'Varieties of Dissenting Expression': a one-day conference

Yesterday, I attended the one-day 'Varieties of Dissenting Expression' conference at Dr Williams's Library in London! I had the pleasure of spending the day there with one of my Ph.D supervisors, Dr Rachel Adcock (@RachelCAdcock if you are on Twitter!). The day was organised by the Centre for the English-Speaking World of Aix-Marseille Université in association with the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies and the University of Liverpool.

The conference focused on the forms of dissenting expression available to dissenters and their congregations, both in England and in America, throughout the seventeenth century. Within this remit, it also looked at how the written materials available to dissenting communities and congregations were intimately related to their religious and social experiences.

It was a conference packed with a great variety of papers given by scholars from many different areas of academia: several covered the usefulness of the contents of Church Record books to researchers; others examined the transition of these records into the digital age; and another looked at the relationship between poetry, politics and dissenting experience. Anyone who knows my research interests will immediately be able to tell that this last paper was the one I was most excited about!

That said, the talk from Margaret Bendroth (Executive Director of the Congregational Library, Boston, MA) and James F. Cooper (who also does work with this library) was fascinating. Their intention is to recover the church records of congregations across America, and to be able to provide digitized versions of them both to researchers, and to those who are just curious to explore their religious heritage. The website for the library is a veritable treasure trove for researchers so, if you are at all interested in religious writing, and especially that relating to dissent or congregationalists, then I urge you to go and explore: http://www.congregationallibrary.org/. I for one will definitely be returning to this website, and am very tempted to look into the possibility of doing some transcription of the church records: watch this space! Both Peggy and Jeff (as they are commonly known!) were wonderful speakers, and have inspired me to seriously take note of this oft-neglected avenue of research. Just because a resource is not 'literary' in the strictest sense, does not mean that it will be of no use to us!

The final paper that Rachel and I were able to go to was George Southcombe's wonderful talk on 'Poetry, Politics and Dissenting Experience'. Throughout my studies, any non-conformist poetry that I have come across, or paid significant attention to, has tended to be that of the libertines. Whilst this poetry is certainly worthy of our attention, I was excited by several new names that George's paper brought to my attention, including Robert Wild and Benjamin Keach (if I had heard of these men before, I had definitely forgotten...). So, apart from opening my eyes to an area of poetry that I have definitely neglected until now, George's paper reminded me of the need to always see the poetry of dissenters as participating in a much broader early-modern culture. In other words, the fact that they, like other 'conformist' writers, used the poetry of their predecessors such as Milton and Dryden for their specific political purposes, should mean that we read their work within the broader context of seventeenth-century poetry. A valuable point to bear in mind!

All in all, the day was a brilliant one (despite the 4.30am start!), and has really ignited my passion for research once again. I don't know about all of you, but I find going to stimulating conferences like this one always reminds me of the reasons why I love what I do.

If you are curious about the other things that the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies has to offer, do have a look at their website: http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/

EEBO-TCP Conference: Digital Methods and Methodologies

As some of my readers may know, last week I attended the 2013 EEBO-TCP conference at Lincoln College, Oxford. It was the first academic conference that I had attended (not counting the ones that I have worked at!), and it really was a fantastic experience. Everybody was so welcoming, and I learnt an awful lot! 

Apart from learning an awful lot about digital humanities that, as the old adage goes, I didn't know I didn't know, I also picked up a wealth of useful information that I will be able to use in the coming years. There was news of new and exciting databases that are up and running (what early-modern undergraduate knew that there was a vast electronic world outside EEBO?!), projects that will be completed in the next couple of years, and lots of incredible work that would not have even begun without the use of electronic databases. 

Not only that, but the two keynote talks from Dr Jane Winters and Professor Ian Gadd were incredibly interesting. It is thanks to Jane that I am about to start my MA armed with an enormous list of little-known early-modern databases that she has been involved in creating (I will cover some of these in another, separate post soon). And it is thanks to Ian that I will never look at the dog-eared corner of a book in the same way again. In his talk, he pointed out that, in the seventeenth century and earlier, dog-earing the corner of a text was considered the mark of a devout reader: fold over the page that interested you, and you were cementing a very personal and tactile relationship with your book that was unique to you. However, as is ever the case, the significance of this act morphed over the centuries. By the nineteenth century (and up to the present day - just look at the definition of dog-ear in the OED), dog-earing had become the hallmark of a clumsy and careless reader who handled their books too roughly. Really fascinating stuff.

If my little snippets of news from the conference have whet your appetite for all things digital, I would encourage you to go and have a look at the Storify feed from the conference to catch up on all the wonderful goings-on that I haven't covered! It can be found here:

http://storify.com/pipwillcox/early-modern-texts-digital-methods-and-methodologi?utm_content=storify-pingback&utm_source=t.co&utm_campaign=&awesm=sfy.co_fReo&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter

Below I have just shared a few of my favourite tweets from the conference that were really valuable:

 © Jenna Townend 2013