Lost in Ideas: Intellectual History before the Guillotine

Day One: Thursday 11th of April 2025

Welcome and Registration: (10.00-10.15)

Introductory remarks: (10.15 - 10.30)

Prof. Angus Gowland (UCL)

Panel 1: Re-reading the classics (10.30 - 12.00)

1. Marta Spina (Warwick) – Republicanism and Freedom in Florence: Sallust’s Influence on the Development of Early Renaissance Political Thought
2. Lidia Negoi (Independent scholar) – Aristotle for the Many: Social and Ethical Ideas in Late Medieval Sermons
3. Matthew Haji-Michael (Vienna) – Plato's Political Realism

LUNCH: (12.00 - 13.00)

Panel 2: Global Chronologies and Christian Formats (13.00 - 14.00)

1. Ross Moncrieff (Oxford) – The Chinese Noah: Harmonising Chinese and Biblical Chronology in Early Modern Britain and China
2. Sofía Williamson-García (Cambridge) – Domingo Chimalpahin: Between Epistemologies of Time

Break (14.00 - 14.30)

Panel 3: Virtues in a Christian World (14.30 - 16.00)

1. Yunru Chen (Cambridge) – Augustine’s exchange with Nectarius
2. Susie Heywood (KCL) – The Virtue of Prudence: forgotten hero of medieval political thought
3. Eero Arum (Berkeley) – Jean Bodin’s Demonic Constitutionalism: Sovereignty, Natural Law, and Political Theology

Break (16.00 - 16.30)

Keynote lecture: (16.30 - 18.00)

Dr. Dmitri Levitin (Oxford) - Saving Early Modernity from Modernity: the New Contextualism

Wine reception: 18.00-19.00

Day two: Friday, 11th of April 2025:

Panel 4: Politics and Artifice (10.30 - 12.00)

1. Karl Peeter Valk (Tallinn) – The Clock and its Maker: On the Late Medieval Mechanical Turn
2. Genevieve E. Caulfield (UCL) – Political visions: Reframing Roger Bacon’s and Johannes Kepler’s optics as political thought
3. James Coghill (Independent scholar) – Unruly Beasts and the advance of common law in the 16th century

Lunch: (12:00 - 13.00)

Panel 5: Nature before and after the Fall (13.00 - 14.30)

1. Lilia M. Ellis (Chicago) – Human weakness, divine love: a theological anthropology of finitude and infinitude in Julian of Norwich
2. Valentin Braekman (Lausanne) – What if Adam Had Not Sinned? Francisco Suárez on the Foundations of Political Power
3. Eva-Sophie Mörschel (Erfurt) – Towards an early modern approach to privacy: Bodin and private contemplation

Break: 14.30-14.45

Panel 6: Tinkering with texts and genres (14.45 - 16.15)

1. Robyn MacLeod Stewart (York) – The Use of the Eusebian Apparatus in Hiberno-Latin Gospel Texts (c. 700-900): Paratextual and Intertextual Approaches
2. Edvald Johnsen (NUST) – Phaedrus’s Aesop
3. Charlotte McCallum (QMUL) – Nicholas Machiavel’s Letter to Zanobius Buondelmontius in Vindication of Himself and His Writings (1675): texts, paratexts, context

Break: (16.15 - 16.30)

Roundtable: (16.30 - 18.00)

Prof. Andrew Fitzmaurice (QMUL) - Concluding Remarks

Prof. George Garnett (Oxford)

Prof. Valentina Arena (Oxford)

Dr. Shiru Lim (Leiden)