Call for papers
Re-considering accuracy, verisimilitude and truth claims in the early
modern period across disciplines

Session at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting 2014

This interdisciplinary session (or, potentially, series of sessions)
takes up the question of issues of accuracy, verisimilitude and truth
claims for scholars of early modern art, historiography, science, and
philology. This period is associated with the production of images and
texts characterized by facticity and exactitude, and by overt or
implicit claims to authority based upon their utilization of
authenticated sources, accurately reconstituted by precise methods. The
session considers the implications of Gabrielle Spiegel's directive:
"one might hypothesize that those instances in which truth-claims for
history are most boldly asserted are precisely those in which
ideological partisanship is most actively at play."
While Spiegel referred to medieval literature and historiography, this
session undertakes to reconsider early modern works in light of this
hypothesis. Do open and implied assertions of truthfulness abounding in
texts and images of this period actually bespeak their producers' desire
to answer a demand for new forms of written and visual discourse
relevant to their particular partisan needs? Greater realism and
accuracy, though perhaps consequences of early modern ostensibly
veristic methods, were not necessarily identical to the initial motives
impelling the use of such methods. The substitution of self-professed
methodological truthfulness for purportedly less accurate means of
producing images, maps, texts, scientific models, etc., represents the
displacement of mediation towards a low mimetic or "realistic" mode, not
for increased realism, but to enhance the credibility of motivating
ideologies, by grounding them in the language of apparent factuality, in
contradistinction to overt use fantasy and figural language, which were
no longer ideologically sufficient.

Please send title and keywords, abstracts of no more than 150 words and
a CV of no more than 300 words, to Ruth S. Noyes, University of
Massachusetts Amherst and the American Academy in Rome,
ruthsnoyesyahoo.com, by June 1.