruction of humanists' libraries and the study of their marginalia; and the social, religious and political relationships between authors and other figures involved in the production of books.

Tuesday 1st March 
Sarah Knight (Leicester), 'A fabulis ad veritatem: Latin Tragedy, Truth and Education in Early Modern England'

In his Ash Wednesday sermon of 1582, Laurence Humphrey, head of Magdalen College, urged his Oxford congregation to make the transition 'à Cothurno ad Cineres, à prophanis ad sacra, à fabulis ad ipsam veritatis inuestigationem & disciplinam' (from tragic buskin to ashes, from the profane to the sacred, from stories to that same examination and practice of truth). Humphrey distinguishes between drama and sermon, between being a passive spectator and an active seeker of religious truth, but many authors of Latin tragedies in early modern England expected greater intellectual engagement from those who watched or read their works than Humphrey's sermon perhaps implies. The context of delivery for Humphrey's sermon was also the most active site of composition and performance of drama, and so a study of Latin tragedy in early modern England inevitably focuses first on the universities. Some examples taken both from Oxford and Cambridge, such as the work of Thomas Legge and William Alabaster, as well as plays written by its graduates who wrote for continental Catholic institutions, particularly Edmund Campion, show how college and university drama evolved into a rich didactic medium. These plays suggest that the staging and consumption of such drama was not just for entertainment - Humphrey uses the term 'ludicra' - in this period, although collective enjoyment could be part of their appeal, and in several cases their authors express concern about the impressionable young minds of the audience and the formative influence of curricular and other institutional activity on the performance of drama.