The Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society (PNRS) warmly invites proposals for papers, panels, or other formats of exchange for its 2027 conference in Sidney (outside Victoria), BC:

Renaissance Bodies of Knowledge: Human Ingenuity in Ages of Artifice.

Plenaries: Tiffany Werth (Univ. of California, Davis); Katherine Schaap Williams (University of Toronto).

Central Ideas

Re-thinking Inquiry: What did inquiry look like when the instruments of knowing were themselves in dispute?
The Renaissance mechanized the word while myriad phenomena unsettled what people knew and whom they trusted. Meanwhile, people pursued inquiry via connected/collective means: correspondence, commonplace books, workshops, academies, playing companies - bodies of knowledge in both senses. And what about inquiry and knowing today…?

Re-visiting Connection & Exchange: What did and can scholars do in a room together that we can't do in isolation or online?
Ours is another age of displacement, of machine learning, artifice: are Renaissance literature and art still resources of the human for our own times? What is the value of humans thinking with these works, collectively? And should such embodied collectivity be re-thought given too-often unequal access – to spaces, across borders?

Questions, broad topics that could unfold from these ideas:
1. When instruments of knowing change, whom do people trust & why?
2. What does a body know that a page did/does not? What carries knowledges of cure, care, and disability?
3. What do people still carry in person once the word could/can travel?
4. What does knowledge cost, for whom? What did Renaissance knowledge cost, for whom?

Formats & Logistics
- Proposals of up to 250 words by 1 February 2027, to pacific.northwest.rsgmail.com; extensions available on request. Interim inquiries are welcome, please contact us at same gmail address.
- Formats are flexible: besides papers and panels we invite seminars, roundtables, disputations, another proposed mode; in every format we’ll ask presenters how they built their argument. Sessions meet in person.
- Graduate student submissions are invited and encouraged.
- Any aspect of early modern Europe, c. 1300 to 1700, is welcome, in history, art history, music, religion, anthropology, medieval studies, global early modern and digital humanities.
- Primary Organizers: Heather C. Easterling (Gonzaga University; President, PNRS), easterlinggonzaga.edu, and Michael Ullyot (University of Calgary; Vice-President, PNRS), ullyotucalgary.ca.