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[1] Renaissance Care
From: John Rattray
Date: 11 Jul 22
Deadline: 31 Jul 22

The Lise Meitner Research Group “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History solicits abstracts for a paper session to be held at the 2023 Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Annual Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

RENAISSANCE CARE

This session looks at how people and communities in early modernity cared for objects that mattered to them. It aims at moving beyond restoration and treatment, examining instead a broader set of material and immaterial practices aimed at securing and maintaining the object’s well-being. These might include (but are not limited to) acts of physical or symbolic protection and repair; rites of consecration, inauguration, and restitution; as well as what we nowadays describe as preventive conservation, risk management, environment control, and boundary maintenance. Our attention therefore extends to spaces of deposit, storage, and concealment, away from those sites of display (the gallery, the cabinet, the studiolo) that have been the focus of much art-historical research.

The session seeks to contribute to the growing contemporary discourse on the ethics and politics of care by making space for a longer historical analysis of these practices, articulating their differences and exposing where they come into conflict with one another. In examining “Renaissance Care”– who gives care, to what, and for what reasons – we also seek to explore the extent to which caring practices are defined in response to the object’s endangerment, especially in times of conquest or conflict.

We invite papers focusing on European and Colonial contexts and welcome proposals in both Spanish and English. Please email a 150-word abstract and a brief CV to Francesca.Borgobiblhertz.it before August 1, 2022

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[2] Transgressing the Socially Controlled Body of Early Modern Italy
From: Rebecca Howard
Date: 15 Jul 22
Deadline: 2 Aug 22

Centuries beyond the early modern period, bodies continue to be controlled and held to certain socially fabricated and problematic expectations. Social and gendered standards placed on early modern persons (realized through the issuing of sumptuary legislation, conduct literature, and clerical/state legislation, to name only a few sources), are often the forces behind artistic depictions of period bodies. The papers in this panel thus seek to consider how social constructs impacted early modern artists’ renderings of figures, either from life, history, and/or fiction. Likewise, we welcome papers that examine both transgressive and/or confirmative depictions of the early modern Italian body, as influenced by gendered norms of the period. Discussions of the policing of early modern bodies might also consider these issues in light of contemporary efforts that further attempt control over the bodies and lives of certain individuals.

Potential topics may address, but are not limited to:
- defining, performing, and/or blurring gender roles
- transgressive dressing, as related to social status or gender
- cross-dressing
- the nude and the body undressed

Panel(s) will be sponsored by the Italian Art Society.
​Please submit proposals with:
- your full name and current affiliation
- paper title (15-word maximum)
- paper abstract (150-word maximum)
- CV (1-page maximum)
- PhD completion date (past or expected)

Submissions will be accepted until August 2. Presenters must be RSA members at the time of the conference. Please email submission materials to both Rebecca Howard (Rmhward2memphis.edu) and Caroline Koncz (ckoncz15gmail.com).

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[3] Climate, Color, and Early Modern Art
From: María Lumbreras
Date: 15 Jul 22
Deadline: 7 Aug 22

We invite submissions for a panel that will investigate the myriad ways in which visual and material culture of the early modern world was impacted, both in theory and in practice, by changing conceptions of climate and color and increasingly sophisticated speculation about the relationship between the two. Through the framework of climate/color, we aim to explore the connections between two important areas of inquiry in the history of early modern art: the well-established interest in materials and techniques and the emerging interest in questions related to climate and the environment.

Color and climate played important and intersecting roles in the visual and material culture of early modernity: they were crucial features of diverse animal and plant worlds, resources and qualities central to artistic production around the globe, important components of a variety of religious and healing practices, and topics of wide-ranging technological experimentation. They were central to early modern trade, bioprospecting, and racialization—often in ways that intersected. And for all of these reasons, color and climate were the object of philosophical, ethical, or naturalist speculation and study during the period. The reasons for these cultural developments were numerous and, crucially, varied from place to place: a dramatic and observable change in the global climate in the late sixteenth century (the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’); the effects of European imperialist and colonialist ventures in the Americas, Africa, and Asia; increasingly rapid, man-made physical changes to landscapes around the world; the gradual waning of Aristotelian natural philosophy and the concomitant rise of ‘the new’ and ‘colonial science’; the encounter with and appropriation of Indigenous knowledges; the emergence in various places of proto-environmental and proto-ecological ways of thinking that recognized the deep imbrication of the human and the landscape; etc.

Although these developments inevitably shaped the way works of art were made, protected, transported, and discussed, the relationship between climate and color has yet to receive sustained art historical attention. We are interested in papers that shed light upon early modern works of art, architecture, material culture, aesthetics, art theory, or art criticism whose practical use or theorization of color is conditioned by these climactic and environmental concerns. We hope that the climate/color framework will prove flexible and capacious enough to encourage submissions on a range of topics that might include (but are certainly not limited to):

- Period thinking about color’s permanence or mutability.
- Deterioration and its treatments, including understandings (or imaginings) of care, protection, impermeability, etc.
- Theories and practices of surface finish, such as iridescence and matteness, glazing, lacquer, etc.
- The materials, techniques, and finish of works made for faraway markets or patrons
- The extraction, production, or trade in pigments and the environmental knowledge involved in these processes
- The aesthetics of snow and ice, heat and humidity
- Theories of pigmentation, bodily fluids and/or complexion, and the representation of racial difference
- Climate and color practices as subaltern technologies
- Fugitive and fading pigments, inks, and papers.
- Color practices involved in human-animal interactions and their importance to art making (the usage or fascination with animal hides, feathers, furs, etc.)
- The mechanics of color production in compendia or repositories of naturalist knowledge
- Earthworks, undergrounds, and labor practices

Please submit proposals to María Lumbreras (mlumbrerasucsb.edu) and James Pilgrim (jpilgrim18gmail.com) by August 7, 2022. These should include your name, affiliation, and e-mail address; paper title and abstract (maximum 150 words); a 2-page CV.

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[4] New Perspectives on the Hanse
From: Laura Tillery
Date: 15 Jul 22
Deadline: 1 Aug 22

The Netzwerk Kunst und Kultur der Hansestädte (Network of the Hanseatic Cities’ Art and Culture) invites abstracts for a session of papers at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico from 9-11 March 2023.

From the middle of the twelfth century onwards, Hanse merchants from Middle Low German-speaking areas engaged in long-distance trade and formed an extensive commercial network of both merchants and towns. The surprising resourcefulness of Hanse merchants, however, enabled them to adapt and sustain their kinetic network throughout the early modern period, well into the nineteenth century. Although the Hanse has been traditionally cast as a regional player before early modern global entanglements, this session aims to reconsider outdated perspectives on the pre- and early modern Hanse. We invite papers from any discipline on a topic that offers new approaches to the Hanse. Papers that interrogate the Hanse during early modern global and colonial entanglements are especially welcome.

Potential topics may address but are not limited to:
- the history and visual culture of Hanse cities and Kontore
- Hanse merchants and art patronage
- trade and exchange of the Baltic Sea region
- postcolonial approaches to artistic geography and/or Hanseatic art
- the Hanse in the “Age of Encounter”
- connected histories and the Hanse
- enslavement and trade inequities
- the Hanse and the Atlantic
- historiography of Hanse studies

Founded in 2011, the Netzwerk Kunst und Kultur der Hansestädte serves as the platform for the international and interdisciplinary exchange of scholars on the subject of the Hanse and is open to all interested.

Presenters must be RSA members at the time of the conference. Please send submissions to Suzie Hermán (johannahprinceton.edu) and Laura Tillery (ltilleryhamilton.edu) by 1 August 2022, including:
-paper title
-abstract (150-word max.)
-full name, affiliation, and email address
-brief (1 page) cv/resume
-PhD anticipated completion date, if still in progress

Please see https://www.rsa.org/page/ConferenceSubmissionsGuide#guidelines for additional information about submissions. Submitters will be notified by 10 August 2022.

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[5] Chronotopes: temporal markers shaping space in the late-medieval and early-modern world
From: Marije Osnabrugge
Date: 15 Jul 22
Deadline: 10 Aug 22

The way people in the past experienced their individual and shared present was interrelated with the space they inhabited. In recent decades, reflections on the perception of time in pre-modern and early-modern periods have multiplied. As a result, the static and univocal image of the Middle Ages and early modernity as eras rooted in a perfect biblical past or as a revival of a mythical past, obstructing any interpretation of an active present and of a future free of its eschatological dimension, is being revised. One of the possible ways to reconsider the relation of pre-modern and early-modern people with time, and in particular with the(ir) present, is to investigate what Mikhail Bakhtin called the ‘chronotope’. Within this literary theory, the perception of the world results from a specific experience of time and space, which are considered inseparable and in constant interaction. The daily or weekly collective rhythms of market day or the fair on the town square, the accelerated frenzy of celebrations in the city hall or church, the reflective hours spent alone waking at a deathbed… The people inhabiting a chronotope were perfectly aware of the order imposed by well-defined temporalities, yet historical studies have too often disconnected this temporal dimension from their analysis of the use of a place or space.

In this interdisciplinary session, we would like to discuss the interconnectedness of time and space in the late-medieval and early modern world. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- cases in which the urban environment provides rhythms to the city's time.
- differences between urban and rural chronotopes
- visual and literary representations of chronotopes that serve to identify events
- sources that connect time and space
- different individual experiences of time in a single space
- places of memory that concentrate different temporalities over decades
- the temporalities of private spaces

Please send submissions to Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (elodie.lecuppreuniv-lille.fr), Marije Osnabrugge (marije.osnabruggeunige.ch), Jan Blanc (jan.blancunige.ch) & Thalia Brero (thalia.brerounine.ch) by August 10, 2022, including:
- paper title
- abstract (150-word max.)
- full name, affiliation, and email address
- brief (1 page) cv/resume
- PhD anticipated completion date, if still in progress