The SCSC was founded to promote scholarship on the early modern era (c. 1450 – c. 1660). The SCSC encourages the participation of international scholars and warmly welcomes early career researchers and postgraduates and graduate students who have advanced to candidacy to the academic community.

ITALIAN STUDIES TRACK

Early Modern Italian Women

This panel invites papers that consider texts by or about women in the early modern period. Please submit your 250-word abstract and brief bio online to www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference and also to Jennifer Haraguchi (jennifer_haraguchi@byu.edu) by April 11, 2022.

Refashioning Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Early Modern Italy

This panel seeks papers on the fate of the works of the “tre corone” in the early modern period. Please submit your 250-word abstract and brief bio online to www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference and also to Jennifer Haraguchi (jennifer_haraguchi@byu.edu) by April 11, 2022.

Strategies of Imitation in Renaissance Literature

Forty years after the publication of Thomas Greene’s instant classic, The Light in Troy, this panel seeks to revisit the question of Renaissance imitation. Papers may revisit Greene’s favorite poet, Petrarch, or reach into the works of succeeding generations, and may address such questions as imitation and historical distance, imitation and selfhood, imitation as parody, imitation and authority. Please submit your 250-word abstract and brief bio online to www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference and also to Michael Sherberg (sherberg@wustl.edu) by April 11, 2022.

Cancelled! Censored! Banned!

At a moment when our own public discourse often addresses issues of censorship, banning and “cancel culture,” this panel invites papers that examine censorship and book banning in early modern Italy. Papers may examine the institutions and processes that censored and banned literary texts; strategies of resistance utilized by authors and publishers; self-censorship and rewriting; discussions or literary representations of censorship; and readings of texts that circulated in censored editions. Please submit your 250-word abstract and brief bio online to www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference and also to Suzanne Magnanini (suzanne.magnanini@colorado.edu) by April 11, 2022.

Pandemic Pedagogies: What should we keep? What should we bury?

This panel or roundtable seeks to continue the conversation on pandemic pedagogies begun in a recent supplement to The Sixteenth Century Journal. How do we address in our early modern classrooms the issues and inequities surrounding race, class, and gender, that were brought to the fore during the pandemic?What practices and tools acquired during the pandemic do we want to hold onto and develop? Which pedagogies, tools, and practices do we wish to abandon? Which do we want to recuperate once the pandemic passes? How has the pandemic changed the way we teach certain texts, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron? Please submit your 250-word abstract and brief bio online to www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference and also to Suzanne Magnanini (suzanne.magnanini@colorado.edu) by April 11, 2022.

Early Modern Codeswitching

The Italian Quattrocento is characterized by the famously discussed “crisi del volgare,” as the vernacular occupied a culturally subordinate position to Latin. In the Sixteenth century, due to various factors such as the spread of the study of Greek, the scientists’ and artists’ dissatisfaction with humanist Latin, and the advent of the printing press, this situation of diglossia evolved in favor of the vernacular, which regained a preeminent position. Italian elites became polyglot, often familiar with four languages: the Latin of high culture, a noble variety of vernacular, a local variety of vernacular, and most likely at least another European language. This panel seeks to investigate how the linguistic situation of Early Modern Italy (1374-1600) resulted in multilingual writing, in particular in the form of “codeswitching,” defined as a writing style in which fluent bilinguals move in and out of two (or conceivably more) languages, within the same work and also between different works. The critical category of codeswitching can help analyze the works of polyglot authors such as Poliziano, Valla, Leon Battista Alberti, Cellini and Giordano Bruno, but it can also contribute to contextualize other multilingual productions, such as homiletic literature or private correspondence. We welcome papers that address the following questions:

– Why did authors move among languages (considering as “languages” the several varieties of written Latin, ranging across a variegated spectrum from the Latin surviving from the Middle Ages to the Classical Latin that humanists strived to revive, Italian vernaculars, including the different spoken and written regional languages, and vernaculars of other countries) and in what contexts?

– What function did codeswitching fulfill in terms of knowledge dissemination among different audiences?

– How does codeswitching relate with an author’s engagement in Early Modern theoretical debates on the language (questione della lingua)?

– How does it differ from and interact with other phenomena resulting from language contact, such as code-mixing, loan-words, calque, borrowing, poliphilesque and macaronic languages?

– How did codeswitching affect the reception of a work in the following centuries?

Please submit your 250-word abstract and brief bio online to www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference and also to Maria Sole Costanzo (MariaSole.Costanzo.12@nd.edu) by April 11, 2022.