Saffron Walden Town Library Society
Programme October 2015 – January 2016
Thursday 15 October 2015 at 8.00 pm
"Thirty-eight years on: how Parliament has changed."
Sir Alan Haselhurst
Looking back on his career in Parliament, Sir Alan’s talk will explore procedure, scrutiny, the role of the Speaker, the need for a second chamber and governance. He will also cover the role of an MP and interaction with constituents and aims to illustrate how in certain respects Parliament has not changed.
Alan Haselhurst has been MP for Saffron Walden for over 38 and before that was MP for Middleton and Prestwich in Greater Manchester. He was Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons from 1997 to 2010, chair of its Administration Committee in the 2010 Parliament and Chair of the International Executive of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association between 2011 and 2014. He has a passion for cricket and has written six comic novels about the game.
(Please note that this meeting is on Thursday, and not on our usual Wednesday evening)
'Death and Glory : Panegyrics and Politics in Early Modern Funeral Sermons'
Dr Penny Pritchard
Funeral sermons provide a startlingly vivid insight into the experience of both life and death for early modern English Protestants. Like other, less neglected, contemporary forms of popular religious literature – such as the spiritual biography – the funeral sermon invites readers to consider the subject’s life both as a spiritual exemplar as well as within the political and other secular contexts which shaped it. Through a close reading of Audley End minister Edward Rainbow’s 1649 funeral sermon for Susanna Howard, Countess of Suffolk, this talk will demonstrate some of the literary and historical riches to be gleaned from reading funeral sermons, but also how a greater understanding of their formal structure and origins can reveal how early modern ministers deployed funeral sermons to communicate ideas far beyond their ostensible, commemorative, purpose.
Dr Penny Pritchard is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire where she has taught since obtaining her doctorate from the University of East Anglia in 2006; her doctoral thesis considered the writing and rhetorical strategies of Daniel Defoe before 1719 in relation to his Nonconformist background. Her publications include The Long 18th Century : Literature from 1660 to 1790 (York Press, 2010) and a chapter on the early modern funeral sermon in The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689-1901 (OUP, 2012) as well as several publications on Defoe. She is an active member of the Defoe Society and serves on the Executive Committee for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Wednesday 6 January 2016 at 8.00 pm
Worlds of Journeys
Join us to celebrate the New Year with a series of readings about travel, both reports of actual voyages, mostly taken from volumes in the Town Library, and journeys in the mind, including the usual mixture of old familiars and those less visited.
All events are held in Saffron Walden Library. There is no charge for admission and non-members are welcome. The Library has disabled access.
