RSA Chicago 2024

Earlier this year, Hannah Murphy and Eli Cumings travelled to Chicago for the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (Thursday 21st to Saturday 23rd March 2024). As always, it was a thrilling, immersive whirlwind, showcasing exciting and dynamic work from colleagues across disciplines, fields and temporalities. We learned a lot, made new acquaintances, and caught up with distant friends.

 

For Hannah, the conference kicked off on Thursday morning, with a panel organised by Katherine Reinhart on drawing as knowledge production. Morgan Ng from Yale gave a fascinating paper about monumental, architectural projections graffitied on flat surfaces, a phenomenon which raised questions about the relationship of the miniature to the gigantic, and how the early modern imaginary processed and projected space, scale, and measurement. What Morgan laid out tallied with early modern German uses of the body itself as a unit of measurement, and raised fundamental questions about accuracy as an aim and a value. Megan Piorko’s paper on alchemical imagery in personal manuscripts played on material text, inscription and collage. Does the manipulation and alteration of context make a new image or not? Longtime friend and former Renaissance Skin reading group collaborator Siestke Franzen now heads up a collaborative research group on Visualising Science in Media Revolutions at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. Her contribution to this panel drew from collaborative work with illustrators to question the epistemic value of the image, arguing that it is in the process of drawing rather than the completed image, which ultimately produces knowledge.  Not only were the papers in this whole panel beautifully illustrated, they asked questions about what knowledge was, how it could be gained, and how it was produced which we continue to think about in our project events.

A roundtable on landscapes of resource management delved into new conceptions of early modern environmental history. Organised by Tina Asmussen and Renee Raphaele as part of a forthcoming special issue in Renaissance Quarterly, six panellists explored entanglements of raw materials, natures, bodies, and landscapes in order to highlight contributions of early modern case studies to humanist scholarship of the Anthroposcene. Lavinia Maddaluna considered rice and mineral resources around Venice, William Rhodes explored the writings of Spencer and the politics of ‘provisioning’, Caroline Murphy interrogated the critical place of aquatic landscapes. In a paper that spoke the relationship of botany and Christianity (of great interest to MMoR), Melissa Reynolds offered an exploration of plants and their relationship to providence. This conceptual linkage continued in Danielle Clarke’s situation of botany, providence and settler imagination in the writings of Lady Ann Southwell. As one might imagine from such a panel, there were many fertile areas of crossover between these papers, which together clearly defined the exigency and urgency of ‘resource management’ as a framing analytic to rethink longer-standing questions of political economy, science, gender, confessionalisation and state-formation.

Directly picking up many of the questions at the heart of MMoR, in the afternoon Hannah attended a panel on “Race and Blackness in Transnational Perspectives”. the panel featured three papers, by Andrew Horn, Henriette Rietveld, and Tim Siriano, which addressed the representation of Roma people in passion ensembles, read Jan Vos’ Aran en Titus in the conext of the Dutch transatlantic slave trade, and explored the legal status of infanticide in Sierra Leone, respectively. Organised by Domna Stanton, the panel was a direct response to the recent publication (and RSA book prize-winning) Scripts of Blackness by Noemie Ndiaye, who also offered a comment drawing the papers together, by dint of thinking about the role of children and hereditability as evidence of a more general preoccupation/problematic of race-making and futurity.

 

The rich programme on Thursday extended into the evening with a keynote by Joan-Pau Rubies, whose work on colonialism and early modern Spanish ideas of race have long been generative for many early modern historians interested in questions of human difference. Rubies’ keynote “The Renaissance of Encounters and the Renaissance of Antiquities” was in many respects a capstone for his longstanding interests in these questions. As one key collaboration for our MMoR project is a sourcebook, his lecture touched on many questions which are key to our own current thinking. 

On Friday morning, it was a pleasure and a privilege to attend a panel Feathers, Scribes and Inky Fingerprints organised by Nadine Akkermann and featuring a former KCL colleague and CEMS assistant director Jonathan Powell. All three papers on this fascinating panel offered new methodological approaches to the study of manuscripts. Holly Rich’s PhD project explores collections of epitaphs, and, connecting back to Megan Piorko’s paper in the first panel, asked in particular whether acts of collage constitute the making of new manuscripts materially.  Clodah Murphy’s interrogation of scribal voices in the correspondence of Elizabeth I used computational stylistics to show scribes consciously trying to mute their own voice through the use of conventions. For anyone interested in material text, authorship, subjectivity, or for those of us who work with texts that feature ‘rote’ passages and phrases, this was really an exciting set of conclusions! In a similar vein, Jonathan Powell’s paper used deep familiarity with the seemingly arcane conventions of early modern legal record-keeping to find new female voices in enrolments in the King’s Bench. The volume of cases brought before English courts never ceases to astonish. In one single term, Jonathan located 894 female participants in trespass cases. But this wasn’t a paper confined to the presence of female voices; rather it thought through the conceptual remit of ‘vox’. Reading legal records ‘through their own terms’, Jonathan argued that early modern vox was a profoundly collaborative textual production.

 

On Friday afternoon, Eli attended a panel exploring the construction of selfhood in early modern travel writing. In a series of fascinating papers which examined works by Francisco Álvares, John Cartwright, and Peter Munday, the speakers demonstrated how writers craft travel writing and how travel writing in turn shapes its writers. One recurrent theme was the “mediatedness” of travel writing—texts in this genre should not only be understood as records of experience, but as highly crafted documents which selectively represent their objects using a range of rhetorical techniques, and seek to craft an impression of their writers too. In this regard, this panel spoke to an ongoing project interest in the notion of expertise in early modernity: how do travel writers, medical practitioners, and theorists of human difference construct their own expertise with reference to the objects of their contemplation? Two of the speakers from this RSA panel, Natalya Din-Kariuki and Eva Johanna Holmberg, will be joining us at our travel, medicine, and race-making workshop in June, where we will continue exploring these and related questions.  

 

Eli had organised two panels for RSA, co-sponsored by MMoR and the Society for Renaissance Studies, which were held on Saturday morning. Like an MMoR conference held last year, these were concerned with the relationship between Christianity and race-making in early modernity. During the first ‘New Research’ panel, Eli shared some new work on parasitical infections which has since appeared in our blog series. This was followed by Deyasini Dasgupta’s paper on racialised discourses of monstrosity in English polemical accounts of Irish Catholics. Finally, Beth Blakemore shared her work on the representation of moriscos—Christians who had converted from Islam, willingly or otherwise, and their descendants—in Spanish literature. Hassana Moosa was unable to attend the conference to present her work on the Curse of Ham but was very much missed!

 

This panel was followed by a roundtable chaired by Eli, with contributions from Dennis Britton, Heather Miyano Kopelson, Noémie Ndiaye, and Stephanie Shirilan. Over the course of a long and productive conversation, the panellists reflected on the re-racialisation of religion in the present moment, the ethical urgency of unpicking the entanglement of these categories in premodernity, and the necessity of engaging these topics through pedagogy. With regards to research, both Stephanie and Noémie also stressed the necessity of engaging in comparative research which identifies overlapping identities and shared struggles, whether between Afro-descended, Jewish, and Muslim populations, or between discourses of race, class, and ability in premodernity and the contemporary world. 


Both Eli and Hannah found time to visit the Art Institute of Chicago, which houses one of the preeminent collections of Renaissance art in the USA. Amongst the abundance of Dürers, Cranachs, and masters of Renaissance Germany, Hannah was drawn to the tactile fleshiness of a particularly doughy putti. Eli lingered in the ancient Chinese collection, impressed by the beauty and sheer age of the early jades on show.

 

After a long journey back, we arrived home feeling inspired and invigorated by a long weekend of sharing ideas and connecting with colleagues across disciplines and institutions. We look forward very much to following the evolution of their projects, and to meeting again in the not-too-distant future!

 

Hannah and Eli 

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