Conference: Reading the Practical in Early Modern Literature

‘Verse with wings of skill': Reading the Practical in Early Modern Literature

16-17th April 2026
The Diamond, University of Sheffield

Registration is now open! 

You can access the registration page via this link: Reading the Practical in Early Modern Literature | University of Sheffield

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This two-day interdisciplinary symposium will invite scholars to re-consider practical texts written between c. 1558 and 1642 as productive sources for literary criticism. In a period best known today for its poetry and drama, practical texts such as Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman were ‘almost literally read to pieces’, Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry ‘led the market’ as ‘a Tudor best-seller’, and cookery books enjoyed a staggering 70% reprint rate (1). That these texts occupied such a prominent position in the publishing industry is testament to their importance in early modern life. Yet despite this, literary criticism has been slow to embrace such texts as more than merely contextual sources for canonical texts by poets and dramatists such as Shakespeare and Spenser. Critics continue to frame Tusser’s work as an agricultural manual or almanack rather than a book of poetry, for example, while literary scholars tend to note his significance in the same breath as they denigrate the quality of his verse: an ‘agrarian book of jingles’ or ‘collection of doggerel’ (2). Other practical texts such as receipt books and surveying texts have been interrogated primarily as a means of understanding early modern culture and society. Less common are studies of practical texts as works of literature, studies that centre the practical text rather than positioning it as context for the work of more canonical writers. 

This symposium recentres the practical text, encouraging readings of this underrepresented and understudied corpus of literature as more than texts that inform our understanding of the period or more canonical Renaissance writers. It aims to demonstrate the value of reading practical and instructional texts as legitimate objects, worthy of literary analysis in their own right. 

The keynote speakers will be Natalya Din-Kariuki (Warwick) and Laurence Publicover (Bristol). 

Provisional conference programme

Thursday 16th April

09:00-9:15 Check in and opening remarks

09:15-10:45 Panel 1: Human/Non-human
Chair: Sharon Emmerichs

Meteorological Grammar in Early Modern Husbandry Manuals
Patrick Durdel

Curing Creatures Serviceable for the Use of Man: Gervase Markham’s Epitome (1616) and an Early Modern Ethics of Care
Ayşe Ece Cavcav

‘first the life of a Plant’: the Vegetal Analogy in Early Modern Midwifery Guides and Natural History
Amelia Ormondroyd Williams

10:45-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-12:30 Panel 2: Bodies and Selves
Chair: Kathryn Hempstead

‘I’ve got a blank space, baby’: Love Letters, Queer Annotation, and Nicholas Breton’s Packet of Letters
Sierra Carter

“Good Habite of the Bodie”: Close Reading Exercise in Early Modern Practical Literature
Laurie Higgins

Hands on the Page: Marginalia, Memory, and Women’s Use of Early Modern Practical Texts
Rachel East

Queer Tropes of Care and Disability in Early Modern Prescriptive Literature
Joseph Maddocks

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-15:00 Panel 3: Local, National, Global: (Re)locating the Practical Text
Chair: Sierra Carter

Putting two and two together: Early Modern interactions with arithmetic in London and Gloucestershire
Meryl Faiers

Title TBD
Kate So

How Joseph Banks Read his Tusser: Plants and Englishness in the Margins of the Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry
Grace Murray

15:00-15:15 Coffee break

15:15-16:45 Panel 4: Language learning in the global early modern
Chair: Natalya Din-Kariuki

Framing Practical Translingual Texts in the Narration of English-Indigenous Encounters
Weiao Xing

Language-learning on the early modern colonial frontier: the case of Roger Williams's A Key into the Language of America
Freya Abbas

Everyday Arts of Knowledge: Chinese Practical Texts and Cosmopolitan Literacy in the Spanish Philippines
Yangyou Fang

16:45-17:00 Coffee break

17:00-18:00 Keynote: Natalya Din-Kariuki

Friday 17th April

09:00-10:00 Career roundtable & coffee

10:00-11:30 Panel 1: Science and Medicine
Chair: Joseph Maddocks

Theories of body; theories of soil: understanding agriculture through medical manuals
Emily Naish

Translating the Practical: Unlettered Translation as Chymical Experiment in the Works of John Hester
Clémence Smith

The Strange Case of ‘M’: framing the melancholy reader in Timothy Bright’s Treatise (1586)
Louise Fang

11:30-11:45 Coffee break

11:45-13:15 Panel 2: Eat Your Words
Chair: Grace Murray

Hungry Minds: Learning to Read with John Murrell’s A New Booke of Cookerie
Shanti Lara Giovannetti-Singh

‘What's in a name?’: Attributing Authorship in English Recipe Books 1600-1642
Kathryn Hempstead

‘Performe this well’: English Cookery Books as Theatrical Scripts
Chloe Fairbanks

13:15-14:15 Lunch

14:15-15:45 Panel 3: Poetic in Practical
Chair: Emily Naish

Title TBD
Felicity Sheehy

Textual Bodies and Material Metaphors in Thomas Godfrie’s A Riche Storehouse for the Sicke
Charlotte Brace

The Prosaic Uses of Poetry: The Early Modern Yeoman’s Guide to Poetic Husbandry
Sharon Emmerichs

15:45-16:00 Coffee break

16:00-17:30 Panel 4: Religion and Performance
Chair: Freya Abbas

Early Modern Tradecraft Manuals: A Practical Guide?
Julian Yates

Title TBD
Samantha Reavis

Eating Your Way Through Isaiah: The Practical and the Exegetical in Thomas Newton’s Translation of Levinus Lemnius’ An Herbal for the Bible
Francis Taylor

17:30-18:30 Keynote: Laurence Publicover

18:30-18:45 Closing Remarks

Registration

The registration fees for the conference are as follows:

General academic admission: £50
This tier is for academics who received their PhD more than 5 years ago or academics who received their PhD less than 5 years ago and are now in full-time employment

Funded PGR admission: £20
This tier is for students currently working towards their masters or PhD with funding

Self-funded PGR/unwaged ECR admission (non-speaker): £10
This tier is for either students currently working towards their masters or PhD without funding or academics who received their PhD less than 5 years ago and not currently in full-time employment

Self-funded PGR/unwaged ECR admission (speaker): free
This tier is for either students currently working towards their masters or PhD without funding or academics who received their PhD less than 5 years ago and not currently in full-time employment

Online attendance: free

The deadline to register (Reading the Practical in Early Modern Literature | University of Sheffield) is Tuesday 31st March.

If you have any questions, you can contact the organisers via scems@sheffield.ac.uk.

References

(1) E.N.L Poynton, A Bibliography of Gervase Markham, 1568?-1637 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1962), p. 2; Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 146; Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, ed. by Geoffrey Grigson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. xviii.

(2) Wendy Wall, ‘Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Syrup and Domesticity in Early Modern England’, Modern Philology 104.2 (2006), p. 160; McRae, p. 146.