RSA 2023 Panel: Ambivalent Harmonies

  • Deadline: Jul 31, 2022
  • San Juan, Puerto Rico
Conference

“Ambivalent Harmonies: Representing Peace at War in the Early Modern Iberian Habsburg Worlds” is a panel at RSA 2023 (San Juan, Puerto Rico) sponsored by the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies, Chicago, and organized by Maria Vittoria Spissu and Marta Albalá-Pelegrín.

Images and texts praising a merciful and triumphant Christendom circulated within the Habsburg Global Empire were often but a fraught fictional rendering of social practices. While publicizing an idea of an inclusive Universal Catholic Monarchy, they were at odds with everyday practices on the ground. Minorities, outsiders and political enemies were often not fully integrated into ideals and models of concord and tolerance.

This panel seeks interdisciplinary contributions dealing with printed books and images, as well as diplomatic and missionary studies that explore the nuances of optimistic representation of peace and harmony in the Iberian and the Italian Peninsula, the Netherlands, Asia and the Americas. It seeks to analyze how these views were articulated, challenged and exchanged through the Habsburg Monarchy and its spaces/networks of allegiance/interference. It further questions the role of moralizing ideas in the construction of Spanish sovereignty within early modern Europe as well as in evangelizing projects.

Proposals on these issues from all fields of early modern studies are encouraged. Global approaches are also welcome. To submit a paper proposal for this panel, please send a Word or PDF document to Maria Vittoria Spissu at [email protected] and Marta Albalá-Pelegrín at [email protected] by July 31, 2022.

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