The ReConEx team is delighted to announce that we will be delivering one of the Devon and Exeter Institution’s monthly evening lectures on the evening of Thursday 30th March. These events are open to the public and aim to introduce cutting edge research to an interested public. £25 ticket includes drinks and supper and should be pre-booked at https://webcollect.org.uk/dei
See below for further details
Thursday 30th March 2023
Devon and Exeter Institution evening lecture with supper:
Writing Religious Conflict and Community in Exeter, 1500–1750.
Professor Philip Schwyzer, Dr Niall Allsopp and Dr David Parry
Devon and Exeter Institution, Cathedral Close, Exeter
6 pm for 6:30 talk followed by supper
Visit https://webcollect.org.uk/dei to pre-book tickets including drinks and supper.
In a sermon on the eve of Civil War, Exeter Puritan minister John Bond hailed Exeter as ‘a Beacon upon a hill, yea, as the Centre, heart and head of the West’. As an influential regional capital, Exeter was a centre for religious as well as political developments, and played a pivotal role in successive national conflicts, including the Prayerbook Rebellion/Western Rising of 1549, the Civil Wars, the Glorious Revolution, and the ‘Exeter Arian Controversy’ in eighteenth-century Dissent. Through these crises, Exeter’s preachers, poets, and printers expounded, defended, and contested competing visions of faith and fellowship.
The ReConEx project (‘Writing Religious Conflict and Community in Exeter, 1500–1750’) draws on a wealth of literary evidence (including poems, sermons, prophecies, pamphlets, letters, travel writing, captivity narratives, diaries, memoirs, and spiritual autobiographies) to trace how Exeter’s religious identity was written into being and fought over in the generations following the Protestant Reformation. In this event, we will introduce our project findings so far and will explore how the city of Exeter functioned as a sacred space and a site of confessional conflict facilitating encounters between individuals and the divine as well as between a diverse range of competing and co-existing religious communities.
Philip Schwyzer, Niall Allsopp and David Parry are members of the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. Philip Schwyzer is Professor of Renaissance Literature, with research interests including personal and collective memory, antiquarianism and national identities. Niall Allsopp is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, with research interests including the literature of the English Civil War, political ideas, and religious and civic ceremonies. David Parry has served in teaching and research roles at Exeter since 2017, with research interests including Puritan writers such as John Milton and John Bunyan and the intersections of rhetoric, religion and intellectual history.
Doors 6pm / Talk 6.30pm / Supper 7.30pm
Tickets £25
Tickets available at https://webcollect.org.uk/dei