Raising the Dead: The Landscape of Violence in Early Modern France
Kathleen Long, Cornell University
Folger Mellon-Mowat Fellow, 2019-2020
Six of the peace edicts produced during the period of the Wars of Religion in France (1562-1628) included a royal prohibition against speaking or writing about these wars. Perhaps the hope was that by suppressing the memory of the preceding war, the violence would abate and the conflicts would end. This was not the case, and as a result, the wars raged on and millions of people died in this period. This talk will explore the various ways in which authors and artists responded to these edicts, and how they expressed the losses and the terror they witnessed around them, with a particular focus on two utopian works: the satirical novel, The Island of Hermaphrodites (L’Isle des hermaphrodites), and the architectural engravings of Hans Vredeman de Vries. Embedded within these works are images of the violence that subtends the idealized or amusing world they claim to represent. The violence of the extended period of religious wars had a pronounced effect on the aesthetics of the period, and is reflected in the centrality of the grotesque in decorative arts (as opposed to its existence on the periphery earlier in the century) as well as the use of material enhancement, dress, jewelry, hairdressing, and make-up as well as idealized and classicizing architecture and ornamentation, to cover over but paradoxically also reveal the scars and losses imposed by war. I will consider what these complex representations of the effects of violence bring to our understanding of the period and of the aesthetic and affective responses to its violence.
LOCATION:Room 212, Sever Hall STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20191107T213000Z DTEND:20191107T213000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR