Author: Eru Fevery

7-9 May 2025
Het Rustpunt
Burgstraat 110-16, Ghent

More and more exciting research is being produced by scholars of political theory and related fields––such as political science, history, and political philosophy––exploring the contributions of women to the history of political thought. This three-day WHPT conference is an important step towards bringing these scholars together, with the aim of fostering new intersections and inspiring future research.

Find the full conference program below.

This conference is organized by Torrey Shanks (University of Toronto), Mary Jo MacDonald (University of Jyväskylä), and Geertje Bol (Ghent University). It is generously funded by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Strategic Institutions Partnerships grant from Ghent University, the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, and the Gender in Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy project at the University of Jyväskylä.

Visit the website for more information.

GEMS is organising a talk by Dr. Elena Bilancia on ‘New Research Perspectives on Italian Vernacular Rhetorics of the 16^th Century’.

Wednesday 7 May, 2025
5 PM
Camelot (Room 3.30, Blandijnberg 2)

The development of vernacular rhetorical theory played a key role in the intellectual culture of the Italian and European Renaissance. During the 16^th century, the growing need to establish an autonomous set of rhetorical principles, crafted by (and for) literary professionals rather than university professors, extended beyond humanistic pedagogy and the formation of the ideal vir bonus dicendi peritus. It also addressed the changing role of intellectuals and their evolving relationship with cultural, political, and religious institutions, especially in the turbulent period between the end of the Italian Wars and the onset of the Counter-Reformation. Italian intellectuals made an original contribution to rhetorical theory not only through their exegetical work on ancient texts but also by exploring the potential of the vernacular language in the extra-university cultural circuits. It was particularly within the Infiammati Academy of Padua that a defence of the practical and civic function of elocutio was elaborated. The objective of Elena Bilancia’s research is therefore to identify the specific cultural projects that contributed to the foundation of an Italian vernacular rhetoric within the complex framework of European humanisms.

Elena Bilancia obtained her PhD in Philology and in Italian Studies from the universities of Naples Federico II and Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis. She is currently a research fellow at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale and a contract lecturer in Italian Literature at the Department of Humanities at Federico II. Her research interests focus on vernacular dialogue production and Renaissance lyric poetry. She has worked on authors such as Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and Torquato Tasso. In 2024, she published the monograph Il dialogo in volgare. Forme dell’argomentazione retorica nel XVI secolo with Bit&s.

GEMS is organising a talk by Dr. Jonathan Schiesaro on ‘Debating Private Censorship and Family Networks from Florence to Flanders: Lodovico Guicciardini’s Letters and the Publication of Francesco Guicciardini’s “Ricordi”’

Monday 26 May, 2025
5 PM
Camelot (Room 3.30, Blandijnberg 2) Hybrid format

This talk explores the epistolary and editorial activity of Lodovico Guicciardini (1521-1589) between the events surrounding the publication of the first edition of Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy (1561), edited by Lodovico’s cousin Agnolo di Girolamo (1525-1581), and the Antwerp edition of the Ricordi (1585). Through a close reading of his correspondence and early printed materials within the Flemish context, the talk examines how private censorship and family networks shaped the reception of Italian historical culture and political thought on the periphery of the Counter-Reformation.

Jonathan Schiesaro (PhD, University of Zurich) is a research fellow of the Irish Research Council at Trinity College Dublin, where he works on a project focused on the transmission and manipulation of documentary heritage within Florentine patrician families (including the Vasari, Bandinelli, Buonarroti, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Ammirato) under the early Grand Dukes of Tuscany. His main research interests include Renaissance art treatises, memory writing, and historiography. He published the monograph Baccio Bandinelli e le anatomie degli scartafacci: il “Libro del disegno”, l’archivio di famiglia e la questione del “Memoriale” (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023).

Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Roundtable: 2:30-4pm
Reception: 4-5:30pm

Faculteitszaal (1^st floor, Blandijnberg 2)

This interdisciplinary roundtable will explore the rich and varied afterlives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in contemporary media, culture, and criticism. A panel of leading scholars in literary studies will delve into how historical figures and forms—from seafaring pirates and biting satirists to queer protagonists and Enlightenment thinkers—continue to shape cultural narratives today. Our discussion will examine the reimagining of early modern tropes in contemporary literature, film, and television; the resonances of eighteenth-century satire in postcolonial thought; and the legacy of Enlightenment ideals in current debates on religious toleration. By interrogating how the past is adapted and reframed in the present, the roundtable promises to offer fresh insights into literature’s role in navigating ongoing conversations around gender, identity, colonialism, and belief.

The event will conclude a lively Q&A session and an informal reception to encourage further exchange.

Speakers:
Manushag Powell, Arizona State University
David Alvarez, DePauw University
Ros Ballaster, Oxford University
Helen Deutsch, UCLA

Chair: Andrew Bricker, UGent

Sponsors:
GEMS: Group for Early Modern Studies
CEL19: Centre for the Study of 19th-Century Literature
International Summer School of Romanticism at UGent

With the support of:
The Department of Literary Studies, UGent
The English Literature Section, UGent
The Doctoral Schools, UGent, with funding from the Flemish Government

Alexander van de Sijpe and David Alvarez are organising a reading group about postsecular perspectives in literary studies. 

The first session will be held next Monday, March 10.

Traditional secularization narratives suggest that, under the influence of modern trends—rationalization, scientific innovation, increasing prosperity, etc.—religious societies have gradually secularized. However, over the past decades, scholars have increasingly questioned this classical understanding of religion and secularity. Postsecular thinkers such as Charles Taylor (A Secular Age, 2007) and Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 2003) challenge the conventional conceptualizations of religion and secularity, as well as the binary opposition between them. Taylor critiques “subtraction stories” that assume secular society emerges through the mere disappearance of religion; instead, he argues that secularization is partly shaped by developments within religious traditions themselves. Asad, on the other hand, contends that the concepts of “religion” and “secularity” are the product of discursive shifts in early modernity and are ultimately the creation of a secular ideology.

These insights are also highly relevant for literary studies. They invite us to reconsider religion and secularity—not as fixed categories, but as concepts shaped by literary texts and literary scholars alike. With this in mind, we are organizing a reading group consisting of four sessions, in which we will engage with key postsecular texts and explore how they might enrich our research practices.

The first session will take place on Monday, March 10, at 1:00 PM in Panopticon (Room 2.23, Blandijn, Campus Boekentoren). The first chapter of Taylor’s A Secular Age, titled “The Bulwarks of Belief.”  will be the topic of our first discussion. The following dates can be scheduled by mutual agreement.

If you are interested in participating, please email Alexander.VandeSijpe@UGent.be. A digital copy of the chapter will be provided. The reading group will be conducted in English.

We congratulate the following GEMS-affiliated researches on their remarkable achievements from the past few months!

• Gulia Coppi presented her paper, “Will Spectators Always Be Spectators?”, at the Periodicals, History and Change: a Postgraduate Workshop, hosted at the historic Leeds Library. Her paper focused on the evolving role of 18th-century periodicals as venues for, and sources of, societal critique and change. She argued that for these publications to maintain their role, both their nature and content had to change, at least in part.
  
• Eleonora Serra, postdoc in linguistic studies, received the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellow (2024-25) at I Tatti The University Center for Italian renaissance Studies.
• Guylian Nemegeer, FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow in literature studies, received a Wallace Fellowship (2025-26) at I Tatti at I Tatti The University Center for Italian renaissance Studies
• Cato Rooryck had her first publication last month: “By Birthright their Mother-Tongue”: Shakespeare, Indigeneity, and Cultural Reclamation in Australia: Kylie Bracknell’s Hecate (2020), a chapter in Woke Shakespeare, published by Quibble Academic.
  
  

On Friday 7 February, Contactgroep Vroege Nederlandse Kunst will visit the exhibition Eeuwige Lente. Tuinen en Wandtapijten in de Renaissance in het Hof van Busleyden Museum in Mechelen and the nearby Koninklijke Manufactuur van Wandtapijten De Wit.

Find the programme below.

Participation fee (incl. coffee and lunch): € 30 per person. There is room for a maximum of 40 participants. You can register by transferring the amount due to NL69INGB0000507640, beneficiary Stichting RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, stating “CVNK – Eternal Spring”.
Registration for lunch before 31 January 2025.

This winter, Museum Hof van Busleyden tempers the wait for spring with a lavish exhibition that pays homage to the rebirth of nature. Eternal Spring. Gardens and Tapestries in the Renaissance brings the splendour and magnificence of lush Renaissance gardens to life with imposing tapestries and other art treasures.

In the Renaissance, sumptuous but meticulously ordered gardens affirmed man’s rule over nature. But time, however, demands humility from every gardener. After all, the beauty of a garden is transient and subject to seasonal change. For that reason, artists try like no other to capture nature in artworks, to create an eternal spring. The most remarkable presentations of the lush Renaissance gardens are to be found in sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries. Thanks to their monumental dimensions, the use of precious materials such as gold and silk and the unparalleled knowledge and skill of the workshops, tapestries are the ideal medium to depict the overwhelming splendour of burgeoning nature.

The exhibition Eternal Spring is built around an extraordinary series of tapestries that adorned the Brussels palace of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle five centuries ago. The tapestries, today part of the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, form an allegorical garden that echoes the fascination with antiquity and the ideals of the Renaissance.

The gardens are a reflection of the viewer looking at them and explore the profound relationship between man and nature. How deep is the human desire to shape the natural world? And to what extent do we continue to see nature as a makeable setting? Like a living masterpiece, the renovated gardens of Museum Hof van Busleyden intertwine the exhibition with the outside world.

In addition to the series of tapestries, Eternal Spring shows other masterpieces from the art collection of cardinal and art collector Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517-1586). His unwavering loyalty to Habsburgian power makes him a controversial statesman in the history of the Low Countries. The exhibition features paintings, sculptures, books and naturalia from his collection.

With Eternal Spring, curated by Carlotta Striolo, Museum Hof van Busleyden once again showcases the finest art from the Northern Renaissance. With their colourful textile fibres, the imposing tapestries bring the lush garden views to life, as if spring is forever. The majestic museum gardens outside, where the first blossoming flowers create a colourful scene, complete this enchanting ode to nature.

(text and image: Hof van Busleyden: Eternal Spring)

Program:

09:30 – 10:00
Registration (30 min)

10:00 – 10:15
Reception and introduction
Kristl Strubbe (director Museum Hof ​​van Busleyden), Suzanne Laemers (CVNK) and Carlotta Striolo (exhibition curator) (15 min)

10:15 – 10:30
Session 1: Granvelles Garden Gallery in Brussels, a digital view
Krista De Jonge (KU Leuven) and Vincent Vanhamme (KU Leuven) (15 min)

10:30 – 10:35
Q&A (5 min)

10:35 – 10:50
Session 2: “Mogen we uw beker dan niet met recht een spiegel van de natuur noemen?” Granvelle as a collector of art and nature
Tine Meganck (VUB) (15 min)

10:50 – 10:55
Q&A (5 min)

10:55 – 11:10
Session 3: Mechelen, a centre for the development of the Renaissance Garden in the former Low Countries
Odile de Bruyn (15 min)

11:10 – 11:15
Q&A (5 min)

11:15 – 11:30
Coffee break (15 min)

11:30 – 12:30
Guided tour of the exhibition “Eternal Spring” by Carlotta Striolo, curator of the exhibition (1 hour)

12:30 – 13:30
Lunch break (1 hour)

13:30 – 13:55
Walk to manufactuur De Wit (approx. 25 min)

14:00-15:30
Guided tour of manufactuur De Wit (1.5 hours)

15:35 – 15:50
End of the tour

GEMS is hosting a talk by Dr. Francesco Caruso on Angelo Poliziano and the encyclopedic ideal.

March 5, 2025
3 – 4PM
Camelot (Room 3.30, Blandijnberg 2)

For early humanists, engaging with the classics was an integral part of their intellectual activity. The inventory of what remained after the shipwreck of the ancient world became the battlefield where “the best minds of three generations” clashed, in the attempt of incorporating this or that author to their range of expertise. In the late 1480s, during the opening of the academic year at the University of Florence, the Tuscan poet and humanist Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) delivered a prologue, the Panepistemon. This work implicitly certified that the efforts of his predecessors had been short-sighted. Not only did they demonstrate a limited or non-existent knowledge of the Greek language, but they also focused on a narrow range of ancient authors, mostly poets, historians, and orators. For Poliziano, this highlighted the need to create a vast encyclopedic project to reorganize the entire intellectual heritage of Greek and Latin output, including, among others, philosophy, sciences, and the law.

Dr. Francesco Caruso has a double background, legal and literary. He graduated from the School of Law in Palermo and holds a MA from University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. His main areas of  research are the Italian Quattrocento, Neo-Latin literature and intellectual history. He has primarily published on Boccaccio and Poliziano, to whose intellectual biography he devoted his dissertation. He currently teaches Italian language and literature in the International Baccalaureate Program at the Gonzaga Campus in Palermo and works also as a professional translator. His current projects concern Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses but he is also conducting archival research on the Hortus Catholicus, one of Europe’s earliest botanical gardens.

GEMS is hosting a talk by Prof. Dr. David Alvarez (DePauw University) on religion, race, and the formation of the secular in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters.

February 19, 2025
2:30-3:30pm
Auditorium B, Rozier 44

Europe and Islam, feminism and the veil, orientalism, empire, and race: there are few works of eighteenth-century British literature that seem as topical as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763). One of the first women to describe her travels to the Ottoman Empire, and one of the first Europeans to visit women-only spaces there, Montagu praises many aspects of Ottoman culture and society, most notably the liberty of the “Turkish ladies,” who are, she claims, “(perhaps) freer than any ladies in the universe.” Hailed in the last thirty years as a proto-feminist Enlightenment effort to overcome the East/West divide, her literary account of her travels from 1716-18 through Europe, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire has been seen as promoting “peaceful cosmopolitan intercultural exchange” and heralding “the advent of European secularism.” The Letters’ topicality, however, has unfortunately had the effect of limiting scholars’ attention to Montagu’s descriptions of the Ottoman empire, which make up less than half the book. By ignoring her account of her travels through Roman Catholic Europe, we miss seeing how Montagu represents Ottoman alterity by projecting outward from England a distinction that is internal to Christianity: the divide between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. This divide in her work is more fundamental than that between East and West. It grounds not only her criticisms of Roman Catholic Baroque Europe as benighted, backwards, and absolutist but also her celebration of the Ottomans for their polite sociability, tolerant cosmopolitanism, and liberty for women. If it is through these binaries that her work contributes to the formation of the secular, they also explain how Montagu conceptualizes race and anti-Black racism in her letters about North African women, who are represented as having more in common with Roman Catholics than Ottoman Muslims.

Prof. Dr. David Alvarez (DePauw University) is a Fulbright scholar this year at Ghent University, and is currently finishing a book manuscript on “Imagining Global Religion: Secularity, Religious Toleration, and Empire in the English Enlightenment.” He has published internationally on eighteenth-century English literature and philosophy, focusing on religious toleration, aesthetics, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. With Prof. Alison Conway, he has also edited a book collection of essays, Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830. His course on “Staging World Religions and the Formation of the Secular in Restoration Drama” builds on his book project by examining how Restoration drama contributes to changes in the meaning of “religion” and to what ethical, secular, and imperial ends.

Architecture’s Mannerisms, or the Modern Path of an Unstylish Style

The department of Architecture and Urban Planning is hosting a lecture by Andrew Leach (University of Sydney) on the notion of mannerisms in 20^th century architectural culture. This talk reports on a book begun at Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti. It reflects on the work done by a modern and evolving concept of architectural mannerism for architecture itself. How has mannerism, it asks, shaped architectural values—directly and obliquely? What does it tell us about modern architecture’s relationship with history? Tracking the ebbs and flows of mannerism’s presence in architectural debate offers a way to think about the construction of architecture as a field apart, and as a profession subject to corruption.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday 17 December at 6 pm, in Auditorium C, Plateaustraat 22.