Citizens within Subjects:
Political Rights and Participation in Historical and Contemporary Perspective
2003 - 2004
II. THE SEMINAR SERIES
3. Format
The intellectual agenda outlined above will be addressed by a seminar series consisting of four complementary components: (i) a series of four one-day colloquia held on four Saturdays over the course of the academic year; (ii) a bi-weekly workshop on alternate Wednesdays, sustaining and enriching discussion less formally in the intervals between colloquia; (iii) a website devoted to the series, which will be used to distribute papers and maintain contact between participating scholars; and (iv) an edited book composed of the main papers of the seminar series.
3.i. The four colloquia will form the heart of the series. The colloquium format derives directly from the central aims of the series: namely, to confront students of the post-modern crisis of political participation with insights gained from a nuanced analysis of early-modern political cultures generated by bringing early modernists together in the richest possible mix of disciplines, methodologies, periods, and geographical areas. Each colloquium will consist of three formal sessions. The first two sessions will include two forty-minute research papers by early modernists, a fifteen-minute formal response by a discussant, and forty minutes of discussion from the floor. The third session will include a single paper by an eminent speaker, responding to the earlier papers from a contemporary perspective, followed by a round-table discussion including speakers, discussants, and audience. The following timetable is envisaged:3.ii. The fortnightly workshop, which will run throughout the year, will involve the local scholarly community and occasional guest speakers. The format will be flexible, and papers will range from polished presentations by eminent scholars to more exploratory pieces relating to theory and practice. Papers will be given from historical and contemporary perspectives, and themes will reflect the central questions addressed by the colloquia. 3.iii. Further communication outside the colloquia and workshop will be encouraged. Speakers will be invited to post papers on a website devoted to the series, and before meetings papers will be circulated to other speakers and discussants. 3.iv. The efficient production of an edited volume will also be incorporated into planning for the seminar.Welcome and introduction: 9am-9.20am
Session 1 (two papers, coffee, response and discussion): 9.30am-12.15pm
Session 2 (two papers, break, response and discussion): 1.15pm-3.45pm.
Tea: 3.45pm-4.15pm.
Session 3 (plenary and discussion): 4.15pm-6pm.
A wine reception and dinner, allowing further informal discussion.
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4. Schedule of Colloquia
COLLOQUIUM I: Participation and governance - 28-29 November 2003:Organised by Phil Withington (Cultural History)
| Friday, 28th November 2003, Linklater Rooms, King’s College | |
5.00 |
C. Duncan Rice, |
|
Patrick Collinson (Cambridge): |
6.30 |
Reception and buffet (all invited) |
Saturday, 29th November 2003, Marischal College, |
|
9.00 - 10.00 |
Coffee and Registration |
10.00 - 12.00 |
Session 1: Participation and community Edward Muir (Northwestern), Mark Goldie (Cambridge), Discussant: Julian Goodare (Edinburgh) |
12.00 - 1.00 |
Lunch |
1.00 - 3.00 |
Session 2: Arbitration and Representation Robert Frost (King’s London), Karen Kupperman (NYU), Discussant: Joanna Innes (Oxford) |
3.00 - 3.30 |
Tea |
3.30 - 5.00 |
Session 3: Responses General Sir Michael Rose John Holmwood (Sussex) Chair: Seth Kunin (Aberdeen) |
5.00 - 6.00 |
Drinks |
7.30 |
Dinner, The Square, Aberdeen |
The opening colloquium will explore the means through which participants were integrated and governments were legitimised in early modern, non-democratic political cultures. It will seek to reveal the different ways in which people other than the governing elite valued and were involved in governing institutions, practices, and processes other than those of modern democracy. These issues of participation and integration are particularly pressing given the on-going processes of negotiation and conflict in areas such as the Balkans and Northern Ireland, as well as the perceived alienation and voter apathy within many Western liberal democracies. Many of these issues - including the maintenance of communal identities within larger political structures and the integration of geographical, social and ideological ’margins’ - are also associated with the communitarian agenda and the so-called ’Third Way’ outlined by theorists such as Anthony Giddens, which will provide an important theoretical focus for this colloquium.
Scholarship on the early modern period has shown how resolving these issues was crucial for successful governance. By shifting the focus from ’high’ politics and monolithic models like ’monarchy’ and ’nation-state’, historians have revealed the sophisticated participatory dynamics of many early modern polities. These included city-states in Germany and Northern Italy; sovereign states, such as England, Scotland and the Scandinavian monarchies, reliant on devolved political participation; and federal polities such as the United Provinces.
The first session will address the issue of political participation and integration. One paper will focus on a key notion which structured the way in which diverse social groups contributed to the public life of communities in many areas of early modern Europe: the concept of ’commonwealth’. The second paper will describe the practice of devolved and autonomous local government as a widespread political reality organic to early modern Europe. As such, this session will show that binaries of periphery and centre, community and society, individual and state are a construction of the grand narratives of modernist historiography rather than a reflection of historical reality. The second session will consider the importance of law and the creation of legitimate fora for contestation in the promotion of active citizenship and the maintenance of political legitimacy, processes which again reflect the social depth and wide geographical distribution of political participation.
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COLLOQUIUM II: Discourse and the public sphere
Organised by Howard Hotson (CEMS/History)| Saturday, 17 January 2004, Marischal College, | |
9.30 - 10.00 |
Coffee and Registration |
10.00 - 12.00 |
Session 4: Discussion networks Harold Love (Monash), Ethan Shagan (Northwestern), Discussant: Adam Fox (Edinburgh) |
12.00 - 1.00 |
Lunch |
1.00 - 3.00 |
Session 5: Media Peter Burke (Cambridge), Discussant: Andrew Pettegree (St Andrews) |
3.00 - 3.30 |
Tea |
3.30 - 5.00 |
Session 6: Response Professor Seamus Deane (Notre Dame) Chair: Allan Macinnes (Aberdeen) |
5.00 - 6.00 |
Drinks |
7.30 |
Dinner, The Square, Aberdeen |
Liber theoricae necnon practicae Alsaharauij in prisco Arabum medicorum conuentu facile principis Alsaharavii (August[a]e Vindelicorum, Impensis Sigismundi Grim & Marci Vuirsung, 1519): Aberdeen pi f6107 Alb. This rare work is a comprehensive treatise of medicine by the famous Arabic surgeon in Cordoba, Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn ’Abbas al-Zahrawi (d. c. 1013). A gift to King’s College in 1643 from Sir Francis Gordon, British agent in Poland. See Wightman, Science and the Renaissance, vol. 2, no. 367; Drummond no. 2337.
The second colloquium will expand this analysis of political participation by looking at modes and media of the discourses sustaining political culture. In doing so, it will address the characteristic pessimism of current political debate regarding the form and content of contemporary public discourse and the ’tyranny’ of mass media. Theoretical focus will be provided by Jürgen Habermas’ influential narrative of structural transformation in the public sphere, which has given this disillusionment historiographical basis.
This colloquium will challenge Habermas’ characterisation of pre-modern public discourse as limited and elitist by examining the infrastructures, forms and contexts of public communication and discussion to show the diversity of public discourse, its social depth, and its centrality to political culture well before the eighteenth century. This colloquium will also reestablish the trans-national dimension of much public discussion in this period, ignored by Habermas, and suggest that his disenchantment with commercial media underestimates people’s ability to appropriate forms and is based on a romanticised conception of Enlightenment debate.
In order to interrogate the processes of cultural production, circulation, reception and appropriation as they relate to public discourse, the colloquium will divide into two sections. The first will look at two kinds of political discussion network which stretched far beyond restricted court circles. On the one hand, it will look at pan-European correspondence, ’republics of letters’ that stretched quite literally across the globe through which many sorts of educated men and women - including statesmen, scholars and merchants - formulated opinions and influenced policy across national divides. On the other, it will consider the efficient and well-informed structures of ’popular’ oral culture that disseminated, and commented upon, public affairs within specific locales (such as England and France). The second session will examine the different media through which news and opinion were exchanged and appropriated. A major impetus for the emergence of a commercialised print culture will be traced to the need to propagate ideology and secure popular support, as well the demands of a market economy. The embryonic mass media which resulted, it will be suggested, typically stimulated rather than stifled political discourse.
Top of PageCOLLOQUIUM III: Identity and allegiance - 13 March 2004
Organised by Cathy Shrank (English)
| Saturday, 13 March 2004, Marischal College, | |
9.30 - 10.00 |
Coffee |
10.00 - 12.15 |
Session 7: Social identities and legal roles Keith Wrightson (Yale), Lorna Hutson (Berkeley), Discussant: Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge) |
12.15 - 1.00 |
Lunch |
1.15 - 3.30 |
Session 8: Place and belief Richard Helgerson (University of California, Santa Barbara), Heinz Schilling (Humboldt, Berlin), Discussant: Roger Mason (St Andrews) |
3.30 - 4.00 |
Tea |
4.00 - 5.15 |
Session 9: Response Craig Calhoun (Oslo/NYU) Chair: Andrew Blaikie (Aberdeen) |
5.15 - 6.00 |
Drinks |
Having surveyed, in the first two colloquia, modes of participation and legitimation crucial to the functioning of early modern polities, the third colloquium will explore some of the forces cutting across and complicating the integration of individuals into larger political communities. The contemporary questions central to this problem are increasingly clear in the fluid, multicultural societies of the present, where the identity and allegiance of a citizen is, in effect, produced by constant negotiation between often conflicting loyalties, including locality, nationality, and trans-nationality; religious ideology and belief; social and economic status; and constructed notions of femininity and masculinity. Here too the early modern period - in which ties of religion, locality or social class often proved far stronger than allegiance to national rulers or regimes - provides parallels to contemporary experience more striking and instructive in some respects than those of the intervening period, in which centrifugal allegiances were more fully subjugated to the sovereign national state.
With chronological comparisons such as these in mind, this third colloquium will examine the self-perception of early modern citizens in terms of four crucial categories: class, gender, place and faith. In each case, speakers will be encouraged to consider how early modern citizens negotiated their overlapping and often conflicting loyalties by exploring social and cultural contexts in which citizenship was practised and experienced, and the relationship between political rights and obligations and other forms of social identity. Far from considering the societies of Europe as a single, undifferentiated entity, speakers will be urged to provide a nuanced and particularised account of those areas with which they are most familiar and to explore constrasts as well as comparisons with other localities, regions, countries, and supra-national communities.
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COLLOQUIUM IV: Rights, resistance and conflict - 15 May 2004
Chaired by Jessica Winston (Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow / ISU)
| Friday, 14th May 2004, Linklater Rooms, King’s College |
|
5.30 |
Geoffrey Parker (Ohio): The crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart Monarchies in the mid-seventeenth century: local problems or global problem? |
|
Reception and buffet to follow |
Saturday, 15th May 2004, Linklater Rooms, King’s College |
|
9.00 - 10.00 |
Coffee |
10.00 - 12.00 |
Session 10: Justifying Resistance Peter Lake (Princeton) Ann Hughes (Keele) Discussant: Markku Peltonen (Helsinki) |
12.00 - 1.00 |
Lunch |
1.00 - 3.00 |
Session 11: Community and conflict John Walter (Essex) Robert von Friedeburg (Rotterdam) Discussant: Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College, Dublin) |
3.00 - 3.30 |
Tea |
3.30 - 5.00 |
Session 12: Response Donald Horowitz (Duke) Geoffrey Parker (Ohio): chair |
|
Discussion |
5.30 - 7.00 |
Drink reception: Zeste |
Having surveyed a range of early modern means of political participation and legitimisation, the final colloquium will examine what happens when participation is curtailed, legitimacy undermined, and resistance to established government justified and enacted. Here too analogues between the early and post-modern periods are readily apparent. Recent years have seen a rise in anti-globilisation and anarchist movements, as well as unprecedented levels of organised violence within and against states. Even when such protests are not justified by the systematic ideological manifestos that are the legacy of the Enlightenment, they are clearly not without ideological content: they result from alienation from political processes, the breakdown of political legitimacy, the perceived disregard of indigenous rights and values, or religious fanaticism. Comprehending the nature of these beliefs and rights, and the manner in which violence and resistance can have the force of legitimacy for their perpetrators, is crucial for the long-term resolution of conflict.
Riots, rebellions and revolutions were integral to the political culture of the early modern period, and the very regularity with which violence was used as a form of political activity makes the earlier period a potential source of insight for understanding the later one. These acts of violence were rooted in conceptions of rights, equity and principle. This can be seen in repeated uprisings, led by peasants, burgesses, gentry or aristocrats, across central and western Europe; revolutions and wars of resistance in Britain and the Low Countries; and the conjunction between religious belief and political activism that spanned national boundaries. In turn, these acts were the catalyst for sustained attempts to accommodate dissident groups, spawning the sophisticated analysis and articulation of political rights and constitutions that mark the birth of modern political thought.
The fourth colloquium will look at the ways in which early modern citizens and subjects conceptualised their rights and then justified, organised, and demonstrated resistance on the basis, and in defence, of those rights. The purpose will be to consider how apparently conservative and reactive beliefs can assume radical status and have radical consequences. It will examine not simply political theory and philosophy (though those certainly have a place in the discussion) but also popular conceptions of rights and, no less importantly, their implementation and expression in practice. Section one will consider how rights and religion are used to justify resistance on a pan-European basis. Section two will consider movements and traditions of resistance in their social contexts.
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WORKSHOP I: Political and Civic Consciousness - 6 December 2003
Organised by Jessica Winston (Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow)
Humanity Manse G1, 1:00-5:00 pm
1.00 - 2.30 |
Seminar 1: Models of Civic Participation Michelle O’Callaghan (Oxford Brookes), Martin Dzelzainis (Royal Holloway, London), |
2.30 - 3.00 |
Tea |
3.00 - 4.30 |
Seminar 2: Reconstructing Political Participation Andrew McRae (Exeter), Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck, London), |
4.30 - 5.00 |
Reception |
This seminar-style workshop explores the question of how we conceptualise early modern political participation and civic consciousness. Taking early- to mid-seventeenth century England as a test case, the first half of the workshop explores two models for civic and political participation, one based on habits of ’commoning’ at the Inns of Court and another on Republican ideals. The second half considers how we now reconstruct civic participation, focusing on the supposed ’popular’ voices of early Stuart manuscript miscellanies as well as on women’s relationship to politics and sexualised languages of rule in the Civil War crisis.
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WORKSHOP II: Networks - 18 February 2004
Organised by Howard Hotson (History)
Humanity Manse G1, 1:30-5:00 pm
1.30 - 3.00 |
Session 1: chaired by Howard Hotson Jennifer Richards (Newcastle), Vladimír Urbánek (Prague), |
3.00 - 3.30 |
Tea |
3.30 - 4.15 |
Session 2: chaired by Steve Murdoch (RIISS) Leos
Muller (Stockholm), |
4.15 - 5.00 |
Reception |
Formal and informal networks provided another context in which early modern actors fashioned multiple identities, organised themselves for political action, and exerted political influence both at home and abroad. These networks took many forms, and this workshop will consider three of them - informal literary and intellectual circles, elite mercantile alliances, and networks of expatriates and exiles - as well as considering the lessons which can be learned from them concerning opportunities for political participation and representation in the contemporary world.
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WORKSHOP III: Law and Custom - 14 April 2004
Organised by Cathy Shrank (English)
Humanity Manse G1, 1:00-5:00 pm
1.00 - 2.15 |
Session 1: chaired by Scott Styles (Law) Alan
Cromartie (Reading), Geoff Baldwin (Cambridge), |
2.15 - 2.45 |
Tea |
2.45 - 4.00 |
Session 2: chaired by Cathy Shrank (English) Dermot
Cavanagh (Northumbria), Jessica Winston (Aberdeen/Idaho State) |
4.00 - 5.00 |
Reception |
Law and custom offered two crucial, but potentially conflicting, resources by which the early moderns constructed experience, and justified – or invalidated – actions and beliefs. In this way, law and custom were both social practices and rhetorical devices. This workshop brings together intellectual and legal historians and literary critics to examine the idea of law as a discourse and the sometimes fraught relationship between law and custom in the early modern world.
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