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Cosponsored by McGill University, this symposium and the publication to follow from it are funded by the interdisciplinary project on Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700. Supported by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this project examines the various forces that shaped the emergence and evolution of "publics": open-membership groups that coalesced around practices, interests, ideas, values, and forms of publication or performance in the early modern period.
Accounts of the cultural, intellectual, social, and spiritual transformations of early modern Europe not only expanded the horizons of European thought but, more essentially, called into question the certainties of classical and religious teachings. This symposium will examine the effects these various processes had upon publics in Europe and in the new domains of European expansion and influence. How did racial, ethnic and cultural differences impact upon traditional concerns, modes of thought, institutions, practices or forms of association? Did “positionality,” one’s physical location, affect the publics found there? Were the roles of science and the arts the same in European publics at home and abroad? And, more generally, how was the creation and evolution of publics informed by European discoveries in Africa, Asia, America, and elsewhere in the early modern period?
David A. Boruchoff, McGill University
David Spadafora, President, The Newberry Library
Carla Zecher, Director, The Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies
Introductory Remarks
Carmen Nocentelli, University of New Mexico
Asia in the Making of Europe: Early Modern Ethnologies and European Sexualities
David Stephen Manning, Clare College, University of Cambridge
Public Conduct and Christian Mission in the Writings of English Religious Societies, c. 1689-1714
Sarah Rivett, Washington University in St. Louis
Religious Conversion in a Secular Age
David Harris Sacks, Reed College and Clare Hall, University of Cambridge
The Blessings of Exchange: Commerce and Commonwealth in Richard Hakluyt’s Political Economy
David Shields, University of South Carolina
Lecture Description
England’s first chartered society entertained several political and cultural ambitions: the importance of Italian humanist geography in considerations of national history; the invention of two English national traditions, one Roman, one Anglo-Saxon; the elaboration of a body of legal precedent to counteract monarchical experiments with absolutism; the promotion of empire as an atavistic national mission; and the creation of a counter-discourse to Spanish-Catholic visions of global autarky. This talk will recover the ways in which the political, cultural, and material possibilities put into play by the discovery and exploitation of America in the 16th century colored the creation of their projects.
A reception will follow the lecture.
Elizabeth A. Sutton, University of Iowa
Collaborative Journeys: Dutch Travel Account Prints in a Humanist Milieu, 1598-1603
Edward M. Test, Boise State University
Making New World Publics: Botanical Studies in Sixteenth-Century Europe
Florence C. Hsia, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Old News From China: Early Modern Audiences for Asian Knowledge Traditions
Stephanie Kirk, Washington University in St. Louis
Sor Juana and the Jesuits: Gender, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere in Colonial Mexico
David A. Boruchoff, McGill University
The Three Greatest Inventions of Modern Times: An Idea and Its Public
Christine R. Johnson, Washington University in St. Louis
Dead Men Tell No Tales: European Publics and the Myth of New World Mastery
Brian Sandberg, Northern Illinois University
“My Hydras and Cruel Monsters Render Homage”: the Marvelous in Religious and Political Culture in Early Modern France
Jennifer R. Ottman, Loyola University, New Orleans
Aztec History and Its Early Seventeenth-Century Publics
Barbara E. Mundy, Fordham University
The Dance of Moteuczoma in Colonial Mexico City: Urban Audiences and Collective Memory in New Spain
Lisa Voigt, University of Chicago and Ohio State University
Imperial Celebrations, Local Triumphs: Festive Accounts and their Publics in the Portuguese Empire
Eun Kyung Min, Seoul National University
Nothing Ancient or Modern Seems to Come Near It: Publicizing China in Seventeenth-Century Europe
Ellorashree Maitra, Rutgers University
Imagining Gypsies as a Public in Ben Jonson’s “The Gypsies Metamorphosed”
Timothy G. Pearson, Université de Montréal
“Un spectacle aux yeux du monde”: Ritual Performance and Colonial Audiences in Early New France, 1632-1668
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University
Performance Publics in the Atlantic World
The conference will include continental breakfast daily. While there is no fee to attend this event, participants must register in advance. To register please call the Center for Renaissance Studies at 312.255.3514, or send an e-mail to renaissance@newberry.org.
Funds are available for graduate students and faculty of Consortium institutions to travel to the Newberry Library to attend the this symposium. If you have any questions, please contact the Center for Renaissance Studies.