I don’t think I heard a dud paper, but three of those that I
heard stand out.
I am a longstanding fan of Kate Narveson, whose lovely paper
on the emotional salience of the doctrine of assurance in English Protestantism
had a warmth all too rare in histories of religion and theology. Once again,
Kate demonstrates her humane yet rigorous engagement with her subjects. There
aren’t many people out there who I’d rather hear speak about Puritan culture:
and I don’t say that solely because this was a version of a piece due to be
published in a forthcoming book on Puritanism and the emotions edited by Tom
Schwanda and myself.
At ERRG, the ‘pre-conference’ for graduate students, I
enjoyed a wonderful paper by David de Boer, a first-year doctoral student at the
University of Constanz, whose description of Catholic efforts to rescue both
images and relics (and to turn images into relics) during the Protestant
iconoclasm in the Netherlands in the 1570s was one of the stand-outs of the
conference. The issues are horribly complex: David untangled them beautifully.
One to watch.
But for me, the stand-out paper of the entire
conference (and, thanks to the curse of parallel sessions, I missed lots of
them) was from Neil Younger, whom I taught as an undergraduate many years ago.
Neil’s account of Christopher Hatton, who was Lord Chancellor under Elizabeth
I, was revelatory: we always knew that Hatton was an antipuritan, but the
extent of his unmistakably Catholic connections and patronage, including
individuals involved in ummistakable plots against the queen, has not I think
been revealed like this before. As a glimpse of the ambiguities of the
Elizabethan regime and of the compromises forced on all sorts of individuals
compelled to be a part of it, this was new to me. I hope we see it in print
soon.
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