RSA San Juan 2023
On 6/7 March, Hannah Murphy and Eli Cummings travelled to Puerto Rico for the annual Renaissance Society of America conference. This is the largest conference spanning the interdisciplinary field of early modern studies, and a wonderful opportunity to experience cutting-edge research and meet colleagues from all over the world. That this event took place in Puerto Rico, colonized by the Spanish from 1493, added complexity and depth to an event which took a critical lens to the processes of the Renaissance. Over the course of the conference Eli and Hannah saw plenty of material relevant to our projects aims, and we present here some of the highlights.
First and foremost, a plenary lecture by Jennifer Morgan, who visited our project back in Summer 2022, and will be known to all attendees of our conference. Addressing the challenges and travails of the archive, Jennifer spent time ‘lingering’ with three of the women central to her thinking: the unnamed subject of an Italian portrait (portraitist intentionally unnamed), Elizabeth Key, the famous petitioner for freedom in seventeenth, Virginia, and another unnamed African woman, whose actions on board a slave ship violently interrupted the passage of enslavement, in devastating and temporary circumstances.
One of the best attended panels of the conference featured another MMoR friend, Miguel Valerio, who spoke on a panel on “Race and Representation in Colonial Latin American Art”. Miguel presented new research which saw him criss-crossing Brazil searching for statues, paintings and material culture from the surviving churches of Black confraternities. The results gave a fascinating insight into confraternities’ strategies for representation and visual identity, as well as their careful and clever financial planning, and the way they navigated local politics. We are excited to see the finished book, and we hope to welcome Miguel back to King’s soon to give us a preview. Miguel was joined by two co-panellists. Jennifer Saracino gave a beautiful and affecting paper about images of Nahua Pochteca on the sixteenth-century ‘Uppsala Map’ (pictured below). While such figures often seem marginal, she showed that their presence testified to the importance of indigenous expertise, landholding and ways of knowing space. Ximena Alexandra Gómez addressed confraternities’ processions, and particularly the strategies of refusal which some confraternities deployed to navigate their non-participation.
On Friday it was a pleasure to chair and attend several panels on skin, in part a legacy of Hannah’s longstanding involvement with Renaissance Skin. A large number of papers this year touched on skin, and a series of panels involved former collaborators Seb Kroupa, Craig Koslofsky, and Katherine Dauge Roth, as well as many other former conference attendees and presenters. One session in particular marked the publication of “Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World”. Showcasing new work from early career researchers and established scholars alike, it showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is ‘skin studies’ a growing field of enquiry, but that future directions in this field will open new questions about community, encounter and meaning. Following this, Hannah was fortunate to chair a session organised by Karen Lloyd in which a focus on skin linked three papers. Investigated funerary monuments and the tactility of skin Allie Terry-Fritsch. “Žižka’s Drum, or the Disembodiment of Sound” by Erika Honisch dealt with skin and sound in the commemoration of sixteenth century Hussites. Finally, Karen Lloyd’s paper explored the presence of the skin, nose and moustache (?!) of a “Turk” in the collection of Cardinal Flavio Chigi.
On Saturday Hannah made her research contribution to the conference, giving a paper on Apothecaries’ Jars. These fascinating and instantly recognisable objects became ubiquitous in early modern apothecaries’ shops. Their uniform rows conveyed and increasing emphasis on measurement, stability and order; at the same time their contents changed dramatically in the period under consideration. Linking this to our ongoing research, in the coming months, our project research will pick up the question of the presence of “African” materia medica in such items, through detailed study of inventories, port records and pharmacopeia.
In Puerto Rico we were also lucky to enrich our experience with cultural exploration of San Juan’s fascinating history. Particular highlights included the Dominican church of San Jose, where intricate restoration work has partially uncovered a variety of earlier murals, and the museum of the arts of Puerto Rico, where baroque treasures sit next to contemporary protest art, all in an old hospital building.
It’s always a fraught process picking and choosing panels to attend at RSA, and all weekend long people were talking about wonderful research they had seen and telling us we had missed out. We’re already looking forward to rectifying this at RSA Chicago. In the meantime, if we missed relevant research, and specifically, if we missed your research, we’d love to hear about it. The next twelve months will bring us blog posts, workshops, seminars and many more conferences, so we always hope there is more scope to meet and grow our project community around shared research questions and collaboration.
HM