PI Jessica Otis will be presenting on Death by Numbers at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America this week. For anyone attending the meeting, the presentation will be Friday, March 10th, from 4:30-6PM in the Caribe Hilton Gran Salón Los Rosales A - Gran Salón Los Rosales (Garage). Free notebooks and stickers with the project logo will be available for anyone who wants one.

The presentation is part of a roundtable on Death and Violence in Early Modern Europe: “Violence and death were a regular part of everyday life in early modern Europe, from fatal accidents to infant mortality, from assassinations to deadly diseases, and from executions to old age. People recorded acts of violence and evidence of deaths in a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative sources, which leave an abundance of surviving evidence in modern archives. This roundtable will discuss various approaches to studying early modern violence and death using sources such as bills of mortality, criminal legal records, necrologies, state records, and diplomatic dispatches. The roundtable’s participants use mixed methods in their research, including methods associated with the digital humanities, which enable them to answer a variety of research questions about violence and death, as well as providing insight into the lived experiences of historical peoples, not just their deaths. Because studying these sources without care and attentiveness can also make victims and the dead just a number, the discussion will include how to be sensitive to tragedies or even well-lived but complete lives, while also protecting the emotional health of the researcher or research team.”

Can’t make it to the Renaissance Society of America? Look for us (and our mugs and notebooks and stickers) in Baltimore this fall, where we hope to present at the North American Conference of British Studies and/or Sixteenth Century Society & Conference annual meetings.