‘Byron and the Bible’ Newstead Abbey, Nottingham 2 May 2015

For the second year in a row, the Newstead Abbey Byron Society conference, organised once again by Mirka Horova and Ken Purslow, was held at Newstead Abbey. Another stimulating and convivial conference took place, with attendees coming from all over the world, and as far away as Moscow and Los Angeles. On Friday evening, prior to the conference itself, we convened at the Mansfield hotel where most would be lodging. Bernard Beatty and Gavin Hopps provided the after-dinner entertainment, performing a selection of poetry chosen by Peter Cochran, whom we toasted in his absence, wishing him good health.

On Saturday morning, participants boarded a mini-coach and embarked on the short jaunt to Newstead Abbey. After morning registration, Gavin Hopps (St Andrews) opened with his plenary, chaired by Mirka Horova. Hopps’s lecture, ‘Byron and the Post-Secular’, examined the ‘paradoxical openness to the impossible, unsettling affects in Don Juan.’ For Hopps, the post-secular is defined as ‘demystification in reverse’, calling on a return to a radical ontological openness—skepticism in the postmodern—and can be traced back to the Romantic poets and nineteenth-century philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. After a theoretical first half, he smoothly transitioned into a detailed analysis of the ‘Norman Abbey’ stanzas of Don Juan. He also maintained that Byron focuses on and laments the abolition and subsequent destruction of the abbey during the Reformation and the English Civil War, which inspired feelings of embarrassment and shame at one’s history, through the ‘ghosts’ of one’s past. In his concluding remarks, Hopps claimed that there is an elegiac quality to the stanzas, and a longing for the idealisation of a ‘perfect’ past. By adopting a post-secular interpretation, a conceptual connection to the past and religion is made. Finally, he asserted that Byron was not a nihilist, like so many critics had held, but a positivist who wanted to be open to all experience.

After a short coffee break, the two morning parallel sessions commenced. In the first session (1A), chaired by Shona Allan (Cologne), Bernard Beatty (Liverpool and St Andrews), Anna Camilleri (Oxford) and Agustín Coletes Blanco (Oviedo) gave their interpretations of ‘Byron & Biblical Allusion’. In his paper ‘“According to the Old Text”: Byron and the Sacred Scriptures’, Bernard Beatty began with a typically subtle and detailed analysis of the first four stanzas of Don Juan, Canto XI, highlighting the ‘bewildering but purposive interplay’ between digression and narrative. Stressing the role of illness in the development of Byron’s orthodoxy and belief here, Beatty also noted that Byron’s problem with religion, with Christianity, was quite simply its ‘manyness’. In her paper ‘Sacrilegious Heroics: Biblical and Byronic Archetypes of the Vengeful Feminine’, Anna Camilleri then explored varying attitudes towards blood-spilling vengeance depending on the gender of the perpetrator, using examples not only from The Corsair, but also from contemporary film. She posed some fascinating questions about feminine vengeance and the explicit contrast between how blood shed by men and blood shed by women is viewed differently. The final paper of the session, Agustín Coletes Blanco’s ‘“A great admirer of Scripture as a composition”: Biblical Allusion in Byron’s Letters and Journals’, moved the focus from poetry to prose, as Coletes Blanco considered how Byron’s biblical experience influenced his private writings. He noted the variety of these biblical allusions, but also stressed the fact that neither the frequency nor the variety of allusions used seemed to lead to any kind of religious feeling in these letters and journals.

The second parallel session, ‘Byron’s Cain’ (1B), was chaired by Horova and included papers by Peter Cochran (Newstead Byron Society), Marina Ragaczewskaja (Independent), and Peter Francev (Mt San Antonio). As ill health had prevented Peter Cochran from being there in person, his paper, ‘Why did Byron have to write Cain before he could finish The Vision of Judgement?’ was read by Horova. Cochran’s argument was that Lucifer makes Cain a great play in that he and God are equals, and that he is entitled to provide his perspective of his...