New Worlds, New Publics: Re(con)figuring Association and the Impact of European Expansion, 1500-1700
Cosponsored by McGill University, this symposium and the publication to follow from it are funded by the interdisciplinary project on Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700. Supported by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this project examines the various forces that shaped the emergence and evolution of "publics": open-membership groups that coalesced around practices, interests, ideas, values, and forms of publication or performance in the early modern period.
Accounts of the cultural, intellectual, social, and spiritual transformations of early modern Europe not only expanded the horizons of European thought but, more essentially, called into question the certainties of classical and religious teachings. This symposium will examine the effects these various processes had upon publics in Europe and in the new domains of European expansion and influence. How did racial, ethnic and cultural differences impact upon traditional concerns, modes of thought, institutions, practices or forms of association? Did “positionality,” one’s physical location, affect the publics found there? Were the roles of science and the arts the same in European publics at home and abroad? And, more generally, how was the creation and evolution of publics informed by European discoveries in Africa, Asia, America, and elsewhere in the early modern period?