All panels take place at Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Campus

Registration and coffee/tea: 9.15 – 9.30am

Welcome: 9.30 – 9.40 am

Keynote speaker: Isabel Davis: ‘Filling Sails and Wrecking Ships: Wind and Conception in Elizabethan Britain’

9.45 – 10.45 am

10.45am – 12.30pm

Panel One (A): Alternative narratives and perspectives

Chair: Leah Astbury

  • Edwina Christie, ‘Surrogate Mothers in Seventeenth-Century Romance Fiction’
  • Coco Farinet-Brenner, ‘Incestuous sweets between ‘em’: Stepmothers, the incest narrative, and disruptive maternal agency in early modern England
  • Lubaaba Al-Azami, ‘The Baburnama: Maternal Authority and the Founding of Mughal India’
  • Amy Victoria Hayes, ‘‘Finding the family: raising Scotland’s royal children in the late medieval period’

11am – 12.30pm

Panel One (B): Religion

Chair: Catherine Maguire

  • Jade Godsall, ‘Motherhood and Martyrdom: Reimagining the ‘Opened’ Maternal Body in Fifteenth-Century Hagiography’
  • Daphna Oren-Magidor, ‘Mary Whitelocke and the Anxieties of Puritan Motherhood’
  • 10-minute research overviews: Naomi Bloxham, ‘The Catholic Women in the Warming Pan Scandal’; Kristy Frenken-Francis, ‘Pregnancy, Labour, and Women’s Communities in Marie de France’s “Le Fresne”’

12.30 – 1.15pm – Lunch

1.15 – 2.45pm

Panel Two (B): Ritual and ceremony

Chair: Lauren Cantos

  • Mette. M. Ahlefeldt-Laurvig, ‘The Curse of Eve: The ritual of churching of women after childbirth in early modern Denmark’
  • Róisín Donohoe, ‘“A solemn relic sent to women travailing”: Childbirth and the Church in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England’
  • Jennifer Hardy, ‘Maternal Time: The Superposition of Confinement, Parturition and Lying-In in Early Modern England’
  • 10-minute research overviews: Kirsty Bolton, ‘Motherhood, Space, and Building in Medieval Romance’

Panel Two (B): Iconography and art

Chair: Rebecca Whiteley

  • Fabien Lacouture, ‘Mother vs Death : motherhood and protection in early modern Italian apotropaic paintings’
  • Orsolya Mednyánszky, ‘Pater Incertus: Skepticism and Evidence of the Incarnation in Late Medieval Art’
  • 10-minute research overview: Fiammetta Campagnoli, ‘Columna Genetrix or the Rhetoric of Expectation: Virtualities and Shadows in Tintoretto’s Maternal Images’

2.45 – 3pm – Coffee/tea break

3 – 4.30pm

Panel Three: (Pre)modern maternal medicine and care

Chair: Catherine Maguire

  • Helen Esfandiary, ‘Mothers and Medics: Mediating Children’s Medical Practice in Eighteenth-century England’
  • Rebecca Whiteley, ‘Fetal images and maternal agency’
  • Juliana Dresvina, ‘Social worker’s visit to the middle ages: using attachment theory to assess mother-child relationships in pre-modern Europe’

4.30 – 4.45pm – Break

Keynote speaker: Leah Astbury: ‘Fruitful families and their paperwork in early modern England’

4.45 – 5.45pm –

Closing remarks: 5.45 – 6pm

Acknowledgments: This event is supported by a generous grant from Queen Mary’s Doctoral College Initiative Fund.