Core Program 2007–08
Spaces of Self in Early Modern Culture
—organized by Center/Clark Professors David Sabean, University of California, Los Angeles, and Malina Stefanovska, Univeristy of California, Los Angeles
Subjectivity is embedded in space, which serves to define, shape, and represent it. Every culture has its own articulation between natural and social places or between material and representational ones, as well as its way of constructing identity and selfhood in relation to space. In the early modern period, sites as diverse as the court, the cabinet of curiosities, or the prayer room were crucial for forming and representing individual identities. This year-long series of conferences, dedicated to five such key places, explores constructions of selfhood and identity, while reflecting on the cultural differences and historical evolution of space, both as material foundation and as representation of human relationships, hierarchies and values.
Conference 1: Circles of Sociability
October 26–27, 2007)
Circles of sociability—be they represented in treatises of court civility, literary quarrels, or epistolary exchanges, or constructed in coffee houses, bourgeois salons and spas—all connect individual identity to practices of hierarchy, exchange, bonding, or conflict.
Session 1: Modes of Sociability 1
Session Chair: Susan McClary, University of California, Los Angeles
Jean Garapon, Université de Nantes
“Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Madame de Caylus, Madame de Staal-Delaunay: The Worldly Set and the Force of Women’s Words in the Age of Classicism”
Angela Borchert, University of Western Ontario (presented via Internet)
“Sociability at the Court of Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach: The Journal von Tiefurt”
David Harrison, Grinnell College
“Saint-Simon, Theorist of Conversation”
Session 2: Modes of Sociability 2
Session Chair: Ann Goldberg,University of California, Riverside
Vera Keller, Princeton University
“Circles of Invention: Cornelis Drebbel and the Lovers of Art”
Brian Cowan, McGill University
“English Coffeehouses and French Salons: Rethinking Habermas, Gender and Sociability in Early Modern French and British Historiography”
Giovanna Benadusi, University of South Florida (presented by David Sabean)
“Epistolary Narratives of Royal Women: Sharing the Stage and Practicing Power in Baroque Tuscany”
Session 3: Fashioning Identities
Session Chair: Stephen Fleck, California State University, Long Beach
Jean-Pierre van Elslande, Université de Neuchâtel
“The Social Invention of Childhood and the Literary Reinvention of Social Values in the French Renaissance”
Déborah Blocker, University of California, Berkeley
“Theatrical Identities: Fashioning Subjects through Drama in the House of Cardinal Richelieu (1635–1643)”
Larry F. Norman, University of Chicago
“Sociability, Self-Identity, and Modernity”
Session 4: Broadening the Limits
Session Chair: Patrick Coleman, University of California, Los Angeles
Amanda Herbert Bilby, John Hopkins University
“Gendering Space, Sociability and Self at British Health Spas, 1640–1714”
Tamara Zwick, University of South Florida
“The Private Party of a Public Circle: Neumühlen and the Landscape of Networks”
David S. Shields, University of South
“Carolina Selfhood and Sociability at the Center of England’s Culture of Print”
David Sabean, University of California, Los Angeles
Closing Remarks
Conference 2: Sites of Exteriority
November 30–December 1, 2007
Sites of exteriority—such as gardens, mountains, landscape painting, travels or maps—participate in the construction of the self by articulating its relationship to otherness (the sublime, the infinite, imaginary or exotic lands, cosmological representations), as well as a novel way of situating oneself in the world (personal perspective, point of view, exploration, limits).
Session 1: The Self in the Sovereign’s Palace
Session Chair: Jean-Claude Carron, University of California, Los Angeles
Jean-Vincent Blanchard, Swarthmore College
“Louis XIV’s Royal Houses, Wondrous Epics, and the Somatics of Sovereignty”
Tom Conley, Harvard University
“‘Ingénieurs du roy, ingénieurs du moi’: Spatial Design of the ‘Self’ after the Age of Henry IV”
Michel Jeanneret, Johns Hopkins University/Université de Genève
“The Primitive and Versailles: The Return of the Repressed”
Session 2: A Natural Self?
Session Chair: Muriel McClendon, University of California, Los Angeles
William T. Hendel, University of Memphis
“The Theatrical Garden in Watelet’s Essai sur les jardins (1774): The Natural Self as Actor and Spectator”
Michael Taormina, Hunter College, CUNY
“Saint-Amant’s Nature Poetry and the Extravagant Self”
Session 3: Broader Reaches
Session Chair: Susan McClary, University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Batchelor, Georgia Southern University
“Fashions for the Interstitial: Garden Stories from Beijing and Nagasaki in 1720’s London”
Susan Johnson-Roehr, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“John Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis: The Mapping of Imperial Subjectivity at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, 1675–1729″
Stacey Sloboda, Southern Illinois University
“Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese Room”
Session 4: Limits Within and Without
Session Chair: Gabriel Piterberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Christopher Wild, University of Califoria, Los Angeles
“Melancholy and the Cartographic Self”
Michael J. Sauter, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, A.C.
“Germans in Space: Astronomy and ‘Anthropologie’ in the Eighteenth Century”
Malina Stefanovska, University of California, Los Angeles
Closing Remarks
Conference 3: The “Inner Self”
February 22–23, 2008
The conference questions how the specifically early modern notion of the “inner self” is crafted through the use of spatial metaphors for representing subjectivity and its relation to otherness (interiority, meditation, concealment, truth or lying), for discussing the mind, the soul, or rhetorical memory, in fiction, medical or religious writings, and philosophy.
Session 1: The “Innermost Recesses”
Andreas Bähr, Freie Universität Berlin
“Spaces of Dreaming: Self-Constitution in Early Modern Dream Narratives”
Robert G. Dimit, New York University
“Divine Grace, the Humoral Body, and the ‘Inner Self’ in Seventeenth-Century France and England”
Jean-Philippe Antoine, Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3
“Sculpted by Dead Marbles: Winckelmann’s Outer Selves and the Body without Organs”
Session 2: Language and Thought
Misia Sophia Doms, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken
“Souls and Spaces: Spatial Metaphors for the Soul in German Baroque Poetry and their Anthropological Implications”
Nicholas Paige, University of California, Berkeley
“How to Read a Mind: The Language of Thought in Crebillon”
Session 3: Motion and Sound
Erec R. Koch, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
“Nicole’s Tourbillions: Materiality, Motion, and the Passions”
Ljubica Ilic, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow, UCLA
“Sound, Self, and Space”
Session 4: From the Personal to the Social
Claudia Jarzebowski, FU Berlin/Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut/University of Pennsylvania
“Spaces of Her ‘Self’ in the Memoirs of Wilhelmine von Bayreuth (1709–1758)”
Karin Sennefelt, Ahmanson Getty Fellow, UCLA
“Virtue, Property, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Stockholm”
Conference 4: Spaces of Sacrality
March 14–15, 2008
The conference explores the interrelatedness between the spatial configurations of religious sites (places of cult, convents, pilgrimage routes, sacralized Absolutist or Republican political space) and conceptions of authority, the sacred and the self (mystical experience, meditation practices, creation of a “secular” sacredness).
Session 1: Architectures of Sacrality
Evonne Levy, University of Toronto
“The Architecture of Confession in Post-Tridentine Churches”
Esther Meier, Universität Dortmund
“Joachim von Sandrart’s Self-Portraits in Altarpieces: Communication in a Catholic Sacral Room”
Barbara R. Woshinsky, University of Miami
“Crossing the Convent Threshold: the ‘Grand Carmel’ de la rue St-Jacques”
Session 2: Sacred Spaces and Inner Selves
Susan Boettcher, University of Texas, Austin
“The Fate of the ‘Inner House of Conscience’ in the Reformation: Churches, Preaching, and Lutheran Interiority”
Frédéric Gabriel, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow, UCLA
“‘Loci theologici’: Rhetoric, Meditation, Casuistry, and Politics of the Self in the Puritan Tradition”
Session 3: Outward Movement
Lee Palmer Wandel, University of Wisconsin
“Exile in the Reformation”
Howard Louthan, University of Florida
“Pilgrimage, Space, and the ‘Self’ in Early Modern Bohemia (1620–1750)”
Geoffrey Symcox, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Sacred Topography of Piedmont, Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries: Popular Devotions and Dynastic Shrines”
Session 4: Sacred Spaces of Holy Empires
Peter Burschel, Universität Rostock
“Topkapı Sarayı”
Joseph F. Patrouch, Florida International University
“In Pursuit of the Holy Roman Empire: On Its Trail in 1570”
Conference 5: Family and Work Space
April 25–26, 2008
The conference seeks to understand the influence on individual identities, of new family and kinship structures, or of emerging work and leisure practices represented in the configuration of the house (reading spaces, craftsman’s workshop, artist’s studio, cabinets of curiosities, material objects of culture, relation of space to memory and work, practices of hospitality, etc.).
Session 1: The Scholar’s Workspace
Session Chair: Craig Yirush, University of California, Los Angeles
Gadi Algazi, Tel Aviv University
“At the Study: Who Was With Early Modern Scholars When They Were Alone?”
Gabriele Jancke, Free University of Berlin Scholars
“Spaces—Households and the Practices of Hospitality”
Anne Vila, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“The Scholar at Work: Habitus, Habitation, and the Identity of the ‘Learned’ in Eighteenth-Century France”
Session 2: The Philosopher Alone and in Public
Session Chair: Patrick Coleman, University of California, Los Angeles
Carole Martin, Texas State University
“Framing the Philosopher’s Work Space: From Chardin’s Philosophe to Diderot’s Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre”
Pierre Saint-Amand, Brown University
“The Philosopher’s Studio”
Carol Pal, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow, UCLA
“Ephemeral Academy: The Hague and the Republic of Letters in the 1630s”
Session 3: Household and Social Space
Session Chair: Massimo Ciavolella, University of California, Los Angeles
Clorinda Donato, California State University, Long Beach
“The Familial and Working Spaces of a Tribade and Her Narrator in Eighteenth-Century Italy”
Kimberley Skelton, Tufts University
“A Socially Stratified Retreat: The 1650’s English Country House and Household”
David Packwood, University of Warwick
“Re-Negotiating Social Space in Poussin’s Louvre Self-Portrait of 1649–1650”
Session 4: Workshops
Sean Silver, University of California, Los Angeles
“Visiting Strawberry Hill”
Jorge Tárrago Mingo, University of Navarre
“Diffuse Boundaries: The Theatrical Workshop”