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Call for Papers: Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference
23-25 March 2006, San Francisco

Imagery, Spirituality and Ideology in Iberia and the New world.

Three sessions on Iberian and Latin American renaissance religious art.

Paintings, sculptures, prints and architecture provide a rich cultural
archive to examine the social, intellectual and spiritual complexity of the
Catholic Reformation in Spain and the process of colonisation and
evangelisation in the 'New World'. This panel explores three critical
perspectives on the significance of renaissance Iberian and Latin American
religious art. Together they investigate religious images as potent cultural
indicators that reflected, transmitted, and regulated spiritual experience.
Papers are invited which focus on one of the following themes. Representing
texts and reading images: through interdisciplinary study of the
relationships between artworks and texts such as, sermons, devotional
poetry, rhetoric or biblical exegesis, this session aims to complement
discussion of 'artistic significance' with analysis of how patrons used
images and spectators responded to them. Re-locating the significance of
religious art: this session w ill examine the original locations of
religious artworks and consider the spiritual and ideological dimensions of
religious art as it was incorporated into the ritual uses of different
devotional and ecclesiastical settings. Embodying the spiritual: a concern
to develop the signifying and expressive potential of art works is
encountered in artistic depictions of the human body. Focused on this
visual theme this final session examines themes such as the visual
articulation of gendered paradigms of sanctity, religious significances of
el imitacisn del natural and the artistic imagination of visions, mystical
experience and the celestial realm.

Please end abstracts of 150 words and a brief CV by 13th May to Jeremy Roe
(jmn_roeyahoo.com) or Christopher Wilson (chrischadwaol.com). As not all
the audience will be Hispanists papers should be given in English. Finally,
a further aim of this panel is to publish these papers as a book of essays.

Please note that a non-refundable payment of the Renaissance Society of
America membership fee and conference fee is required of all participants.
For more information see the website of the Renaissance Society of America
(rsa.org).