CfP: 9th LECTIO International Conference: True Warriors? Negotiating Dissent in the Intellectual Debate (c. 1100-1700)
11-13 December 2019, Leuven
The conference will be organized by the Leuven Centre for the Study of the Transmission of Texts and Ideas in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (LECTIO) and held at the University of Leuven (Belgium).
The aim of this conference is to study the polemical strategies and the modes of rivalry and alliance in scholarly debate from the 12th through the 17th centuries.
Dissent, polemics and rivalry have always been at the center of intellectual development. The scholarly Streitkultur was given a fresh impetus by the newly founded universities in the High Middle Ages and later turned into a quintessential part of early modern intellectual life. It was not only mirrored in various well-known intellectual debates and controversies (e.g. between Aristotelians and Augustinians, scholastics and humanists, Catholics and Protestants) but also embodied in numerous literary genres and non-literary modes of expression (e.g. disputationes, invectives, consilia, images, carnivalesque parades, music, etc.) and discursive or political strategies (e.g. patronage, networks and alliances). Moreover, the harsh debates notwithstanding, consensus was also actively searched for, both within particular disciplines and within society as a whole.
We actively invite papers from a variety of perspectives and disciplines (civil and canon law, philosophy, theology and religious studies, literary studies, historiography, art history, etc.) and aim to study texts in Latin, Greek and the vernacular, as well as pictorial and performative traditions. We do not only welcome specific case studies, but also strongly encourage broader (meta)perspectives, e.g. of a diachronic or transdisciplinary nature.
Submissions Due: 15 April 2019
