Dr Joe Moshenska (English/Trinity College)
Monday, 19 November 201212:30 - 14:00
Location: CRASSH Meeting Room
Part of the CRASSH Fellows Work in Progress seminar series.? All welcome, but please email Michelle Maciejewska if you wish to attend and to request readings.? Sandwich lunch and refreshments provided.
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Dr Joe Moshenska (English/Trinity College): |
My new
project is an exploration of the life and work of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65) ?
pirate, courtier, alchemist, literary critic and editor, philosopher, book
collector, political animal, devout Catholic, fighter of duels and perpetual
courter of scandal.? Digby?s activities
and pursuits spanned an astonishing array of the fields comprising seventeenth
century culture and intellectual life.?
By considering his works in their entirety and placing them in detailed
context, I seek not only to gain a better sense of this remarkable individual,
but also to rethink some of the larger categories and narratives through which
the seventeenth century is understood.?
Digby was a Catholic among Protestants; an Aristotelian among
mechanists; a scholastic philosopher who penned an autobiographical romance and
edited Ben Jonson?s works; a patriotic Englishman who spent much of his adult
life in Paris and voyaged to Algiers and Ottoman Turkey.? He was an exception, but one whose very
uniqueness sheds light on the religious, political and intellectual struggles
of the culture from which he emerged.
As a
CRASSH Early Career Fellow, I will begin this wider investigation by focussing
on Digby?s travels and his encounters with foreignness in all its forms.? I will start to map the complex networks of
correspondence in which he was involved, and which cut across national and
confessional divides.? His friends and
contacts were as varied as Thomas Hobbes, and the Puritan John Winthrop the Younger,
Governor of Connecticut.? I will also
focus on texts from either end of Digby?s life that illustrate his international
movements and connections: his autobiographical romance Loose Fantasies, written on an Aegean island in the late 1620s; and
his posthumously published cookery book, The
Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened, which featured recipes from as far away
as China and Russia.
About Joe Moshenska
Dr Joe Moshenska is a Fellow and Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Cambridge.? He completed his PhD at Princeton University, where he was awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation ? American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship.? He is currently completing the manuscript of his first book, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England, and has articles forthcoming in English Literary History, Modern Philology and Spenser Studies.
For administrative enquiries please contact Michelle Maciejewska.
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Source: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1966/
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