‘Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain’

Royal Geographical Society

Programme

 

THURSDAY 10 SEPTEMBER

 

10.00-10.30     Registration, Main Hall

10.30-11.00     Session 1: Introduction

• Andrew McRae (Exeter), ‘The Poly-Olbion Project’

 

11.00-12.45     Session 2: Forms of Nationhood (Chair: Philip Schwyzer)

• Sara Trevisan (Wisconsin – Madison), ‘National Ancestry and Cultural Geography in Poly-Olbion’
• James Loxley (Edinburgh), ‘Jonson, Drayton and the Mythography of a Binational Britain’
• Sukanya Dasgupta (Calcutta), ‘Imagining Britain: Reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles and Poly-Olbion’

 

12.45-2.00       Lunch

• 15. Introduction to ‘The Children’s Poly-Olbion’ project and ‘The Faerie Land: Michael Drayton’s Vision of Britain’ exhibition: Liz Ellis (Policy Advisor, Communites and Diversity, Heritage Lottery Fund); Anne Louise Avery and Steve Pratley (Flash of Splendour Arts)

 

2.00-3.50         Session 3: Waters (Chair: Andrew Hadfield)

• Sandra Logan (Michigan State), ‘Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion: Maritime England and the Free Seas Debate’
• Shannon Garner-Balandrin (Northeastern), ‘Curls to Curled Waves: the Poly-Olbion and Michael Drayton’s Female Rivers’
• Bernhard Klein (Kent), ‘Poly-Olbion and “those Rough Gods of the Sea”’

 

3.50-4.10         Tea

 

4.10-5.55         Session 4: Localism & Regionalism (Chair: James Loxley)

• Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster), ‘“Of merry Robin Hood, and of his merrier men”: Anti-Curial Chorography and Michael Drayton’s “Robin Hood’s Story”’
• Todd Andrew Borlik (Huddersfield), ‘Poly-Olbion, Bio-Regionalism, and the Beating of the Bounds’
• Steph Mastoris (National Waterfront Museum), ‘Choices in chorography: Inclusion and omission in Drayton’s account of Nottinghamshire’

 

6.00     Exhibition opening: ‘The Faerie Land: Michael Drayton’s Vision of Britain’

FRIDAY 11 SEPTEMBER

 

9.10-10.50       Session 5: Contexts (Chair: Bernhard Klein)

• Daniel Cattell, ‘Michael Drayton and Britain’s Religious Past’
• Robert Smith, ‘Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain in John Trussell’s Touchstone of Tradition’
• Esther M. J. van Raamsdonk, ‘British Consciousness, Poly-Olbion and the Travelogue’

 

10.50-11.10     Coffee

 

11.10-12.30     Session 6: Cartographies (Chair: Sara Trevisan)

• Rab MacGibbon (National Portrait Gallery), ‘William Hole:  Drayton’s engraver in the context of Prince Henry’s court’
• William Porter (Harvard), ‘“By his spatious Maps”: The Cartographic Poly-Olbion’

 

 

12.30-2.00       Lunch

• 00-2.00. Concert: ‘With Musick of My Verse: The Music of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion’, Ars Eloquentiae, Ondaatje Theatre

 

2.05-3.20         Session 7: John Selden’s Poly-Olbion (Chair: Liz Oakley-Brown)

• Sjoerd Levelt (Bilkent), ‘John Selden’s Medieval Chronicles’
• Philip Schwyzer (Exeter), ‘Drayton and Selden in Dialogue’

 

3.25-4.45         Session 8: Poetics (Chair: Sukanya Dasgupta)

• Angus Vine (Stirling), ‘Drayton’s Copious Chorography’
• Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), ‘The Problems of Reading The Landscape’

 

4.45     Closing remarks