![Call for Participants:Allegory in the Early Modern World:Image, Body, Text “[...] allegory, a creaky clockwork device de...](https://img5.medioq.com/525/922/1002062465259223.jpg)
24/07/2024
Call for Participants:
Allegory in the Early Modern World:
Image, Body, Text
“[...] allegory, a creaky clockwork device designed to produce the right moral at the right time.” - Anthony Grafton
Although it is all too often perceived in modern scholarship as the rusty remainder of a rigid medieval worldview out of step with the great cultural and scientific revolutions of the Renaissance, allegory captured the imagination and innermost feelings of early modern people. Literary works like Dante’s Divina Commedia, Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose, and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, as well as its pervasiveness in other artforms, including theater, music, dance, and the visual arts, attest to allegory’s broad reach. Our working group Allegory in the Early Modern World: Image, Body, Text proposes to rethink allegory and its cultural manifestations between 1350-1700. Instead of the narrow definition of Early Modern allegory as a strictly literary phenomenon, we propose an interdisciplinary approach that highlights allegory’s intermedial, performative, and multi-sensorial aspects. Moreover, as Barbara Johnson argues, the inherent tension in allegory between corporeal signifier and abstract signified introduces a “difference between self and other” at the heart of this interpretive form, making allegory a productive site for the study of the ways gender, race, and other identities were negotiated in the Early Modern world.
Meetings are organized by Dr. Eleonora Cappuccilli ([email protected]) and Eyal Pundik ([email protected]). Please email the organizers if interested.
The group will meet once a month from September to February at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies to discuss primary and secondary sources and present related research. Participants will have the opportunity to present their work to the public in a one-day symposium scheduled for April 2025.
