AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior

CALL FOR PAPERS

Domestic and Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe A Two-Day
Conference Victoria & Albert Museum, London 26-27 November 2004

A growing body of studies is steadily expanding our knowledge of the early
modern domestic interior. However, early modern people did not only live
in houses. Men and women from a variety of social backgrounds made their
homes in monastic institutions, houses of the poor and hospitals, some
just for short periods, others for all their lives. For example, a
significant number of the poor were institutionalised in post-Reformation
Catholic Europe and nuns were cloistered: charitable institutions and
convents became a regular feature of the urban landscape. As a result, a
considerable proportion of the laity acquired a direct experience of
institutional life. Ties were maintained between the inmate and his or her
family, kin and community; moreover the new institutions became centres
for the expression of lay piety and received work commissions from
outside.

This raises a number of interesting questions. Did the many connections
between the secular world and institutional environments also extend to
the physical and material features of the living space? Recent studies on
convents have shown that a flow of objects, as well as of visitors and
guests, placed the secular and the institutional space in constant and
close contact. Women who moved into monastic institutions brought with
them furnishings, personal possessions, and sometimes artworks, which had
been part of their secular domestic experience. Did they also bring views
about how to structure their living space in the new environment? And do
the recent findings about convents apply to other types of religious and
lay institutions of early modern Europe, male as well as female? Finally,
to what extent did the new models of devotion and good work promoted by
the Protestant and Catholic Reformations affect the domestic interiors,
such as the spaces dedicated to the sacred within the home?

This two-day conference invites reflections on the still under-researched
characteristics of the institutional interior and on the reciprocal
influence between the domestic and the institutional space in an age
marked, in many European towns, by the growing presence of institutions.
Although the issue has so far been explored in particular in relation to
Catholic areas (especially Italy and Spain) we also hope to attract
studies on other European countries and on the Protestant world. We aim to
bring together social, architectural and art historians to explore the
relationship between institutional interiors, gender and class; the way in
which spatial arrangements contributed to forging the inmates' behaviour
and, in turn, the way in which the inmates themselves shaped the
institutional space they inhabited; the range of objects that were
available and circulated between houses and institutions; the transfer of
rituals and models in interior decoration, furnishings, images from the
domestic to the institutional interior and vice versa.

Proposals for 30 minutes papers are invited from a variety of academic
disciplines. Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words, together
with a brief CV, to the organisers: Sandra Cavallo, Royal Holloway
University of London (s.cavallorhul.ac.uk) and Silvia Evangelisti,
University of Birmingham ( s.evangelistibham.ac.uk).

The deadline for proposals of papers is 1 January 2004.

For further information see the website of the AHRB Centre for the Study
of
Domestic Interior: www.rcs.ac.uk/csdi/ or contact the Centre at
csdirca.ac.uk;
Tel. +44 (0) 20 7590 4183.

Please circulate this information.

_______________________________

AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU
Tel. +44 (0)20 7590 4183
www.rca.ac.uk/csdi/

Royal College of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Bedford Centre,
Royal
Holloway, University of London