Three-day conference on ‘Gender, Power and Materiality in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800’ organised by the AHRC-funded Research network @genderpolsmat

1. Call for Papers
Three-day conference on ‘Gender, Power and Materiality in Early
Modern Europe, 1500-1800’
Plymouth University, 7-9 April 2016
Speakers include:
Tara Hamling (University of Birmingham)
Joanna Norman (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
This three-day conference on the theme of ‘Gender, Power and Materiality in Early Modern Europe, 1500-
1800’ is part of a two-year AHRC-funded international research network run by Professor James Daybell
(Plymouth University), Professor Svante Norrhem (Lund University), Dr Nadine Akkerman (Leiden
University) and Professors Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent (University of Western Australia).
We are looking for papers that explore the relationships between gender, power and ‘materiality’ – a term
that is broader than ‘material culture’, in that it opens up spatial sites and material texts – defined both in
terms of objects or the physical features of texts and the social and cultural practices, and spaces in which
they were produced, consumed, exchanged and displayed. Papers should focus on different forms of power
(political, social, economic and cultural) across the early modern period in Europe, and encompasses formal
and informal power. In viewing power and materiality through the lens of gender, the organisers encourage
transdisciplinary approaches and aim to bring into dialogue historians, art and architectural historians,
literary critics, material culture specialists, anthropologists, archaeologists, curators, archivists and
conservators.

2. In recent years, scholars across Europe from a range of disciplines have sought to understand the gendered
structures of politics in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Much has been done to
reconstruct men’s and women’s roles, to rethink categories and definitions of what constituted ‘power’,
‘politics’ and ‘agency’ throughout this period, integrating the personal and informal, with the public and
formal, and analysing gender as a dynamic at the state, family, and wider society level. Parallel to this work,
the last decade or so has witnessed the ‘material turn’ in history, borrowing approaches from the vast fields
of material culture, anthropology and archaeology which lend a sophisticated theoretical and methodological
understanding of the ways in which objects worked. Scholars have studied the relationship between power
and materiality and materiality and gender, but less well studied is the degree to which power and
materiality were gendered in the early modern period. Among early modern historians, material studies have
looked at gendered patterns of production, consumption and taste or households and related objects as sites
of material meaning and display. For literary critics, work on materiality and gender has tended to focus on
the body, although there is an increasing amount of work on the materiality of women’s texts broadly
defined to encompass ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ texts, canonical and non-traditional forms, the latter
encompassing for example embroidery and needlework. For women’s studies, this turning away from author
to the object leads to a range of interesting questions that remain unanswered about material objects as
expressions of gendered power (and gendered lack of power), which are produced, consumed, owned,
collected and archived. Finally, interdisciplinary work on gifts and gift-giving has studied the exchange of
material objects and texts as a way of understanding social and political relationships, but scholars have far
to go to uncover the gendered dynamics of gift-exchange.
Influenced by the ‘material turn’, the network considers objects as social agents, analysing the gendered
power structures (and non-power) embedded within physical artefacts and the social practices of production,
consumption and exchange, especially in relation to early modern practices and modern theories of gift-
giving. It questions how far materiality made gender positions stable and unstable; and studies objects to
reconstruct new networks and gendered forms of power created around object exchange and production.
Secondly, it considers archives as a form of gendered power, and spaces (e.g. noble households, courts,
libraries and churches) in which material objects were located, and their connection with the politics of
memory, gift-giving and display. Potential topics might include (but are by no means limited to):
 methodologies and meanings of gender, power and materiality in early modern Europe,
 objects and theorizing gendered power
 gender and the politics of early modern archives and architectural spaces
 diplomacy and the politics of gift-exchange
 (female) patrons (of artists, designers and workshops), consumers (shoppers and commissioners)
and gift-givers
 gendered furniture
 writing technologies and the materials of secrecy and power
 gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions
 gender and disguise
 presentation and display
 collecting and connoisseurship
 questions of materiality in relation to curating, preservation and archiving
The conference will employ a range of formats, including two keynote lectures, postgraduate/early
career/next generation training seminars and practitioner-led workshops, round-table discussions, and panel
sessions. Papers from postgraduate and early career scholars are welcome and reduced conference rates are
available. Please send abstracts of papers to Professor James Daybell (james.daybell@plymouth.ac.uk) or to
Professor Svante Norrhem (svante.norrhem@hist.lu.se) by 31 December 2015.