The annual GEMS-lecture is held by a scholar of international standing whose work reflects the double focus of the centre’s mission: early-modern cultural history combined with methodological reflection.
Dr. Carme Font-Paz, Associate Professor of English Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and director of WINK (Women’s Invisible Ink), is giving a lecture where she’ll be presenting the WINK project and her paper on ‘Intellectual Freedom in Early Modern Women’s Spiritual Writings: Practice, Methods, and Identities’.
The essence and manifestation of God’s love has been a major concern for men and women of faith over the centuries, and the object of mystical, fictional and analytical approaches to understanding the relationship between human and divine nature. This presentation will briefly examine the methodological challenges posed by narratives of faith and grace that seek to represent subjective reality as an experience of universal truth.
By paying special attention to four seventeenth-century women writers from different Christian backgrounds, we shall see in what ways their notion of intellectual freedom was constructed and invoked as the primary reason for writing and speaking in public against pastoral misconduct, social ills and domestic abuse within their congregations and communities of faith. Their arguments point at their own freedom of conscience, as well as the “hypocrisie” and superficiality of the alleged “liberty of conscience and freedom” of their own communities. They claim to be intellectually freer in their obedience to God.
This paper will bring to light Maria Jesus de Ágreda manuscript Leyes de la esposa (1637) for the first time, Arcangela Tarabotti’s La semplicità ingannata (1654), Susanna Parr’s Apologie against the Elders (1659), and Anne Wentworth’s A Vindication (1670). We will look at the discourse of divine love and personal conscience as a common feature of female spirituality and intellectuality within a European context, markedly influenced by Teresa de Ávila’s program for mental prayer. We shall discuss the relationship between literary genre and theological tradition, the limits of reason and the imagination as sources of knowledge, and the faint borderlines between obedience and freedom of conscience as paths for intellectual inquiry.
Dr. Carme Font-Paz is Associate Professor of English Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is also an ICREA Academia fellow and director of the European ERC Starting Grant project WINK “Women’s Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity”. A specialist in prophetic genres and early modern women’s writing, her latest books are Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2017) and, with Nina Geerdink, Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2018). She is now preparing her forthcoming monograph Women Writing on Social Change in Early Modern Europe (Brepols).
Renaissance authors tended to fall back on classical literary models, which they wanted to equal or even surpass. In the case of theater, Terence’s Eunuchus was one of the most popular model texts. In the city of Vicenza, near Venice, Giovanni Battista Calderari began to translate this comedy into Italian, but not only that: he also began to rework it. The result is a fascinating rewrite, in which, for example, the secondary character of the ‘Other’ becomes a Moorish woman. In this lecture we place Calderari’s text next to the original, and highlight current issues such as gender, ethnicity and performance in a play text from the Renaissance – which is not so far removed from our own time.
Tuesday January 23, 2024, 7:30 PM
Followed by reception
Rozier Building, Classroom 2.1 Rozier 44 – 9000 Ghent
Landscape History & Ecology – Ghent, 27-31 May 2024
This Spring School is organised by Ghent University (Doctoral Schools), University of Groningen, the Huizinga Institute and the Dutch Research School for Medieval Studies to stimulate contacts and exchange between PhD candidates and ReMa students in the field of cultural history, art history, historical geography, urban history, archaeology, early modern history, medieval history, literary studies, environmental psychology, environmental design and engineering, sustainability studies and environmental education. The course will mainly focus on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, but students working on Antiquity or the Modern Period can attend as well.
Topic
Climate change, depletion of natural resources, loss of natural and cultural landscapes, and many other (ecological) sustainability challenges urge us to (re)evaluate human interaction with the natural world. This renewed environmental consciousness has invigorated not only scientists working on effects in the present and solutions for the future, but also those who study the (distant) past. It has become clear that we need to take the story back(much) further than the industrialisation of the second half of the eighteenth century. Specifically in medieval and early modern studies, scholars have uncovered the deep historical backgrounds of the anthropogenic ecological challenges, including (over)exploitation of natural landscapes, diminishment of open space, deforestation, food production, use of energy and water, fauna and flora extinctions et cetera. Over the past decades, ever more research has been conducted into the ecological impact and implications of practices in different landscapes. Also the traces of environmental mentalities in art and the cultural representation of human interactions with the environment is a flourishing field, strongly influenced by ecocritical approaches. The Spring School will therefore pay attention to a wide range of ecological issues in history related to the landscape of city, country and colony and their mediation in cultural production, most notablyliterature and art. It combines a focus on the medieval and early modern period with an multidisciplinary perspective, attending to the theoretical and methodological background of landscape and cultural history, ecocriticism and archaeology.
Approaches
This course takes four topics and methodologies related to historical landscape and ecology as a starting point:
(A) History of the city and the country,
(B) Archaeology and landscape history,
(C) Artistic representation and ecocriticism,
(D) Ecology and economy.
Ten specialists will reflect from their scholarly background (landscape history, archaeology, literary studies, cultural history) on ecological issues in their own research. An accompanying reading list gives rise to further reflection and discussion with the participants. This will offer students a framework to think theoretical concepts and methodologies through in relation to their own work. Through short pitches the attending PhD students will reflect on the possibilities and difficulties of working with the same concepts and methodologies in their own research projects. A guided bike tour on the ecology of the city Ghent and its surroundings will be part of the programme, as well as an excursion to the Zwin-region and Zeeland Flanders, with presentations and discussions ‘in the field’.
Programme
Session I: Visit Exhibition ‘Ghent’s Lands’ & Bike Tour – Guide: Esther Beeckaert (Ghent Museum for Urban History STAM)
Session II & III: History of the City and the Country- Lecturers: Tim Soens & Iason Jongepier (UAntwerpen)
Session IV: Archaeology and Landscape History – Lecturer: Wim De Clercq (UGent)
Session V: Landscape History and Garden Culture – Lecturer: Willemieke Ottens (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Session VII: Artistic Representation & Ecocriticism – Lecturer: Joana van de Löcht (Universität Freiburg)
Session VIII & IX: Ecology and Economy – Lecturers: Marrigje Paijmans (University of Amsterdam), Charlotte Kießling (University of Cologne) & Thijs Lambrecht (Ghent University)
Registration
PhD students and ReMa students are invited to register for this course before 12 January 2024 through the following link: https://forms.gle/hQUuu4SVfs4wTRsq9 Please note that there is a limited number of places available for this course. After your registration you will soon receive more information about whether your registration can be confirmed or not. Some of the participating graduate/doctoral schools will cover tuition and lodging for their participating members (please wait for more information after your registration).
Organising institutions and partners
This Spring School is organised by Ghent University (Doctoral Schools), the University of Groningen, the Huizinga Institute and the Research School for Medieval Studies in cooperation with the following research groups: the Group for Early Modern Studies (UGent), the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (UGent), the Amsterdam Centre for Studies in Early Modernity (UvA), the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), the Centre for Urban History(UAntwerpen), the Institute for Early Modern History (UGent-VUB) and the Onderzoeksgroep Nieuwe Tijd (KU Leuven). The Spring School was also made possible by the Rudolf Agricola School for Sustainable Development (University Groningen).
Organising committee
Caroline Baetens, MA (UGent, Group for Early Modern Studies), Dr. Femke Kramer (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Research Institute for the Study ofCulture), Dr. Stefan Meysman (UGent, Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies), Dr. Marrigje Paijmans (UvA, Amsterdam Centre for Studies in Early Modernity), Prof. Jeroen Puttevils (UAntwerpen,Centre for Urban History), Prof. Hanneke Ronnes (UvA / Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Landscape History), Prof. Kornee van der Haven (UGent, Group for Early Modern Studies)
The Belvedere Lecture is the Ghent annual lecture on early modern history and culture. It sheds light on the early modern period from a multi-disciplinary perspective. ‘Belvedere’ suggests a bird-eye view on early modern history, which is indeed one of the aims of this annual lecture: to invite international scholars in the field of early modern studies to present their research in the light of bigger questions early modernists are dealing with today.
‘Belvedere Lecture’ refers to the Belvedere of the Ghent famous Boekentoren (Book Tower), an iconic building designed in 1936 by Henry van de Velde. Belvedere is an architectural structure that was especially popular in the renaissance and baroque, but also in modern architecture. It not only refers to the idea of providing an scenic view on early modern history, but it also connects early modernity with modernity.
Renaissance Florence offers a particularly rich variety of three-dimensional grotesques, appearing on doorways, windows, and façades, in fountains, pedestals and armour. They occur particularly in liminal situations, both spatial, as in window frames, but also when they cross boundaries between disciplines, as in the architectural/sculptural objects created by Michelangelo and his followers. In my talk I will start with grotesque designs by Michelangelo, to move on to grotesques in façades and window frames, as well as fountains and hybrid objects by his followers Buontalenti and Ammanati. This group of grotesques does not lend itself very well to current readings of these figurations in terms of the corpus of 16th-century theories produced by Vasari, Ligorio, Lomazzo, Paleotti or Borromeo, because these theories are mainly based on the pictorial grotesque figuration inspired by the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea, not the three-dimensional masque variety of today’s talk. But also because that body of thought is normative and aetiological: normative because it attempts to regulate grotesque design, and aetiological because of its tendency to relate contemporary grotesques to Vitruvius and Roman art. Instead, starting from patterns of visual similarities, I will consider the relation of grotesque architectural ornament to contemporary armour; and I will consider the suggestion of a second skin, as well as the duplication and sometimes triplication of masque features in one grotesque in the light of anthropological work on masks by Franz Boas and Philippe Descola.
Call for papers for the conference ‘aiming to together researchers from a wide variety of fields to discuss the ways in which early modernity related to performing religious ceremonies and customs across the globe, either in text, print, on stage, or in any other imaginable way.’
You can send in your proposal, containing of an abstract and a brief biography, by the 2nd of October 2023.
On June 22, 2023, Prof. Dr. Jeroen Dewulf (UC Berkeley) will present his latest book about the influence of African Catholics on the historical development of Black Christianity in America during the seventeenth century. The meeting will be held at 10.30 am in the Faculty Room. A zoom link is also available and can be found here.
Black Christianity in America has long been studied as a blend of indigenous African and Protestant elements. Jeroen Dewulf redirects the conversation by focusing on the enduring legacy of seventeenth-century Afro-Atlantic Catholics in the broader history of African American Christianity. With homelands in parts of Africa with historically strong Portuguese influence, such as the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé, and Kongo, these Africans embraced variants of early modern Portuguese Catholicism that they would take with them to the Americas as part of the forced migration that was the transatlantic slave trade. Their impact upon the development of Black religious, social, and political activity in North America would be felt from the southern states as far north as what would become New York.
Dewulf’s analysis focuses on the historical documentation of Afro-Atlantic Catholic rituals, devotions, and social structures. Of particular importance are brotherhood practices, which were critical in the dissemination of Afro-Atlantic Catholic culture among Black communities, a culture that was pre-Tridentine in nature and wary of external influences. These fraternal Black mutual-aid and burial society structures were critically important to the development and resilience of Black Christianity in America through periods of changing social conditions. Afro-Atlantic Catholics shows how a sizable minority of enslaved Africans actively transformed the American Christian landscape and would lay a distinctly Afro-Catholic foundation for African American religious traditions today.
This interdisciplinary conference aims to investigate how flowers, and the fruits they produce, represented power in a myriad of ways in the early modern world. The speakers will address the function of flowers (including the flowering process, culminating in fruit) as tools of political, religious, or commercial power, as instruments of global and local knowledge transfer and appropriation, as well as their role in art-making, science, and the construction of gender between c. 1500-1750.
On 15-16 June 2023, Elizabeth Merrill (Faculty of Architecture and Engineering, Ghent University) and Nele De Raedt (Faculty of Architecture, Architectural Engineering and Urbanism, UCLouvain) organise an international conference on “Practices of Copying and Imitation in Early Modern Architecture (1400-1700)” in the VANDENHOVE Centre for Architecture and Arts in Ghent. The keynote lecture will be given by prof. Maarten Delbeke (ETH Zurich).
On 4 May (2pm, Library lab Magnel), Marius Buning will give a talk that may be of interest to GEMS members:
Controlling information flows: Printing privileges in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic
This paper presents an analysis of printing privileges in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. It investigates the impact these privileges had on the dissemination of information, the development of the Dutch printing industry, and the types of publications that were produced. Whereas privileges are often seen of legal means that were primarily important for the local market, this paper will show that the ‘local’ cannot be seen in isolation from intra- and pan-European connections. It thus ties in with a broader discussion of the relationship between knowledge and power in the early modern period, and provides a good starting point for understanding the framework and objectives of the ERC-funded project Before Copyright, which I am currently leading at the University of Oslo.
Biography
Marius Buning (Ph.D, European University Institute, 2013) is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests focus on the nature of intellectual property and the role of the state in shaping notions of scientific and technological progress. Since 2022, he is the PI of the ERC project “Before Copyright: Printing privileges and the politics of knowledge in early modern Europe”.
The Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw is organizing a webinar series that may be of interest to GEMS’ers: “Vroegmodern Babylon? Meertaligheid en vertalen in de Nederlanden in de achttiende eeuw.”
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