(25.-27.3.04)
Date: 13 Dec 2003

The Age of Antiquaries in Europe and China

A Conference Organized by the Bard Graduate Center, New York
25-27 March 2004

http://inside.bard.edu/~louis/conference/

In Europe and in China a lasting historical revolution was made by
antiquaries - scholars who combined textual studies with close
observation of old things, natural things, and different kinds of
people. And in both cultures the peak of this intellectual creativity
was linked to an explosion of the arts and sciences.

Often, interest in antiquarianism has been an annex to a much more
intense focus on the arts of the period. In this conference eminent
historians of European and Chinese culture consider the phenomenon of
antiquarianism in its own terms, through the ways and means of its
wide-ranging scholarship. And rather than hewing to well-worn
chronological paths they move beyond the Song Period and the
Renaissance. The comparative approach of the conference will also allow
us to consider the impact of European antiquarianism on Chinese
scholarship, and that of Chinese antiquarian scholarship on Europeans in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

There are few forms of intellectual activity that defined their age as
completely as did antiquarianism in early modern Europe, nor many that
remain as alien to us. The prestige of those who explored the past
through texts and artifacts had mostly been spent by the end of the
eighteenth century. In recent years, however, scholars in a variety of
fields, operating with very different research agendas, have come to
recognize the importance of the antiquary's pre-disciplinary polymathy
as a key to understanding the changing shape of intellectual life in
early modern Europe. Before "art for art's sake", antiquaries saw style
as a product of historical context; before there was "orientalism",
antiquaries studied the ancient Near East alongside ancient Rome; before
there were "two cultures", antiquaries studied astronomy and philology;
before there was "cultural studies", antiquaries studied the religion,
sport, jewelry and food of ancient peoples. Indeed, the leading
interpreter of antiquarianism in early modern Europe, Arnaldo
Momigliano, has suggested that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
its questions opened the way to the modern human and social sciences.

In many ways, the European phenomenon finds its parallels earlier in
China. As in Europe, antiquarian activities in China emerged as part of
a new intellectual quest to explain a wide range of cultural and natural
phenomena and, as in Europe, the groundbreaking achievements of Chinese
antiquaries had been absorbed into intellectual culture within less than
three centuries -- by the end of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) antiquarian
epigraphy had redefined historiography, while the scholarly collecting
of antiquities had begun spreading into a status-conscious culture of
gentlemanly connoisseurship. Antiquarian practices apparently changed
little in China until the 17th century when a rising wave of scientific
skepticism resulted in a critical revision of earlier writings. But
while in China the intellectual developments of the 17th and 18th
centuries enhanced the antiquarian's prestige in Europe the opposite was
true. The antiquaries' methods, however, survived as the foundation of
other disciplinary practices.

One of the reasons why Europe's antiquarian legacy has remained so
obscure in the West -- and as a result also that of China -- is that the
same circumstances responsible for its marginalization in
eighteenth-century Europe are still at work today. But just as the scale
of the antiquaries' achievement was lost when polymathy was divided by
discipline, some sense of it can be recaptured by approaching it from
the various fields into which their practices have been exiled. Those we
are inviting to participate in this conference have forged paths from
literature, history, art history, history of science, classics and
comparative religion back to that early modern landscape. Their work
shows that the interdisciplinary, comparative study of culture has an
early modern origin and, taken together, describes a new-old model for
the future practice of the cultural sciences.

THE PAST
Thursday, 25 March 2004, 9:00 am-5:30 pm

9:00 am

Welcome
Leon Botstein (President, Bard College)

9:10 am

Opening Remarks
Peter N. Miller (Bard Graduate Center)
François Louis (Bard Graduate Center)

9:15 am
East and West: The Different Patterns of Antiquarianism in Ancient and
Modern Context
Alain Schnapp (Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris)

The Credulity Problem
Christopher S. Wood (Yale University)

Curzio Inghirami's Etruscan Forgeries
Ingrid D. Rowland (American Academy in Rome)

The Academia Basiliana: Greek Philology and Ecclesiastical History in
Barberini Rome
Ingo Herklotz (University of Marburg)

Antiquarianism, Libertinism, Religion: Antonius Van Dale
Martin Mulsow (University of Munich)

Lunch 12:30-2:00

2:00 pm

Collecting The Records of the Sages: Archaic Bronzes as Sacred Text and
Economic Commodity in Song-Dynasty China (960-1276)
Ankeney Weitz (Colby College)

At Play with the Ancients: Pleasure, Power and Antiquity in Ming China
Craig Clunas (School of Oriental and African Studies, London)

Novelty and Archaism in Late Ming and Early Qing Calligraphy
Bai Qianshen (Boston University)

Remaking the Past: The Wu Family Shrines
Michael Nylan (University of California at Berkeley)

Artifacts of Authentication: People Making Texts Making Things in Late
Imperial China
Bruce Rusk (University of California at Los Angeles)

Reception at the Bard Graduate Center, 18 West 86th Street, 6:30pm

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NATURE
FRIDAY, 26 MARCH, 9:00 am-5:30 pm

9:00 am

The Sky and the Past at the High Point of Chinese Astronomy (1280)
Nathan Sivin (University of Pennsylvania)

Forging Antiquities: "China" and the "West" in Seventeenth-Century China

Roger Hart (University of Texas)

Wang Shizhen and Li Shizhen: Archaism and Scientific Thought in
Sixteenth-Century China
Kenneth Hammond (New Mexico State University)

The Botany of Cheng Yaotian (1725-?1814): Multiple Perspectives on
Plants
Georges Métailié (C.N.R.S., Paris)

Comment
Benjamin A. Elman (Princeton University)

Lunch 12:30-2:00

2:00 pm

Styles of Medical Antiquarianism
Nancy Siraisi (C.U.N.Y.)

Accounting for Nature in the Sixteenth Century: Authority, Legitimacy,
and the Role of Experience
Claudia Swan (Northwestern University)

"Philosophy, Physick and Antiquity": Natural History, Cultural History,
and Sense of Place in the Seventeenth Century
Brian Ogilvie (University of Massachusetts)

The Antiquarian Exploration of Celestial Archetypes in Early
Enlightenment Philology. Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Astral Poetry
Ralph Häfner (Free University, Berlin)

Enlightened Antiquarianism and the Chinese Astronomical Tradition
Florence Hsia (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

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PEOPLES
SATURDAY, 27 MARCH 2004, 9:00 am-5:30 p.m.

9:00 am

Real Hieroglyphs: Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Invention in Early
Renaissance Egyptology, 1436-1500
Brian Curran (Penn State University)

The Romans Imagined and for Real: Historical and Antiquarian Research in
Sixteenth-Century Spain
Sabine MacCormack (University of Notre Dame)

Far and Away? Japan, Egypt and the Ruins of Ancient Rome in Justus
Lipsius' Intellectual Journey
Jan Papy (University of Louvain)

Byzantine Studies in the Seventeenth Century: An Intellectual Property
Dispute?
Thomas Cerbu (University of Georgia)

The Study of Islam in Early Modern Europe: Obstacles and Missed
Opportunities
Noel Malcolm (Oxford University)

Lunch 12:30-2:00

2:00 pm

India, China and the World History of Religion
Joan-Pau Rubiés (London School of Economics)

Whose Antiquarianism? Europe Versus China in the Chinese Rites
Controversy
D. E. Mungello (Baylor University)

Accommodation and Conflict: The Paradoxical Dynamics of Joachim Bouvet's
Classical Studies in Early Qing China
Hu Minghui (University of Chicago)

Thinking About "Non-Chinese" in Ming China
Leo K. Shin (University of British Columbia)

Qing Views of Europeans in the Huang Qing Zhigong Tu (Qing Imperial
Illustrations of Tributary Peoples)
Laura Hostetler (University of Illinois)

Comment
Jonathan Spence (Yale University)

Registration
Attendance is free of charge, but pre-registration is requested. For
further information and to register (include name, affiliation, and
contact information) please call 212-501-3019 or email to
antiquarianismbgc.bard.edu.

Location
The conference will take place at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at
Symphony Space, located at 2573 Broadway, New York (entrance on 95th
Street between Broadway and West End Avenue).

Symphony Space can be reached conveniently on the red subway lines 1, 2,
3, or 9 (get off at 96th Street Station), or bus lines M104 on Broadway,
or M7 and M11 uptown on Amsterdam Avenue.

Reception
A reception in honor of the speakers will take place at the Bard
Graduate Center at 18 West 86th Street (between Columbus Ave. and
Central Park West) on Thursday, 25 March, 6:30 p.m. Everyone attending
the conference is welcome.