(Trans)Missions: Monasteries As Sites of Cultural Transfers

A workshop organized by the Center for Ibero-American Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (SIAS FF UK), CEFRES and the Institute of Art History of Czech Academy of Sciences (ÚDU AV ČR). The collaboration is realized within the Research project “Cataloging and study of the translations of Spanish and Ibero-American Dominicans”.

Venue: Špork Palace, Hybernská 3, Prague 1, room nr. 303
Scientific organizers: Monika Brenišínová (SIAS FF UK), Katalin Pataki (CEFRES) and Lenka Panušková (IAH CAS)
Language: English

Read more information about the workshop here

Read the call for papers here

Read the abstracts of the workshop here

Program

25 September, 2017 Monday

9.30–10.00            Registration
10.00–10.40         Opening Ceremony and introduction (organisers)

  • Markéta Křížová (Centre for Ibero-American Studies, Charles University)
  • Clara Royer (French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences)
  • Tomáš Winter (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences)

10.40–12.10
Interpretation and Context
Chair: Veronika Čapská (Department of General Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University)

  • Martin Lešák, Monasteries on the Horizon: The Sacral Landscape Through the Senses of Medieval Pilgrims
  • Jana Králová, The Monastery Translation From the Contemporary Perspective
  • Jan Tesárek and Barbora Spálová, Other time: Construction of Temporality in Benedictine Monasteries

12.10–14.00 Lunchbreak

14.00–15.00
Monastic Networks: Technology and Society
Chair: Jan Zdichynec (Department of the Czech History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University)

  • Barnabás Szekér, Whose Instructions? – Educational Orders, Administration, and Rules of Higher Schools in the 18th Century Kingdom of Hungary
  • Katalin Pataki, The Monasteries as Mediators of Medical Knowledge – Camaldolese Pharmacies of the Hungarian Kingdom and Austria

15.00–15.30 Coffee break

15.30–17.00
Devotion and Vocation: The Transition of Ideas
Chair: Markéta Křížová (Centre for Ibero-American Studies, Charles University)

  • Antonio Bueno, To whom may read this. The Prologue of Linguistic Works and Translations of the Dominicans as the Main Ideas for Reflection on Translation Theory
  • Monika Brenišínová, Mexican Monasteries and Processions. The transmission of ideas, space and time
  • Marcin F. Rdzak, Books of Enrollment to the Fraternity of the Scapular (1911-1946) from the Convent of Carmelite Fathers in Lwow. The Transition of Devotional Patterns

17.00–17.30 Coffee break

17.30
Keynote Lecture
József Laszlovszky (Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University)
Transfer, Translation and Transmission of Knowledge in Monastic Networks — Research Directions and Approaches in the Study of Medieval and Early Modern Patterns

26 September, 2017 Tuesday

9.00–10.00
Arts and Architecture: Transferring the Forms
Chair: Lenka Panušková (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences)

  • Pavel Štěpánek, El Escorial jako duchovní model českých a
    moravských klášterů ve světle současné interpretace
    (Hradisko, Kuks, Plasy) [El Escorial as Spiritual Model of Czech and Moravian Monasteries in the Light of the Contemporary Interpretation (Hradisko, Kuks, Plasy)]
  • Jana Povolná, Sázava monastery: St Procop, Scriptorium and the Church

10.00–10.30 Coffee break

10.30–12.00
Writing Monastery
Chair: Kateřina Bobková (Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences)

  • Renata Modráková, Benedictine St. George’s Cloister at the Prague Castle as a Crossroad of Medieval Cultural Trend and Ideas
  • Jan Kremer: Religious Identity and Order Discipline – Early Thirteenth-Century Bohemian Premonstratensians
  • Kristian Bertović, Glagolitic monks—Monastic Continuity and Glagolitic Script in the Medieval Croatia and the Istrian Peninsula

12.00–13.00 Lunchbreak

13.00–14.30
Presentations of ongoing projects

  • Klášterní stezky (project of the Department of History and History Didactics, Faculty of Education, Charles University); http://www.klasterni-stezky.cz/
  • Visions of Community (VISCOM, University of Vienna); https://viscom.ac.at/home/
  • Szerzetesség a kora újkori Magyarországon – Religious Orders of Early Modern Hungary http://szerzetes.hypotheses.org/
  • Sources, Forms, and Functions of the Monastic Historiography
    in Early Modern Ages in the Czech Lands

Closing remarks
Lenka Panušková (IAH CAS), Katalin Pataki (CEFRES), Monika Brenišínová (SIAS FF UK)

15.30
The Emmaus Monastery
Guided tour by Kateřina Kubínová

The Popularization of Entertainment from the Enlightenment to Modernism: From West to East?

An international conference organized by EUR’ORBEM and CEFRES

Where: Maison de la Recherche – 28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris.

See the program.

See the summaries.

This international conference aims at shedding light on the circulation of “classical” forms of the entertainment culture prevailing since the Renaissance. It encompasses literary and artistic genres (mock epic, parody, satire, epigram, and so forth; cartoons, drawings, and so forth), media (periodicals, satirical prints, leaflets, books, theatre, cabaret, photography, cinema), and modalities (canonized cultures, fortuitous cultures, fashion phenomena and so forth). Often related to antic sources and updated by Western European cultures (Italian, Spanish, English or French), this culture was usually spread in East Central Europe through the German culture, and turned into homegrown cultural patterns. To what extent were these forms copied, readjusted, travestied and mocked?

We would like to assess this passage: does it pertain to reception in line with the Constance school’s reader-response theory, in which, according to Ingarden and Iser, the reader takes part in creating the object (s)he appropriates? Does it relate to cultural transfers which, according to Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, are not only supported by the circulation of cultural items, but also by cultural practices and a network of institutions and sociabilities (schools and universities, reading circles and libraries, associations)? Or should we rather speak in terms of acculturation of dominant cultures’ patterns, in line with postcolonial studies applied to the reappraisal of the trans-European cultural field?

Scholars can be committed to one of these approaches or seek to accommodate them. In any case, they are invited to apprehend the networks and patterns of circulations through which such forms were spread, and to single out the culture they got confronted with: which was it? Was it a “local”, a “popular” culture intended to remain as a “substratum” as it met with these new forms? Did elite cultures seek legitimacy as they claimed a classical, and even more so an antic legacy, may that have been to stand out from the Western canon? How could such forms spring from the reception or integration of disparate sources? Take the case of Sterne-like (or Diderot-like) self-referential narratives that turn the narrator’s irony into a key feature of the text: are they combined with figures, topics, and rhetorical devices stemming from Eastern and Central European canon, folklore and oral culture? What are the paths through which these patterns were spread? (One can think about the so-called “Russian model”, which became quite influent in return in the second half of the 19th century.)

This international conference is designed to be the first step of a research program on “Cultures of Entertainment: Circulation of Patterns and Practices. Another History of Europe from West to East, from the Enlightenment to the World Wars.”

This program aims at assessing the part played by entertainment within European modern cultures. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, the program is based on the exploration of the semantic scope of the French concept of divertissement: a scope comprised between a theological and metaphysical meaning and a more frivolous one. In English though, for lack of a better word, two notions are relevant to better explain the parameters of our inquiry: diversion, as in a worldly standpoint against the Heavens, and entertainment, with its idle connotations and its variety of pleasures. Between these two poles a whole range of synonyms can be embraced (distraction, subversion, leisure, idleness), along with various social strategies, practices and institutions. To what extent do these cultures of divertissement show the other side of European history, and of the great narratives that were made of it?

Our hunch is that such cultures of entertainment have acquainted societies with the transgressing of norms and conventions. Such transgression would have applied to taboo images that were representative of order (as within the institutions of power and control). We believe they initiated social practices, which in turn generated alternative sociabilities. Transgression can oscillate between various figures–irony, mockery, blasphemy–and is a trial for a given society: both a challenge and a touchstone for the contemporaries.

We hope this first conference may give rise to an ambitious research program examining such cultural transfers in its whole European scale. Participants of the conference would be asked to gather within a European research team designed to answer a call for projects (such as ANR or H2020).

Contacts : Xavier Galmiche – Xavier.Galmiche@paris-sorbonne.fr; Clara Royer – clararoyer@cefres.cz.