Early Modern Mentalities and Meeting Points is a new podcast project being run out of the Warburg Institute in London. As the title implies, over the course of this series, and with a wide range of speakers, we’ll be examining the early modern era from an array of different angles, vantage points, and perspectives. But in each case, a priority will be to try to delve as much as possible into the attitudes and casts of mind of our early modern ancestors, who were as culturally-conditioned as we are. It will inevitably also mean collapsing the partitions between areas of knowledge that tend to characterise modern academia and mean for a return to a world where its actors saw far fewer barriers between intellectual domains.

In this first podcast, the main themes are the classical tradition and botany, which will be explored through the prism of Mycology, Neo-Latin and Art and, in particular, the writings of a sixteenth-century antiquarian, Hadrianus Junius.

The speakers in this panel are:

  1. Siôn Parkinson is an artist, composer and writer based in Scotland. He is currently also pursuing a practice-based PhD at the University of Leeds where he is an Amanda Burton Scholar at the Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation. The focus of his thesis is the figure of the stinkhorn fungus in relation to sound and smell.
  2. Dr Caroline Spearing is a classicist by training and now a British Academy post-doctoral fellow based in the English Literature Department at the University of Exeter. She specialises in Neo-Latin, including the works of the 17th century poet, Abraham Cowley.