Objects and Spaces of Encounter in Renaissance Italy

该项目首次将外国人、移民和少数群体置于意大利漫长的文艺复兴的中心。它探索了支撑这一时期文化生产的复杂联系和相互依存，动摇了长期以来关于意大利文艺复兴是什么的假设。它超越了对特定少数群体(如犹太人、希腊人、非洲黑人)的研究，调查了意大利社会和文化的基本多样性和关联性。我们的研究认为，意大利文艺复兴的每一个方面都是一次相遇的结果，在每一次相遇中，每个演员都有不同程度的“归属感”，反之亦然，“外在”(Cerutti，2012)。这一概念模型允许我们，首先，认识到外国人、移民和少数群体对文艺复兴时期文化生产的贡献；其次，确定这些贡献是意大利社会结构的基础，在意大利，城市人口的多样性被固定在整个地区的生活中(鲁宾，2020)；第三，将这些贡献融入整个半岛的文化交流和生产的更广泛模式中。我们专注于揭示外国演员、材料、设计和生产技术对文艺复兴文化的影响的物品和空间。物品(如土耳其地毯、德国床上用品或用锦缎或苏格兰花呢制成的服装)，通过档案、文本和视觉来源的情景，唤起物质交换、社交以及真实和想象的互动的层次化。相遇的空间(车间、客栈、集市、教堂)构成了文艺复兴时期人类和物质联系的框架，并允许我们评估外在和归属感的水平，因为它们随着环境和地点的不同而不同。我们的项目通过对意大利南部、中部和北部较少研究的沿海和边境地区的新研究，防止意大利历史向威尼斯、佛罗伦萨和罗马的传统倾斜。1450年至1650年的时间框架涵盖了一段特殊的流动性时期，这是由于西班牙王国对犹太人和穆斯林的迫害、奴隶贸易、宗教改革、宗教战争和欧洲-奥斯曼帝国关系的变化造成的。我们预计，这段文艺复兴的新历史将是陌生的、令人不安的和不舒服的。它与文艺复兴时期意大利固有的不平等和歧视结构接触，同时梳理出在这个充满敌意和偏见的世界中进行跨文化合作和创新的潜力。通过揭示移民和多元文化主义的创造性后果，我们挑战了“西方文明”的关键神话之一。因此，我们的作品为意大利文艺复兴提供了一种新的批评方法。该领域长期以来一直被定义为研究人文主义学者和精英艺术家的智力和艺术成果，但最近却面临着无关紧要和狭隘精英主义的指责。相比之下，我们认为，那个时期令人震惊的文化生产既不是狭隘的，也不是精英的，而是在与丰富多样的少数群体网络的相遇和相互依存中萌芽的。这个项目是及时的。它回应了一种迫切的需求，即展示前现代社区的多样性和关联性，并根据英国退欧、BLM和课程的非殖民化重塑欧洲历史。它还运用创新的历史方法来挑战关于国家认同和创造力本质的旧假设。在1590年的一本著名的服装书中，塞萨雷·维切利奥将意大利令人眼花缭乱的服装种类归因于其典型的民族组合：“因此，难怪我们在这里看到的服装比其他任何主要国家或地区都要多样化。”通过研究相遇的繁殖力，我们渴望描绘一幅意大利文艺复兴的另类图景，那里有少数民族、移民和外来者。

This project for the first time places foreigners, migrants and minority groups at the centre of the long Renaissance in Italy. It explores the complex ties and interdependencies supporting cultural production in this period, unsettling long-held assumptions about what was 'Italian' about the 'Italian Renaissance'. Moving beyond the study of specific minorities (e.g. Jews, Greeks, Black Africans), it investigates the fundamental diversity and connectedness of Italian society and culture. Our research holds that every aspect of the Italian Renaissance resulted from an encounter, and that within each encounter, every actor possessed a varying level of 'belonging' and conversely of 'extraneity' (Cerutti, 2012). This conceptual model allows us, first, to recognize the contribution of foreigners, migrants, and minority groups to Renaissance cultural production; second, to identify these contributions as fundamental to the social fabric of Italy, where 'the diversity of urban populations was hard-wired into the lives of whole regions' (Rubin, 2020); and third, to integrate those contributions into wider patterns of cultural exchange and production across the peninsula.We focus on objects and spaces which reveal the influence of foreign actors, materials, designs and production techniques on the culture of the Renaissance. Objects (such as Turkish rugs, German bedclothes or garments made of 'damask' or 'scotch tweed'), contextualised using archival, textual and visual sources, evoke material exchanges, sociability, and the layering of real and imagined interactions. Spaces of encounter (workshops, inns, fairs, churches) frame the human and material contacts underpinning the Renaissance and allow us to assess levels of extraneity and belonging, as they varied by circumstance and place.Our project guards against the conventional skewing of Italian history towards Venice, Florence and Rome with fresh research on less-studied coastal and frontier regions of southern, central and northern Italy. The timeframe, 1450-1650, covers a period of exceptional mobility, resulting from the persecution of Jews and Muslims in the Spanish kingdoms, the slave trade, the Reformations, religious wars and shifting European-Ottoman relations. We expect this new history of the Renaissance to be unfamiliar, unsettling and uncomfortable. It engages with structures of inequality and discrimination inherent to Renaissance Italy while teasing out the potential for intercultural collaboration and innovation within that hostile, prejudiced world. By revealing the creative consequences of migration and multiculturalism, we challenge one of the key myths of 'western civilization'.Our work thus presents a new critical approach to the Italian Renaissance. The field, long defined as the study of the intellectual and artistic output of humanist scholars and elite artists, has faced recent accusations of irrelevance and narrow elitism. We argue, by contrast, that the astonishing cultural production of the period was neither narrow nor elite, but germinated in its very encounters and interdependence with richly diverse networks of minority groups.The project is timely. It answers a pressing need to demonstrate the diversity and connectedness of pre-modern communities and to recast European history in the light of Brexit, BLM, and the decolonization of the curriculum. It also deploys innovative historical methods to challenge old assumptions about national identity and the nature of creativity. In a famed costume book of 1590, Cesare Vecellio attributed the dazzling array of clothes in Italy to its defining mix of peoples: 'For this reason, it is no wonder that we can see a greater diversity of dress here than in any other major nation or region.' By studying the fecundity of encounters, we aspire to paint an alternative picture of the Renaissance in Italy, enriched by minorities, migrants and outsiders.