56. Basler Renaissancekolloquium «Renaissance of War»

Mit Stephen Bowd (Edinburgh), Allison Stielau (London), Catherine Fletcher (Manchester)

If recent geopolitical developments have prompted intensified public conversations and debate about war and warfare, Renaissance studies has long pursued a comprehensive understanding of war as a social phenomenon. Harking back to Jacob Burckhardt’s conceptualization of ‘the [Renaissance] state as a work of art’, Renaissance historiography has traditionally taken a holistic view of socio-political processes in which power and violence were deeply intertwined with aesthetics, cultural production, and systems of patronage. War in the Renaissance is a case in point: recent scholarship has made significant inroads in highlighting, for example, the social and financial implications of mercenary cultures, the use of military motifs in representations of the Renaissance state, and contemporary perceptions of the social and moral consequences of war as reflected in artistic and discursive practices and early print cultures.

The 56^th Basel Renaissance Colloquium focuses upon war in the Renaissance as a phenomenon, a practice, and a cultural formation with powerful implications that extended far beyond the battlefield. Inquiring further into the political, institutional, and aesthetic dynamics and consequences of warfare, we propose to examine war as an explicit feature of the Renaissance, both in the sense of an epochal framework of European history and as a potentially transferable historiographical model. Examining war in this light, a series of questions arise: was there a specificity of ‘Renaissance war’, and, if so, what was its impact on subsequent social, economic, technological, and/or and artistic trends? How might the destructive dynamics of warfare have also served as a vector of social transformation? What can be learned from Renaissance ethical and moral regimes that tolerated or even advanced warfare as a political tool while simultaneously pointing to its dangers? How can we tell histories of organized violence as it was experienced by non-combatants and former combatants: persons displaced and dispossessed by warfare; women who traveled with armies as sex-workers, laundresses, and porters; disabled ex-soldiers, whose bodies testified to the brutality of past military campaigns?

Renaissance of War thus invites critical reassessments of the general implications as well as the social, material, and intellectual conditions of organized violence. The meeting is intended as an interdisciplinary forum open to (and seeking to combine) social, political, intellectual, and art historical methods, as well as approaches that engage with non-European/global contexts and influences. We are particularly interested in comparative, connected, and “bottom up” approaches, as well as in thematic contributions relating to, for example: narratives of victory, victimhood, and survival; the aestheticizing, heroizing, and (visual) critique of military violence; the construction, representation, and differentiation of social roles and responsibilities amidst military conflicts; the forms of transformation both foreclosed and propelled by war in the Renaissance.

The colloquium will allow for individual presentations of about 30 minutes in length, followed by questions and a final roundtable discussion.

Veranstaltung übernehmen als iCal