Encounters – December 2020 – Parallel Sessions 1

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In this paper I will give an overview of my thesis from the vantage point of my fourth year of research. My thesis examines a trope of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth British poetry which I call ‘nature’s consolation’. Again and again in poetry of this period, the speaker of a poem communicates with a non-human presence — an animal, a landscape, or an abstraction — and asks them to remove suffering, madness, or disease. In short, poetry represents the ways in which humans use the more-than-human world as a therapeutic object. This thesis is interested in the political and ecological stakes of such a gesture. Whilst the poets I discuss in this thesis are invested in the idea of nature’s consolation, they are also equally conscious of the possible effects of using the environment in order to meet their own desires. This thesis therefore reframes critical perspectives on Romantic nature writing by reconceiving the encounter between humans and non-humans around the idea of ‘use’: does the human desire to extract consolation from their non-human environment constitute a kind of use; and if so, is it possible to ascertain the material implications of such use?

Matthew McConkey is a CHASE-funded PhD student in the School of English at the University of Sussex. He holds a BA in English from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Literature, Culture, and Theory from the University of Sussex. His doctoral thesis focuses on the relationship between the nonhuman environment and mental illness in Romantic literature and culture.

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This paper outlines how the emergence in Bolivia of the major peasant union confederation, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Sole Syndical Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia — CSUTCB) was integral to the development of an Indigenous politics of the environment in late twentieth-century Latin America. In 1979 the CSUTCB emerged out of a longer history of peasant mobilisation in Bolivia which included union and non-union forms of organisation. While the existing literature widely documents the CSUTCB’s fusion of class politics and indigeneity, in this paper I address its ecological politics. I draw on documents and audio recordings from CSUTCB national congresses, as well as pamphlets and documents from the wider peasant movement throughout the 1970s and 1980s which reveal that CSUTCB leaders developed arguments relating to the spiritual importance of the natural world. Ecological claims corresponded to Indigenous cosmovisions, but they also provided a way of advancing anti-capitalist critiques through the language of culture which was more amenable to the neoliberal era in Bolivia. I argue that the CSUTCB’s environmental discourse also reveals an important ‘indigenisation’ of debates over resource nationalism which had emerged in the mid twentieth century.

Olivia Arigho-Stiles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. Her CHASE-AHRC supported project examines the history of ecological thought within highland indigenous movements in twentieth century Bolivia between 1920–1990. She holds a BA in History from the University of Oxford and an MA in Latin American Studies from University College London (UCL).

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At the conclusion of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck suggests to potentially offended audience members that they ‘have but slumbered here’, and thus that their whole experience of the play might be dismissed as a dream. But did playgoers really fall asleep in the Renaissance theatre, and if so, what did they dream about? Was dozing during a performance necessarily a bad thing? This paper uses evidence from early modern plays as well as anti-theatrical, philosophical, satirical, and religious texts to characterise Renaissance discourse concerning sleeping and dreaming audiences. It looks at how plays compared with sermons in terms of their soporific qualities, and asks who was to blame—author, actor, or spectator—when audiences dropped off. It investigates whether particular types of audience and venue were associated with sleep in the theatre, and explores how drowsiness and dreaming confused the boundaries of actor and spectator, and of drama and reality. Finally, this paper describes how the motif of dreaming in the playhouse raised profound questions of agency surrounding the creation, performance, and reception of Renaissance drama. In doing so, this paper provides a new perspective on both the closing moments of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the early modern theatregoing experience.

Niall Boyce is a CHASE-funded second-year part-time PhD student at Birkbeck, under the supervision of Dr Gillian Woods. This presentation consists of a snapshot of one section of my thesis, England’s dreaming: dreams, inwardness, and the self in Renaissance England.

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Rarely, if ever, can a scholar avoid dead ends and diversions during their pursuit of research. This paper concerns one such detour, repeatedly encountered over three years of research on the book called A Curious Herbal containing five hundred cuts of the most useful plants which are now used in the practice of physick, to which is added a short description of ye plants and their common uses in physick. Produced in parts, the book comprised two volumes that originally were published in London in 1737 and 1739. Two later London editions were printed in 1751 and 1782, and a re-engraved, expanded edition of it was published in Germany between. In each of those cases, the name prominently displayed on every title page is that of Elizabeth Blackwell.

Consensus has been that Blackwell took on the project to aid her husband, Alexander, a scholarly émigré from Aberdeen, whose careless business dealings left him deeply in debt. After his wife rescued him, Alexander traveled to Sweden, became embroiled in a political plot, and was executed for treason against the crown. In contrast to his rather well-documented escapades, however, almost nothing is known about Elizabeth’s life prior to or following the Herbal’s publication. But paucity of authoritative information has not prevented numerous Blackwell biographies from being written over the course of some 250 years. This paper analyses a notably divergent biographical strand – one claiming that Blackwell, in addition to etching 500 folio-size plates and transcribing 125 pages of verbal entries for A Curious Herbal, also managed to practice midwifery.

Janet Stiles Tyson is a PhD candidate in early modern history at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis, A Curious Undertaking: the collaborative making of a herbal in Georgian London, analyses the material culture and social history of A Curious Herbal – a book produced by a British gentlewoman named Elizabeth Blackwell.