Between 2–5 July 2025, over 300 renaissance scholars came to Bristol for the eleventh biennial Society for Renaissance Studies (SRS) Conference. Having hosted the very first SRS Conference in 2004, the University once again welcomed academics from across the world for a packed four-day programme organised by Dr Kenneth Austin, Dr Ed Holberton, Dr Catherine Hunt, Dr Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer, and Dr Sebastiaan Verweij, with support from other Bristol academics.
The theme was ‘Interconnections’, inviting scholars to explore both Bristol’s significance in regional, European and transatlantic networks of commerce and exchange and also other kinds of relationships between people, places, ideas, and textual and material culture. The three plenary speakers – Prof. Giuseppe Marcocci (University of Oxford), Prof. Subha Mukherji (University of Cambridge), and Prof. Bronwen Wilson (UCLA) – discussed the role of books and libraries in early-sixteenth-century global knowledge exchange, the hermeneutics of different types of renaissance encounter, and the Leiden Sketchbook (1577–85) and other contemporary itineraries written by Europeans traversing Islamic areas. Nearly 100 panels, seminars and roundtables offered other perspectives on the ways in which strands of early modern experience came together, clashed, and coalesced. For example, Dr Tamsin Badcoe offered a paper on ‘Edmund Spenser and the Art of Long-Distance Running’, while Dr John McTague and Dr Rhiannon Daniels ran a seminar on ‘Practice-Based and Collaborative Research into Early Modern Print Cultures’. The conference also celebrated twenty-first-century connections across academia and beyond, with Dr Gina Walter organising a roundtable about early career networks and Dr Laurence Publicover hosting local secondary school teachers for a discussion about teaching Shakespeare. Other Bristol English Department researchers who contributed include Dr Emily Derbyshire, Kitty Edgerley, Dominic Gilani, Dr Robert King, Hollyann Pye, and Kaila Yankelevich.
There were also other activities. Dr Jenny Batt invited participants to help print the conference’s very own newspaper, The Bristol Mercury, on the University's experimental, historically-influenced letterpress printing studio, Bristol Common Press. Dr Richard Stone led guided walks exploring Bristol’s history of slavery and how to navigate the city’s relationship with its past. Meanwhile, Dr Ian Calvert and Dr Lesel Dawson organised a unique performance in the beautiful Gaunt’s Chapel (also known as the Lord Mayor’s Chapel) which was built in 1230 to serve the adjacent Hospital of Saint Mark. PhD researchers Tom Sherman and Lucy Ruddiman and undergraduate student Deborah Beckett performed extracts from Euripides’ Hecuba (c. 424 BC), Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia (c. 1553), and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599–1601), selected to consider the conflicted relationship between sympathy and violence, and the ways in which texts speak to each other across the ages. Local young musician Archie Robinson played the organ.
Dr Rachel Hare, Bristol