Tuesday 18th February 2020, 5.15-6.30pm

Old Library, All Souls College

Lisa Nicholson (University of Cambridge) - Translating the Vagabonde: Figuring Exile in the Operas of the Mazarin Salon

When Hortense Mancini Duchess of Mazarin arrived in England on 31st December 1675, she came in sodden men's attire with few possessions and plenty of scandal in tow. Having fled her abusive husband several years earlier, Mancini was constantly called upon to defend herself as an 'errant Lady', particularly after she made the decision to publish her memoirs that marked the first time a European woman had allowed her life-writing to enter the public domain during her lifetime and under her own name. Once installed in London, Mancini established the Mazarin salon, which brought together an eclectic mix of European exiles and Restoration London's cultural elite who collaborated on a series of operatic pieces. In this paper, I will examine the representation of Mancini and the salon's habitués in these operas, which form a narrative on exile, loss, and displacement.

Anton Bruder (University of Cambridge)- Changing Tastes among Sixteenth-Century Readers: From the Roman de la Rose to Amadis de Gaule


A medieval best-seller, the Roman de la Rose sailed into the age of print on a wave of popularity. In the first fifty years following the introduction of the printing press to France (1470) the Rose went through twenty-one editions, being printed in a variety of formats at both Paris and Lyons. After a final edition in 1536, however, this book vanished from bookshops; it was not to be published again till the eighteenth century. What might account for the sudden fading of the Rose? And what might the publishing success of the Amadis de Gaule serial have to tell us about the mysterious disappearance of the time-honoured classic? For just a few years later, in 1540, the French reading public would be gripped by Amadis-fever. Amadis de Gaule, the last and greatest hero of chivalric romance, galloped across the shelves of readers of every station for the better part of a century, from kings to farmhands, in adventures spread over twenty-seven sprawling volumes. Amadis, however, burst not from the manuscript pages of medieval legend, but from the imagination of a series of translator-authors working in the first half of the sixteenth century, authors deeply committed to the modern ideal of Renaissance. Is there more to this change in taste than meets the eye? Perhaps it was not so marked a change after all; on closer inspection Amadis and the Rose have much in common. More fundamental, however, is the question of how we measure the popularity of a text, whether today or five hundred years ago. Ultimately this paper asks: what makes a classic – and what unmakes it?