*Call for Papers*

*Beyond Words: The Unknowable and the Unutterable in early modernity*


Friday 1st June 2018,

CREMS, University of York


This conference will explore the parameters of the Unknowable and the
Unutterable in early modernity. It will range across the theological, the
literary and the scientific, to attend to what early modern thinkers
deemed beyond what they could find words for. If this apophatic
inheritance – the language of what can’t be said - was a
theological-mystical mode of thinking, what happened to it in the
post-reformation climate of thought? Did natural philosophy understand the
knowable limits of nature in the manner of the apophatic? How did emergent
science negotiate the edges of what could be thought? What uses did early
modern writers find for the apophatic traditions, Dionysius, Cusa, or John
Scotus Eriugena? How did early modern poetry attend to the ineffable and
that which was beyond words? The conference invites papers on the
unknowable, the unutterable, the unthinkable and the unsayable, all
broadly considered, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, whether
English or European.

Keynote speaker: William Franke (Vanderbildt)

Author of ‘On What Cannot be Said’ and ‘A Philosophy of the Unsayable’
(among others).


Please send abstracts (c. 250 words) to Kevin Killeen
(kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk), by *Friday 10th November *(or send expressions
of interest).



This symposium is part of the lax and diffuse Thomas Browne Seminar series

https://www.york.ac.uk/english/news-events/browne/