Conference Notes

Abstract

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY OF AMERICA held its annual conference, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS), in Toronto, from Thursday, April 5 to Saturday, April 7, 1990. The conference was hosted by Victoria College in the University of Toronto. The 36th annual RSA Council business meeting was held on the afternoon of April 5 th in conjunction with the conference. J. Kelly Sowards (Wichita State U) chaired the Thursday afternoon plenary session on Recent Trends in Renaissance Studies: Education in the Renaissance and Reformation. Paul Grendler (U of Toronto) spoke on "Schooling in Italy and Beyond"; Susan Karant-Nunn (Portland State U) on "Early Modern German Schooling and the 'New History' of Education"; and Charles Nauert (U of Missouri, Columbia) on "Humanist Infiltration into the Academic World: Some Studies of Northern Universities." Robert Proctor (Connecticut College) was Commentator and spoke on "The Studia Humanitatis: Contemporary Scholarship and Renaissance Ideals." Anthony Grafton (Princeton U) chaired the Thursday evening plenary session, a CRRS 25th Anniversary Panel, on the topic Early Modern Studies: an Agenda for the New Millennium. Germaine Warkentin (Victoria College, U of Toronto) made introductory remarks and introduced a panel consisting of David Wootton (U of Victoria, BC), Jane Abray (U of Toronto), and Debra Shuger (UCLA) who spoke on "Decanting Theory, or Old Wine in New Bottles." Twenty-nine sessions were held with the following topics and papers presented. On Friday, April 6th, Session 1, Sexuality, Satire and Stage Censorship in the English Renaissance, 1599-1604, was organized and chaired by Richard Burt (U of Massachusetts, Amherst). Lynda Boose (Dartmouth College) presented a paper on "The 1599 Bishops Ban, Elizabethan Pornography and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage"; Richard Burt on "Critics as Consumers: Sexual Slander and Censorship in Jonson's Epicene"; and M. Lindsay Kaplan (UC-Berkeley) on "Satire and the Arraignment of Love Poetry in Jonson's Poetaster." Session 2, Renaissance Women from Twentieth-Century Feminist Perspectives: a Modern Walk with Renaissance Notions of Love and Death, was organized by Robert L. Mazzola (U of Connecticut,