The Blake Society at St James’s Piccadilly
Programme
2000

[Data awaiting incorporation]

July 2000
Angela Esterhammer

August 2000
Bunhill Fields

Tuesday 19th September 2000
A Reconsideration of Execution & Conception: the Evidence of Blake’s Job Copperplates
May Sung
May Sung is a Ph.D. student at St. Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill.  Her study of the surviving plates for Blake’s ‘Illustrations to the Book of Job’ has thrown up fascinating evidence about Blake’s working methods.  The myriad corrections, erasures, & second thoughts (pentimenti) upon the copperplates contradict what has become, following Joseph Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), the conventional view of Blake’s creative process.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St. Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2XR; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 17th October 2000
Blake & Germany
Susanne Schmid
Dr. Susanne Schmid has lectured at the Free University of Berlin since 1994.  She has written a study on myth in contemporary women’s fiction (1996), & an introduction to Byron, Shelley and Keats (1999).  Her “Habilitation” was on the German reception of Shelley.  She has also written a variety of articles on contemporary writers & on romanticism, also an afterword to an English-German Blake edition (1996).
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St. Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2XR; 7.30pm.)

November 2000
National Portrait Gallery

Friday 1st December 2000
Dee Drake
Blake’s Hecate Colour Print: a Celebration of Infernal Female Desire
Dee Drake was recently awarded a doctorate by Stockholm University for her study ‘Searing Apparent Surfaces: Infernal Females in Four Early Works of William Blake’.
She writes: “It is my contention that the infernal constitutes an essential female element of the divine in Blake’s early work but is demonized in the late work as an attribute of the Female Will.  I propose degrees of female desire on an infernal scale (the less restrained the desire, the more infernal the female) which I find characterized by Thel, Oothoon, & Hecate.  As Hecate is the most infernal of these three figures, it is her mythological complexities as Goddess of the Limen, of the Dark Moon, & of the Underworld that I claim Blake celebrates in his colour print.”
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St. Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2XR; 7.30pm.)

December 2000
AGM