Call for Papers: Universal Reformation: Intellectual Networks in Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670

Dates: 21-23 September 2010
Venue: St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
Organisers: Howard Hotson (Oxford), Vladimír Urbánek (Prague), James Brown (Oxford), Miranda Lewis (Oxford)
CFP Deadline: 31 December 2009

For decades before the Thirty Years War, Protestant communities in Poland-Lithuania, the Czech lands, and Hungary-Transylvania, lacking fully functional local universities responsive to their needs, sent their sons westward to study in Germany’s numerous universities and academies. The resulting contact and reciprocal influence knit the intellectual histories of these regions together in inextricable ways. The three decades of war which followed disrupted many of these institutions and replaced these patterns of academic travel with fresh waves of intellectual refugees fleeing in all directions: not only to Transylvania, western Poland, and Polish Prussia, but also to Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and the British Isles. At the same time, the trauma of displacement transformed long-nurtured aspirations toward ecclesiastical reunification, political pacification, pedagogical improvement, and philosophical reform into an all-embracing programme of universal reformation. This international conference invites both emerging and established scholars to contribute their perspectives on this huge system and the unfamiliar intellectual traditions exchanged within it. For further details, see the conference webpage.

The conference is organised under the auspices of the Project ‘Cultures of Knowledge: An International Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic Letters’, based in the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.