EDITORIAL
The Current Issue
This is the fourth issue of the Renaissance Journal to appear. In general,
it follows the pattern of previous issues, with sections devoted to
Renaissance Research Centres, to advance notice of materials to be
included in the forthcoming Europa Triumphans collection of Festival
texts, and to news of continuing research activities in the Centre for the
Study of the Renaissance at Warwick. As before, we also include
reviews and notices of recent publications on Renaissance topics,
allowing ourselves in this case to stretch the term, as our elders and
betters have done, as late as Milton. We conclude with notices of
forthcoming Renaissance meetings and conferences.
One gratifying aspect of this issue is the increasing
interdisciplinarity of its contents and, accordingly, the range of subject
disciplines professed by the contributors. As we noted last time, the
Journal now incorporates news of all three of the AHRB-supported
research projects situated at Warwick, Italian Elites, John Nichols and
Europa Triumphans, and not only, as was initially the case, of the last of
them. In connection with these projects, we are fortunate in having been
able to bring together at Warwick a group of post-doctoral Research
Fellows from diverse discipline backgrounds in History, History of Art,
Literature, Theatre and Modern Languages. Five of these Research
Fellows contribute to this issue: Drs Christine Shaw (the Senior Fellow),
Elizabeth Goldring (who also edits the Journal with myself), Jonathan
Davies, Sarah Ross and Jayne Archer. Dr Fabrizio Nevola, who joins us
in September, is mentioned in this issue for his contribution to the
Savonarola volume, and will no doubt contribute to future issues. Dr
Sarah Cusk and Dr Alexander Samson will also join us in September as
Research Fellows for the Resource Enhancement project, as mentioned
below.
Launch Day
The official launch of the AHRB Centre for the Study of Renaissance
Elites and Court Cultures, which is situated within the Centre for the
Study of the Renaissance, took place in February. We were extremely
fortunate in having Professor Sir Brian Follett, chairman of the AHRB, to
preside over the inaugural lecture, a wonderfully stylish, erudite and
entertaining illustrated exposition of ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti: the Power
and Glory of the Republic’ by Professor Quentin Skinner, Regius
Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. We were equally fortunate to
have a wide-ranging and informative lecture the same day by Professor
Henri Zerner, Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, on
the topic ‘Renaissance or Modern: Contested Ground’. Both lectures
drew very large audiences comprising colleagues and students at
Warwick and visitors from other universities. Professor Skinner's lecture
was followed by a Reception, and was much enhanced by an
accomplished and sprightly musical performance by students of the
Centre, dressed in (approximately) Renaissance costume. The day also
hosted the first meeting of the Management Committee of the AHRB
Centre, and, taking advantage of the presence at Warwick of contributors
to the Europa Triumphans collection, a working dinner planning the
General Introductions. All went off in great good humour, with the bonus
of considerable academic advance.
Research Report
The last few months have seen important advances in the research
activities of the Centre. The Europa Triumphans collection is now
almost complete, with copy in virtually finished form now safely received
at Warwick, and for the most part edited. It is remarkable that an
international enterprise of this kind, with the participation of around fifty
contributors from countries all over Europe and North America, should
have reached this point, and reached it within the timetable, only very
slightly stretched, as originally proposed. I should like to salute the
industry, scholarship and good-humoured forbearance of all our
contributors. The General Editors, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Margaret
Shewring and myself, and the hugely hard-working Research Fellow,
Elizabeth Goldring, are greatly indebted to each one of the contributors,
and especially to the ‘cluster leaders’. Two of the clusters, on texts
associated with the New World and the Protestant Union, are summarised
in this issue in short essays by Peter Davidson and by Helen WatanabeO’Kelly and Sara Smart. Only the General Introductions remain to be
finished—with the exception of the introduction on politics by the
indefatigable Professor Robert Knecht, which has already been
completed, ahead of time, and is replete, as one would expect, with
scholarship and wise commentary. The remaining General Introductions
are expected by 1st September, and the volumes go to Ashgate by the end
of the year.
The second publication associated with Europa Triumphans is the
volume of essays arising from the conference at Castelvecchio Pascoli in
September 2000. This too is virtually complete. The editors, Elizabeth
Goldring and myself, are once again grateful to the contributors, who
have re-written the invited essays on time, and to a high standard. The
various chapters have now been edited for style, consistency and
scholarly accuracy, translations have been obtained for those in foreign
languages (‘foreign’ from a narrowly Anglophone perspective) and quite
detailed negotiations have been entered into with some of the
contributors. The edited copy goes to Ashgate at the end of July, under
the title Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and
Performance. We are looking forward to the production in 2002 of a
handsome volume, on high-quality paper, with a four-colour dust jacket
and something like 80 illustrations. Rachel Lynch of Ashgate has been a
hugely supportive commissioning editor.
We have included below some account of the Italian Elites and
John Nichols projects. The first, by Dr Jonathan Davies, summarises two
symposia held in connection with Elites research. These symposia have
been the effective means over a number of years of promoting the
development of collaborative research in this area, and of sharing new
initiatives for comment and (if appropriate) criticism. We are grateful for
the willingness of a wide range of colleagues from a number of
universities to contribute to the symposia, and to Professors Michael
Mallett and Julian Gardner, with Drs Christine Shaw and Jonathan
Davies, for organising and contributing to them. Individual research is
also progressing apace. Perhaps we may mention the welcome
appearance of an essay collection on The World of Savonarola, edited by
Christine Shaw and Stella Fletcher, (reviewed in this issue) based on an
Elites conference, and we look forward to the publication of Dr Shaw’s
book on Pandolfo Petrucci (in press). Other published work and work in
preparation will be noticed in future issues. Dr Humfrey Butters is
preparing his extensive biographical index to the Medici correspondence
for deposit in the Centre's library—this is an invaluable research resource
which we hope may in time be made more widely available by electronic
means.
The John Nichols project is introduced in this issue by its director,
Dr Margaret Shewring. The project is a new one, which has been
successfully launched by Dr Shewring and by the Research Fellows
working with her, Dr Sarah Ross and, more recently, Dr Jayne Archer.
The aim is to produce a fully-edited modern version of the Elizabeth and
James volumes (seven volumes in all) of John Nichols’ early nineteenthcentury collection of Entertainments. The volumes, drawing on Nichols’
own collections of thirty or so years earlier, as well as on published and
manuscript materials of the time of Elizabeth and James, have been
routinely cited by modern scholars, without the benefit of modern editing.
As Dr Shewring indicates below, the project has got off to a very positive
start, through the preparatory work of Dr Ross, the meetings of a
distinguished Steering Group and the holding of a Workshop Day to
consider methods and procedures appropriate to an enterprise of this kind,
with the intellectual and editorial principles which will guide future work.
Some of the conclusions reached are summarised in Dr Shewring’s
article.
A significant development in the research life of the Centre has
been the inauguration by Dr Christine Shaw of a series of lunchtime
Research Seminars. These have brought together colleagues across the
Faculty of Arts as well as postgraduate and research students. Attendance
has been high—never fewer than twenty—and the intellectual quality of
contributions has been impressive. Dr Shaw summarises in this issue the
seminars which have taken place, and offers a trailer for those to come in
the Autumn. Any reader of the Journal within reach of Warwick who
would like to attend any of the seminars will be most welcome. No
notice is required. Just join us.
Resource Enhancement
We have been fortunate in gaining further support from the national Arts
and Humanities Research Board, this time for a project for the digitisation
of up to three hundred festival books in the collections of the British
Library.
Competition for support under the so-called Resource
Enhancement scheme was acute, with only twenty successful bids
emerging from a field of over two hundred applicants. The grant, of
approximately £250,000, has enabled us to appoint (after national
advertisement) two one-year Research Fellows, Dr Sarah Cusk and Dr
Alexander Samson, as well as to fund the technical work of digitisation
by staff of the British Library.
We have been greatly helped and encouraged in the Resource
Enhancement bid and in the appointment of Fellows by Dr Kristian
Jensen, Mr Graham Jeffcoate, and Mr John Fletcher of the British
Library, and by Mr Richard Parker of the library of the University of
Warwick. The digitisation project will complement a similar project at
the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. We have been very
fortunate to have had the advice of Dr Thomas Stäcker of that library,
who will be joining the Steering Group of the project.
This latest grant brings to something like £1.7m the funding
provided for the Centre by the AHRB, in partnership, in the case of the
Research Centres award, with the University of Warwick. We are told
(by the university’s Statistics Department) that, on the face of it, and
assuming that all applicants are equally strong, the odds against being
successful in all three competitions we have entered are more than 500-1
against. Success in these terms is certainly gratifying, and we take it that
everyone interested in Renaissance research will be glad we have
garnered what we have, hopefully for the benefit of all. But the inside
story is a little less positive, with each grant, for differing and sufficient
reasons, falling short of the amounts needed to carry out the research.
This is not the place to detail, or even outline, the problems, and certainly
there is no cause for whingeing. But we would not wish our readers to
suppose that champagne and caviar are daily rations at the Centre. It
might be more appropriate to think hardtack.
Personnel
We are very sorry to tell her many friends that we have had to lose Dr
Sarah Ross, the Research Fellow attached to the John Nichols project,
who has had to return to New Zealand for personal reasons. Happily
Sarah, who contributed wholeheartedly and with great skill and enterprise
to the project, has accepted appointment as Associate Fellow of the
Centre, so that we shall continue to keep in touch with her, and she will
continue to contribute to the Nichols project. She has been replaced, after
national advertisement, by Dr Jayne Archer, whose undergraduate degree
in English Literature comes from the University of Exeter, and her
doctorate from King’s College, Cambridge. Jayne has made an excellent
beginning to her work and we welcome her warmly.
The Resource Enhancement Fellows mentioned above formally
begin work in September, but have already begun their preparations,
including taking part in a meeting at the British Library, with a further
meeting in prospect. Dr Cusk took her undergraduate degree in English
at Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature at Columbia
University, New York. She has worked in the Special Collections at the
Newberry Library in Chicago, as a cataloguer at St John’s College,
Oxford, and at Sotheby’s. Dr Samson took his B.A. at Leeds, an M.A. in
Renaissance Literature at Sussex and a Ph.D. at Queen Mary and
Westfield College, University of London. He has been a Research
Fellow in the Spanish Department at St Andrews. Alex has begun his
association with us by giving a very illuminating seminar for the M.A.
group on the reign of Mary Tudor and Philip II.
Links
Our link with the Wolfenbüttel digitisation project is mentioned above. A
more official and formal link has been established between the Centre at
Warwick and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance at
Tours. The link, which will be confirmed at an official ceremony in
Tours in September, will permit student and staff visits between Warwick
and Tours and shared research.
The Future of the ‘Journal’
In line with our wish to expand the Journal we shall begin with the
January 2002 issue to publish brief essays describing work in progress.
These will be limited to 700 words each, and are intended to signpost
research by both new (especially) and established scholars. It is hoped in
this way to give researchers an opportunity to advertise their work at a
much earlier stage than is usually possible, at least by means of
conventional publication, and to encourage them to seek information and
comment from the readership of the Journal.
To make this and the other activities of the Journal possible, we
need subscriptions. Our subscription list is creeping up in numbers, but
painfully slowly. We have again included a subscription form with this
issue. Individual subscriptions are low (and have not changed since our
first issue!) but we need your support to keep going. Please help!
Ronnie Mulryne
University of Warwick