35th SEDERI International Conference, ‘Early Modern Travails’

‘Travail’ in the early modern period encapsulates a physical as well as an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimension, nothing short of hard work and of a trying and taxing experience, one that tests the determination and resilience of those who dare undertake it. Rich in literary connotations, travail frequently also refers to the throes of the process of writing, editing, and translating, and to the outcome of such physically demanding mental labour in the form of poems and of prose fiction and non-fiction (from memoirs and epistles, to cosmographies, to maps). As later noted by Samuel Johnson, ‘travel’ is furthermore ‘generally supposed originally the same with travail’, differing ‘only as particular from general’, though commonly used indistinguishably in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries to mean journey and voyage. Travail thus becomes a way to think about journeys out into the world, into the depths of socio-political and individual selves, and into the intricacies of textual composition. It moreover stands as a reminder that writing was a professional and an economic activity, and as such illustrates other meanings of work and labour. The 35th SEDERI International Conference invites discussions around the complexities of the multifaceted notion of travail through analyses of diverse perspectives and sources: from travelogues to devotional prose, from plays to works on geography and history, from epic poetry to cartography. Proposals are invited that might address (but are not limited to) any of the following: – Travel guides and accounts of actual travel practices – Depictions of imagined voyages to made-up lands – Utopian/dystopian writing – Pilgrimages and other forms of embodied spiritual practices – Metaphorical explorations of writing, reading, and performing as forms of travelling/travailing – Travelling books: commerce and the booktrade – Publishing and translating: practices and challenges – Professional authors, playwrights, actors – Commercial theatre and touring practices – Women travellers – Pain and travail: bodily suffering and the throes of writing