Time and Early Modern Thought

Sat 10th May 2014 - York Minster Old Palace Library Run jointly by the universities of Lancaster and York, this seminar will look at ‘time’ in the renaissance. We will consider this broadly, but papers would be welcome, for example, on any of the following:

•       Was there a ‘concept of time’, distinct to the period? What ideas of time were inherited from antiquity?
•       How was time related to music and poetics, measure and proportion? how was it perceived, on the pulse, in the heart and on the brain?
•       How was time related to timelessness, quotidian time to divine time? What did it mean, as Plato has it, to suppose time is a moving image of eternity?
•       Was the relationship between time and mortality – emblematised in the Renaissance hour-glass and skull – terrifying or mere renaissance kitsch?
•       What were the functions of early modern antiquarianism and the obsession with chronologies?
•       How does renaissance theatre figure time, and what is the relationship between dramatic time and quotidian time?
•       What was the relationship between time and space, eternity and infinity?
•       Who were the Renaissance theorists of time?


The seminar will be held in the beautiful surroundings of York Minster Old Palace Library, and will conclude with a concert given by the Minster Minstrels, a renaissance-baroque early music wind group.

Kevin Killeen ([email protected]) and Liz Oakley-Brown ([email protected])