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  1. November 2023 – Bicentenary of the Bannatyne Club - by Laurie Atkinson 2023 marks the bicentenary of the foundation of the Edinburgh Bannatyne Club. Why an antiquarian printing society, dissolved after less than forty years, should warrant commemoration may not immediately be clear. But read on. One illustrious literary founder aside, the club represents a milestone in the transition from amateur scholarship to the professional academic work of universities and learned societies. One of its first publications suggests an attractive fable of scholarly inclusivity in the age of the elite gentleman’s club. Writing of Scottish ‘Antiquarianism’ about 1800, Padmini Ray Murray observes that: The rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of… Continue Reading
  2. April 2023 – 500th Anniversary of John Skelton’s Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell - by Laurie Atkinson The Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell by John Skelton is five hundred years evergreen. In 1523, this remarkable poem about Skelton’s elevation to the court of Fame was published in London by Richard Faques. Mostly the preserve of early modern scholars, Skelton is best known as the writer of satires and invectives at the court of Henry VIII – most famously against the king’s powerful minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who he calls ‘the bochers dogge’ (Why Come Ye Nat to Court?, line 298), among other things. But in the Garlande, Skelton’s subject is himself; or rather, a… Continue Reading
  3. Rainer Lengeler (1933-2022) - Rainer Lengeler, a long-time member of the Connotations Society and a close colleague of the founding editor Inge Leimberg, died on 29 October 2022. He was born in 1933 and grew up in the Eupen-Malmedy region, then and now a part of Belgium. He attended Belgian schools and was fluent in French as a result (German being his mother tongue). He subsequently studied at the universites of Leuwen and Cologne and he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn. He taught at the Universities of Kiel, Düsseldorf and Bonn, and he was elected a member of the prestigious Northrhine-Westfalian… Continue Reading
  4. Judith H. Anderson (1940-2022) - Belatedly, but no less sadly, we would like to notify the readers of Connotations that Judith H. Anderson passed away last year, leaving a gap in our editorial board that we have felt acutely. In an article on Donne published in Connotations in 2018, she set out by wondering in disbelief how close reading could ever be framed in opposition to cultural studies or indeed any investigation of intellectual and material history and presence. “Language,” she writes “is the basic building block of human culture, whether as philosophy, as politics, as literature, or as something else, and it clearly has… Continue Reading

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