The 2022 Conference on John Milton is next week: June 21-23. It features plenary presenations by Feisal Mohamed and Steven Zwicker, as well as a the Geraghty Symposium on race, gender, and power. The conference is part of the Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. The full program and registration information are available at the SMRS website.

For more information, please contact Sara van den Berg (sara.vandenberg@slu.edu), Jonathan Sawday (jonathan.sawday@slu.edu), or Ryan Netzley (rnetzley@siu.edu)

For the conference poster, click on the image below.

Ryan Netzley is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is also the editor of Marvell Studies. His research focuses on Renaissance lyric poetry, critical and poststructuralist theory, poetics and reading practices, and Reformation theology. Continue reading →

• June 2022: Marvell Studies 7.1 has just been published and is a special issue on “Mourning.” Kevin Laam examines Marvell’s poem through the lens of anti-mourning, so as to highlight its critique of the transactional nature of elegy. Stephen Spencer reads “Mourning” alongside Marvell’s elegy for Francis Villiers, and finds in the later poem a suspicion of the misogyny that attends Cavalier joy. Diana Wise examines the poem’s self-sufficient eroticism, derived from its evocation of a physical (and not merely metaphorical) water cycle. And Blaine Greteman refocuses readerly and critical attention on the “Indian slaves” who dive for pearls and the whiteness of the concluding stanza’s silent judgment. This issue also includes a note from Nicholas von Maltzahn on the source of a heretofore obscure (and scatological) Latin quotation in Mr. Smirke.
• January 2022: My essay on catastrophe and vegetal growth in country house poems, “Managed Catastrophe: Problem-Solving and Rhyming Couplets in the Seventeenth-Century Country House Poem,” has just appeared in a special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on Forms of Catastrophe (edited by Shannon Gayk and Evelyn Reynolds). The article explores how central features of this poetic tradition, procatalepsis and the rhyming couplet, place readers in the position of estate managers, but also challenge the notion that practical problem-solving can save us from catastrophe, ecological or otherwise.

• Video link to “Illuminating the Word: The Devotional Tradition and the Future of Poetry,” a symposium on devotional lyrics at Brigham Young University, 20-21 November 2014. My paper, “Religious Formalism,” is part of the first panel on early modern devotional lyrics.

Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events is available via Fordham University Press’s site. Reviews have appeared in Renaissance and Reformation, Renaissance Quarterly, Milton Quarterly, SEL: Studies in English Literature, Literature and Theology, and the Andrew Marvell Newsletter.

Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (2011) is available via the University of Toronto Press. It’s been reviewed in the following journals: Modern Philology, Year’s Work in English Studies, Seventeenth-Century News, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Divinity Magazine.

Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, co-edited with Thomas P. Anderson, is available from the University of Delaware Press, via Rowman and Littlefield. Contributors to the volume explore the relationship between digital and early modern texts and their impact on reading practices. It’s been reviewed in Prose Studies, SEL, Renaissance Quarterly, and Renaissance and Reformation.