Early modern history plays dramatized the recent and distant past for audiences and readers across Europe. While there is a wealth of scholarship on individual national traditions, European history plays have been rarely studied from comparative, interdisciplinary and multilingual perspectives. This conference will explore a range of questions. What was the relationship between historical drama and other forms of historical writing? How did vernacular and neo-Latin history plays respond to major political events and religious conflicts, both at home and abroad? How far did history plays exert influence across national borders?

9 September – Programme

10:00-11:00 Keynote #2 Blair Worden, ‘History and Tragedy on the Jacobean Stage’
Chair: Sofie Kluge

11:15-13:00 Session #4 War
Chair and Respondent: Peter Wilson
Jacobo de Camps Mora, ‘A Sceptical Vision of Imperial Warfare in Calderón’s El sitio de Bredá’
Christian Dahl, ‘Joan of Arc in London, Rouen, and Paris 1590-1640’
David Zirak-Schmidt, ‘Staging the Thirty Years’ War’

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:45 Session #5 Royal Deaths
Chair and Respondent: Jim Van der Meulen
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘British Royal Executions Through the Eyes of German Dramatists’
Rasmus Vangshardt, ‘Deaths of Medieval Rulers’
A. Robert Lauer, ‘The Tragic Deaths of King Sebastian I of Portugal’

15:45-16:15 Tea

16:15-18:00 Session #6 History and Its Public
Chair and Respondent: tba
Erik Coenen, ‘Popular Revolt in Shakespeare and the Comedia’
Amy Lidster, ‘Investing in History’
Josh McLoughlin, ‘Impossible history 1640–1737’

18:00-19:00 Concluding roundtable

19:00 Dinner