Events and Calls for Papers
CALL FOR PAPERS
THE MEDICI AND THE PRINCELY COURTS OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: ART, DIPLOMACY AND MATERIAL CULTURE – WORKSHOP, FLORENCE, 7 FEB 2025
Organised by the Medici Archive Project, Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700 and Collecting Central Europe
Communication between courts and cities could be achieved by several means, including the exchange of objects, artists, diplomats and news. Exchange was rarely a linear back-and-forth but could follow all sorts of patterns. In early modern Europe, it included the nascent courts in Italy, as well as central and eastern European courts among others.
Our workshop will focus on courtly exchange via objects, such as diplomatic gifts between early modern rulers to establish rarely investigated patterns of connectivity extending throughout eastern and northern Europe. We aim to demonstrate that by the early sixteenth century, the Medici court, the Holy Roman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, Hungarian territories, and beyond used objects and artists to maintain contact and convey diplomatic messages. While some courts may have developed more direct routes of communication, at various times the courts at Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Munich, Prague, Cracow, and Warsaw played important nodal roles.
We invite proposals for papers addressing topics such as
• The presence of Florentine artists at Central and Eastern European courts and their influence
• The presence and display of Central and Eastern European objects in the Medici collections and their impact
• The role of artists as brokers between courts
• The role of women as mediators
• The agency of patronage between courts
• Trendsetters in matters of collecting and display
To be considered, please send the following material by 15 October 2024 to education@medici.org: (1) full name, affiliation and email address; (2) paper title (15-word max); (3) abstract text (200 words max); and (4) short curriculum vitae/bio (200 words max). We welcome proposals from established scholars, as well as work in progress from advanced doctoral candidates. The workshop will take place in person in Florence at the Medici Archive Project, Palazzo Alberti. The conference language is English. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes.
CALL FOR PAPERS - RSA, Boston 2025
https://www.rsa.org/forms/FormResponseView.asp?id=06E7FF73-CF91-4A06-BC05-2AA117EFCBCD
Organised by CCE and Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700
Provenance and Provenience in Early Modern Collections in Central and Eastern Europe
Provenance—the study of an object’s track of ownership—Is typically associated with the twentieth century, often focusing on the biographies of looted art in colonial or post-WWII contexts. However, during the early modern period objects were also traded, gifted or stolen, often ending up in collections far from their places of origins. These objects could have fragmented biographies long before they arrived in the museums where they are displayed today, resulting in gaps in their histories. “Provenience” (a term borrowed from archaeology) is often used to describe this ambiguity, marking the location where an artefact first appears in historical record, traceable (rather than tied) to a specific place, suggesting that an artwork’s interpretative context is not limited to its place of production or original owner.
The history of collecting, along with diplomatic history and the history of the art market, have uncovered information on the origins of objects prior to modern provenance studies. Nonetheless, it is rare to focus on the origins and biographies of collection objects rather than on their owners. When it comes to collections in Central and Eastern Europe, the origins of objects (whether they be provenance or provenience) before modern provenance studies are even less explored and still need to be placed within the broader context of a pan-European early modernity.
We invite speakers working on collections in the former Holy Roman Empire, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Hungarian lands and connected territories, with a special interest in where from and how objects arrived from regions within and outside Central and Eastern Europe. When and by what means did collection objects from overseas travel to these collections? Were their origins known and recorded? Was war booty the typical provenance or did an international art market exist with connections to collectors in the eastern half of Europe? What role was played by international diplomacy and exchanges between courts?
Please send a 200-word abstract, a 200-word bio, a curriculum vitae of no longer than 5 pages, and the PhD completion date to Andrea Gáldy (collectingcentraleurope@gmail.com), Suzanna Ivanič (s.ivanic@kent.ac.uk), and Tomasz Grusiecki (tomaszgrusiecki@boisestate.edu) before Monday, 22 July 2024. Presenters will have to be active RSA members at the time of registration.
CALL FOR PAPERS
HAD TO BE CANCELLED
Collecting and Issues of Provenance in Central and Eastern Europe
We plan to hold a one-day workshop on Saturday, 6 July 2024, via zoom.
Please send us your abstract and short bio blurb by 12 May 2024 to collectingcentraleurope@gmail.com!
The workshop will discuss all issues connected to matters of provenance in the area, from mediaeval times to the present, in relation to museums and private collections. We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations in English.
CALL FOR PAPERS
CCE and Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700 are in the process of organising panels for the RSA annual meeting in Chicago in 2024.
Here is the link to the call for papers on the RSA website: https://lnkd.in/epEE5_9K
We are also working on a round table for the same event.
Artistic Materials from Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe
Despite early modern artists’ increasing reliance on global supply chains, materials like silver, gold, copper, amber, oak, chalcedony, and rock crystal continued to be sourced from Europe’s peripheries to the east and the north. In fact, regions we now call Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe were recognized for their mineral and natural wealth: Central European silver was mined regardless of the influx of Potosí silver into Europe; Baltic amber was worked and fashioned as far afield as China; Lithuanian oak was transformed in Dutch shipyards into Transatlantic frigates; and Swedish copper was used to make bronze casts all over Europe. Yet, relatively little is known about the impact of these natural resources on art making and collecting in Europe and elsewhere. Spanning various extraction sites, manufacturing centres, trading routes, courtly networks, cosmopolitan cities, and artistic communities, these artistic materials warrant a careful examination as they allow us to expand our ideas of early modern European art beyond Western Mediterranean and Atlantic cultural zones.
To encourage further research in this field, the scholarly networks “Collecting Central Europe,” and “Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700,” seek papers that explore the materiality of objects and collections across Europe and the wider world, with an emphasis on objects made from materials sourced in the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Scandinavia. Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following themes:
• Central, Eastern, and Northern European materials in European and global artistic collections
• Efforts to brand Central, Eastern, and Northern European materials as local
• Typical materials of Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe
• Celebrated artists
• Innovative ways to demarginalize the region
Please send a 200-word abstract, a 200-word bio, a curriculum vitae of no longer than 5 pages, and the PhD completion date to Andrea Gáldy (collectingcentraleurope@gmail.com), Suzanna Ivanič (s.ivanic@kent.ac.uk), and Tomasz Grusiecki (tomaszgrusiecki@boisestate.edu) before Monday, 31 July 2023. Presenters will have to be active RSA members at the time of registration.
If you attend the Virtual RSA Meeting, do not miss:
TRANSCULTURAL THINGS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, Thursday, December 1, 2022｜RSA Virtual 2022 • Meeting Room 13
To encourage further research in this field, the scholarly networks Collecting Central Europe, and Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700, have solicited papers that explore the complex entanglements of foreign and local, theories of mobility, and previously overlooked types of objects from the region of Europe that stretches from the Baltic to the Adriatic, and from the Rhine to the Danube and the Dnipro.
PANEL ORGANISERS: Andrea Gáldy (Collecting Central Europe), Tomasz Grusiecki (Boise State University), and Suzanna Ivanič (University of Kent)
Panel 1｜10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Eastern Time)
10:30 AM｜ Tomasz Grusiecki (Boise State University),
“Revisiting Polish Carpets”
10:50 AM｜ Jeffrey Taylor (European Humanities University,
Vilnius), “The Transylvanian Carpet as Cultural Transcendent”
11:10 AM｜ Ruth Sargent Noyes (National Museum of
Denmark), “Furs and Slaves from the Edge of The World: The
Art of Exploiting Animals and Unfree Humans as Transcultural
Things from Early Modern Europe’s Russo-Baltic Frontier c.
1400-1700”
Panel 2｜12:30 PM - 2:00 PM (Eastern Time)
12:30 PM｜ Oleksii Rudenko (Central European University),
“Books in Motion: University and Private Libraries in Early
Modern Lithuania, Poland, and Ruthenia”
12:50 PM｜ Hanna Mazheika (Polish Academy of Sciences),
“Gift Exchange between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and
England in the Early Seventeenth Century”
1:10 PM｜ Aleksandra Lipińska (University of Cologne),
“Decolonize ‘Kresy’? Towards an Entangled History of the Early
Modern Art of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth”
30 June – 1 July 2023
Connected Central European Worlds, 1500–1700, University of Kent, UK, and Online
https://research.kent.ac.uk/emcentraleu/conference/
Early modern Central and Eastern Europe, a multiconfessional, multiethnic, and multilingual realm, was a crossroads of Latin, Orthodox, and Muslim cultures. Home to Slavic, Germanic, Latin, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic peoples, it sat astride a network of commercial routes, cultural interactions, and demographic flows that turned it into one of the most entangled regions of the early modern world. This conference examines how the complex transcultural nature of Central and Eastern Europe was co-shaped, fostered, and reimagined by artefacts, materials and visual culture, from food to art and clothing to weapons.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton University)
On the 50th anniversary of his first research trip to Prague.
Call for Papers:
We welcome abstracts of 200 words for proposed papers of 20 minutes. Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:
Abstract deadline: 15th January 2023
Please email to Dr Suzanna Ivanič s.ivanic@kent.ac.uk and Dr Tomasz Grusiecki tomaszgrusiecki@boisestate.edu
Postgraduate Bursaries: Please outline costing requirements on your abstract proposal.
30 Nov - 3 Dec 2022: The Renaissance Society of America will hold a virtual meeting. For more information please visit the RSA website www.rsa.org. Below is our call for papers for sessions jointly organised with Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700.
Transcultural Things in Central and Eastern Europe
Early modern Central and Eastern Europe was a multiethnic, multiconfessional, and multilingual realm, where a member of one community could easily claim a sense of belonging to another, navigating intersecting identities and personal biographies, and often merging and converging cultures associated with different regions and communities. Often labelled transculturation, this process of gathering and coming together of various forms of cultural expression, first theorized by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, results in transformative changes which alter societies as they adopt new kinds of objects and materials into their way of life. These transcultural forms are subject to cultural recontextualisations; they often take up other forms, acquire news uses, and change meanings, all the while reversing, upending, translating, surprising, and reappropriating local lifestyles and traditions. Habanerware, Transylvanian carpets, Polish costume, Siberian pelts, and Rudolf II’s collections are some of the region’s best examples of transcultural forms appropriated into local life. To encourage further research in this field, the scholarly networks “Collecting Central Europe,” and “Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700,” seek papers that explore the complex entanglements of foreign and local, theories of mobility, and previously overlooked types of objects from the region of Europe that stretches from the Baltic to the Adriatic, and from the Rhine to the Danube and the Dnipro.
Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following themes:
· Transcultural objects and images
· Mobility of materials
· Networks
· Diasporas
· Collections
· Historiography of transculturation in the region
Please send a 150-word abstract, a curriculum vitae no longer than 5 pages, and the PhD completion date (as per the new RSA guidelines) to Andrea Gáldy (collectingcentraleurope@gmail.com), Suzanna Ivanic (s.ivanic@kent.ac.uk), and Tomasz Grusiecki (tomaszgrusiecki@boisestate.edu) before Sunday, 29 May 2022. Presenters will have to be active RSA members.
13 — 17 June 2022: Collections in the Early Modern Era, organised by Palacký University Olomouc in collaboration with Leiden University, University of Trnava and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. To find out more, please visit https://dejinyumeni.upol.cz/nc/zprava/clanek/katedra-dejin-umeni-vypisuje-call-for-papers-pro-mezinarodni-workshop-collections-in-early-modern-er/.
13 May 2022: Mapping Connections in Early Modern Central Europe workshop organised by CONNECTED CENTRAL EUROPEAN WORLDS, 1500-1700. For further information, please email Suzanna Ivanič (s.ivanic@kent.ac.uk) and Tomasz Grusiecki (tomaszgrusiecki@boisestate.edu).