56. Basler Renaissancekolloquium FS 2025

Renaissance of War

Veranstalter: Departement Geschichte und Kunsthistorisches Seminar, Universität Basel

The 56th Basel Renaissance Colloquium focuses upon war in the Renaissance as a phenomenon, a practice, and a cultural formation with powerful implications that extended far beyond the battlefield. Inquiring further into the political, institutional, and aesthetic dynamics and consequences of warfare, we propose to examine war as an explicit feature of the Renaissance, both in the sense of an epochal framework of European history and as a potentially transferable historiographical model. Examining war in this light, a series of questions arise: was there a specificity of ‘Renaissance war’, and, if so, what was its impact on subsequent social, economic, technological, and/or and artistic trends? How might the destructive dynamics of warfare have also served as a vector of social transformation? What can be learned from Renaissance ethical and moral regimes that tolerated or even advanced warfare as a political tool while simultaneously pointing to its dangers? How can we tell histories of organized violence as it was experienced by non-combatants and former combatants: persons displaced and dispossessed by warfare; women who traveled with armies as sex-workers, laundresses, and porters; disabled ex-soldiers, whose bodies testified to the brutality of past military campaigns?

Renaissance of War thus invites critical reassessments of the general implications as well as the social, material, and intellectual conditions of organized violence. The meeting is intended as an interdisciplinary forum open to (and seeking to combine) social, political, intellectual, and art historical methods, as well as approaches that engage with non-European/global contexts and influences. We are particularly interested in comparative, connected, and “bottom up” approaches, as well as in thematic contributions relating to, for example: narratives of victory, victimhood, and survival; the aestheticizing, heroizing, and (visual) critique of military violence; the construction, representation, and differentiation of social roles and responsibilities amidst military conflicts; the forms of transformation both foreclosed and propelled by war in the Renaissance.

PROGRAM
4. April 2025, 14.15−18.30 Uhr / Kunsthistorisches Seminar, St. Alban-Graben 8/10, 4051 Basel, Raum 131

14.15−14.30 Welcome & Introduction

14.30−15.00 Stephen Bowd (Edinburgh): Shadow Agents of Renaissance War
15.00−15.20 Discussion

15.20−15.40 Coffee break

15.40−16.10 Allison Stielau (London): The Threat of Dispossession in German Treasure Hoards of the 1630s
16.10−16.30 Discussion

16.30−16.50 Coffee break

16.50−17.20 Catherine Fletcher (Manchester): The Renaissance and the Gun
17.20−17.40 Discussion

17.40−17.45 Comfort break

17.45−18.30 Final roundtable

Online-Zuschaltung: Die Vorträge und Diskussionen können auch per livestream verfolgt werden; eine aktive Teilnahme ist in diesem Format nicht möglich.

Anmeldung: Melden Sie sich für Ihre Teilnahme (sowohl physisch wie im livestream) unter folgender Webadresse an: https://dg.philhist.unibas.ch/de/forschung/forschungskolloquien/basler-renaissancekolloquium/

Kontakt: renaissanceunibas.ch

Outline & Abstracts: www.renaissancen.ch