Date:
Location:
Speaker: Mary Laven (I Tatti / University of Cambridge)
As part of a new project to ‘diversify’ the Italian Renaissance, this talk questions geographical assumptions. The association of the peninsula with artistic fecundity dates back to the period itself and is recorded in the claims of writers and creative practitioners who believed that they were living in a special time and place. The cognitive glue that binds Italy with the Renaissance has lasted well and scholars have continued to engage productively with the social, economic and political conditions in which innovation flourished. But current trends in the field and the exigencies of our times present new challenges. This seminar asks what’s left of the Italian Renaissance in the light of the global and planetary turns. The goal is not nihilistic; rather, this talk hopes to show how a new engagement with materiality, mobility and the physical environment can enrich Italian Renaissance studies.
Mary Laven is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. Grounded in the social and cultural history of early modern Italy, her work has engaged with the themes of religion, gender, sociability and material culture, and has been inspired by a close relationship with the Fitzwilliam Museum. She is the author of Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (Penguin, 2002), Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (Faber, 2011), and – with Abigail Brundin and Deborah Howard – The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 2018). Laven is currently the Principal Investigator of a collaborative project, funded by the AHRC: Objects and Spaces of Encounter in Renaissance Italy.
Image: Mappa Mundi, Fra Mauro, c. 1450. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.
Add event to calendar
