Wednesday, 3 April 2013

Opening Reception

5:30–7:30 p.m.

Location: San Diego Museum of Art and Timken Museum, Balboa Park

Thursday, 4 April 2013

Tour: San Diego Bay Walk along Spanish Landing Park to San Salvador Build-Site (Sold Out)

12:00–2:00 p.m.

This tour is sold out.

Lunch Reception for CASVA

12:30–1:30 p.m.

Sponsor: CASVA, National Gallery

Location: Sheraton Bay Tower, Lobby Level, Fairbanks D

Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture

5:30–7:00 p.m.

Sponsor: Erasmus of Rotterdam Society

Organizer: Eric Macphail, Indiana University

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Lobby Level, Harbor Island 1

Brian Cummings, University of York

Erasmus and the Invention of Literature

It was once axiomatic that Erasmian humanism had an inaugural place in literary studies. "If you follow my advice," Erasmus says at the opening of De pueris institutiendis, "you will see to it that your infant makes a first acquaintance with a liberal education immediately." This is an education in bonae litterae and in litterae humaniores. In recent years the idea of a liberal education has taken a battering. The study of Erasmus’s literary writings has happily devolved into other areas: into philology, grammar, and rhetoric. But does Erasmus have a concept of "literature" as such? And is it still worthy of debate? I will reexamine the idea of literature in Erasmus, both as a theory of imitation and as a medium of subjectivity, in order to suggest that his concepts are different from the way that we used to understand them and still have the capacity to surprise.

Italian Art Society Reception

5:30–7:00 p.m.

Location: San Diego Sheraton Hotel and Marina, lobby level. Please come to the entrance of the Harbor’s Edge Restaurant. Event will be in a reserved space adjacent to the Tapatini Bar. More details.

If you plan to attend, please respond to Sheryl Reiss vicepresident@italianartsociety.org and/or Anne Leader webmaster@italianartsociety.org by April 1, 2013.

Reception in Honor of Carlo Pedretti

6:00–7:30 p.m.

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Marina 6

By invitation, RSVP to Mike Koligman at mkoligman@sbcglobal.net

Friday, 5 April 2013

Tour: San Diego Bay Walk along Spanish Landing Park to San Salvador Build-Site (Sold Out)

12:00–2:00 p.m.

This tour is sold out.

Plenary Session: Current Trends in Migration and Cultural Change in the Early Modern World

5:30–7:00 p.m.

Sponsor: The Renaissance Society of America

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Lobby Level, Grande Ballroom

Organizer and Chair: Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto

Ida Altman, University of Florida

Migration and Mobility in the Early Modern Spanish World

As a doctoral student I set out to examine the connections between local society in Spain and emigration to Spanish America. I found that early modern Spaniards were well equipped in terms of their historical experience, family and kinship structures, and patterns of mobility linked to the search for economic opportunity to move into the newly acquired territories of the expanding empire. As they did so they retained many of their traditions and roots in particular localities. Migration and mobility proved to be central to the formation of new societies in Spanish America. The movements of all groups — Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans — were closely interconnected. Mobility and migration — often coerced or occurring under duress in the case of Indians and Africans — to a great extent defined the ordering of and contests over geographic space, and were fundamental to the configuration of early modern Spanish American societies and interethnic relations.

David B. Ruderman, University of Pennsylvania

Jews on the Move: Mobility, Migration, and the Shaping of Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe

Mass migrations initiated by governments as well as voluntary migrations of individuals were significant factors in shaping Jewish culture and society from the end of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. I will assess briefly their impact on the creation of new Jewish communal structures; on the social mixing of Jews with non-Jews, both Christian and Muslim; and on the intense and regularized encounters between Jews of disparate backgrounds and traditions who were obliged to live with each other in new social settings. I will also offer some suggestions on the relationship between mobility and cultural production. How was Jewish culture — both that of intellectuals and the less educated — transformed by the constant movement characteristic of this period? Finally, I will offer some tentative reflections on how the Jewish experience of mobility and migration was different or the same compared with similar groups in the Christian and Muslim worlds.

Steve Hindle, The Huntington Library

Movers and Stayers: Migration and Social Relations in Town and Countryside, ca. 1500–1700

The early modern period is conventionally understood to be one of the first great ages of European urbanization, in which the demographic growth of towns and cities fundamentally reshaped the social and economic contours of both rural and urban landscapes. Although migration was a key motor of this process, it will be argued that the spatial mobility of early modern populations must be understood in terms not only of the movement from the rural to the urban, but also between rural spaces, in which different patterns of settlement and association made possible new forms of economic activity and of social interaction. By reconceptualizing geographical mobility more broadly in terms of the relationship between "migrant-remitting” and "migrant-receiving” environments, population turnover can be understood not only as a contribution to the increasing significance of the "urban variable,” but also as a factor in the penetration of industry into the European countryside.

Society of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome Reception

6:00–8:00 p.m.

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Lobby Level, Marina 6

RSVP required

Reception in Honor of Janet Cox-Rearick

6:00–7:30 p.m.

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Lobby Level, Executive Center 1

By invitation

Reception Honoring the Career of Howard Mayer Brown

6:30–8:00 p.m.

Location: Sheraton Bay Tower, Lobby Level, Fairbanks A

By invitation

Reception in Celebration of Patricia Fortini Brown

7:00–9:00 p.m.

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Executive Center 3A

Saturday, 6 April 2013

Tour: San Diego Bay Walk along Spanish Landing Park to San Salvador Build-Site(Sold Out)

12:00–2:00 p.m.

The Maritime Museum of San Diego is building a full-sized, fully functional, and historically accurate replica of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s flagship, San Salvador, which entered San Diego Bay on 28 September 1542. A one-mile walk of 20–30 minutes from the back gate of the Sheraton Hotel north along San Diego Bay through Spanish Landing Park will arrive at the San Salvador build-site, where a box lunch awaits and a guided tour of the Spanish galleon under construction will be led by museum staff. In addition to the 260,000-ton ship under construction, the site includes historical exhibits on sixteenth-century shipbuilding tools, ropes, sails, sailing ships, and an exhibit of the local Kumeyaay Indians’ habitat at the time of contact in 1542.

This tour is sold out.

Annual Membership Meeting

5:30–6:30 p.m.

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Lobby Level, Grande Ballroom

All RSA members are invited

Awards Ceremony

6:30–7:00 p.m.

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Lobby Level, Grande Ballroom

Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award
Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize
Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Prize for Best Book in Renaissance Venetian Studies
William Nelson Prize

Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture

7:00–8:00 p.m.

Sponsor: Renaissance Society of America

Location: Sheraton Marina Tower, Lobby Level, Grande Ballroom

John M. Najemy,Cornell University

Machiavelli and History

History is the foundation of Machiavelli’s thought. He theorized contemporary dilemmas through the lens of history and approached history in order to illuminate the etiology of modern ills. Yet history itself was an unsettled concept for him. Inheriting, but never fully sharing, Renaissance ideas about the superiority and emulation of antiquity, Machiavelli worried about the fragmentary nature of historical knowledge and the elusiveness of historical truth. Moreover, his writings contain many and often conflicting theories of history, among them cyclical recurrence, the constancy of human passions, the influences of the heavens, the dominance of fortune, laws of nature, and the succession of empires. In asking why Machiavelli entertained such a variety of diverse interpretations of history, I suggest that they function in his texts as traces of seductive and consoling fictions that he (and others) sometimes found appealing when facing Italy’s woes and the seeming unintelligibility and irrationality of history.

Closing Reception

8:00–10:00 p.m.

Sponsor: The Renaissance Society of America

Location: Sheraton Pavilion