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Call for Papers: Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe
By Karen | 18 November 2009
Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe:
Networks, Knowledge and Form
8 – 10 July 2010
Royal Society, 6-9, Carlton House Terrace, London
Keynote speakers: Mark Greengrass, Margaret Ezell, and Richard Serjeantson
The seventeenth century in Europe was an age of turmoil. As wars, revolutions, and exploration redrew the boundaries of the physical world, a tumult of new ideas shifted the boundaries of the intellectual world. In poetry and in polemics, men and women involved in philosophy, theology, politics, and science created a dynamic knowledge economy.
Ideas were the currency of this economy – but how did writers, thinkers, and agents choose the forms in which that currency should circulate? This conference takes up that question, investigating the relationship between the circulation of ideas and the forms in which they circulated.
Forms. Ideas might circulate in manuscript or in print; in Latin, or in the vernacular. How were individual writers thinking about the effects or consequences of these choices? How might the language, form, and medium of these texts influence the reception of the content?
Networks. The circulation of ideas involved networks of intelligencers, scribes, printers, publishers, and booksellers. How did particular coteries and networks circulate their arguments? How does this collaborative aspect affect how modern scholarship construes their significance?
Knowledge. Concerns about censorship and secrecy – or conversely a perceived need for publicity – influenced how ideas in these fields are communicated. How were particular categories of content (scientific, satirical, literary, theological, or political) linked to particular material forms?
Possible panel topics might include:
* Science and medicine in circulation
* Literary communities/coteries
* the Republic of Letters
* Authorship and identity
* History of the book
* History of reading and reception
* Scribal publication
* Censorship
* Ciphers and codes
* Gender and knowledge
The organisers welcome proposals for either full panels or individual papers. Individual paper proposals should be 300 words long. For full panel proposals, please send all paper abstracts with an additional 300-word description of panel itself.
Proposals should be e-mailed to all three conference organizers (Ruth Connolly, Felicity Henderson, and Carol Pal) by 7 January 2010.
See the conference website at: http://tiny.cc/cisce. More details will be posted as available. This conference is presented to mark the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society.
Topics: Calls for Papers | 1 Comment »
January 9th, 2010 at 01:26
[...] to a recent call for papers for the conference Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge and Form (presented to mark the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society), I’ve composed [...]