Reading, watching, listening: the early modern audience and their entertainments, 1400-1800

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the opportunities and challenges that arise when we centre the audience in discussion of early modern entertainment.

Early modern audiences have received increased attention amongst scholars in recent years, invigorated by new interdisciplinary approaches. The period 1400-1800 marked major shifts: from manuscript to print culture, the rise of professional theatre, and the development of ‘amateur ’ street and household performance. Whether gathered in rowdy playhouses, overhearing singers on the street, or engaged in devotional reading at home, audiences across this period could take many forms.

This free conference features keynote speakers Elaine Hobby and Pete Smith, and will include an evening performance as well as workshop and training opportunities.

It is funded by Midlands 4 Cities and hosted with support from the Early Modern Research Centre at University of Birmingham.

Call for Papers

Our definition of both audience and entertainment is necessarily capacious. Possible topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:

• Print audiences: readers, printers, buyers, and writers of marginalia
• Theatre audiences: playgoers, spectators, dramatists
• The street crowd & urban entertainment and spaces: ballad-singers, preachers, alehouses
• Elite audiences: court-masques, operas, tournaments
• Early modern soundscapes: over-hearing, sonic identities, multisensory experiences
• Emotional and corporeal responses from audiences
• Audience manipulation and propaganda: ephemera, rumour
• Early modern visual culture and its audiences
• Gender and audience
• Theoretical approaches to audience: reader-response theories and imagined audience
• Reception of classical and medieval text amongst early modern audiences
• Afterlives, responses and imaginings of early modern audiences beyond the eighteenth century

We welcome abstracts of up to 250 words for individual research papers of 20 minutes in length, or 700 words for a panel of three people presenting on a shared topic or sub-theme.

Please submit abstracts via the following Google form before Friday 13 November 2026. (23:59 GMT). Successful applicants will be notified by Monday 30 November 2026. Papers are welcomed by Postgraduate Researchers and Early Career Researchers. 

A full programme will follow shortly. 

For more information or questions, please email the organizers, Olivia Golby-Kirk (Birmingham), Louisa Pickard (Birmingham) and James Kaye (Nottingham), at: earlymodaudconfm4c@gmail.com or contact us on the earlymodaudconf Instagram.