SAMEMES Conference 2024

Irish Gospel of St. Gall

Medieval and Early Modern Swiss-British Relations

Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies
Eighth Biennial Conference
4th - 6th September 2024, University of Basel

This international SAMEMES conference will take place within the framework of the SNSF-project SwissBritNet: Swiss-British cultural exchange and knowledge networks 1600-1780. The conference will extend the investigation of these networks back through the Middle Ages.

The study of early modern transnational relations in Europe has been advanced in recent years by digital humanities initiatives enabling the large-scale collection, visualization and analysis of data designed to improve our understanding of knowledge networks and the Republic of Letters. Joining this international research community, SwissBritNet will highlight the nature and relevance of Swiss-British relations as an intrinsic part of a bigger European picture.

While both continental Anglophilia and the British enthusiasm for Switzerland are often seen as late-18th century phenomena, this conference will show that they have a much longer and intricate history. From the 7th century Irish monks who established the monastery of St Gallen and the Bishop of Sion who helped found Westminster Abbey to the English envoys stationed in the Swiss confederacy in the 17th century, from the Genevan teacher Antoine-Rodolphe Chevalier, who was Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge in the reign of Edward VI to the English knowledge networks of Swiss theologians and scholars in the 17th and 18th centuries; from the Marian exiles in Basel and Geneva in the 1550s to Puritan regicides in Geneva and Lausanne – to name only a very few examples – there has been constant movement and cultural exchange between Switzerland and Britain, and considerable resulting mutual influence.

At the SAMEMES conference, we will be able to discuss medieval and early modern case studies as well as larger theoretical and methodological considerations, and the project database SwissBritNet will subsequently enable us to collect and link documents and stories that form part of this Swiss-British history (with an initial focus on early modern materials).

Topics to be addressed may include, but are not limited to

Transmission of medieval manuscripts
Libraries and collections
Go-betweens and brokers of knowledge
Modes of exchange in the Republic of Letters
Drama and itinerant players
Translations of literary works and devotional literature
Travel accounts and letters
Economic relations, trade, crafts and art
Natural philosophy, medicine and science
Diplomacy and warfare
Religion and theology

Global Medieval Studies, Transnational Studies, Network Studies, Digital Humanities, and Gender Studies approaches are encouraged in the investigation of literary and cultural history.

Select papers presented at this conference will be edited by the conference organizers and published in the open access Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature SPELL in 2025.

Keynote Speakers

Ardis Butterfield, Professor of English, Yale University

Prof. Ardis Butterfield specialises in the literatures and music of France and England from the 13th to 15th centuries. She has particular interests in the medieval lyric and lyric theory; word and music relationships; Chaucer and nationhood; city writing; bilingualism, translation, and medieval and modern linguistic identities; and theories and histories of language, form, and genre. With courtesy appointments in the departments of French and music, her scholarship distinctively traverses disciplines.

Butterfield is currently completing a new Norton edition of medieval English lyrics, and writing a book on medieval song, tentatively called "Medieval Songlines: Theory of Medieval Song". The edition has provoked her to rethink approaches to medieval lyric, taking into account notions of rhythm, repetition, silence and writing, and the pressures and tensions of history on voice formation in multilingual song genres.

Annina Seiler, Research Associate, University of Zürich

Dr Annina Seiler currently works on a research project entitled "Glossaries: Lexicography in the English Middle Ages" in which she investigates glossaries and dictionaries from the early Anglo-Saxon period to the end of the Middle Ages. She is particularly interested in the role of English in medieval lexicography and its relation to other languages, most notably Latin and French.

Her general research interests include: History of the English language, Old and Middle English language and literature, the West Germanic languages, orality and literacy in the Middle Ages, the functions of writing and the connections between roman and runic script, the history of linguistic thought.

Erin McCarthy, Professor of English Literature & Computational Humanities, University of Galway

Prof. Erin A. McCarthy is the Principal Investigator of the Irish Research Council and European Research Council-funded project "STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700" which computationally maps and models the movement of English poetry through early modern social networks. It will apply insights from network analysis and graph theory to provide the most comprehensive overview of the circulation of early modern English verse in manuscript to date.

Dirk van Miert, Director of Huygens Instituut, Amsterdam

Dr Dirk van Miert specialises in early modern history of knowledge and currently devotes his time to the application of network analysis and text mining in order to understand how early modern scholars in Europe managed to create a border-crossing collective identity. Among other associations, Dirk van Miert is guest-associate professor at the Cultural History section of the Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University.

Conference Organisers

Prof. Ina Habermann, University of Basel
Prof. Elisabeth Dutton, Université de Fribourg

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