“How oft have I with public voice run on …?”: Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, and the Christian Literary Imagination

The Christian Literary Imagination Series

Continuing from the previous academic year, over the course of the 2021-22 academic year the Future of the Humanities Project is sponsoring a series of webinars on the Christian literary imagination in collaboration with Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. The ‘Christian Literary Imagination Series’ will explore the role and function of the arts and humanities in the development of the individual and society.

The hour-long virtual events will be followed by a Q & As chaired by Professor Michael Scott and Rev Fr Joseph Simmons SJ. These events are free and hosted on Zoom by Georgetown University.

Recent creative responses to Aemilia Lanyer’s poems in Salve Rex Judaeorum (1611) and Elizabeth Cary’s play The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) suggest that while in the early modern period the gender of these authors was the major issue in relation to them claiming a public voice, today it is the Christian imagination—literary and theatrical—of Lanyer and Cary respectively that provides the major challenge. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play Emilia (2018) and Cutpurse Theatre’s recent production of Mariam demonstrate very different ways of navigating, and responding to, the public voice and Christian imagination of these two groundbreaking women.

Featured

Elizabeth Schafer is a professor of drama and theatre studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published performance histories of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night; a monograph on women theatre directors, MsDirecting Shakespeare; and a biography of Lilian Baylis, who ran the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells theatres. Her Theatre & Christianity (2019) offers a radical new reading of Isabella in Measure for Measure.

Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., (moderator) is an American Catholic priest currently writing his doctoral thesis at Campion Hall, Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Graham Ward. He is exploring the Christian imagination and the fertile place where belief and unbelief touch in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson. Simmons previously studied theology at Boston College and the Harvard Divinity School. His Licentiate in Sacred Theology thesis, “Via Literaria: Marilynne Robinson’s Theology Through a Literary Imagination,” explored the convergence of literary and Christian imaginations.

Michael Scott (moderator) is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president of Georgetown University. Scott previously was the pro-vice-chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice-chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk