The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Renaissance Literature Seminar meets with Jonathan Koch, Assistant Professor of English at Pepperdine University, on Saturday, September 21. Professor Koch's research focuses on early modern British literature, history, and religion, particularly studying experiences and expressions of religious toleration in seventeenth-century England. His seminar paper, "Lay Speech and the Style of Indifference in Cavendish and Dryden," reads Margaret Cavendish’s Orations of Divers Sorts (1662) and John Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682) together as examples of how a poetics of religious toleration developed alongside the more familiar ideas and practices of toleration that emerged in and from Restoration England. Drawing from contemporary discussions about preaching style and adiaphora (things indifferent), Cavendish and Dryden cast themselves as lay-speakers whose simple style of speech is sufficient for conveying essential religious truth. But even as they preach common quiet, both writers swerve from their posture of stylistic indifference to indulge in the pitch and timbre of other voices, revealing the challenge and the opportunity of imagining religious toleration.

All EMSI events are free and open to the public.