Associate Professor Lisa BAILEY
University of Auckland (New Zealand)
The Fama and Fortuna of Balthild, Slave-Queen
Abstract: Fama and fortuna are useful lenses through which to examine the stories about the life of Balthild, a slave girl who became the queen-regent of much of France and then was pushed out of power, reshaping herself as a servant of God. Balthild experienced the vicissitudes of fortuna, the classic rise and fall, but her story was not told in those terms after her death. Instead her life path was represented as the will of God, playing out in unexpected but pre-determined ways. Meanwhile her fama became a tense issue after her death, with the rapid emergence of competing visions of Balthild, as hero or villain. Even now her fama is unclear, being claimed by modern scholars as a schemer, an abolitionist, or a feminist hero, while she remains largely unknown outside of academia (and even within it…). This paper seeks to give Balthild’s fama and fortuna an early medieval context, to understand how these conceptual categories shaped the telling of her life-story.
Biography: Lisa Kaaren Bailey is Associate Professor of History / Classics and Ancient History at the University of Auckland / Waipapa Taumata Rau. She is the author of Christianity’s Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Servants of God, Slaves of the Church: Service as Religious Metaphor and Social Reality in Early Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 2026).
Professor Jane Hwang DEGENHARDT
University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA)
Fortune’s Empire: The Global Rise of Fortune on the Early Modern English Stage
Abstract: This talk will explore how the late-sixteenth-century English commercial theater participated in a larger cultural discourse linking global trade and colonialism to the concept of fortune. Beginning with a consideration of the shifting meaning of “fortune” in the period in relation to seafaring and overseas investment, this paper will focus on how new forms of economic fortune affected metaphysical understandings of fortune and its relationship to human will. Through brief discussions of the influence of Machiavellian philosophy and sixteenth-century emblems that linked iconic representations of Fortuna to Occasion, this identifies a gendered dialectic between fortune and human will in which masculine action was increasingly privileged. Turning to the theater, we will consider how English playwrights took up this dialectic in order to problematize and reframe it. We will explore the ways in which the risks inherent to theatrical commerce and live performance were bound up with fortune’s evolving signification and conclude with some thoughts about fortune’s legacy in our current world, where luck and chance serve as alibis for the ongoing inequities of global capitalism.
Biography: Jane Hwang Degenhardt’s work focuses on early modern drama with particular interests in the effects of globalizing processes, historical and speculative understandings of “worlding”, and the intertwined histories of race, religion, and empire. Her publications include the collection Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage (co-edited with Elizabeth Williamson; Routledge Press, 2011), Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh University Press, paperback 2015), and Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford University Press, 2022). Current book projects include “Shakespeare’s Speculative Worldmaking: Beyond Empire and Empiricism”, and “Shakespearean Cosmologies: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Experience” (the latter in collaboration with Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University). Professor Degenhardt has recently co-edited a special issue on “Local Oceans: New Perspectives on Colonial Geographies” in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and has co-edited a special cluster on “Speculation and the Early Modern” forthcoming in SEL. She currently serves as the lead editor for English Literary Renaissance, a top journal for new research in early modern literature and culture.
Professor Carl WENNERLIND
Barnard College, Columbia University (USA)
Bees, Yahoos, and Houyhnhnms: Mandeville and Swift on the Morality of Capitalism
Abstract: Monsters, as the saying goes, “are good to think with”. From the Bible’s Nimrod to Stephen King’s Pennywise, monsters serve as mirrors onto our cultural anxieties and fears. The ideological battles fought over the moral impact of the emergence of Capitalism around the turn of the eighteenth century in Britain featured a veritable menagerie of zoological monsters. Alongside philosophical tracts and political pamphlets, the debate raged on in novels, ballads, plays, and poems. Three of the most famous monsters to come alive in these debates made their appearance in Bernard Mandeville’s poem The Grumbling Hive and Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels. Mandeville employed bees to show how selfish and hedonistic capitalist subjects, having repudiated all pretentions of morality, nevertheless successfully generated a prosperous and well-functioning society. Swift used yahoos, a vile creature obsessed with pleasure and accumulation, to reveal how despicable and distasteful humanity had become now that Capitalism had invaded the very soul of Augustan England. Swift also employed a special breed of horses, houyhnhnms, to put the spotlight on the absurdity of people living perfectly rational and moral lives, the very dream of moralists troubled by the naturalization of Capitalism. The contrast that Swift makes between the yahoos and the houyhnhnms is mirrored by Mandeville’s juxtaposition between the selfish bees that produced a thriving society and the pious bees, made morally righteous by divine intervention, that caused the economy to collapse and the population to implode. The two authors used the bees, the yahoos, and the houyhnhnms as allegorical figures to put the spotlight on particular characteristic of human behavior. More precisely, true to the original meaning of the term monster, or the Latin monstrum, these figures served to warn, remind, instruct, and foretell.
Biography: Professor Wennerlind specializes in the history of early modern Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of ideas about money and credit; ideas on the relationship between economy and nature; and ideas about “improvement” and “modernization”. He is the author of three monographs: Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720 (Harvard University Press, 2011), A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism, together with Margaret Schabas (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, together with Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (Harvard University Press, 2023). Currently, he is working on two books, one on early modern Swedish political economy (tentatively titled The Materiality of Capitalism: Linnaeus and the Conquest of Nature) and one on the history of arguments for and against Capitalism.