CfP: Kunsttexte 2025 (No.2), special issue: Epidemics and Cultural Rebirth in Early Modern Worlds
Kunsttexte – Journal für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte is among the oldest and most established academic open access journals from the German-speaking countries. The journal welcomes proposals from all fields, including art history, history, visual studies, anthropology, architectural history and literature studies.
For the special issue „Epidemics and Cultural Rebirth in Early Modern Worlds“, the journal accepts submissions that investigate epidemics and their repercussions from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century. Epidemics – viewed as transformative events – are on the frontier between nature and culture, and offer unique epistemological opportunities to understand cultural processes, traditions and vulnerabilities. In the Early Modern era, the ubiquitous search for meaning in the aftermath of such events relied heavily on the visual and literary arts. Expanding the concepts, ideas, images and objects of cultural rebirth with a particular focus on the transformative impacts of epidemic outbreaks, this special issue brings together different case studies to understand how epidemics forced societal and cultural change as communities collectively tried to overcome tragedy.
Possible areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to:
- Long- and short-term consequences of disease outbreaks on the functioning of Early Modern societies, and their respective visual cultures
- Artistic and scientific achievements that were catalyzed by the specific nature and dynamics of health crises
- Early Modern literary sources, genres and texts that depict and chronicle epidemic outbreaks
- Circulations of Early Modern ideas, images and objects along the lines of cultural rebirth and social resilience
- Cross-cultural comparisons of different regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, to understand diverse cultural responses during and in the aftermath of epidemic outbreaks
Deadline for proposals, including an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short CV: 21.07.2024
Deadline for submission of accepted proposals (max. 8000 words): 31.12.2024
Proposals should be sent in either English, German, Italian, or French to: renaissance@kunsttexte.de
Editors:
- Angela Dressen (Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies)
- Susanne Gramatzki (University of Tübingen)
- Nils Weber (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut)
Contact Information: Nils Weber