Colloquium | Seeing Her: Where Women Wrote Architecture, 1700–1900
From the conference website:
Seeing Her: Where Women Wrote Architecture, 1700–1900
Sie Sehen: Wo Frauen Architektur Schrieben, 1700–1900
ETH Zurich Hönggerberg, 29 November 2024
The 5th WoWA Workshop and Colloquium is entitled Seeing Her / Sie Sehen and will take place on 29 November 2024 at ETH Zurich. Featuring a private bilingual reading workshop followed by public talks in the afternoon, it brings together a diverse group of scholars in terms of seniority, period, background, and expertise.
Talks by Emma Cheatle (Sheffield), Sonja Dümpelmann (Munich), and Isabel Karremann (Zurich) will centre around specific sites ranging from maternity spaces to the literary country house and gendered landscapes. Together with the respondents, Anna-Maria Meister (Florence/Karlsruhe) and Anne Hultzsch (Zurich), speakers will complicate architectural histories of the 18th and 19th centuries with the question where women wrote architecture. Join us for the in-person colloquium: all are welcome!
Online Lecture | Charles O’Brien and Simon Bradley on Pevsner
From the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art:
Charles O’Brien and Simon Bradley | Celebrating Pevsner: Reflections on the Completion of the Buildings of England
Online, 14 November 2024, 6.00pm (London time)
The editors of the Pevsner Architectural Guides will be in conversation, reflecting on the revision of the Buildings of England series from 1983 to 2024, lately completed with the new Staffordshire volume. Simon Bradley and Charles O’Brien will consider the development and updating of the guides over forty years, the expansion of their content and the challenges both of research and writing and of maintaining the spirit and ambition of Pevsner’s original vision for the books. They will also reflect on their own contributions as authors of the new and revised editions, spanning their time with Penguin Books and Yale University Press. The event will be chaired by Jeremy Musson.
Book tickets here»
Jeremy Musson is an architectural historian; he studied at UCL and the Warburg Institute and was an assistant curator for the National Trust and architectural editor at Country Life, 1998–2007. He is the author of a number of books on the country house, including English Country House Interiors (2011) and The Drawing Room (2014), and was co-writer and presenter of BBC2’s The Curious House Guest. A heritage consultant since 2007, Jeremy has worked on projects including Hardwick Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral. He is editor of The Victorian and teaches on the building history masters course at the University of Cambridge; a senior research fellow of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Buckingham; and a supervisor of students at New York University (NYU) in London. He is also a trustee of the Historic Houses Foundation. He was a contributing author to the revision of the Buildings of England: Sussex West with Elizabeth Williamson, Tim Hudson, and Ian Narin.
Charles O’Brien FSA is Listing and Architectural Research Director at Historic England. Until 2022 he was joint Series Editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides. He joined the series in 1997, where he worked full time on the research, writing, and editing of the new editions. As author and co-author he has written the revised volumes London 5: East; Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough; Hampshire: South; and Surrey. He is a former Commissioner of Historic England and former Chair of their London Advisory Committee.
Simon Bradley FSA joined the Pevsner series in 1994. His own revised volumes include London 1: The City of London; London 6: Westminster; Cambridgeshire; and Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South East. He has also published on the Gothic Revival, drawing on his PhD thesis, and on railways and railway buildings including St Pancras Station (2006), The Railways: Nation, Network, and People (2015), and Bradley’s Railway Guide: A Journey Through Two Centuries of British Railway History, 1825–2025 (2024).
New Book | Chronos: Die Personifikation der Zeit
In the US, daylight saving time ends Sunday morning. New from Michael Imhof:
Angelika Eder, Chronos: Die Personifikation der Zeit und ihr Einsatz in der Kunst des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2024), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-3731914044, €50.
Chronos, die Personifikation der Zeit, fand in der Kunst des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts weite Verbreitung—sei es in Tafelbildern, in Deckengemälden, in der Druckgrafik oder der Skulptur. Das weite Einsatzspektrum dieser äußerst komplexen Figur bildet den Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Untersuchung.
Die Konfrontation mit der Erkenntnis des befristeten Lebens und der Fragilität jeder Existenz machte die Menschen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert empfänglich für das Thema der Vergänglichkeit, das die destruktive Seite von Chronos in den Vordergrund stellt. Auf vielfältige Weise wird die Personifikation der Zeit als Zerstörerin dargestellt: von menschlichem Leben, von Liebe, von materiellen Errungenschaften. Parallel zeigen Kunstwerke die positive Seite von Chronos, bei denen sich die Zeit als Helferfigur offenbart. In der Allegorie trägt so die Zeit den Ruhm des Herrschers über dessen Tod hinaus in die Zukunft. Ebenso bewahrt Chronos die Schöpfungen der neuzeitlichen Künstler vor dem Verfall und sichert deren Andenken in ihren bleibenden Werken. Im Buch wird eine bisher fehlende Systematik entwickelt, die von der Herkunft und Genese der Zeitfigur ausgeht und anhand von ausgewählten Beispielen ihre facettenreiche Verwendung in den Blick nimmt.
Call for Papers | Objects in Early Modern Latin America
From ArtHist.net:
Objects and Everyday Life in Early Modern Latin America: Art, Crafts, and Material Culture in Light of the Encounter with European Travellers
Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France, Paris, 12 February 2024
Organized by Maddalena Bellavitis, Corinne Mencé-Caster, and José Manuel Santos Pérez
Proposals due by 15 November 2024
Colonial studies in recent years are increasingly bringing attention to topics that go beyond purely historical, geographical, or ethical issues. There is also a desire to focus on aspects of everyday life, on the elements that constituted moments of family routine, the rituals of cult activities, the spheres of work, like handicrafts, agriculture, and commerce, or personal affairs. In this field, research from a variety of disciplines is mixed, collaborating with each other to search for sources from which information can be drawn, and to analyse their contents in order to reconstruct contexts and narratives that can give us glimpses of the reality of that time.
This workshop intends to explore precisely this reality, and investigate the objects that were part of the private and everyday—but also public and religious—moments in the lives of the peoples of Latin America between the 16th and 18th centuries. Consideration will be given not only to items produced, constructed, and preserved in situ, but also to those that travelled to Europe with the ships that returned there, collected by travellers as curiosities or trophies. Particular attention will then be paid to objects that were derived from the encounter with European culture, through technical, practical, or aesthetic inspiration. Therefore, all proposals that deal with the world of objects, both craft and artistic, and material culture related to colonial Latin America and its encounter with Europe are welcome.
Please submit a one-page PDF with abstract for an unpublished contribution and short bio by 15 November 2024 to the following address: maddalena.bellavitis@gmail.com. Presentations will be in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese and will last a maximum of 20 minutes. The organizers, Maddalena Bellavitis, Corinne Mencé-Caster, and José Manuel Santos Pérez, will notify the selected proposals by the end of November 2024.
Conference | Gothic (Revival) Spaces, 1750–1900
From John Britton, Graphical and Literary Illustration of Fonthill Abbey Wiltshire, with Heraldical and Genealogical Notices of the Beckford Family (1823).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From ArtHist.net:
Gothic (Revival) Spaces: Concepts and Reinterpretation of British and Continental Domestic Architecture, 1750–1900
Würzburg, 14–16 November 2024
Organized by Daniela Roberts and Christina Clausen
Critical engagements with so-called Gothic spaces in fiction is arguably one of many intellectual explorations in the field of Gothic literature. These literary representations of space may emphasise the semiotic structure of fictional spaces in terms of plot, atmosphere and mood but they also reflect on characteristics and behavioural patterns of the narrative’s protagonists.
Until recently, however, less sustained scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature and the architectural style of the Middle Ages as prototype of the Gothic Revival space. In the discipline of art history, on the other hand, a critical focus on Neo-Gothic architecture that highlights design, styles and architectural precursors inhabits a much more prominent role. And yet one could argue that scholarly enquiries into the complexity of spatial structures and effects including the re-contextualised Gothic forms and features as well as the social and performative functions of spaces, especially Gothic Revival interiors and furniture, are yet to emerge. With the conference Gothic (Revival) Spaces, we critically engage with the imaginary spaces in literature and the actually built or designed architectural spaces, since there’s little doubt that the evolution of the fictional and the tangible, material Gothic space is closely intertwined.
Organisation
• Daniela Roberts (daniela.roberts@uni-wuerzburg.de), Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
• Christina Clausen (clausen@kunst.tu-darmstadt.de), Fachgebiet Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte, Universität Darmstadt
t h u r s d a y , 1 4 n o v e m b e r
13.00 Arrival
13.30 Welcome and Introduction — Daniela Roberts (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg) and Christina Clausen (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
14.00 Opening Lecture
• Dale Townshend (Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies / Manchester Metropolitan University) — Towards a Poetics of Gothic Space
14.45 Break
15.15 Section 1 | Literary and Visual Fiction of Gothic Space
Chair: Daniela Roberts
• Antje Fehrmann (Freie Universität Berlin) — Fragmented Gaze versus Spatial Narrative: Horace Walpole and his Appropriation of Medieval Architecture
• Nicolas Marine (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) — A Broad Mass of Existence: The House of the Seven Gables and the view from the Gothic House
• Maria Duran Marques (Universidade de Lisboa) — Gothic Fictions – Walpole’s Influences on Ferdinand II of Portugal and his Gothic Revival Projects in the Domestic Sphere
• Christina Clausen (Technische Universität Darmstadt) — Interactions between Pictorial Spaces in Painting and Neo-Gothic Interior Designs
f r i d a y , 1 5 n o v e m b e r
9.30 Section 2 | Constitution and Perception of Gothic Space
Chair: Antje Fehrmann
• Ute Engel (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) — The Chapel in the Woods and The Vyne: The Ambiguity of Gothic (Revival) Spaces
• Michal Lynn Shumate (Scuola IMT Alti Studi, Lucca) — Pointed Arches and Atmosphere: Cataloguing Roman Gothic
• Margarida Elias (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) — The Gothic Revival in Lisbon during the 19th Century
12.00 Lunch
14.00 Section 3 | Concepts of Historicisation and Authenticity as a Construction of Political Identity
Chair: Christina Clausen
• Meinrad von Engelberg (Technische Universität Darmstadt) — Von Laxenburg nach Stolzenfels: Die politische Bedeutung der deutschen Neugotik
• Mélina Collin (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) — American Gothic: Andrew Jackson Downing and the Democratisation of the Gothic Revival Style in the United States
• Dominik Müller (ETH Zürich) — Pyramids, Hexagons, and Pinnacles: Batalha’s Influence
• Madalena Costa Lima (Universidade de Lisboa) — Concepts of Gothic: Judgements and Sensibilities towards a Not Yet Defined Style in the Long 18th Century
17.30 Break
18.00 Keynote Lecture
• Peter Lindfield (Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University) — Creating Multi-layered Gothic (Revival) Spaces in 18th- and 19th-Century Britain: The Fashionable and Eccentric
s a t u r d a y , 1 6 n o v e m b e r
9.30 Section 4 | Neo-Gothic Interior in the Context of Stylistic Pluralism
Chair: Michal Lynn Shumate
• Matthew Winterbottom (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) — Furnishing Gothic Revival Space
• Tommaso Zerbi (Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom) — Tracing Empire and Domestic Gothic in the Eternal City (online)
• Katrin Kaufmann (Vitrocentre Romont) — Light and Colour in the Gothic Revival: Stained Glass as a Constitutive Element of Neo-Gothic Interior Design
• Ole W. Fischer (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart) — Learning from Morris? From Red House to Bloemenwerf: Henry van de Velde and the Invention of L’Art Nouveau from the Spirit of Gothic
13.00 Closing Discussion
Call for Papers | Sex and Art
From ArtHist.net:
What Is Sex? Special Issue of Frame[less] Magazin
Proposals due by 8 December 2024
In der Kunstgeschichte ist Sexualität seit jeher ein facettenreiches und kontroverses Thema, das sich sowohl in subtilen Andeutungen als auch in expliziten Darstellungen widerspiegelt und eine breite Spannweite an Imagination und Interpretation bietet.
Klassische Darstellungen wie Tizians Zeus und Danae oder Berninis Apoll und Daphne zeigen, wie sexuelle Themen in mythologischen Kontexten verarbeitet wurden und bieten, wie die Erzählung der unbefleckten Empfängnis, die ikonografisch besonders in religiösen Darstellungen verankert ist, reiches Material für eine kritische Auseinandersetzung.
Auch Stillleben beinhalten oft subtile Anspielungen auf Erotik und Sexualität, erzählen von verborgenen Begehren und reflektieren das Verhältnis von künstlerischer Darstellung und gesellschaftlichen Normen, das sich weniger offensichtlich auch in den Werken Fragonards widerspiegelt.
Wie haben sich diese Erzählungen über die Jahrhunderte verändert und welche Bedeutung haben sie noch heute?
Die Enttabuisierung sexueller Themen in der Kunst, insbesondere seit den 1960er Jahren, bietet Ansatzpunkte für die Betrachtung, wie Künstler*innen den Diskurs über Sexualität und Feminismus revolutioniert haben und welche Tabus heute noch herausgefordert werden.
Gender, Diversität und LGBTQ+-Themen sind von zentraler Bedeutung, wenn es um die Frage geht, wie Kunst die Komplexität sexueller Identitäten und Vielfalt sichtbar macht und reflektiert.
Künstlerinnen wie Sarah Lucas und Nan Goldin setzen sich in ihren Arbeiten explizit mit der Darstellung von Geschlechtsteilen und sexuellen Handlungen auseinander. Auch im Performativen findet sich diese Auseinandersetzung mit Sexualität—wie zuletzt in Florentina Holzingers Opernperformance Sancta, die weltweit Schlagzeilen machte. Direkte Konfrontation—erotische Fotografie—künstlerisch inspirierte Form der Pornografie: Welche Grenzen werden zwischen Kunst und Konsum gezogen und wie fungiert der Körper dabei als Medium?
Im digitalen Zeitalter erweitert sich dieser Diskurs um neue Dimensionen: Cybererotik und die Erforschung von Körperlichkeit im Virtuellen schaffen innovative Formen der Sexualität, die physische Grenzen verschwimmen lassen und den erotischen Ausdruck in bisher unerforschte digitale Räume verlagern. So entstehen neuartige Verbindungen zwischen Körper, Sexualität und Technologie, die den Umgang mit Intimität auf radikal neue Weise gestalten.
Nach Foucault ist Sex Macht und das Bild Verhandlungsebene zwischen Gesagtem und Gesehenen. Doch welche Rolle spielt Kunst in der Auseinandersetzung mit problematischen Machtverhältnissen, mit Missbrauch und Übergriffen? Kann Kunst wirklich aufklären und ist Sex in all seinen Facetten und sozialen Implikationen überhaupt darstellbar?
frame[less]—das digitale Magazin für Kunst in Theorie und Praxis ist auf der Suche nach euren Beiträgen. Für das Issue #8 schreiben wir den Open Call zum Thema SEX aus. Die Form wird den Beitragenden freigestellt. Wir freuen uns über vielfältige Formate wie theoretische, kritische und wissenschaftliche Annäherungen an das Thema, genauso wie praktische, projektbezogene Beiträge. Ebenso heißen wir interdisziplinäre und hybride Formen willkommen. Es gibt keine formalen und personenbezogenen Kriterien für die Auswahl der Beiträge. Einzig die Qualität der Abstracts und Proposals entscheidet.
Wir ermöglichen einen interdisziplinären Diskurs im Bereich Kunst, wobei wir einen offenen Kunstbegriff propagieren, der unter anderem Disziplinen wie Architektur und Design mit einbezieht. Besonders Menschen, die sich als FLINTA definieren und beziehungsweise oder BIPoC möchten wir ermutigen, sich zu bewerben.
Sende uns dein Abstract oder Projektvorhaben (maximal eine Seite) zu, in dem du kurz deine Idee beschreibst. Bis zum 08.12.2024 hast du Zeit, dich unter redaktion@framelessmagazin.de zu bewerben. Wir geben dir dann schnellstmöglich eine Rückmeldung (ca. eine Woche) und informieren dich über alle weiteren Vorgänge.
frame[less] ist ein digitales Magazin für Kunst in Theorie und Praxis. frame[less] ist ein unabhängiges und nicht kommerzielles Online- Magazin, das Studierenden, Wissenschaftler:innen sowie Künstler:innen eine Plattform bietet, wissenschaftliche Beiträge, Essays, Kritiken, Kommentare, künstlerische Arbeiten und weitere Formen zu veröffentlichen.
New Book | Fierce Desires
From Norton:
Rebecca Davis, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), 480 pages, ISBN: 978-1631496578, $35.
From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades.
Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a ‘tradwife’ is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are ‘acceptable’—and which are not—since before the founding itself.
From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation’s sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock’s crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson.
At the heart of the book is Davis’s argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America’s sexual past since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis’s magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them.
Rebecca L. Davis is professor of history at the University of Delaware and author of Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics and More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. She lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
New Book | Lower than the Angels
From Penguin Random House in the UK, with publication forthcoming (2025) in the US:
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (London: Allen Lane, 2024), 688 pages, ISBN: 978-0241400937, £35 / $40.
The Bible observes that God made humanity “for a while a little lower than the angels.” If humans are that close to angels, does the difference lie in human sexuality and what we do with it? Much of the political contention and division in societies across the world centres on sexual topics, and one-third of the global population is Christian in background or outlook. In a single lifetime, Christianity or historically Christian societies have witnessed one of the most extraordinary about-turns in attitudes to sex and gender in human history. There have followed revolutions in the place of women in society, a new place for same-sex love amid the spectrum of human emotions and a public exploration of gender and trans identity. For many the new situation has brought exciting liberation—for others, fury and fear.
This book seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a 3000-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender, and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. The message of Lower than the Angels is simple, necessary and timely: to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity. The reader can decide from the story told here whether there is a single Christian theology of sex, or many contending voices in a symphony that is not at all complete. Oxford’s Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church introduces an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears, and hopes.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is a fellow of both St Cross College and Campion Hall, Oxford, and emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford University. His books include Thomas Cranmer: A Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize, and Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, a New York Times bestseller that won the Cundill Prize in History. He has presented many highly celebrated documentaries for television and radio and was knighted in 2012 for his services to scholarship. He is an ordained deacon of the Church of England. He lives in Oxford.
Call for Papers | Religion, Ancestry, and Identity
From ArtHist.net:
Religion, Ancestry, and Identity: On the Relationship between Theology, Genealogy, and Heraldry in the Early Modern Period
Warburg-Haus, Hamburg, 3–4 April 2025
Proposals due by 13 December 2024
In early modernity, genealogy was a topic of major religious and theological relevance. During the Reformation, genealogical thinking helped to shape new confessional identities, significantly influencing perceptions of family and kinship. References to ancestry served to illustrate religious continuities and the transmission of the ‘true’ faith across generations. Thus, genealogy not only contributed to establishing religious authority, but also shaped confessional identities and served as a tool for resolving theological issues. This interdisciplinary conference proposes to discuss the various interconnections between questions of origin or ancestry and confessional contexts.
The conference takes as its starting point the seemingly surprising observation that numerous theologians were simultaneously active in the fields of genealogy or heraldry. On the Protestant side, Cyriacus Spangenberg (1528–1604), Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), and Johann Ulrich Pregitzer IV (1673–1730) can serve as examples. On the Catholic side, the pronounced engagement of Jesuits in genealogy and heraldry is particularly striking, with Philibert Monet (1566–1643) and Claude-Francois Menestrier (1631–1705) being prominent examples in France.
This phenomenon can be explained through the numerous intersections between the fields of genealogy, heraldry, and theology. Genealogical and heraldic practices served theologians as tools for addressing theological issues, such as resolving the conflicting genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Additionally, the merging of secular and sacred fields of knowledge generated iconographic innovations for illustrating and conveying these topics, for instance in the form of printed family trees, which differed from earlier representations. In heraldic literature, there was cross-confessional discussion up until the seventeenth century about the extent to which the origins of coats of arms could be traced back to the 12 tribes of Israel or even to Adam. Christian symbols, such as depictions of saints, were widely used in early modern city coats of arms—a tradition whose traces can still be seen today. At the same time, Jesuits were particularly active in princely genealogy and heraldry. Their studies were initially connected to the education of young nobles in these subjects at their colleges, but they also resulted in extensive heraldic and genealogical compendia.
At least on the Protestant side, theologians engaged in genealogical and heraldic activities often faced pressure to justify their work. Contemporary criticism of genealogical and heraldic studies as vanity or a waste of time must be understood within the context of a broader moral-theological debate about the Christian valuation of family, ancestry, and birth. A central reference point in this debate was Paul’s (seemingly) critical view of the genealogies of ancient Judaism (1 Timothy 1:4 and especially Titus 3:9), around which an antiquarian-theological dispute unfolded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The influence of this criticism can be traced from Spangenberg to Spener.
While there has been some initial research into the complex and sometimes tense relationship between genealogy, heraldry, and theology during the early modern period, the majority of the field remains largely unexplored. This is especially true regarding Christian discourses on genealogy and heraldry, the use of theological arguments in both fields, and changing perspectives on the family as a result of the Reformation, as well as possible confessional differences regarding these topics. The aim of the conference is to illuminate and discuss the early modern relationship between religion and ancestry in an interdisciplinary way.
Possible topics include:
1 What confessional differences can be identified in the use and discussion of genealogical concepts? How did genealogical concepts help to support or clarify biblical/confessional narratives? To what extent do genealogy and heraldry, as secular fields of knowledge, offer a ‘common ground’ for understanding between different confessions?
2 What media and narrative forms of expressing ancestry can be identified in religious contexts? What temporal and confessional developments can be observed?
3 In what ways and contexts were theological concepts and arguments applied and incorporated in genealogy and heraldry? To what extent did these applications vary according to region or confession within Christianity? What specific theological challenges could be addressed through genealogical and heraldic approaches?
4 How did the contemporary moral pressure to justify their work affect theologians who engaged with genealogy and heraldry? Can confessional differences in these debates be identified? To what extent did societal expectations and norms influence theologians’ approaches to genealogical and heraldic studies? Are there specific examples of conflicts between the outcomes of their research and the doctrinal mandates of the church? What strategies did theologians develop to deal with this pressure and present their research as morally justifiable?
5 How do genealogy and heraldry integrate into the biographies of theological scholars? What motivated theologians to engage in these studies? Was it a matter of personal interest, an exploration of their own family history, a didactic endeavour (for instance, as tutors to princes), or a serious alternative career option?
Contributions from cultural and literary studies, history, art history, and theology are warmly invited. If interested, please send a (working) title and a brief abstract by 13 December 2024, to Kai.Hendrik.Schwahn@uni-hamburg.de.
New Book | Augustus the Strong
From Penguin Random House:
Tim Blanning, Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco (London: Allen Lane, 2024), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0241705148, £30.
From the acclaimed author of The Pursuit of Glory and Frederick the Great, a riotous biography of the charismatic ruler of 18th-century Poland and Saxony—and his catastrophic reign.
Augustus is one of the great what-ifs of the 18th century. He could have turned the accident of ruling two major realms into the basis for a powerful European state—a bulwark against the Russians and a block on Prussian expansion. Alas, there was no opportunity Augustus did not waste and no decision he did not get wrong. By the time of his death Poland was fatally damaged and would subsequently disappear as an independent state until the 20th century. Tim Blanning’s wonderfully entertaining and original new book is a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance. Augustus’s posthumous sobriquet ‘The Strong’ referred not to any political accomplishment, but to his legendary physical strength and sexual athleticism. Yet he was also one of the great creative artists of the age, combining driving energy, exquisite taste, and apparently boundless resources to master-mind the creation of peerless Dresden, the baroque jewel of jewels. Augustus the Strong brilliantly evokes this time of opulence and excess, decadence, and folly.
Until age-dictated retirement in 2009, Tim Blanning was Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. He remains a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1990. His major works include The French Revolution in Germany, The French Revolutionary Wars, The Power of Culture and the Culture of Power, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815, and The Triumph of Music. He has written biographies of Joseph II, Frederick the Great, and George I.
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