Zoom Webinar: Debating Intellectual Change in Early Modern Europe (16th – 18th Centuries)

Debating Intellectual Change in early modern Europe (16^th – 18^th centuries) 

Hosted by IMEMS, Durham University 

 To register click here 

Beginning at least with Paul Hazard’s seminal analysis of the crisis of the European mind, scholars have provided alternative approaches to the transformation of western civilization which enabled the still unfolding process of modernity. Some of them have claimed that around the 1650s-1680s an intellectual and cultural crisis occurred, ‘which rapidly overthrew theology’s age-old hegemony in the world of study, slowly but surely eradicated magic and belief in the supernatural from Europe’s intellectual culture, and led a few openly to challenge everything inherited from the past.’ (J. Israel, 2001) Others, instead, have downplayed the extent to which the crise involved a radical rupture with the modes of thought inherited from the late Humanistic past, emphasising the persistent relevance of ancient philosophy, biblical philology, and erudition to Enlightenment debates, or stressing the centrality in eighteenth-century culture of the religious and intellectual problems unleashed by the catholic and protestant Reformations.  

Following the successful organization in 2022 of a similar event entitled Debating Intellectual Change in early modern Europe (16^th – 18^th centuries), this webinar is intended to place into conversation leading intellectual historians about the nature and extent of intellectual change in Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century. How helpful are notions such as “long-Reformation”, secularization or (religious) pluralism to understand the crisis of the European mind from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century? Are the concepts of Renaissance and Enlightenment(s) always indispensable to understand the changes in political, religious, intellectual, and social culture occurring simultaneously in distinct areas of early modern Europe? And how does the analysis of the transmission and reception of books and ideas contribute to the debate about the national vs cosmopolitan dimension of such changes? These and other questions will be addressed by the participants to the Webinar during both their presentations and the following round-table discussion. The Webinar will be held on July 6^th, 2023 from 3pm to 5pm (UK Time). All participants will have each 10 minutes at their disposal to make a presentation, which will be followed by a roundtable discussion between them enriched by relevant questions asked by the audience via the chat function.

Program:

Stephen Taylor (Durham University, IMEMS Director) "Introduction"

Giorgio Caravale (University of Roma Tre) “Censorship as an agent of change? Early Modern Italy and the Role of the Church”

Franz L. Fillafer (Austrian Academy of Sciences) “The Chrono- and Geopolitics of Enlightenment”

Ruth Hill (Vanderbilt University): “How the Others Became the Norm: Spain, Portugal, and the ‘New’ Models of ‘European’ Scientific Modernity” 

Sara Miglietti (Warburg Institute) “Ancient climate theories in early modern Europe: continuity and change”

Andrea Strazzoni (Università Cà Foscari, Venezia) “Natural philosophy in early Cartesian dictata (1650s–1660s)”

Alexis Tadié (Sorbonne) ““English Prose and its Relations with the Continent at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century”

Chair/moderator: Marco Barducci (University of Pavia/IMEMS)