CFP: Dynasty and Dynasticism, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 16 – 18 March, 2016)

Abstract submissions are invited for a major international conference on “Dynasty and Dynasticism, 1400-1700” in Europe and beyond.
Somerville College, University of Oxford
March 16th -18th 2016
with:
Professor János Bak (Central European University)
Professor Craig Clunas (Oxford)
Professor Jeroen Duindam (Leiden)
Professor Paula Sutter Fichtner (CUNY /Brooklyn College)
Professor John Morrill (Cambridge)
 
Boyd Tonkin has written that credence in the power of dynastic blood is the ‘residue of a magical world view’, yet in this period dynasty co-existed with new kinds of national and imperial state. Cliff Davies has questioned whether a dynasty such as the Tudors existed at all in the minds of contemporaries, suggesting they might have been ‘invented’ retrospectively. This conference aims to ask afresh what royal dynasty was in the late medieval and early modern periods: what beliefs underpinned it, whence its power and mystique derived, and who or what ruling dynasties believed themselves to be. In recent decades, the ‘new political history’ has reanimated the study of monarchy, courts, parliaments and royal image-making, using a range of interdisciplinary techniques, in the process enriching our grasp of political culture in the late medieval and early modern periods. This conference now seeks to put dynasty under the spotlight, as a category of analysis in its own right, and as a major organising political principle in the pre-modern world. The questions which the conference wishes to address include: How was the identity of a dynasty constructed and expressed? Did a heightened dynastic consciousness emerge in Europe or elsewhere in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries?
For more information: http://media.wix.com/ugd/1869ac_a69f8059646540debfd7a19c9f9b9eeb.pdf