The Spring 2019 Brown Bag Talks schedule is now posted to the library’s website:  http://library.unca.edu/c.php?g=291476&p=6475924

Library Brown Bag Talks are free and open to UNC Asheville students, faculty, and staff as well as the Asheville community. Feel free to bring your lunch. Light refreshments are always served.

Please join us next week for our first Brown Bag of the semester.  Evan Gurney will talk about his recent book, Love’s Quarrels: Reading Charity in Early Modern England. 
 

Date: Thursday, January 24

Time: 12 – 1 PM

Location: Ramsey Library Special Collections

Evan Gurney, Department of English

“Vagrant Virtue: Reading Charity in Early Modern England”

Evan Gurney will present work from his new book, Love’s Quarrels: Reading Charity in Early Modern England, which explores overlaps between the landscape of poverty and social dislocation in early modern England, the period’s emergent laws that criminalized itinerant poverty, and a new popular genre of literature that purported to reveal the schemes and guises of wandering vagrants who weren’t placed in a settled location or occupation. These “masterless men and women,” as they were called, acquired a symbolic power in the cultural landscape, and their reputed capacity for persuasion and disguise offered a stand-in for larger cultural anxieties about the instability of language and unreliability of appearance. Vagrancy worried and fascinated contemporaries even as it offered them a touchstone for the interpretive pressures of reading, giving, and living charitably.

For questions or comments about Library Brown Bag Talks, please contact Gene Hyde, Head of Special Collections and University Archivist, UNC Asheville. ghyde@unca.edu or 828-251-6645