CALL FOR PAPERS
“On the Eve of the Reformation: The View from Then and Now”
An interdisciplinary conference at Victoria College in the University
of Toronto
21-22 October 2016
sponsored by The Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium
Deadline for submission of proposals: Thursday, 31 March 2016.
As we prepare to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s
posting of his 95 theses in October 1517, it may be useful to pause
for a moment and consider two important questions: first, how were the
historical and cultural events of the late fifteenth and very early
sixteenth century defining the European world that would soon break
apart along sectarian lines, and, second, how did writers, thinkers,
and artists later in the century look back at that earlier world and
culture. The years immediately preceding 1517 were  richly marked by
events/works that were to have a lasting impact on their times. In
1516, for example, the fifteen-year-old Charles von Habsburg was
crowned king of Spain, Thomas More published his Utopia, Erasmus his
Novum Testamentum and Ariosto his Orlando furioso, and the Venetians
established the Ghetto. The previous year, 1515,  the twenty-year-old
Francis I was crowned king of France, Thomas Wolsey was named cardinal
and then Chancellor of England, Martin Luther began to lecture on
Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Johannes Reuchlin established the first
university chair of Greek in Germany, while across the ocean the
Spaniard Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded the city of Havana. How
did people later in the sixteenth century and early in the next see
these events? How, for example, did Shakespeare see and depict
pre-Reformation England in some of his historical plays? How did
Montaigne, or Cervantes, or Caravaggio, or Monteverdi see the world
before the Reformation?
This interdisciplinary conference seeks, therefore, to take the pulse
of European history and culture in two different ways: from our
perspective as early twenty-first-century scholars and from the
perspective of late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century writers and
artists. In so doing, the conferences seeks to cast its eyes on  both
the Old World and the New,  Europe as well as in its African and Asian
extensions, history as well as the arts, society as well as events.
Proposals for papers to be presented at the conference should include:
the name of the speaker; the speaker’s academic affiliation (or
“independent scholar”, as applicable); the title of the presentation;
a 150 words abstract; full contact information for the speaker (name,
address, telephone, email); the speaker’s one-page CV. In the case of
complete session proposals, this information is to be repeated for
each presenter.
Proposals should be emailed to both conference organizers:
Prof. Elizabeth Cohen at ecohen@yorku.ca
Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler at konrad.eisenbichler@utoronto.ca
Deadline for submission: Thursday, 31 March 2016.
For further information, please contact either one of the conference
organizers.
For further information on the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation
Colloquium, visit its web site at: http://www.itergateway.org/trrc/