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SUMMARY:Making truth or masking lies: the triumph of the Conards - Michael
  Wintroub (University of California\, Berkeley)
DTSTART:20061109T163000Z
DTEND:20061109T180000Z
UID:TALK5275@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Stephen John
DESCRIPTION:We will be reading two chapters from my recently published boo
 k\, _A Savage Mirror: Power\, Identity and Knowledge in Early Modern Franc
 e_. The first sets out the social and epistemic fields within which popula
 r urban traditions such as the charivari were linked to a display of New W
 orld peoples organized by the city of Rouen for their king's royal entry. 
 It argues that the carnivalesque was neither a critique of France's 'estab
 lished hierarchies' nor of its traditional order\, but aimed to satirize t
 he social aspirations of new urban elites\, while at the same time valoriz
 ing ideals of natural virtue and simplicity that were associated with both
  feudalism and peoples from the New World. Like popular social satire\, th
 e verisimilar representation of the New World found in the entry is linked
  to an 'empiricist' response to the social and epistemic instabilities tha
 t accompanied the discovery of the New World\, the fracturing of religious
  unity\, humanist philological historicism\, and the rising power of Franc
 e's new elites. The next chapter focuses on the relationship between early
  modern collecting practices and the form and content of the king's entry.
  It argues that it was through acts of collecting that France's civic elit
 es sought to fashion themselves as a new kind of nobility and to resurrect
  the lost Age of Gold. At the same time\, it suggests that insofar as nobi
 lity came to be seen as an art to be affected rather than a natural (e)sta
 te\, the question of how authenticity – that is\, how truth – was to b
 e adjudicated took centre stage. Attempts to answer this question – pres
 criptively and in social practice – came to play an important and often 
 overlooked role in the social history of our own representational practice
 s.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, History and Philosophy of Science\, Department o
 f
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