The Restoration

Bangor Conference on the Restoration

Reconciliation and its failures in the late Stuart World, 1658-1714

The Bangor Conference on the Restoration: 23-25 July 2024

The period 1658-1715 was, of course, marked by conflict, and by polarising memories of conflict, in the Stuart world. But reconciliation – achieved, attempted, unsuccessful, and resisted - was, of necessity, also an important dimension of the age. When society had been so ruptured by events such as the restoration, the early 1660s religious settlement, the exclusion crisis and the emergence of bitter party strife, the 1688-9 revolution, and the Hanoverian succession, many groups felt an urgent need to heal division or to find way of working with old enemies; and failures to do this determined the course of later conflicts.

Forms of reconciliation shaped political thought, popular assumptions, and both literary and visual culture. The healing of division and the resolution of disharmony were central to Christian notions of church and salvation; to contract theories of the origins of government; to advocacy of religious toleration and comprehension; to genres of literature which stressed the re-emergence of harmony after rupture, and synthesis after polarisation; to emerging pragmatic approaches to politics; to international peace treaties and the building of foreign alliances; and to a myriad of other social, political, cultural, and artistic forms. Reconciliation, of course, also operated at personal, family, and community, levels.

In contrast, the inability to bind people together also affected human relationships, and resistance to reconciliation fostered movements as diverse as post-1660 republicanism, dissent, Jacobitism, Scots and Irish nationalism, and colonial resistance and resistance to colonialism; and it resulted in the formative European warfare of these decades.

Arguably, efforts to end division, and the effects of their frustration, were the crucial factors shaping the late Stuart world.
In 2024, the Bangor Conference on the Restoration will welcome people to beautiful Eryri / Snowdonia to explore this theme: not only examining specific instances, but attempting, perhaps, to understand how actors in the age conceived reconciliation. How, and how far, did they think reknitting society was possible or even desirable; how far can we gain new insights into the period by thinking about reconciliation as a theme?

The plenary papers will be:

Martin Dzelzainis (Leicester): Four Elegies and a Funeral: negotiating the Restoration
William Pettigrew (Lancaster): Royal African Companies: Trading in Enslaved Africans to Unify Restoration Society
Valerie Rumbold (Birmingham): Awkward print: making the unreconciled Swift
Alasdair Raffe (Edinburgh): Reconciliation and Fragmentation in Scottish Protestantism, 1660-1715

Programme

Please note: this is a provisional programme – exact paper titles and positions within panels may change slightly, all conferences can suffer last-minute withdrawals, and some chairs are to be determined, but it gives a good indication of the shape of the conference.

13:45 Plenary Lecture (Lecture Room 4)

Martin Dzelzainis: Four Elegies and a Funeral: negotiating the Restoration
Chair: Tom Corns

15:00 Tea (Lecture Room 2)

15:30 Panels

Reconciliation and its failure in Restoration literature (Lecture Room 4)

Helen Wilcox 'Violated Vows ... never go unpunished': the failure of reconciliation in Behn's prose fiction.
Tom Corns: Paradise Lost: reconciliation (and resistance) of sorts.
Laura Knoppers: “My Wife, My Traitress”: Milton’s Unreconciled Samson.
Chair: Achsah Guibbory

Reconciliation and the succession settlements post 1689 (Lecture Room 3)

Alison Shell: Jeremy Collier and non-juring literature
Nigel Aston: Before the ‘Venetian oligarchy’: the failure to establish a cross-party ministry, 1714-15
Austen Saunders: Non-juror book collecting

Chair: to be confirmed

17:00 End of panels – break to allow check in to accommodation

18:45 Buffet (Cledwyn Room 3 - for those who have ordered this)

20:15 Plenary Panel

Lessons from contemporary truth, reconciliation, and peace processes. Discussion led by Alys Brown, and Martin Frampton, Clive Glaser.
Chair: Tony Claydon

21:45 End

08:30 Light breakfast and coffee available in Powis Hall.

09:15 Plenary Lecture (Lecture Room 4)

William Pettigrew: ‘Royal African Companies: Trading in Enslaved Africans to Unify Restoration Society’.
Chair: David Veevers

10:30 Coffee (Lecture Room 2)

11:00 Panels

Reconciliation in the 1660s (Lecture Room 4)

David Appleby: Indigent royalist veterans: unwilling agents of national reconciliation 1660-1684
Tristram Griffin: ‘Popular Royalism: reconciliation, celebration and/or revenge in Restoration media’.
Newton Key: “Repairing the Breach: Reconciliation and Unity in Restoration Sermons.”
Chair: to be confirmed

Reconciliation in and beyond Europe (Lecture Room 3)

David Veevers: Peace-making and reconciliation in the Indian Ocean
Dr William White (University of Hertfordshire) Peace-making and reconciliation in the British Atlantic
Haig Smith: The 1684 abolition of the Massachusetts Bay Company
Chair: to be confirmed

12:30 Lunch (Powis Hall)

13:30 Plenary Lecture (Lecture Room 4)

Alasdair Raffe: Reconciliation and Fragmentation in Scottish Protestantism, 1660-1715
Chair: Tony Claydon

14:45 Tea (Lecture Room 2)

15:15 Panels

Religion and reconciliation – part one (Lecture Room 4)

Tim Cooper: Richard Baxter, William Johnson, and the Failure of Reconciliation.
Ben Sharpe: Danby and the 1675 Test Act
Chair: to be confirmed

Reconciliation and letters – part one (Lecture Room 3)

Mark Knights: Reconciliation and Division in the Life and Work of James Boevey, Merchant-Philosopher.
Hannah Straw: Reconciling Rochester: Reevaluating Gilbert Burnet’s Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester
Chair: to be confirmed

16:15 Ten minute break

16:25 Panels

Reconciliation and letters (part 2) (Lecture Room 4)

Anna Pravdica: Honesty, Hypocrisy, and Radical Belief in Post-Restoration England.
David Fletcher: Reconciliation and religious coexistence in new plays after the Glorious Revolution.
Chair as for part one

Reconciliation and religion (part 2) (Lecture Room 3)

Thomas Clifton: Reviewing, Rewriting, and Reconciling Spiritual Identity in Elizabeth Delaval’s Meditations and Memoirs
Chair as for part one

17:25 End of panels

19:00 Dinner (for those who have ordered this – Reichel Dining Hall)

08:30 Coffee and light breakfast available in Powis Hall

09:15 Plenary Lecture (Lecture Room 4)

Valerie Rumbold (Birmingham): Awkward print: making the unreconciled Swift

10:30 Coffee (Lecture Room 2)

11:00 Panels

Responses to the restoration in Britain (Lecture Room 4)

Waseem Ahmed (UCL) The Politics of Survival: ‘Monarchical Cromwellians and the use of apology tracts at the Restoration

Dr Gabriel Glickman (University of Cambridge) Migration of political dissidents at the Restoration

Ian Atherton: The Restoration of Cathedrals in the Church of England: Reconciliation and Division in the 1660s

Chair: Grant Tapsell

Aphra Behn and reconciliation (Lecture Room 3)

Elaine Hobby, ‘“Sir, I'le be reconcil'd to you on one condition” (Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677): Aphra Behn’s Reconciliations’

Dominic Boden-Tebbutt, ‘Wealth, hypochondria, and medical advancement in Molière’s Le malade imaginaire and Aphra Behn’s Sir Patient Fancy’

Marcus Nevitt, 'Commonplace Behn: Reading Printed Drama in the 1680s'.

12:30 Lunch (Powis Hall)

Showing the Main Arts Building of Bangor University at night

Accommodation

Please use one of the codes below when booking for a preferencial rate:

RESTO24 – Room only @£40 a night
RESTO24-B - B&B @£50 a night

Book Accommodation at Bangor University Halls

Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG

Contact Us

Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG

+44 (0)1248 382009

cahbconferences@bangor.ac.uk

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