Forging Credibility: Knowledge, Trust, and Authority in the Premodern World

Invitation - Program - Abstracts_ pdf

Program

Monday 21 September

10:00–10:30 Welcome and Introduction

Session I: Political, Confessional and Frontier Credibility
10:30-12:00

Chair: Václav Žůrek
10:30 Ludovica Sasso (Dresden University of Technology)
Claiming Authority at Europe’s Eastern Frontiers: Neo-Latin Political Poetry and the Politics of Credible Knowledge

11:00 Márton Szentpéteri (MOME, Budapest)
From Agrippa to Kolosi Török: Vernacularising Learned Dissent in Unitarian Transylvania

11:30 Paweł Cholewicki (Palacký University, Olomouc)
Between Union and Uniformity: Jan of Oświęcim and the Legacy of Florence

12:00–14:00 Lunch break

Session II: Humanist Scholarship and the Struggle for Authority
14:00–15:30

Chair: Lucie Storchová
14:00 Simona Iaria (University of Turin)
Literary Models, Humanitas, and Friendship in Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Authority in Central and Eastern Europe

14:30 Justin P. Meyer (Washington University in St. Louis)
Source Authority and Humanist Intellectual Values: Tacitus and Strabo between Aegidius Tschudi and Beatus Rhenanus (on-line)

15:00 Hanna Szabelska (Jagiellonian University, Cracow)
The Virtue of Impartiality in Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (1503–1572)

15:30–16:00 Coffee break

Session III: Institutional Authority and the Governance of Truth
16:00–17:00

Chair: Vojtěch Bažant
16:00 Luciano Micali (Université de Fribourg)
Jean Gerson on Academic Knowledge and Magisterial Authority

16:30 Roberto Peressin (University of Warsaw)
Construction and Performance of Authority at School: Sources and Symbols of Legitimation at the Danzig Academic Gymnasium in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

17:00–17:30 Coffee break

17:30 Evening keynote lecture
Stefano Gulizia (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
The Forensics of Credibility in Early Modern Universities: A Global Perspective

Conference dinner

Tuesday 22 September

Session IV: Contesting Authority in Natural Knowledge
9:00–10:30

Chair: Lenka Řezníková
9:00 Ovanes Akopyan (Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb)
Forging and Contesting Authority: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Attack on Astrology and Its Aftermath

9:30 Martyna Osuch (University of Warsaw)
Challenging Zoological Authority: Early Modern Readers’ Responses to Errors and Gaps in Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium

10:00 Jan Čížek (University of Ostrava)
Mosaic Physics between Factuality and Construction: The Case of Theatrum divinum by Matouš Konečný (1616)

10:30–11:00 Coffee break

Session V: Self-Fashioning and the Forging of Expert Authority
11:00–12:00

Chair: Stefano Gulizia
11:00 Vladimír Urbánek (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
“My Manner of Working is Not Imaginary but Real & Experimental”: Mechanical Knowledge and the Construction of Expert Authority in the Case of Johann Christoph Berger

11:30 Oded Rabinovitch (Tel Aviv University)
Mathematical Publishing in the Scientific Projects of Blaise-François, Comte de Pagan (1603–1665)

12:00–14:00 Lunch break

Session VI: Jesuit Negotiations of Knowledge and Trust
14:00–15:30
Chair: Iva Kovaříčková

14:00 Svorad Zavarský (Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava)
Whom Did Szent-Ivany trust?

14:30 Maciej Jasiński (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
Astronomy and Authorities in the Works by Polish Jesuit Wojciech Tylkowski (1624–1695)

15:00 Kateřina Šolcová (Charles University, Prague)
Rodrigo de Arriaga (1592–1667) and the Challenges to Natural Philosophy in Post-White Mountain Prague

15:30–16:00 Coffee break

Session VII: Experience and Epistemic Legitimacy 16:00–17:00
Chair: Márton Szentpéteri

16:00 Claudia Marsulli (Sapienza University, Rome)
Forging Authority Through (Supernatural) Experience: Mysticism, Knowledge, and Epistemic Legitimacy in Early Modern Italy

16:30 Karl Johann Scharpf (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Forging Matters of Fact? Lay Testimony and Situational Expertise in Johann Weichard von Valvasor’s Die Ehre des Herzogthums Crain

Wednesday 23 September
Session VIII: Limits and the Destruction of Credibility
9:00–10:00

Chair: Vladimír Urbánek
9:00 Zoltán Tomkó (University of Szeged)
Who Can Write Whose History? An Early Modern Discussion of Historiography by Giovanni Michele Bruto

9:30 Jakub Wolak (Polish Academy of Sciences)
The Quincunx in Sir Thomas Browne and Stanisław Orzechowski, or the Limits of Geometrical Paradigm and the Breakdown of the Universal Analogy

10:00 Marie-Isabelle Schwarzburger, Michaela Clark (University of Düsseldorf)
Werewolf in Lemgo: The Curious Case of David Welman (1590–1669)

10:30–11:00 Coffee break

Session IX: Reconfiguration of Epistemic Authority around 1700
11:00–12:00

Chair: Petr Pavlas
11:00 Daniel Špelda (University of West Bohemia, Pilsen)
Authority, Time, and Method: Fontenelle’s Reconfiguration of Epistemic Authority in the Wake of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns

11:30 Dagmar Pichová (Masaryk University, Brno)
Arguments from Epistemic Authority: The Correspondence of Émilie Du Châtelet

12:00 Final Discussion, Closing Remarks