50th Anniversary Conference of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies / Société canadienne d’études de la Renaissance (CSRS/SCÉR).

This special jubilee event, co-organized with the Université de Montréal, brings together international scholars to explore diverse aspects of the Renaissance, with a strong emphasis on art history, visual culture, and material history.

Colloque du cinquantième anniversaire / Fiftieth Anniversary Conference

Un merci tout particulier à Marie-Alice Belle et Alicia Viaud pour la coorganisation de cet événement spécial, ainsi qu’à l’Université de Montréal. / With special thanks to Marie-Alice Belle and Alicia Viaud for co-organizing this special event as well as to l’Université de Montréal.

2026 Programme / Program

Samedi le 6 juin / Saturday, June 6
9am-9:15am

Reconnaissance du territoire autochtone et mots de bienvenue / Land Acknowledgment and Welcoming Remarks (Jean Brillant, B-2305)

Elizabeth Pentland (York University)
President, CSRS/SCÉR
9:15am-10:30am

Séance plénière 1 / Plenary 1 (Jean Brillant B-2305)
Président de plénière : Claude La Charité (Université du Québec à Rimouski)
Maxime Gohier (Université du Québec à Rimouski), “Colonisation, droit et légitimité : la place du « droit des gens » dans le processus d’implantation française en Amérique du Nord-Est.”

10:30am-10:45am, pause rafraîchissement / refreshment break (Jean Brillant, B-2305)

11am-12:30pm
Session / Séance 1A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room Multifonctionelle C-3061) Print Production and Translation Practices in Early Modern Britain: Collaboration and Competition
Chair: Brenda Dunn-Lardeau (UQAM)
Brenda M. Hosington (Université de Montréal), “Riding Tandem: The Interrelated Worlds of Translation and Print in Early Modern Britain.”

Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby (Memorial University), “The Power of Print: Invective and the Pamphlet War of the English Grammarians.”

Marie-Alice Belle (Université de Montréal), “Claims of Novelty in Seventeenth-Century Printed Translations in Britain.”

Session / Séance 1B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02)

Early Modern Extemporaneity: Orality, Textuality, and Writing Out of Time
Chair: Ben Woodford (Thompson River University)

Shaun Ross (University of Toronto), “Liturgy, Orality, and Spontaneity in Paradise Lost and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.”

John Allaster (Champlain College, St-Lambert), “Recollecting Spontaneity: Sir Philip Sidney’s Memory of the Ineffable in Astrophil and Stella.”

Manuel Cárdenas (University of Alberta), “The Poetics of Extemporization in Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653).”

Session / Séance 1C (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059)

Non-Shakespearean Drama Chair: Mark Beatrice Kaethler (Medicine Hat College)
Philip Goldfarb Styrt (St. Ambrose University), “The Pointlessness of Empire in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.”
Mathew R. Martin (Brock University), “Romance and Satire in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.”
David Nicol (Dalhousie University), “‘Yet this doth endure to the last’: The Afterlives of William Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman.”

Lunch / déjeuner
12:30pm-1:45pm
1:45pm-3:15pm

Séance / Session 2A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02)

Parler et écrire au féminin ou du féminin
Président de séance : Renée-Claude Breitenstein (Brock University)

François Paré (University of Waterloo), « La blessure du langage dans Les Prisons de Marguerite de Navarre. »
Jean-Philippe Beaulieu (Université de Montréal), « Parler de l’autre et de soi: finalités du paratexte dédicatoire dans Les Sentimens du sage mondain de Suzanne de Nervèze. »
Guy Poirier (University of Waterloo), « Une entrée facétieuse en «palimpseste» à la cour des
derniers Valois. »

Session / Séance 2B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room Multifonctionelle C-3061) Marginality and Fluidity around Gender Identity
Sponsored by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Centre
Chair: Travis DeCook (Carleton University)

Cristian Berco (Bishop’s University), “When the Centre Transgresses: Inquisitional Sexualities, the Holy Office, and Society.”
Naomi Makowska (Queen’s University), “Becoming Giulia: The Social Construction of a Marginal Woman in Early Modern Modena.”
Konrad Eisenbichler (University of Toronto), “When Daniel Gave Birth: The Unusual Case of a German Hermaphrodite.”

Session / Séance 2C (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) New Perspectives on Sidney Chair: Linda Steele (Carleton University)

Andrew Bucheim (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “‘In it selfe it have deformities’: Paratextual Discourses of Disability in the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.”
Sarah Johnston (Royal Military College of Canada), “The Embattled Humanities and Tomorrow’s Military Leaders.”
Elizabeth Hodgson (University of British Columbia) and Tiffany Potter (University of British Columbia), “Is Astrophil Kenough? Philip Sidney, Early Modern Masculinisms, and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.”

3:15pm-3:30pm: refreshment break / pause rafraîchissement (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room Multifonctionelle C-3061)

3:30pm-5pm
Séance / Session 3A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02) Les incunables conservés à l’Université de Montréal : une collection fascinante !
Président de séance : Brenda M. Hosington (Université de Montréal)

Éric Bouchard (Université de Montréal), « Les incunables de l’Université de Montréal : le legs d’insignes bienfaiteurs. »
Helena Kogen (UQAM), « Les Opuscula theologica et mathematica de Nicolas de Cues [Strasbourg, Martin Flach,1488] : un recueil de pensée humaniste et ses lecteurs anciens et modernes. »
Brenda Dunn-Lardeau (UQAM), « La Catena aurea de Thomas d’Aquin (Nuremberg, Anton Koberger, 1475) et son enlumineur padouan. »

Session / Séance 3B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room Multifonctionelle C-3061) Legacies of Early Modern Women Writers
Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender
Chair: Ben Woodford (Thompson River University)

Micheline White (Carleton University), “Katherine Parr, Book History, and Literary Legacies.”
Grant Williams (Carleton University), “Female Commemoration in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: Apostrophe, Exempla, and Humanist Fame.”
Marie Loughlin (UBC Okanagan), “Outsourcing Commemoration: The Tomb of Love in Mary Wroth’s Urania.”
Victoria Burke (University of Ottawa), “Lady Anne Southwell’s Theory and Practice of Poetry.”

Session / Séance 3C (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) Revisiting Topics in Shakespeare
Chair: Glenn Clark (University of Manitoba)

Dennis Britton (University of British Columbia), “Pitiless Jews in The Merchant of Venice: Race, Religion, and Emotional Impairment.”
Marie Trotter (McGill University), “Breaking the Threshold: Ethical and Spatial Disruptions in Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
Andrew Loeb (Trent University), “The Stuff of Grief in Hamlet.”

Sunday, June 7 / Dimanche le 7 juin
8am-9am
Graduate Student Breakfast / petit-déjeuner pour les étudiants aux cycles supérieurs (Agora Morris and Rosalind Goodman, Sall/Room 575A: S1-10-AGO: 264)

9:15am-10:45am
Session / Séance 4A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room Multifonctionelle C-3061) Renaissance Art History
Chair: Jade Reinhardt (Université de Montréal)

Anuradha Gobin (University of Calgary), “Playful Illusionism: Domestic Miniatures in the Dutch Republic.”
Hatice Koroglu Cam (Temple University), “A ‘New’ Jerome for the Reformation Era: Rhetorical Brilliance in Cranach’s Portraits of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg.”
Linda Steele (Carleton University), “Sitting on Top of the World: Elizabethan Portraiture and Imperial Colonialism.”
Carina-Nathalia Madonna Visconti-Paff (Sapienza Università di Roma), “Frozen Tides and Shifting Fortunes: The Little Ice Age’s Imprint on Sixteenth-Century Italian Art, Economy, and
Society.”

Session / Séance 4B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02) Minds and Worlds in Renaissance Drama
Chair: Mark Beatrice Kaethler (Medicine Hat College)

Inhye Ha (Incheon National University), “Baring Madness, Bearing Madness: Reading King Lear as Pathography.”
Vera Hadzic (Queen’s University), “‘The Secretaries of the Starres’: Astrological Knowledge as Performance in Rollo, Duke of Normandy.”
Olivia King (Independent Scholar), “‘How to Gain Another World’: Incest, Expansionism, and Semiotic Insurrection in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.”

Session / Séance 4C (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) Metaphor and Theological Poetics in Herbert and Milton
Chair: Gary Kuchar (University of Victoria)

Paul Dyck (Canadian Mennonite University), “‘The Elixir’ and Herbert’s Use of Things and Metaphors.”
Travis DeCook (Carleton University), “God in Writing: Miltonic Accommodation and the Experience of Metaphor.”
Jason Peters (Booth University College), “The Moral Philosophy of Metaphor: Herbert’s ‘Elixir’.”

10:45am-11:15am, refreshment break / pause rafraîchissement (Jean Brillant, B-2305)
11:15am-12:30pm

Plenary 2 / Séance plénière 2 (Jean Brillant, B-2305)
Chair: Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto)

Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago), “Shylock and Slavery: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation on the English Stage.”
12:40pm-1:50pm

Assemblée générale annuelle / Annual General Meeting (Jean Brillant, B-2305)

Déjeuner fourni / Lunch Provided
2pm-3:30pm

Séance / Session 5A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room Multifonctionelle C-3061) Montaigne
Président de séance : Marie-Alice Belle (Université de Montréal)

Claude La Charité (Université du Québec à Rimouski), « La reception de Montaigne au Québec (1790-2024) : un premier état des lieux. »
Luc Vaillancourt (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi), « Lost in translation: reprises et détournements du projet de Montaigne à la Renaissance anglaise. »
Léna de la Bouère (Université de Montréal), “Truth in Print: Montaigne and the Transformation of Parrhēsia in the Age of the Printing Press.”

Session / Séance 5B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02) Rethinking Fallenness in Milton Studies
Chair: Grant Williams (Carleton University)

Ben Woodford (Thompson Rivers University), “Milton’s Paradise Lost and Defoe’s Roxana.”
Elizabeth Sauer (Brock University), “Aging Milton.”
Don Beecher (Carleton University), “Eve and the Necessary Illusion of Free Will.”

Session / Séance 5C (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) Rethinking Genre and Narrative
Chair: Glenn Clark (University of Manitoba)

Michael Cop (University of Otago), “Adapting Reading Paths: The Effects of Shakespearean Text and Rhetorical Tropes on How We Read Visual Narratives.”
Dylan McCorquodale (University of Exeter), “‘Enter History, with drum and ensign’: A Historiographical Approach to Defining the Early Modern History Play.”
Kenzo Pecchia (McGill University), “Ovid’s Erotic Poetry and the Ending of Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.”

3:30-3:45pm: refreshment break / pause rafraîchissement (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room Multifonctionelle C-3061)

3:45pm-5:15pm
Session / Séance 6A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room Multifonctionelle C-3061) Women’s Poetics and Voice in the Renaissance
Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender
Chair: Elizabeth Sauer (Brock University)

Leah Knight (Brock University), “The Poetics of Future Forms: Early Modern Legacies in Helster Pulter’s Verse.”
Melanie Simoes Santos (University of New Brunswick), “‘By birth it’s yours’: Anne Clifford, Aemilia Lanyer, and the Matrilineal Inheritance of White Privilege.”
Mia Smith (Brock University), “Gendered Voices and the Rhetoric of Rage in the Ongoing Querelle des Femmes.”

Session / Séance 6B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02) Renaissance Environments
Chair: Mark Beatrice Kaethler (Medicine Hat College)

Julian Yates (University of Delaware), “Spit Boys, Spit Jacks, Turnspit Dogs, and the Bioenergetics of the Flesh in Early Modern England.”
Haley Prosser (McMaster University), “As You Like(d) It: Civility and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.”
Louise Geddes (Adelphi University), “Camp Dramaturgies in Middletonian Tragedy.”

Session / Séance 6C (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) Shakespeare’s Language and Rhetoric
Chair: Elizabeth Pentland (York University)

Caden Elliott (University of Victoria), “Ars Moriendi Poetics in Richard II.”
Kenneth Graham (University of Waterloo), “To Infinity and Beyond: Marriage and Spiritual Language in Late Shakespeare.”
Todd Pettigrew (Cape Breton University), “Shylock Proverbially.”

6pm (Agora Morris and Rosalind Goodman, Sall/Room 575A : S1-10-AGO : 264)
Banquet and Awards Ceremony / banquet et cérémonie de remise des prix

Monday, June 8 / Lundi le 8 juin
9am-10:30am
Session / Séance 7A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) New Approaches to John
Donne
Chair: Linda Steele (Carleton University)

Anna Lewton-Brain (Dawson College), “A Performance-based Approach to John Donne’s Confessional ‘Hymne to God the Father’.”
Sonia Beltz (Loyola University), “A World of Monsters and Virgins: The Feminization of Illness in Donne’s Bodies-as-Worlds.”
Brent Nelson (University of Saskatchewan), “The Text Revealed: Introducing DigitalDonne 2.0.”

Session / Séance 7B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02), Intersections of Proto-Capitalism in Early Modern England: Cultural Engagements with Racialized Property, Inheritance and Unnatural Usury
Chair: Patricia Badir (University of British Columbia)

Ronda Arab (Simon Fraser University), “‘A Little More Wit Upon Compassion’: Primogeniture and the Proto-Capitalist Spirit.”
Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto), “Racial Properties: Labour, Whiteness, and Slavery in Early Modern English Literature.”
Daniel Vitkus (University of California, San Diego), “Unnatural Usury in Early Modern England: Monsters, Beasts, and Parasites at the Intersection of Ecocriticism and Historical
Materialism.”

10:30am-10:45am, refreshment break / pause rafraîchissement (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02)

10:45am-12:15pm
Session / Séance 8A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) Littérature historique en France et en français
Président de séance : Jean-Philippe Beaulieu (Université de Montréal)

Isabelle Gagnon (l’Université du Québec à Rimouski), « Ronsard, lecteur de Nicandre : perspective sur une influence hellénistique. »
Marianne Legault (l’Université de la Colombie-Britannique, Okanagan), « L’autre côté du miroir magique : la fin du bonheur conjugal dans le conte de fees de l’Ancien Régime. »

Session / Séance 8B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02) Engineering and Constraining the Deviant for the Early Modern Stage
Chair: Grant Williams (Carleton University)

Mark Beatrice Kaethler (Medicine Hat College), “Marian/Matilda’s Gender Nonconformity in Munday and Chettle’s Robin Hood Plays.”
Joseph Khoury (St. Francis Xavier University), “The Paradoxical King Henry V.”
Ian Munro (University of California, Irvine), “‘Foul Disproportion’: Othello and the Judgment of the Eye.”

Session / Séance 8C (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room C-7149): Renaissance Ecologies and Economies
Chair: Paul Dyck (Canadian Mennonite University)

Melina Olivas (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “Hunting Wolves and Men.”
Micha’el Kabasele (University of Cambridge), “The Meanings of Internality/Externality in Sixteenth-Century Dietaries.”
Brandon Taylor (Mount Marty University), “Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and the Tragedy of the Unincorporated.”

Déjeuner / Lunch, 12:15pm-1:30pm

1:30pm-3pm
Session / Séance 9A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02) Shakespeare, Colonization, and Indigeneity
Chair: Kenneth Graham (University of Waterloo)

Meredith Beales (University of British Columbia), “Caliban, Ariel, and Indigeneity in The Tempest.”
Sarah Crover (University of Vancouver Island), “Appropriating the Bard: The Land Acknowledgement as Vehicle for Processing National Trauma.”
Patricia Badir (University of British Columbia), “Shakespeare and the Culture Wars: The Folger Folios and the Making of the University of British Columbia.”

Séance / Session 9B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) L’histoire de la Renaissance
Président de séance : Guy Poirier (University of Waterloo)

Devika Vijayan (University of Calgary), « Voyager depuis le harem : itinérance, pouvoir et identité dans le récit de voyage de Gulbadan Bégum : entre espace privé et lieu de pouvoir. »
Marie-Clarté Lagrée (Sorbonne Université), « Comment un pasteur protestant soignait-il son corps ?: Enquête sur Pierre Du Moulin (1568-1658). »
Jade Reinhardt (Université de Montréal), « Les habitants du marais dans l’art italien du XVIe siècle. »

3:15pm-4:45pm
Session / Séance 10A (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de projection C-1017-02) Re-scaffolding Mnemonic Ritual: The Memory Arts and Literature
Chair: Grant Williams (Carleton University)

William E. Engel (Sewanee, University of the South), “Protestant Print Culture and John Day’s Renovation of The ABC and Catechism, 1560-82.”
Rebeca Helfer (University of California, Irvine), “A Love-Poet’s Complaint: The Art of Love, The Art of Poetry, and The Art of Memory.”
Gary Kuchar (University of Victoria), “Thomas Traherne’s Baptismal Spirituality.”

Session / Séance 10B (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room de soutenance C-2059) Renaissance History
Chair: Glenn Clark (University of Manitoba)

Luke Roman (Memorial University), “A Library Without Walls: Erasmus, Italian Humanism, and the Spaces of Knowledge.”
Alexander William Hofing (McMaster University), “Swords and Sensibility: Fencing Manuals, Nobility, and Society in Renaissance Italy.”
Laureano López (Université de Rouen-Normandie), “Dictatorship and Abdication: Juan Luis Vives and the Ethics of Power.”

Session / Séance 10C (Lionel Groulx, Salle/Room C-7149) Renaissance Adaptations
Chair: Mark Beatrice Kaethler (Medicine Hat College)

Blessy Samjose (VIT University), “Chord, Canvas, and Cane: Talents and Girlhoods in Three Historical Young Adult Novels Set in the Italian Renaissance.”
Nancy La (Queen’s University), “Adaptations and Shakespearean Legacy in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed.”
Saum Arora (McMaster University), “Adapting Shakespeare: A Case Study of the Video Game Elsinore.”

5:15pm-6:30pm
« A Pilgrim’s Solace »
Un concert mettant en vedette le célèbre duo montréalais de musique ancienne Ménestrel, avec la soprano Janelle Lucyk et le luthiste et ténor Kerry Bursey (Église Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, 5366 Chem.de la Côte-des-Neiges)

Une célébration du 400e anniversaire de la naissance de John Dowland : partant de ses voyages à l’étranger à l’adolescence au service d’un ambassadeur anglais, le programme retrace la carrière de
Dowland à travers une carte musicale, avec des séjours à travers l’Europe continentale mettant en lumière des influences musicales éclectiques, pour aboutir à son dernier recueil de chansons, A Pilgrime’s Solace. Avec son univers sonore irrésistible, Ménestrel met en lumière les influences musicales et les expériences de vie qui ont conduit Dowland à devenir le luthiste le plus important et le compositeur emblématique de la Renaissance.
A concert featuring the acclaimed Montreal early music duo, Ménestrel, with soprano Janelle Lucyk and lutenist and tenor Kerry Bursey (Église Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, 5366 Chem. de la Côte-des-Neiges).

A celebration of the 400th anniversary of John Dowland's life—beginning with his travels abroad as a teenager under the employment of an English ambassador, the program is a musical map of Dowland's career, with séjours across continental Europe highlighting eclectic musical influences, and culminating
in his final collection of songs, A Pilgrime’s Solace. Bringing their irresistible sonic universe, Ménestrel showcases the musical influences and life experiences that led Dowland to become the most important lutenist and iconic songwriter of the Renaissance.