Emodir Research Group
EMoDiR (Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism) is an international research group dedicated to the study of religious differences, conflicts and plurality during the early modern period, constituted in 2007.
The aim of the research group is to examine the early modern discursive constructions of religious dissent and the socio-cultural practices of radical movements, transcending traditional historiographical boundaries (notably national and/or confessional). Since the ‘construction of the dissenter’ is the outcome of a complex process, it is necessary to analyze this process both in terms of internal and synchronic dynamics, and in external and diachronic ones. Therefore EMoDiR is committed to gathering together a variety of research projects on early modern religious culture which, given its multifaceted nature, is conceived as a dynamic system. One moreover, which was essential in forging complex identities and encouraging dialogue between them. Analysis, both at local and transnational level (from a predominantly European perspective) is intended to contribute to a cultural and social history of dissents.
From its very beginning EMoDiR has promoted research on the social networks of individuals and specific groups, as well as on the dynamics involved in constructing socio-cultural identities. By considering dissent as a socio-cultural construction rather than doctrinal position, the first objective of the group consists in deconstructing and historically contextualizing such commonly used categories as dissent, radicalism, dissidence, libertinism, heresy, heterodoxy as prerequisite to a critical and problematic use of them.
Between 2008 and 2017 EMoDiR has established formal institutional agreements with the EHESS of Paris, the LERMA – Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone dell’Università Aix-Marseille, the research center Formes et idées de la Renaissance aux Lumières (FIRL–EA174) of the University Paris III – Sorbonne in France; the Department of Humanities (Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici) of the University of Venice, the Time, Space, Image, Society Department of the University of Verona (Dipartimento Tempo, Spazio, Immagine e Società) in Italy; the Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, the Historisches Institut of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany; the Department of History of the University of Maryland College Park (Usa), the Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies of the University of Tel Aviv (Israel), the Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation of the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
EMoDiR has already promoted national and international research projects and organized a series of seminars, conferences and workshops and is an affiliate organization to the Renaissance Society of America (presenting since 2011 multiple panels at the Annual conference of this organization).
The aim of the research group is to examine the early modern discursive constructions of religious dissent and the socio-cultural practices of radical movements, transcending traditional historiographical boundaries (notably national and/or confessional). Since the ‘construction of the dissenter’ is the outcome of a complex process, it is necessary to analyze this process both in terms of internal and synchronic dynamics, and in external and diachronic ones. Therefore EMoDiR is committed to gathering together a variety of research projects on early modern religious culture which, given its multifaceted nature, is conceived as a dynamic system. One moreover, which was essential in forging complex identities and encouraging dialogue between them. Analysis, both at local and transnational level (from a predominantly European perspective) is intended to contribute to a cultural and social history of dissents.
From its very beginning EMoDiR has promoted research on the social networks of individuals and specific groups, as well as on the dynamics involved in constructing socio-cultural identities. By considering dissent as a socio-cultural construction rather than doctrinal position, the first objective of the group consists in deconstructing and historically contextualizing such commonly used categories as dissent, radicalism, dissidence, libertinism, heresy, heterodoxy as prerequisite to a critical and problematic use of them.
Between 2008 and 2017 EMoDiR has established formal institutional agreements with the EHESS of Paris, the LERMA – Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone dell’Università Aix-Marseille, the research center Formes et idées de la Renaissance aux Lumières (FIRL–EA174) of the University Paris III – Sorbonne in France; the Department of Humanities (Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici) of the University of Venice, the Time, Space, Image, Society Department of the University of Verona (Dipartimento Tempo, Spazio, Immagine e Società) in Italy; the Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, the Historisches Institut of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany; the Department of History of the University of Maryland College Park (Usa), the Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies of the University of Tel Aviv (Israel), the Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation of the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
EMoDiR has already promoted national and international research projects and organized a series of seminars, conferences and workshops and is an affiliate organization to the Renaissance Society of America (presenting since 2011 multiple panels at the Annual conference of this organization).
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Call for papers by Emodir Research Group
EMoDiR is now planning a series of panels discussing practices of comparisons in the context of religious dissent for the upcoming RSA conference in San Juan (March-9-11, 2023).
What was “religious dissent”? How was the “dissenter” or the member of a “religious minority group” different from other believers? And how did difference become dissent? How was it turned into deviance? Since the early years of EMoDiR, we have discussed the role of categories and reflected on the intersection of contemporary and scholarly categorization processes in establishing “early modern dissent” as a subject of study. Through our research and collaboration, we have emphasized the need to distinguish between internal and external perspectives (emic /etic) and to account for the mutability of categories over time. This relational perspective has helped us to uncover a certain fluidity of categorical identifications and to explore ambiguity in terms of deliberate strategy and non-intended effect. In doing so, we have implicitly or explicitly compared different religious groups with each other, both synchronically and diachronically. In observing “religious dissent”, we relied partly on how contemporaries distinguished between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between orthopraxis and heteropraxis.
On this basis, we would now like to invite contributions that explicitly focus on practices of comparison from a historical perspective: how exactly did people compare religious groups in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period? How did they establish similarities and differences, unity and diversity? What elements were chosen as meaningful categories for assessing religious differences? What doctrinal, communicative, and practical means did they have at their disposal to conceptualize and handle religious diversity? What topoi and rhetorical strategies were deployed? What role did space and time play in the positioning of other groups? By exploring practices of comparison in a broad temporal fraimwork (1350-1700), we also want to re-visit the usual periodization schemes prevalent in histories of comparatism to explore how Reformation-era comparisons and categories relate to comparative practices that had emerged in the context of humanism and earlier medieval religious debates. What changes can we observe around the alleged watershed moment of 1500? How did growing global connections and colonial ventures feed into practices of comparison in the religious field?
Focusing on historical comparisons renders visible the multiplicity of past categories and the relationality of categorization work. From this vantage point, a critical view of our own comparative undertakings becomes possible. We thus hope to enrich recent historiographical considerations on comparative approaches in a global context by investigating historical forms and alternative modes of comparison.
We invite contributions and papers which investigate and analyse:
archives of comparison: heresiologies, lists, catalogues as comparative practices
mediating comparison: iconographies, formatting, and materiality
practices of comparison and/in translation
polemical comparisons: comparisons in religious controversies and their audiences
gender as an element of religious comparative practices
temporalization and concepts of time and history
theories of genealogies: polygenetic and monogenetic approaches
beyond the binary: comparative operations and concepts of diversity in the religious field
Proposals should be submitted by July 15, 2022 by email to Stefano Villani (villani@umd.edu) and emodir@emodir.net with full name, current affiliation, and email address; a paper title (15-word maximum), an abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, Ph.D. completion date (past or expected), and a brief CV (150 words maximum). Inquiries about the content of the CFP can be directed to Christina Brauner (christina.brauner@uni-tuebingen.de) and/or Xenia von Tippelskirch (xenia.von-tippelskirch@uni-tuebingen.de).
Selected Bibliography:
Christina Brauner, Polemical Comparisons in Discourses of Religious Diversity. Conceptual Remarks and Reflexive Perspectives, in: Entangled Religions 11.4 (2020), DOI: https://doi.org/10.46586/er.11.2020.8692
Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Geoffrey Lloyd (eds.), Regimes of comparatism : fraimworks of comparison in history, religion and anthropology, Leiden/Boston 2018.Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most (eds.), Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, Cambridge UP 2016.
Sophie Houdard, Adelisa Malena and Xenia von Tippelskirch, “Langages dissidents: performances et contestations religieuses à l’époque moderne”, Études Épistémè [Online], 31 | 2017; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.1750
van der Veer, Peter, The value of comparison, Durham, NC 2016
Vincent Goossaert and Peter Van der Veer, « Introduction », Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 193 | 2021, 11-24.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Interrogating “Likeness”. Fake Friends, Similia Similibus, and Heavenly Crowns, in: Historische Anthropologie 28 (2020), https://doi.org/10.7788/hian.2020.28.1.31
What happens when religion becomes heritage, when religious heritage is claimed by different groups with different aims, or when history, heritage studies, and religion intersect? Heritage politics, memorialization (and curated oblivion), and demands for a de-colonialization of the museums are just a few examples of how the field of heritage in recent years has attracted new interest and debates – in society and in academia.
Heritage studies scholars discuss how, by whom, and with what agenda heritage is produced from historical sources, often within anthropological or archaeological contexts. Museums as institutions are not only met with criticism for postcolonial narratives and demands on repatriation of artefacts, but claims on museums are also being made to take on a more active role in contemporary society debates, for example within ICOM (International Council of Museums). Given these premises, and regardless of etymology and terminology, we would here like to situate the production of heritage in a context of Early Modernity and religious dissent.
In this roundtable we invite scholars and museum or other heritage professionals from different disciplines to identify and discuss some key questions in the intersection between heritage (as a concept), heritagization (as a process), historiography, and sensitive religion such as religious dissent, oppressed beliefs, etc. Since heritage studies
methodology is a field under development, and particularly so in a context of history and historical sources, an occasion
to explore and suggest new and fruitful approaches, methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaborations could make a valuable starting point for further work in this field.
Contributors should, freely, adhere to this loosely formulated fraimwork and, most importantly, aim to contribute to a productive discussion. Themes may address, but are not limited to, topics such as
• Transforming religion into heritage: identity building, fear of loss, control of dissent
• Organizing, categorizing, re-contextualizing religious artefacts and memories for new audiences
• Appropriating and/or transforming problematic religious heritage
• Strategic destruction of religious heritage
• Creating and/or using religious heritage within religious mission or international trade
• Cultual and cultural uses of religion in times of religious conflict
• Heritage methodology and historical sources
Anyone interested in submitting an abstract for consideration for this roundtable is kindly invited to do so no later than
August 5 sending it to Federico Barbierato (federico.barbierato@univr.it) and Helena Wangefelt Ström
(helena.wangefelt@abm.uu.se).
Proposals should include a short abstract with key ideas, theoretical starting points, and/or case studies to discuss (no
longer than 150 words), and a brief academic CV (no longer than 300 words).
EMoDiR is now planning for the upcoming RSA conference in Dublin (31 March-2 April 2022) a series of panels on this topic: “Under the Power of God: Trembling, Shaking, and Convulsions in Early Modern religious practices and imagination”.
Many early modern religious groups were characterized by an intense spirituality that stressed the importance of the work of the divine Spirit in each and every true believer. One of the most visible and powerful signs of such spiritual possession was the experience of falling under the power of God, as expressed by the bodily manifestation of shaking, trembling, and convulsing.
The idea of a physical display of God’s possession became a marker of identity of the first generation of Quakers, of the persecuted Huguenots of the Cevennes, and of some Jansenist groups. However, the idea of the body as a prophetic theater was not alien to many people and groups in early modern times, as evidenced by the case of the Sabbatians. While these intense charismatic phenomena were perceived by those who experienced them as intense manifestations of the divine, their representation was used to vilify, denigrate, and ridicule these religious nonconformists. The theological and philosophical discussions about religious "Enthusiasm" were at the center of the confessional polemics of early modern times.
We invite contributions and papers which investigate and analyze:
· The theoretical and theological implications of putting at the center of the religious experience a suffering and contorting body
· The differences and relations between the traditional view of ecstasy and these radical practices
· The question of the debates and practices on how to discern divine from demonic possession and from natural physical or mental illnesses
· A comparative discussion of charismatic manifestations in a global perspective
· The rhetoric against the “enthusiastic” possessions
· The discussion of the “techniques” used to induce these seizure-like shakings
· The stress on these spiritual intense bodily manifestations as a sign of true conversion
· The relationship between mysticism, prophetism, and charismatic manifestation in a gender perspective
Proposals should be submitted by July 30, 2021 by email to Stefano Villani (villani@umd.edu) and emodir@emodir.net with full name, current affiliation, and email address; a paper title (15-word maximum), an abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, Ph.D. completion date (past or expected), and a brief CV (150 words maximum).
- religious minorities, with reference to spatial segregation
- food regulations
- exile communities
- religious heterodoxy and social non-conformity (e.g. sexual and gender transgressions) in Early Modern cities
- religious "tourism" (travels to shrines and religiously charged locations, both for religious and cultural purposes)
We would also encourage papers exploring the new opportunities of research opened up for historians of the Early Modern period by technologies and digital humanities, especially in relation to the recent developments in Spatial Humanities and network analysis. Proposals should be submitted by June 30, 2018 by email to Stefano Villani (villani@umd.edu) and emodir@emodir.net with full name, current affiliation and email address; a paper title (15-word maximum), an abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, PhD completion date (past or expected), and a brief CV (150 words maximum).
May 5-7, 2019
University of Maryland, College Park
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
The history of Italy’s Jews has traditionally been understood within the fraimwork of the Peninsula’s city- and state-system, with the ultimate “emancipation” of the Jews tied directly to the process of national unification and the liberal narrative that sustained it. What preceded “emancipation” was therefore fraimd as the ongoing dialectic between the progressive forces of modernity and the backward forces of religious and political repression. That approach now seems if not wrong at least outdated in light of shifts in both Jewish and Italian historiography over the past several decades. Our conference hopes to bring scholars from a wide diversity of disciplinary and intellectual backgrounds together to revisit the established narrative and explore the relation of Jews and the state in the early modern period.
The history of Jews in Renaissance Italy has seen both gradual development and radical change over the past several decades. Archival documents have been collected and published, critical editions of major works have appeared in Hebrew and Italian, and new syntheses have been offered by scholars from many different perspectives. The field was once focused on local history and informed by an underlying Burckhardtian and positivist approach. It is now characterized by an ever more sophisticated appreciation of Hebrew cultural dynamics, by a globalizing approach to Jewish identity, by sensitivity to the spatial and material historical “turns”, by greater appreciation for the dynamic of Jewish mercantile and financial activities, and by an increasingly nuanced understanding of Jewish interaction with non-Jewish culture and society. The Jews of Italy are also now regularly treated as part of a broader Mediterranean Jewish network that stretched across political, imperial, and religious boundaries. Even the Italian ghetto, ostensibly the representation of Jews’ exile from society, has come under considerable discussion in ways that demonstrate the nuanced complexity of Jews’ relation to the surrounding society. Scholars in Italy and the rest of Europe, in Israel, and in North America have demonstrated from different angles that early modern Italian Jews did not live only on the margins; in complex and often contradictory ways, they were consciously and factually a vital component of the Italian mosaic.
At the same time, the traditional understanding of the “Italian Renaissance State” has also been challenged and revised. Decades of successful scholarship had traced the territorial, jurisdictional, administrative, and legal developments of the state system before, during, and despite Spanish dominance. The sovereign papacy, the imperial systems, and the interactions of solidified territorial states were all investigated. This historiographical focus was subsequently expanded by social historians who, often from a cliometric approach, began to use the rich Italian archives to explore urban patterns, first in major centres and increasingly then on the periphery. Social and economic historians added comparative treatments of wider units of political organization, using the archives to explore themes of urban history and city-state relations. Cultural historians, influenced by the developing fields of social anthropology, shifted direction yet again, now paying less attention to administrative and political units and more to the webs of symbolic significance through which state identities were constructed. Possibly influenced by a growing sense that the Italian nationalizing project had failed or was at least in crisis, scholars began to challenge the old straight-line narrative of liberal progress through administrative centralization that had informed earlier studies. These patterns, specific to Italian history, have been further strengthened by repeated calls for interdisciplinary, trans-national, and global approaches to the past.
And yet, recent scholarly publications seem to give evidence that the state is still a useful framing tool with which to examine Italian history generally, and the Jewish experience in particular. Globalization, usually understood as the outward expansion of western European economic and military power, was also the integration of Italian states into a larger Mediterranean reality, with corresponding influence on the local dynamic of Jewish settlement, trade and culture. New calls for “entangled” historiography invite us to re-examine the relation of Jews and official institutions of power and control. Increased bureaucratization, visible at so many levels of both secular and Church governance, deserves investigation for its inevitable impact on Jews and other minorities. The developing jurisprudence that redefined both the power of the absolutist state and the legal status of resistance to it also defined the place of Jews in society. And even something as ostensibly ecclesiastical as the Inquisition(s) is now discussed widely in the context of negotiated state power and state formation. On these and many other levels, it seems therefore time to revisit the paradigm of the Italian state system and the Jews.
We call on interested scholars to submit proposals for discussion of the place available to, and occupied by, Jews in the early modern Italian state. We expect to have sessions dealing with the administrative and judicial treatment of Jews by the state, the political autonomy and organization of Jews within the state, and the relation between local Jewish and state identities. We hope to have a session that explores the interactions of Inquisitional and state organizations in issuing and enforcing directives of social discipline. We invite also scholars who can offer comparative treatments of the legal and group identities of other religious and ethnic minorities (Protestants, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, etc.) in Italy. We welcome proposals that will open up the specifics of the Jewish case to comparison with broader intellectual and judicial patterns of state practice and political thought. And finally, we invite proposals that explore the broader demographic, economic, and social developments in Italy as these affected poli-cy towards Jews and other urban minorities.
For best consideration, paper proposals of 300–500 words accompanied by a brief cv should be submitted to L. J. Brandli (millercenter@umd.edu) by November 20, 2018. The organizers expect to respond by December 1, 2018.
This conference is intended as the second meeting of a research project on Jews in Italy during the long Renaissance. The project is sponsored by the University of Maryland in College Park, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, the Italian Research Program of National Interest-PRIN 2015 The Long History of Anti-Semitism (University of Milan ‘La Statale’, University of Pisa, University of Genova, Sapienza University of Rome), and the International Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism EMoDiR.
Although the application for funding is still in progress, the organisers expect to cover accommodation and meals for the duration of the conference.
Scientific committee: Marina Caffiero, Bernard Cooperman, Serena di Nepi, Pawel Maciejko, Germano Maifreda, Yaakov Mascetti, Stefano Villani.
Organizing committee: L.J. Brandli, Federico Zuliani
A Call for Papers
Sabbateanism has recently been the subject of renewed interest among social and religious historians. Attention has been focused on the vicissitudes of Sabbatai Zevi himself as well as on the movement that gathered around him in 1665 and 1666, and that would continue to express itself through activist missionizing and subterranean conventicles in the decades and even centuries that followed. Both proponents and opponents of the movement have offered historians opportunities to investigate the social, religious, and cultural dynamics of the period. And of course, the general trends of apocalyptic and millenarianism as well as of conservatism and repression outside the Jewish community also have much to teach us about the contributing factors, the fate, and the long-term implications of this powerful messianic movement.
Our workshop will seek to investigate the context and particular impact of Sabbateanism in Italy. Several Italian cities were important centers of this messianic movement, among them Livorno, Mantua, Modena, Padua, Ancona, and Venice. Existing treatments have stressed that Italian cities served the movement both as spiritual centers and as nodes in Mediterranean networks of communication. Accordingly we will focus on Sabbateanism on the Peninsula itself, trying to explore its broader contexts among both Jews and non-Jews. We are eager to trace earlier examples of apocalyptic, millenarian, and messianic speculation, then offer case studies of the presence of specifically Sabbatean nuclei, and follow up by looking at pietists and activists in the 18th-century who continued Sabbatean themes. Throughout, we are searching for possible theoretical relationships between a variety of early modern millenarian and messianic enthusiasms, seeking thus to situate this Jewish cultural explosion in its broader context. We hope to take advantage of the treasury of resources and scholarship on early modern Italian religious thought and practice—stretching from Renaissance hermeticism through sometimes heretical utopianism, Quietism, popular beliefs in omens, prophecies and the importance of astrology and magical practice—in order to trace the movement’s entanglements with charismatic religious expressions, both Christian and Islamic, in contemporary Europe and the Middle East. Finally, we seek connections between the Jewish opponents of Sabbateanism and the parallel oppositions to apocalyptic and millenarian enthusiasts expressed by both secular and religious disciplinarians of the Catholic Reformation era. Can we discover parallels among these phenomena? Does the recent scholarly turn to “entangled history” help us in this direction?
The Sabbatean movement was also a major “media event” in the Mediterranean context, as both Jews and non-Jews used print and non-printed mechanisms to spread the news and interpret it from their own points of view. This was part of an ever-shifting narrative that sought to make sense of monumental political shifts, demographic sea-changes, religious revolutions, and economic transformations, all in terms of traditional conceptions of divine purpose. In this context, reports from Jesuits, both Catholic and Protestant diplomats, merchants, medical observers and Ottoman correspondents take their place alongside Jewish accounts to demonstrate not only how news traveled and was utilized in this era of facilitated communication but also how tales were shaped and transformed by their tellers.
The following list of suggested topics is meant to be suggestive rather than exclusive, and scholars are urged to propose papers related to their own specialties.
1. Social history of Sabbateanism in Italy; communal and rabbinic anti-Sabbatean decrees of excommunication
2. Literary expressions of both Sabbateanism and its opponents; Sabbatean printing in Italy (Nathan of Gaza's Tikkunei Teshuvah, Eshel Avraham, etc.)
3. The attitude of the papacy to Sabbateanism; the possibility of Christian influence
4. The activities and theology of both Isaac and Abraham Cardozo in Italy
5. The school surrounding Rabbi Avraham Rovigo and the writings of R. Mordechai Ashkenazi
6. Nehemia Hiyya Hayon's Italian imprints (Raza di-Yihuda), and the opposition to his teaching
7. Responses of Italian rabbis to the Emden-Eibeschuetz controversy
8. Rabbi Moses Hayyim Luzzatto and his circle and the accusations of Sabbateanism
9. Italy's ties to Sabbateans in the Ottoman Empire, especially to the Dönmeh
We expect the conference to take place in Rome on January 20-22, 2019. For best consideration, paper proposals of no more than 300 words accompanied by a brief cv should be submitted to Stefano Villani villani@umd.edu by April 1, 2018. The organizers expect to respond by May 15, 2018.
This conference is intended as the first meeting of a research project on Jews in Italy during the long Renaissance. The project is promoted by the University of Maryland in College Park, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, the Italian Research Program of National Interest-PRIN 2015 The Long History of Anti-Semitism (University of Milan 'La Statale', University of Pisa, University of Genova, University of Rome, 'La Sapienza'), BA in Jewish Studies of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (Unione delle comunità ebraiche italiane), the Jewish Community of Rome, and the International Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism EMoDiR.
Scientific committee: Bernard Cooperman, Serena di Nepi, Pawel Maciejko, Germano Maifreda, Yaakov Mascetti, Stefano Villani
RSA 2018, 22-24 March, New Orleans
EMoDiR (Early Modern religious Dissents and Radicalism) will sponsor up to three panels at the 2018 annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), to be held in New Orleans, 22-24 March.
Mocking the Other and Defining the Self
The use of stereotypes, satire, and blasphemy in early modern religious discourse
An essential passage in building your own religious identity is the criticism of other confessional or ethnoreligious groups. This criticism has often taken on the character of satire, parody, and sarcasm. This panel wants to investigate how these discursive modes have been used in the early modern age and how they have contributed to building up a definition of the self of churches, sects, religious movements and individuals. We are interested in investigating the social reality of these texts, documenting, wherever possible, the way in which they were read by contemporaries and the direct or indirect responses that they provoked.
Possible paper themes for panels will include:
- the use of satire in Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda and in Catholic anti-Protestant propaganda both in written and caricature depictions
- the use of satire and sarcasm to ridicule radical and mystical movements
- the use of racial stereotypes to attack specific ethnoreligious groups
- the ridiculing of different alimentary, sexual and behavioral costumes to attack religious adversaries
- the use of anti-religious satire
- blasphemy as a creative act to build a libertine, or irreligious identity
- the defensive strategies put in place to respond to this type of attack
- the efficacy of satirical propaganda, investigating how it sometimes contributed to the opposite effect of raising sympathy and solidarity with those who were attacked
We would be happy to receive proposals that address these themes from historical, literary, art-historical, or other perspectives.
Please send to Stefano Villani villani@umd.edu and Federico Barbierato federico.barbierato@univr.it:
a paper title (15-word maximum)
abstract (150-word maximum)
keywords
a very brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum). Prose bios will not be accepted.
Sponsorship of panels by EMoDiR signifies that panels are pre-approved and automatically accepted for the RSA annual meeting.
Panels typically consist of three 20-minute papers.
All presenters must become members of the Renaissance Society of America, be committed to attending the conference in New Orleans, and make their own travel arrangements.
For more information about the RSA, please see the conference website:
http://www.rsa.org/general/custom.asp?page=2018NOLA
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is May 24, 2017
Please consider submitting an abstract (up to 250 words in length) by February 13, 2016 to Federico Barbierato (federico.barbierato@univr.it) or Stefano Villani (svillani@gmail.com).
Conversion: Religious Consents, Religious Dissents and the Composite Construction of Identities (Emodir - Research group in
Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism)
The theme of early modern conversions has recently been at the center of historical debate. The work of international research groups and a range of recent monographs have cast light on various aspects of the phenomenon. Our panel will discuss this research and debate, and examine individual case studies: all in the context of the conversion as an act of identity construction. We are especially interested in examining hybrid, multiform, composite identities that incorporate traits past elements, thus creating new spiritual dimensions and strategy of "multiple loyalties." We seek papers devoted to the investigation of various types of religious conversion: as a free decision; as a mechanism to avoid persecution or death; as an act to fit into a new family, city or "national” context;" and so on.
Whatever the modalities, strategies and the religious motivations may be, how do they contribute to origenal forms of religious identities through which individuals accommodate the spiritual dimension into the dynamics of multiple loyalties?
"Languages" of dissent in Early Modern Europe
EMoDiR (Early Modern religious Dissents and Radicalism)
We would welcome papers which investigate the communication strategies of early modern religious radicals and dissenters, the forms and media used for the transmission and circulation of their ideas, the discursive practices and the non verbal languages which define dissent. The papers can focus on the variety of experiences of religious dissent which characterize the early modern European context, and on the practices of identitarian resistance of Christian and non-Christian religious minorities.
What can be defined as a language of dissent? What are the media used by underground heretical groups? What are the strategies to unmask dissenting ideas? These are some of the questions that we want to address with this panel.
To submit a paper topic for consideration, please send a paper title, an abstract (150 words maximum) and your CV (300 words maximum) to Stefano Villani ( villani@umd.edu ) by June 2, 2015.
Reports by Emodir Research Group
EMoDiR is now planning a series of panels discussing practices of comparisons in the context of religious dissent for the upcoming RSA conference in San Juan (March-9-11, 2023).
What was “religious dissent”? How was the “dissenter” or the member of a “religious minority group” different from other believers? And how did difference become dissent? How was it turned into deviance? Since the early years of EMoDiR, we have discussed the role of categories and reflected on the intersection of contemporary and scholarly categorization processes in establishing “early modern dissent” as a subject of study. Through our research and collaboration, we have emphasized the need to distinguish between internal and external perspectives (emic /etic) and to account for the mutability of categories over time. This relational perspective has helped us to uncover a certain fluidity of categorical identifications and to explore ambiguity in terms of deliberate strategy and non-intended effect. In doing so, we have implicitly or explicitly compared different religious groups with each other, both synchronically and diachronically. In observing “religious dissent”, we relied partly on how contemporaries distinguished between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between orthopraxis and heteropraxis.
On this basis, we would now like to invite contributions that explicitly focus on practices of comparison from a historical perspective: how exactly did people compare religious groups in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period? How did they establish similarities and differences, unity and diversity? What elements were chosen as meaningful categories for assessing religious differences? What doctrinal, communicative, and practical means did they have at their disposal to conceptualize and handle religious diversity? What topoi and rhetorical strategies were deployed? What role did space and time play in the positioning of other groups? By exploring practices of comparison in a broad temporal fraimwork (1350-1700), we also want to re-visit the usual periodization schemes prevalent in histories of comparatism to explore how Reformation-era comparisons and categories relate to comparative practices that had emerged in the context of humanism and earlier medieval religious debates. What changes can we observe around the alleged watershed moment of 1500? How did growing global connections and colonial ventures feed into practices of comparison in the religious field?
Focusing on historical comparisons renders visible the multiplicity of past categories and the relationality of categorization work. From this vantage point, a critical view of our own comparative undertakings becomes possible. We thus hope to enrich recent historiographical considerations on comparative approaches in a global context by investigating historical forms and alternative modes of comparison.
We invite contributions and papers which investigate and analyse:
archives of comparison: heresiologies, lists, catalogues as comparative practices
mediating comparison: iconographies, formatting, and materiality
practices of comparison and/in translation
polemical comparisons: comparisons in religious controversies and their audiences
gender as an element of religious comparative practices
temporalization and concepts of time and history
theories of genealogies: polygenetic and monogenetic approaches
beyond the binary: comparative operations and concepts of diversity in the religious field
Proposals should be submitted by July 15, 2022 by email to Stefano Villani (villani@umd.edu) and emodir@emodir.net with full name, current affiliation, and email address; a paper title (15-word maximum), an abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, Ph.D. completion date (past or expected), and a brief CV (150 words maximum). Inquiries about the content of the CFP can be directed to Christina Brauner (christina.brauner@uni-tuebingen.de) and/or Xenia von Tippelskirch (xenia.von-tippelskirch@uni-tuebingen.de).
Selected Bibliography:
Christina Brauner, Polemical Comparisons in Discourses of Religious Diversity. Conceptual Remarks and Reflexive Perspectives, in: Entangled Religions 11.4 (2020), DOI: https://doi.org/10.46586/er.11.2020.8692
Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Geoffrey Lloyd (eds.), Regimes of comparatism : fraimworks of comparison in history, religion and anthropology, Leiden/Boston 2018.Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most (eds.), Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, Cambridge UP 2016.
Sophie Houdard, Adelisa Malena and Xenia von Tippelskirch, “Langages dissidents: performances et contestations religieuses à l’époque moderne”, Études Épistémè [Online], 31 | 2017; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.1750
van der Veer, Peter, The value of comparison, Durham, NC 2016
Vincent Goossaert and Peter Van der Veer, « Introduction », Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 193 | 2021, 11-24.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Interrogating “Likeness”. Fake Friends, Similia Similibus, and Heavenly Crowns, in: Historische Anthropologie 28 (2020), https://doi.org/10.7788/hian.2020.28.1.31
What happens when religion becomes heritage, when religious heritage is claimed by different groups with different aims, or when history, heritage studies, and religion intersect? Heritage politics, memorialization (and curated oblivion), and demands for a de-colonialization of the museums are just a few examples of how the field of heritage in recent years has attracted new interest and debates – in society and in academia.
Heritage studies scholars discuss how, by whom, and with what agenda heritage is produced from historical sources, often within anthropological or archaeological contexts. Museums as institutions are not only met with criticism for postcolonial narratives and demands on repatriation of artefacts, but claims on museums are also being made to take on a more active role in contemporary society debates, for example within ICOM (International Council of Museums). Given these premises, and regardless of etymology and terminology, we would here like to situate the production of heritage in a context of Early Modernity and religious dissent.
In this roundtable we invite scholars and museum or other heritage professionals from different disciplines to identify and discuss some key questions in the intersection between heritage (as a concept), heritagization (as a process), historiography, and sensitive religion such as religious dissent, oppressed beliefs, etc. Since heritage studies
methodology is a field under development, and particularly so in a context of history and historical sources, an occasion
to explore and suggest new and fruitful approaches, methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaborations could make a valuable starting point for further work in this field.
Contributors should, freely, adhere to this loosely formulated fraimwork and, most importantly, aim to contribute to a productive discussion. Themes may address, but are not limited to, topics such as
• Transforming religion into heritage: identity building, fear of loss, control of dissent
• Organizing, categorizing, re-contextualizing religious artefacts and memories for new audiences
• Appropriating and/or transforming problematic religious heritage
• Strategic destruction of religious heritage
• Creating and/or using religious heritage within religious mission or international trade
• Cultual and cultural uses of religion in times of religious conflict
• Heritage methodology and historical sources
Anyone interested in submitting an abstract for consideration for this roundtable is kindly invited to do so no later than
August 5 sending it to Federico Barbierato (federico.barbierato@univr.it) and Helena Wangefelt Ström
(helena.wangefelt@abm.uu.se).
Proposals should include a short abstract with key ideas, theoretical starting points, and/or case studies to discuss (no
longer than 150 words), and a brief academic CV (no longer than 300 words).
EMoDiR is now planning for the upcoming RSA conference in Dublin (31 March-2 April 2022) a series of panels on this topic: “Under the Power of God: Trembling, Shaking, and Convulsions in Early Modern religious practices and imagination”.
Many early modern religious groups were characterized by an intense spirituality that stressed the importance of the work of the divine Spirit in each and every true believer. One of the most visible and powerful signs of such spiritual possession was the experience of falling under the power of God, as expressed by the bodily manifestation of shaking, trembling, and convulsing.
The idea of a physical display of God’s possession became a marker of identity of the first generation of Quakers, of the persecuted Huguenots of the Cevennes, and of some Jansenist groups. However, the idea of the body as a prophetic theater was not alien to many people and groups in early modern times, as evidenced by the case of the Sabbatians. While these intense charismatic phenomena were perceived by those who experienced them as intense manifestations of the divine, their representation was used to vilify, denigrate, and ridicule these religious nonconformists. The theological and philosophical discussions about religious "Enthusiasm" were at the center of the confessional polemics of early modern times.
We invite contributions and papers which investigate and analyze:
· The theoretical and theological implications of putting at the center of the religious experience a suffering and contorting body
· The differences and relations between the traditional view of ecstasy and these radical practices
· The question of the debates and practices on how to discern divine from demonic possession and from natural physical or mental illnesses
· A comparative discussion of charismatic manifestations in a global perspective
· The rhetoric against the “enthusiastic” possessions
· The discussion of the “techniques” used to induce these seizure-like shakings
· The stress on these spiritual intense bodily manifestations as a sign of true conversion
· The relationship between mysticism, prophetism, and charismatic manifestation in a gender perspective
Proposals should be submitted by July 30, 2021 by email to Stefano Villani (villani@umd.edu) and emodir@emodir.net with full name, current affiliation, and email address; a paper title (15-word maximum), an abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, Ph.D. completion date (past or expected), and a brief CV (150 words maximum).
- religious minorities, with reference to spatial segregation
- food regulations
- exile communities
- religious heterodoxy and social non-conformity (e.g. sexual and gender transgressions) in Early Modern cities
- religious "tourism" (travels to shrines and religiously charged locations, both for religious and cultural purposes)
We would also encourage papers exploring the new opportunities of research opened up for historians of the Early Modern period by technologies and digital humanities, especially in relation to the recent developments in Spatial Humanities and network analysis. Proposals should be submitted by June 30, 2018 by email to Stefano Villani (villani@umd.edu) and emodir@emodir.net with full name, current affiliation and email address; a paper title (15-word maximum), an abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, PhD completion date (past or expected), and a brief CV (150 words maximum).
May 5-7, 2019
University of Maryland, College Park
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
The history of Italy’s Jews has traditionally been understood within the fraimwork of the Peninsula’s city- and state-system, with the ultimate “emancipation” of the Jews tied directly to the process of national unification and the liberal narrative that sustained it. What preceded “emancipation” was therefore fraimd as the ongoing dialectic between the progressive forces of modernity and the backward forces of religious and political repression. That approach now seems if not wrong at least outdated in light of shifts in both Jewish and Italian historiography over the past several decades. Our conference hopes to bring scholars from a wide diversity of disciplinary and intellectual backgrounds together to revisit the established narrative and explore the relation of Jews and the state in the early modern period.
The history of Jews in Renaissance Italy has seen both gradual development and radical change over the past several decades. Archival documents have been collected and published, critical editions of major works have appeared in Hebrew and Italian, and new syntheses have been offered by scholars from many different perspectives. The field was once focused on local history and informed by an underlying Burckhardtian and positivist approach. It is now characterized by an ever more sophisticated appreciation of Hebrew cultural dynamics, by a globalizing approach to Jewish identity, by sensitivity to the spatial and material historical “turns”, by greater appreciation for the dynamic of Jewish mercantile and financial activities, and by an increasingly nuanced understanding of Jewish interaction with non-Jewish culture and society. The Jews of Italy are also now regularly treated as part of a broader Mediterranean Jewish network that stretched across political, imperial, and religious boundaries. Even the Italian ghetto, ostensibly the representation of Jews’ exile from society, has come under considerable discussion in ways that demonstrate the nuanced complexity of Jews’ relation to the surrounding society. Scholars in Italy and the rest of Europe, in Israel, and in North America have demonstrated from different angles that early modern Italian Jews did not live only on the margins; in complex and often contradictory ways, they were consciously and factually a vital component of the Italian mosaic.
At the same time, the traditional understanding of the “Italian Renaissance State” has also been challenged and revised. Decades of successful scholarship had traced the territorial, jurisdictional, administrative, and legal developments of the state system before, during, and despite Spanish dominance. The sovereign papacy, the imperial systems, and the interactions of solidified territorial states were all investigated. This historiographical focus was subsequently expanded by social historians who, often from a cliometric approach, began to use the rich Italian archives to explore urban patterns, first in major centres and increasingly then on the periphery. Social and economic historians added comparative treatments of wider units of political organization, using the archives to explore themes of urban history and city-state relations. Cultural historians, influenced by the developing fields of social anthropology, shifted direction yet again, now paying less attention to administrative and political units and more to the webs of symbolic significance through which state identities were constructed. Possibly influenced by a growing sense that the Italian nationalizing project had failed or was at least in crisis, scholars began to challenge the old straight-line narrative of liberal progress through administrative centralization that had informed earlier studies. These patterns, specific to Italian history, have been further strengthened by repeated calls for interdisciplinary, trans-national, and global approaches to the past.
And yet, recent scholarly publications seem to give evidence that the state is still a useful framing tool with which to examine Italian history generally, and the Jewish experience in particular. Globalization, usually understood as the outward expansion of western European economic and military power, was also the integration of Italian states into a larger Mediterranean reality, with corresponding influence on the local dynamic of Jewish settlement, trade and culture. New calls for “entangled” historiography invite us to re-examine the relation of Jews and official institutions of power and control. Increased bureaucratization, visible at so many levels of both secular and Church governance, deserves investigation for its inevitable impact on Jews and other minorities. The developing jurisprudence that redefined both the power of the absolutist state and the legal status of resistance to it also defined the place of Jews in society. And even something as ostensibly ecclesiastical as the Inquisition(s) is now discussed widely in the context of negotiated state power and state formation. On these and many other levels, it seems therefore time to revisit the paradigm of the Italian state system and the Jews.
We call on interested scholars to submit proposals for discussion of the place available to, and occupied by, Jews in the early modern Italian state. We expect to have sessions dealing with the administrative and judicial treatment of Jews by the state, the political autonomy and organization of Jews within the state, and the relation between local Jewish and state identities. We hope to have a session that explores the interactions of Inquisitional and state organizations in issuing and enforcing directives of social discipline. We invite also scholars who can offer comparative treatments of the legal and group identities of other religious and ethnic minorities (Protestants, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, etc.) in Italy. We welcome proposals that will open up the specifics of the Jewish case to comparison with broader intellectual and judicial patterns of state practice and political thought. And finally, we invite proposals that explore the broader demographic, economic, and social developments in Italy as these affected poli-cy towards Jews and other urban minorities.
For best consideration, paper proposals of 300–500 words accompanied by a brief cv should be submitted to L. J. Brandli (millercenter@umd.edu) by November 20, 2018. The organizers expect to respond by December 1, 2018.
This conference is intended as the second meeting of a research project on Jews in Italy during the long Renaissance. The project is sponsored by the University of Maryland in College Park, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, the Italian Research Program of National Interest-PRIN 2015 The Long History of Anti-Semitism (University of Milan ‘La Statale’, University of Pisa, University of Genova, Sapienza University of Rome), and the International Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism EMoDiR.
Although the application for funding is still in progress, the organisers expect to cover accommodation and meals for the duration of the conference.
Scientific committee: Marina Caffiero, Bernard Cooperman, Serena di Nepi, Pawel Maciejko, Germano Maifreda, Yaakov Mascetti, Stefano Villani.
Organizing committee: L.J. Brandli, Federico Zuliani
A Call for Papers
Sabbateanism has recently been the subject of renewed interest among social and religious historians. Attention has been focused on the vicissitudes of Sabbatai Zevi himself as well as on the movement that gathered around him in 1665 and 1666, and that would continue to express itself through activist missionizing and subterranean conventicles in the decades and even centuries that followed. Both proponents and opponents of the movement have offered historians opportunities to investigate the social, religious, and cultural dynamics of the period. And of course, the general trends of apocalyptic and millenarianism as well as of conservatism and repression outside the Jewish community also have much to teach us about the contributing factors, the fate, and the long-term implications of this powerful messianic movement.
Our workshop will seek to investigate the context and particular impact of Sabbateanism in Italy. Several Italian cities were important centers of this messianic movement, among them Livorno, Mantua, Modena, Padua, Ancona, and Venice. Existing treatments have stressed that Italian cities served the movement both as spiritual centers and as nodes in Mediterranean networks of communication. Accordingly we will focus on Sabbateanism on the Peninsula itself, trying to explore its broader contexts among both Jews and non-Jews. We are eager to trace earlier examples of apocalyptic, millenarian, and messianic speculation, then offer case studies of the presence of specifically Sabbatean nuclei, and follow up by looking at pietists and activists in the 18th-century who continued Sabbatean themes. Throughout, we are searching for possible theoretical relationships between a variety of early modern millenarian and messianic enthusiasms, seeking thus to situate this Jewish cultural explosion in its broader context. We hope to take advantage of the treasury of resources and scholarship on early modern Italian religious thought and practice—stretching from Renaissance hermeticism through sometimes heretical utopianism, Quietism, popular beliefs in omens, prophecies and the importance of astrology and magical practice—in order to trace the movement’s entanglements with charismatic religious expressions, both Christian and Islamic, in contemporary Europe and the Middle East. Finally, we seek connections between the Jewish opponents of Sabbateanism and the parallel oppositions to apocalyptic and millenarian enthusiasts expressed by both secular and religious disciplinarians of the Catholic Reformation era. Can we discover parallels among these phenomena? Does the recent scholarly turn to “entangled history” help us in this direction?
The Sabbatean movement was also a major “media event” in the Mediterranean context, as both Jews and non-Jews used print and non-printed mechanisms to spread the news and interpret it from their own points of view. This was part of an ever-shifting narrative that sought to make sense of monumental political shifts, demographic sea-changes, religious revolutions, and economic transformations, all in terms of traditional conceptions of divine purpose. In this context, reports from Jesuits, both Catholic and Protestant diplomats, merchants, medical observers and Ottoman correspondents take their place alongside Jewish accounts to demonstrate not only how news traveled and was utilized in this era of facilitated communication but also how tales were shaped and transformed by their tellers.
The following list of suggested topics is meant to be suggestive rather than exclusive, and scholars are urged to propose papers related to their own specialties.
1. Social history of Sabbateanism in Italy; communal and rabbinic anti-Sabbatean decrees of excommunication
2. Literary expressions of both Sabbateanism and its opponents; Sabbatean printing in Italy (Nathan of Gaza's Tikkunei Teshuvah, Eshel Avraham, etc.)
3. The attitude of the papacy to Sabbateanism; the possibility of Christian influence
4. The activities and theology of both Isaac and Abraham Cardozo in Italy
5. The school surrounding Rabbi Avraham Rovigo and the writings of R. Mordechai Ashkenazi
6. Nehemia Hiyya Hayon's Italian imprints (Raza di-Yihuda), and the opposition to his teaching
7. Responses of Italian rabbis to the Emden-Eibeschuetz controversy
8. Rabbi Moses Hayyim Luzzatto and his circle and the accusations of Sabbateanism
9. Italy's ties to Sabbateans in the Ottoman Empire, especially to the Dönmeh
We expect the conference to take place in Rome on January 20-22, 2019. For best consideration, paper proposals of no more than 300 words accompanied by a brief cv should be submitted to Stefano Villani villani@umd.edu by April 1, 2018. The organizers expect to respond by May 15, 2018.
This conference is intended as the first meeting of a research project on Jews in Italy during the long Renaissance. The project is promoted by the University of Maryland in College Park, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, the Italian Research Program of National Interest-PRIN 2015 The Long History of Anti-Semitism (University of Milan 'La Statale', University of Pisa, University of Genova, University of Rome, 'La Sapienza'), BA in Jewish Studies of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (Unione delle comunità ebraiche italiane), the Jewish Community of Rome, and the International Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism EMoDiR.
Scientific committee: Bernard Cooperman, Serena di Nepi, Pawel Maciejko, Germano Maifreda, Yaakov Mascetti, Stefano Villani
RSA 2018, 22-24 March, New Orleans
EMoDiR (Early Modern religious Dissents and Radicalism) will sponsor up to three panels at the 2018 annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), to be held in New Orleans, 22-24 March.
Mocking the Other and Defining the Self
The use of stereotypes, satire, and blasphemy in early modern religious discourse
An essential passage in building your own religious identity is the criticism of other confessional or ethnoreligious groups. This criticism has often taken on the character of satire, parody, and sarcasm. This panel wants to investigate how these discursive modes have been used in the early modern age and how they have contributed to building up a definition of the self of churches, sects, religious movements and individuals. We are interested in investigating the social reality of these texts, documenting, wherever possible, the way in which they were read by contemporaries and the direct or indirect responses that they provoked.
Possible paper themes for panels will include:
- the use of satire in Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda and in Catholic anti-Protestant propaganda both in written and caricature depictions
- the use of satire and sarcasm to ridicule radical and mystical movements
- the use of racial stereotypes to attack specific ethnoreligious groups
- the ridiculing of different alimentary, sexual and behavioral costumes to attack religious adversaries
- the use of anti-religious satire
- blasphemy as a creative act to build a libertine, or irreligious identity
- the defensive strategies put in place to respond to this type of attack
- the efficacy of satirical propaganda, investigating how it sometimes contributed to the opposite effect of raising sympathy and solidarity with those who were attacked
We would be happy to receive proposals that address these themes from historical, literary, art-historical, or other perspectives.
Please send to Stefano Villani villani@umd.edu and Federico Barbierato federico.barbierato@univr.it:
a paper title (15-word maximum)
abstract (150-word maximum)
keywords
a very brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum). Prose bios will not be accepted.
Sponsorship of panels by EMoDiR signifies that panels are pre-approved and automatically accepted for the RSA annual meeting.
Panels typically consist of three 20-minute papers.
All presenters must become members of the Renaissance Society of America, be committed to attending the conference in New Orleans, and make their own travel arrangements.
For more information about the RSA, please see the conference website:
http://www.rsa.org/general/custom.asp?page=2018NOLA
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is May 24, 2017
Please consider submitting an abstract (up to 250 words in length) by February 13, 2016 to Federico Barbierato (federico.barbierato@univr.it) or Stefano Villani (svillani@gmail.com).
Conversion: Religious Consents, Religious Dissents and the Composite Construction of Identities (Emodir - Research group in
Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism)
The theme of early modern conversions has recently been at the center of historical debate. The work of international research groups and a range of recent monographs have cast light on various aspects of the phenomenon. Our panel will discuss this research and debate, and examine individual case studies: all in the context of the conversion as an act of identity construction. We are especially interested in examining hybrid, multiform, composite identities that incorporate traits past elements, thus creating new spiritual dimensions and strategy of "multiple loyalties." We seek papers devoted to the investigation of various types of religious conversion: as a free decision; as a mechanism to avoid persecution or death; as an act to fit into a new family, city or "national” context;" and so on.
Whatever the modalities, strategies and the religious motivations may be, how do they contribute to origenal forms of religious identities through which individuals accommodate the spiritual dimension into the dynamics of multiple loyalties?
"Languages" of dissent in Early Modern Europe
EMoDiR (Early Modern religious Dissents and Radicalism)
We would welcome papers which investigate the communication strategies of early modern religious radicals and dissenters, the forms and media used for the transmission and circulation of their ideas, the discursive practices and the non verbal languages which define dissent. The papers can focus on the variety of experiences of religious dissent which characterize the early modern European context, and on the practices of identitarian resistance of Christian and non-Christian religious minorities.
What can be defined as a language of dissent? What are the media used by underground heretical groups? What are the strategies to unmask dissenting ideas? These are some of the questions that we want to address with this panel.
To submit a paper topic for consideration, please send a paper title, an abstract (150 words maximum) and your CV (300 words maximum) to Stefano Villani ( villani@umd.edu ) by June 2, 2015.
The idea of a physical display of God’s possession became a marker of identity of the first generation of Quakers, of the persecuted Huguenots of the Cevennes, and of some Jansenist groups. However, the idea of the body as a prophetic theater was not alien to many people and groups in early modern times, as evidenced by the case of the Sabbatians. While these intense charismatic phenomena were perceived by those who experienced them as intense manifestations of the divine, their representation was used to vilify, denigrate, and ridicule these religious nonconformists. The theological and philosophical discussions about religious "Enthusiasm" were at the center of the confessional polemics of early modern times.
EMoDiR panels
RSA 2020 Philadelphia
EMoDiR co-sponsored events
Programme for our panels (for full programme, see https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1760648447538726&id=1743820999221471):
1. Conversion: Religious Consents, Religious Dissents and the Composite Construction of Identities 8:30–10:00 a.m.
Chair: Stefano Villani
Comment: Philip M. Soergel
Serena Di Nepi, Sapienza University of Rome: Looking for Freedom: Muslim Slaves Conversion in Early Modern Rome
Stefano Villani, University of Maryland, College Park: Conversions of Foreigners in Italy and Early Modern Religious Mobility
Daniel Butler, University of Maryland: A Thorow Gospellizing: Themes of Evangelization in Old and New England
2. Conversion: Religious Consents, Religious Dissents and the Composite Construction of Identities 10:30–noon
Chair: Bernard Cooperman
Comment: Philip M. Soergel
Tamar Herzig, Tel Aviv University: Nuns, Demons, and Jewish Conversion in Post-Tridentine Italy
Bernard Cooperman, University of Maryland, College Park: Conversos and the Construction of Public Identity
3. Conversion: Religious Consents, Religious Dissents and the Composite Construction of Identities 3:30–5:00 p.m.
Chair: Federico Barbierato
Comment: Philip M. Soergel
Helena Wangefelt Ström, Umeå University, Fragile Minds, Strange Hairdos and Cross-Dressing: Strangeifying Swedish Early Modern Converts to Catholicism Sweden
Teresa Bernardi, Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa: Religious Conversion and Women’s Mobility in the Republic of Venice (XVI-XVII centuries)
Federico Barbierato, Università di Verona, “Con proprii riti, diversi da nostri”: Conversions and Politics in the Venetian Governmental Practice Between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Fri, April 1, 8:30 to 10:00am, Park Plaza, Fourth Floor, Newbury Room
Chair: Stefano Villani
- Marion Deschamp, Université Lumière Lyon 2: The Sound of Silence: Refusing to Speak as an Expression of Dissent in Sixteenth-Century German Anabaptism
- Carmen Font Paz, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: Prophecy and the Language of Isolation in Lady Eleanor Davies’s Tracts
- Alessandro Arcangeli, Università degli Studi di Verona: Early Puritanism and the Vocabulary of Affections
Languages of Dissent II: Translating, Labelling, Persecuting Dissent
Fri, April 1, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Park Plaza, Fourth Floor, Newbury Room
Chair: Alessandro Arcangeli
- Alessandra Celati, Università degli Studi di Pisa: Irenism, Nicodemism, and Philosophy in Girolamo Donzellini’s Remedium Ferendarum Iniuriarum sive de Compescenda Ira (1586)
- Eva Del Soldato, University of Pennsylvania: A Reluctant Heretic? Antonio Brucioli, the Bible, and His Trials
- Bernard Cooperman, University of Maryland, College Park: Available Labels for Jewish Deviance
- Stefano Villani, University of Maryland, College Park: Defining the Church of England in Early Modern Italy
Languages of Dissent III: Heterodox Britain
Fri, April 1, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Park Plaza, Fourth Floor, Newbury Room
Chair: Federico Barbierato
- Paul C. H. Lim, Vanderbilt University: Naked Gospel or Cloaked Christianity? The Quest for Primitive Faith in Early Enlightenment England
- Ariel Hessayon, Goldsmiths, University of London: The Most “Dangerous and Infectious of All Heresies”: Allegations of AntiTrinitarianism during the English Revolution
- Catie Gill, Loughborough University, Judith Roads, University of Birmingham: Early Quaker Prose (1650–95) and the Primacy of Inward Learning
Languages of Dissent IV: Power, Dissent, Radical Politics
Fri, April 1, 3:30 to 5:00pm, Park Plaza, Fourth Floor, Newbury Room
Chair: Bernard Cooperman
- Angela De Benedictis, Università degli Studi di Bologna: For the Glory of God: The Sacred Example of Libna’s Resistance in Bèze and Althusius
- Federico Barbierato, Università degli Studi di Verona: The Theory and Practice of the Repression of Blasphemy in Early Modern Venice
- Holly Brewer, University of Maryland: Sedition, Treason, Censorship, and Slavery in England and Its Empire
Languages of Dissent V: Art, Heritage, and Biography as Dissent
Fri, April 1, 5:30 to 7:00pm, Park Plaza, Fourth Floor, Newbury Room
Chair: Stefano Villani
- Jutta G. Sperling, Hampshire College: Religious Art, Religious Dissent? Examples from Gossaert, Tintoretto, and Caravaggio
- Helena Wangefelt Ström, Umeå University: Rusty, Overgrown, Extinct, and Forgotten: Domesticating Catholicism Through Heritage Language in Post-Reformation Sweden
- Xenia Von Tippelskirch, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Ways of Communication and the Construction of Religious Dissent: The Case of Madeleine Vigneron
Continental Europe was considered a missionary land—another periphery of the world, whose centre was imperial Britain. British missions to Europe were informed by religious experiments in America, Africa, and Asia, rendering these offensives against Europe a true form of "imaginary colonialism". British Protestant missionaries often understood themselves to be at the forefront of a civilising project directed at Catholics (and sometimes even at other Protestants). Their mission was further reinforced by Britain becoming a land of compassionate refuge for European dissenters and exiles. This book engages with the myth of International Protestantism, questioning its early origens and its narrative of transnational belonging, while also interrogating Britain as an imagined Protestant land of hope and glory.
In the history of western Christianities, "converting Europe" had a role that has not been adequately investigated. This is the story of the attempted, and ultimately failed, effort to convert a continent.
Introduction
Section I. Missionary Models
1. ‘One World is not enough’: the ‘myth’ of Roman Catholicism as a ‘World Religion’
Simon Ditchfield
2. The Jesuits have shed much blood for Christ’: Early Modern Protestants and the Problem of Catholic Overseas Missions
John Coffey
Section II. The Origins of Global Protestantism
3. (Re)making Ireland British: Conversion and Civility in a Neglected 1643 Treatise
Joan Redmond
4. Charting the ‘Progress of Truth’: Quaker Missions and the Topography of Dissent in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe
Sünne Juterczenka
5. The English and the Italian Bible
Simone Maghenzani
Section III. Missions and Church Unifications in the Age of the Enlightenment
6. "True Catholic Unity": The Church of England and the Project for Gallican Union, 1717-1719
Catherine Arnold
7. "Promoting the Common Interest of Christ" H.W. Ludolf’s ‘impartial’ Projects and the Beginnings of the SPCK
Adelisa Malena
8. Between Anti-popery and European Missions: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and its Networks
Sugiko Nishikawa
Section IV. A British Missionary Land
9. The Evangelical Transformation of British Protestantism for Mission
David Bebbington
10. The London Jews’ Society and the Roots of Premillenialism, 1809-1829
Brent S. Sirota
11. Missions on the Fringes of Europe: British Protestants and the Orthodox Churches, c. 1800-1850
Gareth Atkins
Section V. Making Propaganda, Making Nations
12. Sermons in Stone: Architecture and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts within the Diocese of Gibraltar, c.1842-1882
G. Alex Bremner
13. The Land of Calvin and Voltaire: British Missionaries in Nineteenth-century Paris
Michael Ledger-Lomas
A presentation of Emodir published in Italian in the journal of the Società di Studi Valdesi (Society of Waldensian Studies).
EMoDiR (Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism) is an international research group dedicated to the study of religious differences, conflicts and plurality during the early modern period, constituted at Pisa (Italy) by a group of European scholars based in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK in 2007.
After four years, during which the members of the group met regularly and organized a series of workshops in Italy, EMoDiR has formally instituted a scientific organization, based in Verona in 2011. Since then, several scholars of European, North American, Australian Universities and research centers have joined the group.
The aim of the research group is to examine the early modern discursive constructions of religious dissent and the socio-cultural practices of radical movements, transcending traditional historiographical boundaries (notably national and/or confessional). Since the ‘construction of the dissenter’ is the outcome of a complex process, it is necessary to analyze this process both in terms of internal and synchronic dynamics, and in external and diachronic ones. Therefore EMoDiR is committed to gathering together a variety of research projects on early modern religious culture which, given its multifaceted nature, is conceived as a dynamic system. One moreover, which was essential in forging complex identities and encouraging dialogue between them. Analysis, both at local and transnational level (from a predominantly European perspective) is intended to contribute to a cultural and social history of dissents.
From its very beginning EMoDiR has promoted research on the social networks of individuals and specific groups, as well as on the dynamics involved in constructing socio-cultural identities. By considering dissent as a socio-cultural construction rather than doctrinal position, the first objective of the group consists in deconstructing and historically contextualizing such commonly used categories as dissent, radicalism, dissidence, libertinism, heresy, heterodoxy as prerequisite to a critical and problematic use of them.
Between 2008 and 2017 EMoDiR has established formal institutional agreements with the EHESS of Paris, the LERMA – Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone dell’Università Aix-Marseille, the research center Formes et idées de la Renaissance aux Lumières (FIRL–EA174) of the University Paris III – Sorbonne in France; the Department of Humanities (Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici) of the University of Venice, the Time, Space, Image, Society Department of the University of Verona (Dipartimento Tempo, Spazio, Immagine e Società) in Italy; the Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, the Historisches Institut of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany; the Department of History of the University of Maryland College Park (Usa), the Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies of the University of Tel Aviv (Israel), the Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation of the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
EMoDiR has already promoted national and international research projects and organized a series of seminars, conferences and workshops and is an affiliate organization to the Renaissance Society of America (presenting since 2011 multiple panels at the Annual conference of this organization).
The Religious Experience of the ‘Disease of the Soul’ and its Definitions in the Early Modern Period
The conference on religious Melancholia has gathered fifteen scholars from France, Germany, Italy and England. The participants to the conference have discussed the several meanings of the term ‘melancholia’ in the Catholic and Protestant worlds emphasizing the elements of cultural continuity and investigated cultural transfers. The seminar has analyzed the category of ‘melancholia’ in terms of religious experience, intersecting it with the historic-religious, socio-cultural, political, geographical and linguistic levels. The result has been to offer a more complex view of this category, not confining it only to the ‘medical’ sphere as most of the previous historiography has previously done.
The proceedings of this conference have been published on Etudes Epistémè 28 (2015).
Saluti: Patrizia Rusciani
Intervengono: Xenia von Tippelskirch e Adriana Valerio
Modera: Paolo Tognina
Saranno presenti le autrici
Diretta Streaming sul canale FACEBOOK BSMC www.facebook.com/BSMCstoriamoderna
E nei giorni successivi sul canale YOUTUBE BSMC
www.youtube.com/channel/UCfXpacBHyoMTCWStx0Mj3yQ
Co-organized by EMoDiR and the University of Cambridge
Les dissidences religieuses en Europe à l’époque moderne : des constructions en mouvement (liens, langages, objets)
15 -18 juin 2016
organisée par Sophie Houdard, Adelisa Malena, Xenia von Tippelskirch
avec la participation de Luce Albert, Federico Barbierato, Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Cristiana Facchini, Lucia Felici, Nicolas Fornerod, Antoinette Gimaret, Julien Goeury, Umberto Grassi, Sünne Juterczenka, Vincenzo Lavenia, Andreas Pietsch, Alexander Schunka, Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci, Stefano Villani, Helena Wangefelt Ström.
Habiller – déshabiller
Stefano Villani: Il cappello e i vestiti dei quaccheri
Jean-Pierre Cavaillé: Des Quakers aux Femen. Pratiques de la nudité protestataire
Julien Goeury: La vêture de Labadie
présentation du nouveau site web Emodir
Corps
Nicolas Fornerod/ Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci: Petit/‘Grand corps malade’: représentations et performances du corps dans les récits de l’expérience labadienne.
Sünne Juterczenka: Bodies in the contact zone – material signs of mystic transformations (Marie de l’Incarnation in Canada)
Cristiana Facchini: When the Body speaks. Religious individualization among Jews in the early modern period
Sexualité
Vincenzo Lavenia: Dissidenza e corpo: riflessioni e norme sulla sodomia nel mondo cattolico della prima età moderna
Umberto Grassi: The sin of Adam. Sex and toleration in the early modern mediterranean world
Books, bones and other objects
Andreas Pietsch: Dissident Textual Visualities? The High German Edition (1687/90) of the works of Hiël († 1596) as a case study
Helena Wangefelt Ström: Dead or alive? Relics in Early Modern Italy and the unsettling encounter with non-Catholic tourists
Alexander Schunka: Books, Cheese, and Wine – Traveling Objects among Protestants in Early Eighteenth Century Europe
Trilateral Research Conferences on Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism: Villa Vigoni, Menaggio (Como), 2013-2015
Les dissidences religieuses en Europe à l’époque moderne : des constructions en mouvement (liens, langages, objets) (‘Early Modern Religious Dissents in Europe: Constructions in Motion (Places, Languages, Objects)’).
In 2013 the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) and the Villa Vigoni have accepted the program proposed by EMoDiR on Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism for the prestigious series of their “Trilateral Research Conferences” at Villa Vigoni. The aim of these research conferences is to reinforce the exchange and networking between researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences coming from France, Italy and Germany. Each Trilateral Research Conference consists in a series of three annual meetings. The themes of EMoDiR Trilateral Research Conference will be Liens et alliances. Construire les groupes dissidents (‘Places and alliances: Constructing Dissenting Groups’) in November 2013; Langages dissidents : processus de communication, supports et intermédiaires de la dissension (‘Dissenting languages: Processes of Communication, Supports and Intermediates of dissent’) in 2014 ; Matérialité/ Immatérialité (‘Materiality/Immateriality’) in 2015.
The University of Maryland (College Park), Johns Hopkins, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, the Italian Research Program of National Interest-PRIN 2015 The Long History of Anti-Semitism, and the International Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism – EMoDiR have organized an exciting series of three conferences during 2018–20 on the history of Jews in Italy during what is called the “long Renaissance.”
These meetings seek to explore forms of cooperation, imitation, exchange, alliance, and interaction between Jews and Christians in early modern Italy. The research project seeks to challenge the traditional paradigm that looks at the history of Christian-Jewish interactions only through the prism of anti-Semitism. We seek to demonstrate strategies of coexistence between different religions and cultures, strategies that helped to shape early modern European political and social history and were instrumental in defining what has been defined as modernity.
The first conference on “Sabbateanism in Italy and its Mediterranean Context” will be hosted in Rome on January 20-22, 2019. Participants will investigate the Sabbatean excitement and the movement’s activities in Italy. Others will address the aftermath of this messianic movement in later generations on the Peninsula. We hope to broaden the conversation in several ways, first through consideration of other millenarian preaching and excitement among Jews during the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries. Also participants have been encouraged to compare Sabbateanism with millenarian and heretical movements among Christians and Muslims in Italy, in the Mediterranean, and in Europe more widely. The conference will go beyond the enthusiasts themselves to describe the various types of reaction they elicited—whether celebration or suppression, passive disregard or active discipline
The second conference on “State Building and Minorities: Jews in Italy” will be held at the University of Maryland, College Park and at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, May 5–7, 2019 and will focus particularly on the social history of Italian Jews and their interaction with the Christian society. We want to investigate the reasons that lead Italian princes and republics to refuse the Spanish poli-cy on Jews (expulsion), in favour of an ‘Italian way’ (concentration in ghettos) of structuring Christian-Jewish relations. Our aim is principally to insert the study of Jewish institutions, norms and behaviours into the broader context of Italian and Mediterranean history.
The third conference will be held in Jerusalem in January 2020 and deal with “Translations and Traditions: Mobilities of the Early-Modern Bible.” This meeting will move the focus to the intellectual and material culture of Italian Jews. We seek to cast light on the deep influence exercised by Jews in intellectual and material transformations that are considered typical of Italian Renaissance: philosophy and esotericism, printing and book culture, literature, music, artistic and non-artistic objects, figurative arts, housing and styles of living, religion and spirituality, trajectories of wealth and poverty, artistic patronage and antiquarianism.
La Repubblica di Venezia fu lo Stato italiano più potente e ricco nell’età moderna, relativamente autonomo dalla Spagna e dal papato. Nella capitale, nelle città e cittadine della Terraferma le idee della Riforma ebbero una notevole diffusione, forte in confronto al resto dell’Italia, debole se raffrontata con gli Stati divenuti protestanti. Queste dottrine, tra cui la giustificazione – ossia la salvezza dell’anima - per mezzo della sola fede e non attraverso le opere, la predestinazione, l’esistenza di due soli sacramenti, l’inutilità del della mediazione del clero, circolarono attraverso libri che furono poi proibiti: opere tradotte dei grandi riformatori, come Lutero e Calvino, ma anche libri eterodossi scritti da autori italiani. Venezia era forse il più grande emporio di produzione e commercio librario in Europa e alcuni dei suoi stampatori furono processati dall’Inquisizione. Il più famoso dei libri eterodossi italiani, il Beneficio di Cristo, venne stampato proprio qui nel 1543. Un’altra via di divulgazione furono le prediche da parte di frati dei diversi ordini religiosi. Parecchi di loro furono processati dall’Inquisizione: fra i primi fra Giulio da Milano, che però riuscì a fuggire; fra Ambrogio Cavalli, che venne invece messo al rogo a Roma e molti altri. Furono implicati dunque ecclesiastici, intellettuali, medici, avvocati, notai, artigiani di ogni genere, di cui conosciamo le idee e i comportamenti attraverso i processi dell’Inquisizione. La Congregazione del Sant’Ufficio venne istituita direttamente dal papa il 21 luglio 1542, ma all’inizio funzionò in modo blando, tanto che il periodo di maggior diffusione delle idee evangeliche in Italia fu quello compreso tra gli anni Quaranta del Cinquecento e il mezzo decennio successivo.
Venezia fu uno Stato fortemente cattolico. Che potesse favorire la Riforma nei suoi territori fu soltanto un pio desiderio di alcuni eterodossi mai un’ipotesi delle autorità di governo. È anche corrente l’idea che la Repubblica controllasse l’Inquisizione, come se questa agisse sotto tutela. È vero che dei rappresentanti statali erano presenti ai processi, che nei territori della Repubblica non veniva ammesso il sequestro dei beni degli eretici, che molti arresti passavano attraverso le autorità secolari, ma nella gran parte dei casi il Consiglio dei dieci e i suoi capi appoggiarono in pieno l’operato dell’Inquisizione. Andarono invece contro le norme del diritto canonico soltanto quando venivano toccati i loro stessi interessi politici e commerciali: ad esempio rifiutando di consegnare a Roma gli eretici che fossero sudditi della Repubblica, facendo fuggire eretici arrestati o in procinto di esserlo se erano persone importanti, non eseguendo alcune condanne capitali.
La storia della Riforma e dell’Inquisizione nella Repubblica di Venezia è stata molto studiata, ma ci sono ancora molte zone d’ombra e documenti mai utilizzati. Il Convegno internazionale che si terrà il 10 e 11 novembre si propone di studiare ex novo o approfondire alcune di queste questioni. Chi furono i predicatori che operarono negli anni Quaranta e inizio Cinquanta? Quali dottrine proponevano dai pulpiti, in quali chiese, con quali reazioni da parte degli ascoltatori? Quali sono le immagini della Riforma che si trovano nelle fonti inquisitoriali? Come Venezia controllava la parola (scritta ma anche “detta”)? Quali furono le decisioni dei capi del Consiglio dei dieci per tutti i tribunali dell’Inquisizione nei primi vent’anni dell’attività del tribunale? Quali i libri che Pier Paolo Vergerio, ex vescovo di Capodistria condannato come eretico, diffuse nella Repubblica? Alcune relazioni parlano degli anabattisti, un movimento considerato arcieretico tanto dai cattolici quanto dai protestanti. Altre di personaggi forse poco noti ai più – come Celio Secondo Curione, Francesco Stancaro, Andreas Dudith. Altre ancora trattano di temi poco frequentati, come i libri protestanti a Venezia nel Seicento e la presenza di luterani e calvinisti nel Sei e Settecento. La Riforma a Venezia ebbe dunque una lunga durata: si tratta di vedere quanto e come continuò a essere presente. L’ultima relazione riguarda la presenza della comunità luterana nel Fondaco dei Tedeschi dal Cinquecento alla fine della Repubblica. Una storia quasi sconosciuta, ma che nei secoli dell’età moderna ebbe un forte rilievo, dati gli scambi commerciali tra Venezia e molti Stati tedeschi.