14. November 2025, 14h15 - 18h30

Departement Geschichte, Seminarraum 1, Hirschgässlein 21, 4051 Basel

Outline

The nature of possession in the Renaissance was to be contested. How could it have been otherwise? A rising merchant class owned more things than ever before, but emergent credit systems led to ruinous loss and repossession. A fractious and divided church alternatively clung to and purged worldly goods, finding new uses for buildings and grounds. The idea of self-possession was articulated as inherent to humanity even as it was denied to an ever-larger number of enslaved individuals. Imperial claims were staked not only through force but also by simple assertion, dispossessing indigenous communities of ancestral lands. Evolving notions of authorship meant that something as immaterial as an idea came to be considered a product of the self, which could unjustly be taken by others. In all of these domains, declarations were met with counter-arguments in constant (re)negotiations of claims of rightful ownership.

The 57th Basel Renaissance Colloquium seeks to reevaluate processes of possession and dispossession. Though the legal sphere often provided a theater in which Renaissance dramas of claim and counter-claim played out, and while this period saw plenty of outright theft, the Colloquium will not focus primarily on legal definitions and decisions. Rather, we are interested in how contesting rights of (dis)possession in the Renaissance revealed or produced epistemological fissures in the “who, what, where, when, and why ” of rightful possession in the first place. Possessions could easily become embroiled in dispute simply because the actions of owning, saving, hiding, or retaining were incongruently understood by different groups or within divergent segments of the social fabric. In turn, the very notions of, conceptual frame-works for, and practices of (dis)possession will be our principal concern.

The discrepancies in perceiving and constructing legitimacies around rightful ownership open onto broad historical questions: how were notions of (self-)possession understood, shared, extended, or withdrawn? Under which circumstances was the very idea of possession disavowed or rejected out of hand? How did certain groups assert affiliation to, and singular inheritance of, previous artistic and philosophical traditions? What can incompatible legal codes and daily practices around enslavement reveal about contemporary conceptions of the human? How did conflict in colonial spaces reveal alternative conceptions of property? And what modes of representation produced either durable or contestable claims to ownership?

Renaissance (Dis)possession is intended as an interdisciplinary forum open to (and seeking to combine) social, political, intellectual, and art historical methods. The colloquium will allow for individual presentations of about 30 minutes in length, followed by questions and a final roundtable discussion.

Owning the River: Possession, Power and the Environment in Renaissance Italy 

Luca Zenobi, University of Edinburgh

From trade to slavery and from identity to religion, the language and culture of possession permeated every aspect of Renaissance life. This paper explores its place in politics and diplomacy, and particularly in how Italian regimes identified the extent of their territorial holdings. Drawing from a larger study on the role of rivers in the geopolitics of the time, it shows that watercourses were not used merely as spatial markers; they were also appropriated in their entirety and folded into the bundle of possessions that defined a dominion. The paper examines the challenges and opportunities that emerged when applying this patrimonial logic to the natural world, while also attending to the agency of rivers themselves as forces that defied ownership and invited acts of repossession — or indeed, dispossession. In tracing how rivers both underpinned and unsettled the ambitions of Renaissance rule, the paper makes a case for a more dynamic understanding of pre-modern territoriality: one grounded not in permanence, but in constant bargaining, adaptation and literal flow. Rivers, it argues, expose the contradictions behind the claim to power over space, laying bare the tension between political imagination and ecology — between human fictions and the realities they sought to encompass. 

Aesthetic Excess and (Dis)possession in Indigenous Maps of New Spain

Barbara E. Mundy (Tulane University, New Orleans)

Across sixteenth-century New Spain, Indigenous individuals and communities contested encroachment or seizure of their lands in courts, thereby taking advantage of a new, but not entirely novel, system of justice introduced by Spanish Habsburg rulers. Often, they buttressed their claims with property maps, called pinturas in the archival record. While a simple sketch map would have met the legal standard, Indigenous property maps were sometimes elaborate paintings, dense with multi-hued pigments, their artists deploying various systems of projection in their representations of contested territory. They were, in short, aesthetically excessive.

This paper looks at the relationship between aesthetic excess and possession. It centers on Indigenous maps (pinturas) produced for court cases, their anomalous presence in the archival record rupturing the otherwise even cadence of the textual claims.  It seeks to explain the value of such Indigenous aesthetic experiments, expressed in the maps' formal and chromatic features, within contests over possession. Rather than seeing aesthetic excess as an indicator of community prestige, it argues that pinturas made an Indigenous system of knowledge about the land visible. In doing so, they reveal an fundamental disjunction between Hapsburg ideals of rightful possession and those of their subjects in the Indies

Possession by Category in Renaissance Italy: What Does Actual Ownership of Goods Reveal About the Meaning of Possession?

Kate Lowe (Queen Mary, University of London)

The notion of possession was central to all aspects of life in Renaissance Italy, and ownership as an idea was completely accepted, even if particular examples of who owned what were contested. Renaissance goods can easily be separated into inanimate and animate, and animate goods can easily be further separated into animals and humans. But did possession (or ownership) of all these categories of goods imply that they were conceptualised at the time as similar or equivalent, or was it still entirely clear that they were all different? This paper will analyse the types of evidence from Renaissance Italy that can be used to address these questions – documentary, object-based, textual, visual – in an attempt to clarify what possession signified, and how the realities of the act of ownership could override both forms of morality and ideas of legality. The main focus will be on Florence but there will also be material from Northern Italian courts and from the papal court. Particular attention will be paid to the intersection of possession with wealth and status; in addition to generating the most evidence, these intersections usually provide the clearest lines of demarcation, and thus permit very fruitful interrogation.