Concluding six years of work, the research group FOR 2305 “Discursivisations of the New. Tradition and Novation in Medieval and Early Modern Texts and Images” (funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG) has held its final conference at Freie Universität from June 20-22, 2022.

We investigate the complex relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’, seeking to conceptualise this relationship not in terms of strictly linear diachronicity, but rather as the result of intricate temporal entanglements. ‘Discursivisations of the New’ as suggested in the group’s name are understood as processual categories that are meant to transcend static old-vs.-new dichotomies and to overcome simplistic teleologies of progress. Comprised of works dating from the 12th to the 18th centuries, the corpus examined covers a rich variety of European literatures, and includes both canonical and non-canonical texts and images.

Our eight subprojects share the common goal of developing analytical categories for the conceptualisation and discursivisation of the new. We aim to achieve a redefinition of cultural dynamics that goes beyond the theoretical opposition of rupture and continuity. We take our departure from the observation that what is ‘new’ in epistemological, social or cultural terms is frequently coupled, in complex processes, with existing textual and generic structures.

All subprojects have placed emphasis on aspects that have proved particularly relevant to describing various historical entanglements of ‘the old’ and ‘the new’. These include: the role of genre-specific markers in literary and visual arts (e.g. as regards the ‘mixing’, ‘hybridization’, or ‘amalgamation’ of certain genres as they developed over time); the concept of emergence and its usefulness in explaining phenomena of aesthetic innovation or novelty; and the role of implicit or explicit temporal markers which often take on programmatic or meta-poetic valency, not least because such markers are often associated with the claim that they keep artifacts suspended between ‘old’ and ‘new’, or that they create or contribute to keeping in place what is seen as ‘new’ or ‘old’. 

Featuring an international panel of guests from various disciplines, our closing conference “Von Neuem / The New: All over again” was held in German and in English. The workshop addressed some of the central questions that we have been discussing since 2016. Our guests approached the topic from the perspective of their own areas of interest.

Agenda

Monday, June 20th

18:00	Arrival of the participants
18:30	Bernhard Huss (Berlin): Opening address
18:45	Postgraduate staff of FOR 2305: Introduction to the subject, insight into the project activities

Tuesday, June 21st

Session 1
9:00	Nicholas Cronk (Oxford): Between Old and New: Voltaire and the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes
9:30	Gisela Schlüter (Erlangen): Modernität als Zeitgenossenschaft
Session 2
11:00	Annette Gerok-Reiter (Tübingen): Von Neuem: Sprechen über das Licht. Dynamiken zwischen ‘alt’ und ‘neu’ im Fließenden Licht Mechthilds von Magdeburg
11:30	Andreas Haug (Würzburg): /nova carminum compositio/ – Historische versus historiographische Diskurse über das Neue in der vorneuzeitlichen Musikgeschichte
Session 3
14:00	Emily Thornbury (New Haven): The Tremulous Scribe, Classicist: Imagining Alternative Modernities in Thirteenth-Century Worcester
14:30	Andrew Lynch (Perth): ‘Stuff happens’: Time and the Fortunes of War in Lydgate’s Troy Book I and II
Session 4
16:00	Roger Friedlein (Bochum): Der Atlantismythos in der frühen spanischen und portugiesischen Neuweltchronistik
Session 5
17:00	Anna Pawlak (Tübingen): Ästhetische Extravaganz im Dienst kollektiver Distinktion. Frans Floris’ Sturz der gefallenen Engel

Wednesday, June 22nd

Session 6
08:30	Florian Mehltretter (München): La coruttela del secolo: Normensuspension und Normenablösung in Paratexten des Seicento
09:00	Christina Schaefer (Kiel): Von Sonnen, Wolken und Bienen im Haus: Stimme und Rolle der Frau in italienischen und französischen Ökonomiken der Renaissance
Session 7
10:30	Kai Bremer (Osnabrück): Jesum jetzund jubiliret: Deutsche Neujahrslyrik im 17. Jahrhundert
11:00	Yasmin Haskell (Perth): The Ark of Orpheus: Towards a New-Old Poetics of Nature
Session 8
11:30	Sina Rauschenbach (Potsdam): Aktualisierung und Nicht-Aktualisierung: Die Beschreibungen Englands und Irlands in den Elzevierschen Republiken
12:30	Closing plenary session and farewell