Workshops and Conferences

 

The Institute has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to host a workshop on “Art and Religious Reform in Northern Europe, 1500-1650”. This workshop will bring together leading scholars of German and Netherlandish history and art history in order to explore the ways in which the creation of distinct confessional cultures shaped the production and reception of images in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century northern Europe. Papers will cover themes such as sacred and secular portraiture, images’ role in religious conversion, the material Reformation, memory and commemoration, and emotionalism and the visual. They will be presented in preliminary form in St Andrews in March 2013, and published in final form in a special issue of the journal “Art History” in 2017.

The Institute hosted its second workshop on ‘Sermon Reception in Early Modern Europe’ in June 2012. The workshop was one of a series, funded by the British Academy, which seeks to answer that question and investigate how sermons contributed to growing religious differences across continental Europe. The 2012 workshop focused on Italy. For information about upcoming workshops in the series, please contact Emily Michelson (edm21@st-andrews.ac.uk).

To mark the 600th anniversary of the foundation of St Andrews University, the School of History and the Institute of Scottish Historical Research joined with the International Commission for the History of Universities to host an international conference on the theme of 'Function, form and funding: What are universities for – and who should pay for them?'  Highlights included plenary lectures by Roger Mason and Steven Reid on the Scottish universities in the Renaissance and Reformation periods, a range of papers on the universities of late medieval and early modern Europe, and a critique by Howard Hotson of current trends towards the marketization of university education. A rich and stimulating event all round.