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Love and Death in the Renaissance

Northern Renaissance Seminar series, Leeds University: 15 May 2010

Keynote Speaker, Elaine Hobby, Loughborough University

In this one day seminar event we plan to consider the peculiar pairings of love and death that so often animate the Renaissance mind. Medical opinion, theology, historical memoirs, and drama are among the many kinds of discourse where love and death are thought to come into contact with one another as a matter of necessity. How did this happen? What was the origin of the mating of love and death? What was its purpose? What were its consequences? Long before Freud and the contest between Eros and Thanatos there was, of course, the story of Romeo and Juliet and all its analogues. There was the commonplace that passion could kill, or that, as Shakespeare once put it, ‘desire is death’, and there was another that said that death was to be desired. ‘After so foul a journey,’ George Herbert wrote about life and its passions, ‘death is fair’. Death was the ultimate beloved.

We are very pleased to invite you to join us for what promises to be a stimulating and exciting seminar, with papers covering paintings, poetry, drama and prose, monarchy, religion, and marriage, from Michelangelo, through Shakespeare to John Ford.

Registration fees: full £20
student £5
We have some limited funding to offer postgraduate travel bursaries

Download the poster of Love and Death in the Renaissance as a Word document.

Download the conference programme and the registration form.

For more information, please contact:

Niamh Cooney and Jana Pridalova, Leeds University

Jessica Dyson, Lancaster University