TRUE WARRIORS? NEGOTIATING DISSENT
IN THE INTELLECTUAL DEBATE (c. 1100 – 1700)
LECTIO INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, 11-13 December 2019
UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN (BELGIUM)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Dissent, polemics and rivalry have always been at the center of intellectual development. The scholarly Streitkultur was given a fresh impetus by the newly founded universities in the High Middle Ages and later turned into a quintessential part of early modern intellectual life. It was not only mirrored in various wellknown intellectual debates and controversies – e.g. between Aristotelians and Augustinians, scholastics and humanists, Catholics and Protestants – but also embodied in numerous literary genres and nonliterary modes of expression – e.g. disputationes, invectives, consilia, images, carnivalesque parades, music, etc. – and discursive or political strategies – patronage, networks and alliances. Moreover, the harsh debates notwithstanding, consensus was also actively searched for, both within particular disciplines
and within society as a whole. The aforementioned genres and strategies are all modes of negotiating dissent, which raises several important questions regarding these intellectual ‘warriors’. What were the most important issues at stake and how were they debated? Did the debates in the public sphere reflect the private opinions of the scholars involved? What access do we have to those private opinions? Can we approach such controversies in terms of authenticity and truthfulness, or consistency and coherence? Is there a contrast between egodocuments and the published part of an author’s oeuvre?
Starting from these questions, the aim of this conference is to study the polemical strategies and the modes of rivalry and alliance in scholarly debate from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries.
Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:
- the role of alliances and polemics in establishing intellectual networks;
- the presentation of rivaling views and the depiction of adversaries;
- the discrepancy or congruency between private and public persona;
- hitherto neglected disputes or new perspectives on well-known controversies;
- non-literary modes of negotiating dissent;
- the relation and connections between various literary and non-literary genres, also across
different semiotic modes (literature, visual arts, performative arts, …); - the role of socio-cultural and economic background in polemics;
- the role of language (e.g.: vernacular vs. Latin);
- similarities and differences across disciplines (philosophy, civil and canon law, theology,
medicine…) with regard to polemization and the negotiation of dissent.
FIND HERE THE CALL FOR PAPERS: CfP-TrueWarriors-Leuven
Please submit your proposal via email (lectio@kuleuven.be) by April 15, 2019.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Annamaria (February 25, 2019). CALL FOR PAPERS: TRUE WARRIORS? The Making of Legal Knowledge . Retrieved February 12, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/r7mb