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)
Paper Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA.
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 provisionally titled in-progress 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 currently serves as the lead editor for English Literary Renaissance, a top journal for new research in early modern literature and culture. She is a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and serves on the Seventeenth-Century Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association.
Professor Carl WENNERLIND
Barnard College, Columbia University (USA)
Bees, Yahoos, and Houyhnhnms: Mandeville and Swift on the Morality of Capitalism
Abstract: TBA.
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.