Women, Weapons, and War Workshop

1 June 2018, Raeburn Room, Old College, South Bridge, University of Edinburgh

10.00am – Tea and Coffee and Welcome

10.15am – Dr Alice König (St Andrews), ‘Thinking Women: Current trends and future avenues in the study of women and war in antiquity’

10.45am – Professor John Gillingham (LSE), ‘Women and War pre-1650’

11.15am – Professor Stephen Bowd and Dr Sarah Cockram (Edinburgh), ‘Alda Gambara and Isabella d’Este: Gender and Military Management During the Italian Wars’

11.45am – Reflective Session

12.15 – Lunch

12.45 – Dr Catherine Fletcher (Swansea), ‘The Ladies’ Peace Revisited: Gender, Counsel and Diplomacy’

1.15pm – Dr Frédérique Dubard de Gaillarbois (Sorbonne), ‘Women and War in Sixteenth-century Italian Literature and Art : examples and  proposals.’

1.45pm – Professor Brian Sandberg (Northern Illinois University), ‘Considering Intersections of Gender and Violence: Conceptual Problems and Early Modern Evidence’ 

2.15pm – Tea and Coffee and Cakes

2.30pm – Dr Linda Fibiger (Edinburgh), ‘“A great fury”: Bioarchaeological Considerations of Women and Violence During the Irish Confederate Wars’

3.00pm – Reflective Session

4.00pm – Close

Note: Papers are pre-circulated and space is very limited so please e-mail Prof. Stephen Bowd (Stephen.Bowd@ed.ac.uk) or Dr Sarah Cockram (S.Cockram@ed.ac.uk) if you wish to attend.

Thanks to the generosity of the Society for Renaissance Studies we are able to support the costs of participation for postgraduate and early career researchers and academics.

Speaker Biographies

Alice König is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on ancient technical literature and the history of science, and the relationship between literature, society and politics in the early Principate. She is preparing a monograph on the author and statesman Sextus Julius Frontinus, and has published a series of articles on Vitruvius, Frontinus, Martial, Pliny and Tacitus. In 2011, she founded the Literary Interactions project (https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/literaryinteractions/), which has produced two edited volumes on different aspects of intertextuality. She also runs a collaborative research project entitled Visualising War: Interplay between Battle Narratives in Ancient and Modern Cultures (https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/visualising-war/).

John Gillingham is a former professor of history at the LSE.

Sarah Cockram is a Teaching Fellow in Early Modern History at the University of Edinburgh. Before this Sarah was Lecturer in History c. 1200-1600 at the University of Glasgow and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. Sarah’s work on Isabella d’Este has focussed on Isabella’s statecraft. Her monograph Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga: Power Sharing at the Italian Renaissance Court was published in 2013 and she is currently writing on ‘Isabella’s Sartorial Politics’. Sarah is a member of the team on the Digital Humanities project IDEA, Isabella d’Este Archive, and is co-PI of the IDEA Bibliography, just launched on the IDEA site. Sarah’s recent research also intersects with Animal Studies and she is completing a monograph on Courtly Creatures and Transnational Animals, having recently published work on pets and on exotic animals.  https://edinburgh.academia.edu/SarahCockram

Stephen Bowd is Professor of Early Modern History at Edinburgh and the author of ‘Mass Murder in Sacks during the Italian Wars, 1494-1559’, in Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (eds), Murder in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), ch. 12; and Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers During the Italian Wars (Oxford University Press, 2018). His most recent research website is http://research.shca.ed.ac.uk/mass-murder/.

Catherine Fletcher is Associate Professor in History and Heritage at Swansea University. She is the author of Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, 2015) and two trade books on sixteenth-century Italian history, Our Man in Rome: Henry VIII and his Italian Ambassador and The Black Prince of Florence: The Life of Alessandro de’ Medici, both with Bodley Head. She has recently co-edited a collection for Palgrave on Queenship and Counsel in Early Modern Europe which will be out this summer, and her new project explores the early history of handguns in Italian culture and society.

Frédérique Dubard de Gaillarbois is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and full Professor of Italian Literature of the Renaissance at the Sorbonne. Her main interests include the art of war, on which she has written a book Les armes de Minerve L’Humanisme militaire dans l’Italie du XVIe siècle (Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1997); women warriors, writers, and artists (see her book Le miroir des Amazones: Amazones, viragos et guerrières dans la littérature italienne des XV et XVIe siècles (2003), her translation of Moderata Fonte, Le mérite des femmes (1600) (Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2002); and her article ‘Elisabetta Sirani’s Porcia wounding her thigh (1664) A piece of mute eloquence or a meta-painting?’, Icon: Journal of iconographic studies, 7 (2013): 235-48; Machiavelli and Machiavellianism (with papers on Machiavelli’s Art of War, on women in Machiavelli’s works, and a book on Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza: Caterina Sforza et Machiavel, ou l’origine d’un monde (Vecchiarelli, 2010); and artistic literature (for example, on Michelangelo and Cellini). She is now finishing an edition/translation of Benedetto Varchi’s Two Lessons (1550) on art theory.

Brian Sandberg is a Professor of History at Northern Illinois University who works on religion, violence, and political culture during the European Wars of Religion. He authored a monograph entitled, Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Sandberg has held fellowships from the Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Institute for Research in the Humanities (University of Wisconsin-Madison), the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Medici Archive Project), and the European University Institute. He recently published an interpretive essay, War and Conflict in the Early Modern World, 1500-1700 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016) and a collective volume, The Grand Ducal Medici and their Archive (1537-1743), edited by Alessio Assonitis and Brian Sandberg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016). He is currently serving as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at NIU, and is working on several research projects, including a monograph on A Virile Courage: Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion 1562-1629.

 Linda Fibiger is a Senior Lecturer in Human Osteoarchaeology at the University of Edinburgh and Programme Director of the MSc in Human Osteoarchaeology. She has published on the promotion of professional standards, ethics and legislation in bioarchaeology and is currently involved in the European-funded TRACES project that focuses on the challenges and opportunities inherent in transmitting contentious cultural heritage in contemporary Europe. She also has a long-standing interest in interpersonal violence and cranial trauma, investigating – through analytical and experimental approaches – how age and gender influence involvement in violent interaction in prehistoric Europe. See the websites TRACES: Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritage with the Arts – From Intervention to Co-production www.tracesproject.eu; Forensic Archaeology https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138014244; The bones beneath the face http://jharries.wix.com/skulls-and-faces; Word of Mouth: Talking about how we interpret skulls
http://surgeonshallmuseum.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/word-of-mouth-talking-about-how-we-interpret-skulls/