Location:

April 17 2025, 9:30 am to 5:00 pm 
Alumni Hall, 91 Charles Street West

Although it is all too often perceived in modern scholarship as the rusty remainder of a rigid medieval worldview out of step with the great cultural and scientific revolutions of the Renaissance, allegory captured the imagination and innermost feelings of early modern people. Allegory’s broad reach is attested to by literary works like Dante’s Divina Commedia, Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose, and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, as well as by its pervasiveness in other artforms, including theater, music, dance, and the visual arts.

This symposium, Allegory in the Early Modern World: Image, Body, Text, proposes to rethink allegory and its cultural manifestations between 1350-1700. Instead of the narrow definition of Early Modern allegory as a textual phenomenon, we propose an interdisciplinary approach that highlights allegory’s intermedial, performative, and multi-sensorial aspects. After a cycle of workshops, scholars of various disciplines will present new research to offer a fresh glimpse on a category that was one of the more lasting legacies of the Renaissance.

Organized by Dr. Eleonora Cappuccilli  (eleonora.cappuccilli@utoronto.ca) and Eyal Pundik (eyal.pundik@mail.utoronto.ca).

Speakers:

Ethan Matt Kavaler (Department of History of Art, University of Toronto)

Hong Liu (Department of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)

Bernice Neal (CRRS Fellow and English, York University)

Andrea Walkden (Department of English, University of Toronto)

Catherine Power (Department of Political Science, York University)

Heather Smith (Department of History,  University of Toronto)

Yixin Alfred Wang (Department of History,  University of Toronto)

Keynote Speaker:

Amy Knight Powell (Department of Art History, University of Southern California)

David Galbraith (Department of English,  University of Toronto) – respondent