Leuven, 29 November - 2 December 2016
In
the year 1516, two crucial texts for the cultural history of the West
saw the light: Thomas More’s Utopia and Desiderius Erasmus’s Novum
Instrumentum. Both of these works dealt freely with authoritative
sources of western civilization and opened new pathways of thought on
the eve of invasive religious and political changes.
Lectio
and the University of Leuven, in collaboration with its RefoRC-partners
the Johannes a Lasco Library Emden and the Europäische Melanchthon
Akademie Bretten as well as other partners, will mark the 500th birthday
of both foundational texts by organizing a conference, from November 29
through December 2, 2016. The university city of Leuven is a most
appropriate place to have this conference organized, since it was
intimately involved in the genesis and the history of both works.
The
conference will be devoted to studying not only the reception and
influence of Utopia and the Novum Instrumentum in (early) modern times,
but also their precursors in Classical Antiquity, the Patristic period,
and the Middle Ages. The conference will thus lead to a better
understanding of how More and Erasmus used their sources, and it will
address the more encompassing question of how these two authors, through
their own ideas and their use of authoritative texts, have contributed
to the rise of Modern Western thought.
The
conference also explicitly aims at enhancing our understanding of
iconographic, book-, and art-historical aspects of the transmission of
the texts under consideration, both before and after the publication of
the two works.
This
multidisciplinary Lectio conference wants to bring together
international scholars working in the field of theology, art history,
philosophy, history of science and historical linguistics.
Call for papers : here