Traherne Online Research Network

Detail of Brasenose College from David Loggan, Oxonia Illustrata
Detail of manuscript of Select Meditations, III.83

 

The Oxford Traherne edition, under its general editor Dr Julia Smith, has recently set up a Traherne Online Research Network. Scholars working on Traherne are widely scattered, and do not often have the opportunity either to hear about current research, or to talk about their own work with other Traherne experts. The online research network will facilitate this, and will also build up a community of scholars in advance of the 350th anniversary of Traherne’s death in 2024, which will help to raise his profile with other scholars and with students.

 

The Traherne Online Research Network will meet 3 times a year (October, January, April) via Zoom to listen to and discuss a short research paper, and to raise research queries. You do not need to be an academic researcher to attend the seminars, and students and others interested in Traherne are very welcome.

 

Our first meeting took place on Thursday 26 October 2023, when Professor Sarah Hutton, University of York, gave a paper on ‘”I need not treat of Vertues in the ordinary way”: Ordinary and un-ordinary discussion of virtue in Traherne’s Christian Ethicks’.

 

 Our next meeting is as follows:

Thursday 18 January 2024, 5.00 p.m. London time (GMT): Dr Thomas Clifton, Coventry University, ‘Recontextualizing Verse and Thought in Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations and his Works’

 

If you would like to offer a paper for a subsequent meeting, we would be very pleased to hear from you. Please send a proposed title and a very brief synopsis (no more than a hundred words); the paper should last no longer than 30 minutes. Your suggestions are also welcomed as to how else the network can encourage the exchange of ideas on Traherne.

 

The Traherne Online Research Network is also organizing a longer online symposium in October 2024, with a number of shorter 15 to 20-minute papers, as part of the events which we are planning to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Traherne’s death. Further details of its date, format, and how to submit papers will be available in early 2024.

 

To join the mailing list for the network, to receive the Zoom link for a seminar, or to offer a paper, please contact Dr Julia Smith.

 
 
  • Left image: Detail of Brasenose College, from David Loggan, Oxonia Illustrata (Oxford, 1675): courtesy of Yale Center for British Art
  • Right image: Osborn MS b308, p. 159 (‘Select Meditations’, III.83): The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University