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Dear colleagues, The Cambridge New Habsburg Studies Network organised two events on 16th-century costume books by Katy Bond (Cambridge) and the religious landscape of 16th century central Europe by Prof Howard Louthan (Minnesota) this term which might be of interest for some of you. All welcome! Best wishes, Annja Neumann ************** CAMBRIDGE NEW HABSBURG STUDIES NETWORK UPCOMING SEMINAR Tuesday 10th May 2016, Senior Parlour, Gonville & Caius College, 5-6pm Katy Bond (University of Cambridge) Costume Books: 16th-century Habsburg Networks and Power This paper argues that the costume book genre, which developed and gained traction across the European continent in the sixteenth century, was more than a mere reflection of increasingly globalised perspectives in the so-called Age of Discovery. Yet to have been acknowledged is the role that the Habsburg Empire under the rule of Charles V had upon the initial development of the genre. A couple of the earliest known works of this kind, which established conventions of content, composition, and format, were fashioned in wake of extensive exposure to Charles’s court. Christoph Weiditz’s Trachtenbuch (c.1529-32) and Christoph von Sternsee’s costume album (c.1549) were produced and commissioned by artists and patrons whose participation in Habsburg imperial networks allowed them to traverse much of Europe and subsequently encounter a great diversity of human custom and costume. Charles’s reign ushered in a unique moment of history which symbolically united a great assortment of culture, language, governance, and customs under a single, powerful sovereign. Within this milieu, the creators of these two costume manuscripts had profited from cross-cultural engagement and cross-territorial movement. Costume books developed in the second half of the century to become popular printed products. With the Habsburg Empire now divided between its Austrian and Spanish Houses, and the Universal Empire Charles V’s advisors had encouraged now but a distant memory, competitive power struggles between Europe’s nation-states led costume books’ function to shift. No longer intimate works visualising personal travels and experiences, these printed encyclopaedias of global, sartorial character took on increasingly moralised and patriotic agendas that participated in debates common across Europe regarding the volatile dress habits of one’s countrymen and the adoption of foreign fashions. ************** ANNUAL LECTURE Tuesday 17th May 2016, Leslie Stephen Room*, Trinity Hall, 5pm-6pm Professor Howard Louthan (Director of the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota) The Habsburgs and their Eastern Neighbours: Re-evaluating the Religious Landscape of 16th-century Central Europe While relations between the Habsburgs and their Valois, Tudor, and Ottoman rivals have been well studied, their connections with their eastern neighbors, the Jagiellonians, have not been examined with the same degree of scrutiny. The paper will first offer an overview of the complicated web of relationships that developed between the two families. I will then argue that a fixation with diplomatic and dynastic history has obscured our vision of a common cultural and intellectual landscape the families shared. We will pay specific attention to a great scandal that occurred in mid-sixteenth century Poland and unpack that incident to explore some of the distinctive features of a multiconfessional religious culture that developed across Central Europe during the Age of Reform. *Please note this lecture will be held in Trinity Hall ************** Cambridge New Habsburg Studies Network Supported by the Cambridge DAAD German Research Hub with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO) and the Department of German and Dutch (University of Cambridge) Suzanna Ivanič, Janine Maegraith, Annja Neumann, Joachim Whaley --------------- ([log in to unmask]) https://camhabsburgstudies.wordpress.com/