Architectural barriers such as walls and military defenses are never just innocent markers in the built environment, but instruments of socio-spatial exclusion and inclusion whose significance becomes especially pronounced in conditions of crisis or emergency. While scholarship on such structures in the early modern period has largely fallen within the purview of architectural and military history, it may be greatly enriched by insights from social and cultural history, and even the history of science and medicine. From this broad interdisciplinary perspective, then, we invite papers that consider two such categories of architectural boundaries situated physically or metaphorically at the limits of Renaissance civic life.
For the first session, “Renaissance barriers I: between sickness and health,” we seek papers that tease out the spatial politics of early modern medical practices. How did Renaissance understandings of contagion or the effects of the natural environment on health affect the division of spaces in medical wards? How were the diverse charitable and salutary functions of hospitals physically organized along the lines of class or gender? How did hospital architecture negotiate between its functions as institutional symbols of religious or civic pride, and as spaces of bodily abjection? And how did public authorities physically contain diseased populations at the urban scale, as well as regulate entry into and exit from the city during periods of plague?
In the second session, “Renaissance barriers II: city walls,” we extend the theme to the subject of urban fortifications. To what extent did fortifications serve to control the populace inside the walls, and to what extent did they guard against external intrusion? How did the physical thickness of early modern defensive systems, which were far more substantial than two-dimensional surfaces, change their effectiveness as spatial or conceptual barriers? In addition to serving military functions, how did these boundaries negotiate the movement of urban and rural populations? How did city walls reflect period conceptions of urban identity and citizenship, whether as codified in law, or as represented in the visual arts?
Please send a paper title, a 150 word abstract, and a brief CV (300 words max.) for consideration by MAY 29, 2015 to Maggie Bell ([email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>); Joel Penning ([email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>); and Morgan Ng ([email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>)