20-22 June 2017
Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR), 59 Rue Néricault Destouches, 37000 Tours, France
The roots of the idea of the Renaissance as a time of innovation and revival of learning, wisdom and art after a long period of decline can be traced back to the thought of contemporary groups of intellectuals, artists, and cultural elites.

At the threshold of what can be seen as two different historical periods, the “Middle Ages” and the “Renaissance”, these groups started to think of their age as a new era, distinct from the younger past, grounding this distinction on their renewed relationship with the more remote era of the ancient cultures of Rome and Greece. This image of an abrupt break with a past of gloom can be considered a myth, and just as all myths do, it unfolded and metamorphosed over the centuries. Its origins are nonetheless intriguing: what were these thinkers opposing themselves, at what level, with what discrepancies and inconsistencies? This cross-disciplinary international conference proposes to explore the early modern perceived reality of the continuities and the disruptions between the Renaissance and the previous period, in connection with but nevertheless tangential to their objective actuality. By examining the numerous aspects and fields in which this conception of a time that had interposed itself between Antiquity and its renewal manifests, the conference hopes to better clarify the different Renaissance attitudes towards it.
See Call for papers – CESR Tours France for more details.