Orthodoxies and Diversities in Early Modern German-Speaking Europe
The Fourth International Interdisciplinary Conference
sponsored by
Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär.
April 7-10, 2005,
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
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I. Description
From April 7 to April 10, 2005, Duke University will host the 4th FNI International Conference. With its theme of "Orthodoxies and Diversities," the 2005 conference will provide a significant venue for studying a critical feature of early modern Germany that reverberates in today's world as well: the dynamic tension between the search for stable order-culturally and institutionally-and the complex diversity of early modern German society. Key examples of this tension include the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics over religion, between centralizing states and local people protecting their particular ways of life, and, in the creative sphere, between evolving canons of language use, musical performance, painting or sculpture on the one hand and individual creativity or traditional cultures on the other.
The FNI conference is uniquely structured to allow intense interaction between German and American scholars who bring diverse perspectives to a shared them. The conference program will include about seventy presenters from multiple disciplines, with nearly equal numbers of American and European scholars. Sessions are long to allow intensive discussions, while the overall program contains generous time for more informal contacts. Larger than a focused workshop but more intimate than a convention, the conference will consist primarily of active researchers presenting their work, together with a number of senior scholars, local faculty and advanced graduate students.
II. Intellectual Rationale
Early modern Germany abounded in tensions between efforts to construct, reform or replace systems of normative order—orthodoxies, canons, epistemes, dominant discourses—and an enormous diversity of practices. Growing formalism in state, church and cultural institutions after the Protestant Reformation confronted a tenacious variety of political forms, religious expressions and local cultures. We can see this tension in many areas, ranging from efforts to regularize German as a literary language to the struggles between Catholic, Protestant and radical religious movements during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. New demands for public conformity had to cope with new kinds of secret knowledge and hidden practice, from natural philosophy to diplomatic communication. Efforts to rationalize public health and medical practice struggled with contested models of medicine and the human body. Baroque ideals of order aroused contention among experts even as they faced resistance from lively popular cultures. Classificatory systems that sought to organize nature, human sexuality, social norms and the human self appeared in the work of German intellectuals, sparking vehement debate even as they were appropriated or ignored in daily life. Reformulations of artistic canons and changes in artists' circumstances transformed visual and musical cultures, always in dynamic tension with both traditions and individual creativity. The populations of German communities could react with equal vehemence to local dissent and outside pressure for discipline and conformity.
All of these examples reveal the terrifying as well as exhilarating predicaments that the people of the Holy Roman Empire faced. The underlying dynamic tension that they reveal provides the unifying theme for the papers chosen for presentation at the 2005 FNI conference.
III. Audience and Impact
The FNI conference reaches international, national and regional audiences through the conference itself and the contacts it initiates, through the resulting publications, and through outreach to the academic and regional communities.
As a major gathering of American, German and European specialists on the early modern German lands the conference showcases current research and thinking about selected topics in the field. By stimulating concentrated interaction among senior and junior scholars from Germany and the United States, the conference helps to nurture the tradition of fruitful cooperation between Americans and Germans who study Reformation and Baroque Germany. The emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and scholarship also encourages scholars to communicate across disciplinary boundaries.
Finally, among the benefits of meeting at Duke University are the resources at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including, the Harold Jantz Collection of German Baroque Literature at Duke's Perkins Library, and the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literature at both Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Conference outreach will include invitations to professors, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in German history and culture and to interested scholars and college teachers in the Mid-Atlantic region. By bring the conference together with the strong local scholarly community FNI contributes to enriching knowledge and teaching about pre-modern Germany in a significant part of the United States.
IV. Conference planning and organization
The conference theme, intellectual rationale and program is the vision of Randolph C. Head (FNI President, Department of History, University of California, Riverside). Additional advice and support has come from the FNI Executive Committee. Following the conference, participating scholars will be invited to contribute manuscripts for a peer-reviewed volume of essays edited by Prof. Head.