In recent years, theoretical developments across several disciplines (history, art history, literary studies) have highlighted the intrinsic dependence of the political in general, and early modern European politics in particular, on the suggestive powers of images and fictions. Building on the groundbreaking insights of Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic The King’s Two Bodies (1957), which revealed the central role of fictio for the emergence of modern statehood, and now often departing quite dramatically from this body of work, recent scholarship has addressed the confluence and interaction of politics and aesthetics. This workshop will explore the complex cultural mechanics of this interaction in a series of case studies illuminating individual texts and/or works of art across early modern Europe.

FREE REQUIRED REGISTRATION:
http://goo.gl/forms/DDLpRW7EUb

Sponsored by the Department of English, Council
of the Humanities, Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures, Department of German,
University Center for Human Values, Center for
Collaborative History

Contact for more information:
k.ospovat@gmail.com
nsmith@princeton.edu