John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives, eds
“… so that the learned may savor the profundity of the allegory while the humble may profit from the lightness of the story” (de modo praedicandi)
Early modern audiences were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, performances, rituals, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which various modes of communication were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness.
This volume seeks papers that investigate the ways in which authors, artists, preachers, theologians, trade guilds, confraternities, and civic or court officials took account of, encoded, and imagined pluriform audiences in their works. Topics might consider, but are not limited to, questions such as:
How did location, time of year, and other local circumstances nuance reception?
How did networks between authors, audience members, performers, and/or artists intersect and what effects did those intersections (or even collisions) have?
What sorts of strategies were employed to take into account multiple ‘levels’ of audience? How well did such strategies work? What were the consequences—possible or actual—when they failed?
Chapter proposals should be no more than 200–250 words; final papers should be between 7,000–10,000 words (inclusive of notes). We welcome all submissions but are especially seeking contributions about music, sermons, and public ritual.
Please email a short bio and proposal to: jdecker@pratt.edu. Submissions open until 30 July 2019. Accepted authors will be notified by 30 August 2019. Fully completed chapters will be due by January 2020. We are currently seeking a publisher for this volume.
Key Words: social history, art history, cultural history, literary history, musicology, performance studies, theatre studies, neo-Latin studies, sermon studies, urbanism, urban spaces, gender, collaboration, identity, imagination, invention, religious communities, representation, visual arts, visual communication, material culture, visual culture
Source: RSA