How Can You Tell? Judgment in Early Modern Europe

We don't like to stand in judgment, and we don't want to be judged, but we live in a world of ratings, assessments and evaluations. Judgment is an elusive topic in the humanities because it falls between the cracks of periods and disciplines. This workshop will address this problem by bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to study judgment in early modern Europe.

We are seeking contributions from humanities researchers at Warwick for this workshop, which will be held on March 6, 2020. The event is part of the annual series of workshops run by the Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre. We are seeking two sorts of paper: surveys of the concept of judgment, or of related concepts such as connoisseurship, discernment, and discrimination; and case studies exploring the techniques that people used to make judgements in their daily lives.

Like early modern people, we interpret judgment broadly to include any attempt to determine the quality or authenticity of something, whether an idea, an object, a text, an act or a person. Judgments may be legal, social, political, scientific, commercial, aesthetic, culinary, sartorial, scholarly, and more. The period covered is the early modern and eighteenth century, roughly from the Reformation to the French Revolution. The geographical scope is Europe, European Empires, and their global connections.

To submit a paper, please send a 200-word abstract to m.bycroft@warwick.ac.uk by Sep 10, 2019.

We are delighted to be joined by EMECC's first Research Fellow, Dr Callie Wilkinson, who will work on her Leverhulme-funded project, and by Dr Naomi Pullin, who returns to the Department from Cambridge as Assistant Professor with her Leverhulme-funded research project. Further details of their projects will follow on our Research page.

We are very sorry to lose Dr David Taylor (English), who has been an enthusiastic and supportive member of the Centre for several years. He is moving on to a new job as Associate Professor of Eighteenth Century literature at the University of Oxford, and tutorial fellow at St Hugh's College. We wish him every success!

Two EMECC members have just received well deserved promotions to professor. They are Kate Astbury (French) and Tina Lupton (English).