“Muddling East and West: Costume and Identification in the Early Modern Borderlands of Habsburg and Ottoman Europe“
Wednesday, February 22, 2017 – 5:30pm Budapest, Central European University
The multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, bureaucratic organisms referred to as the “German” and “Turkish” Empires and the massive militaries they supported were conglomerates: patchworks with permeable borders into which entrepreneuring men from the borderlands could always migrate and find exciting and rewarding positions to take up their swords and shields. Local troops, carrying their material culture with them as they moved, frequently joined either imperial army to create relentless and highly variegated war machines. This paper explores the relationship between dress and dynastic affiliation on the military borderland between Habsburg and Ottoman Europe. Using extant objects alongside verbal portraits and visual attempts to pinpoint identities in costume books, it shows how locals of the borderland lived in a world where practices of clothing, draping, and arming the body were just as fluid and permeable as the border itself. While diplomats and travelers were cautious to identify and follow formal dress protocol, locals continued their own mixed practices. We see groups commissioning wearable arts across the border, exchanging textile gifts, and forging multiple self-images in conversation with their surroundings. The question of how to tell the subjects of the Sultan apart from the subjects of the Holy Roman Emperor persists today in cataloguing museum collections of material culture. This muddling of costume and identity is essential to grasping how the two rival empires defy models of cultural exchange and the very categorizations of East and West.
Robyn D. Radway is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. She specializes in imperial entanglements in politics, culture, society, and the arts in early modern Central and Eastern Europe. Trained as both a historian and art historian, she has worked in a number of international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
At Close Quarters: Experiencing the Domestic, 1400-1600
This interdisciplinary conference examines late medieval and early modern experiences ‘at close quarters’. Building on recent research into the architecture and objects that shaped the pre-modern household, we examine the nooks and crannies, challenges and constructions of the domestic environment, and its interaction with art, literature and thought.
Register here.
Friday, 3rd March. York. Bowland Auditorum, Berrick Saul Building.
Registration 9.00-9.20
Welcome 9.20
Conference Keynote 9.30-10.30
Tara Hamling (University of Birmingham) and Catherine Richardson (University of Kent) A Day at Home in Early Modern England: The Materiality of Domestic Life.
Opening: Society for the Study of the Church Interior

From an art-historical perspective, the vast majority of artworks produced in the medieval and Renaissance periods was intended for the many chapels, altars and screens in the church interior.Yet, despite the obvious importance of these sites, the spatial dispositions of church interiors – and how they evolved over time – are still little-understood. Scholars studying the church interior seek to reconstruct the meaning, functions and visual appeal of these sacred spaces. The Society for the Study of the Church Interior seeks to promote this holistic and interdisciplinary approach to researching historic church buildings.
We are a group of scholars who are interested in the material culture, spatial dynamics and multifarious functions of the church interior in the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods. We are mainly based in the US, Germany, Italy and the UK, but welcome members from around the world.
We are also in the process of establishing an online, collaborative database to collect data on the church interior. Initially concentrating on Italy, where the impact of the Counter Reformation was particularly strong, the database will reveal the broad patterns and chronologies which are currently beyond the grasp of the individual researcher. Members of the Society who wish to contribute to the database will receive a login to access it: please email Joanne or Michael if you are interested.
Sign up for the mailing list here.
IV. FORUM KUNST DES MITTELALTERS / FORUM MEDIEVAL ART
360° – Places, Boundaries, Global Perspectives
BERLIN and BRANDENBURG
20.-23 September 2017
The 4th Forum Medieval Art will focus on research at the geographical and methodological boundaries of classical medieval studies. The various venues in Berlin and Brandenburg with their medieval heritage and their rich collections of Byzantine and Middle Eastern will be taken as a starting point. Accordingly, the conference will highlight the interaction of Central European medieval art and artistic production with other regions ranging from Eastern Europe, Byzantium, the Middle East, the Caucasus and the Mediterranean to the British Isles and the Baltic region. Thus research areas such as Byzantine Studies or Islamic Art History will be brought into the focus and consciousness of medieval studies, particularly in the context of the endangered artistic and architectural monuments of the Middle East. Especially welcome are topics discussing phenomena such as migration, media transformation and changing cultural paradigms. By asking for culturally formative regions at the borders of “Europe” and transcultural contact zones, definitions of the Middle Ages can be put up for debate. As a counterpart to this panorama, research about the region of Brandenburg and Berlin will also be presented. This includes subjects of museum studies and the history of art of and in Berlin, where the development of areas of cultural exchange has a long tradition.
Hosted by: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft e.V. www.dvfk-berlin.de
Organization:
Christian Freigang & Antje Fehrmann (Freie Universität Berlin),
Kai Kappel & Tina Zürn (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) mit
with other partners in Berlin & Brandenburg