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.

Our working group, 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. Moreover, as Barbara Johnson argues, the inherent tension in allegory between corporeal signifier and abstract signified introduces a “difference between self and other” at the heart of this interpretive form, which makes it prone to potential slippage, interpretive failure, and playful misinterpretation. This makes allegory a productive site for the study of the ways gender, race, and other identities were negotiated in the Early Modern world.

A partial list of themes we are interested in exploring includes: allegory and embodied cognition; female and women’s allegorical representations in sacred art and the roles of gender and sex in allegory; transatlantic and transnational circulation of allegorical interpretations, debates, and artworks through texts, images, and objects; allegory in the colonial contexts and allegories of race; historical shifts from medieval to early modern allegory; allegory and misinterpretation; multi-sensorial and performative reception of texts and works of art.