Space and Experience: Mapping and Movement in the Global Renaissance, Renaissance Society of America 2018 Annual Meeting, New Orleans, March 22–24, 2018

In the past decade, spatial analysis has yielded new ways to engage with historical information and revealed previously hidden patterns, trends and understandings. From small-scale network representations and large scale mapping projects to a wealth of important articles and monographs, considerable new insight has been gained into processes of movement, spatial representation, migration, experience, and the dynamics of the early modern period.

We are hosting two panels on this range of topics at RSA 2018 (New Orleans) under the auspices of the Prato Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (PCMRS). The panels will bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines to reflect upon the production and discoveries made possibly by spatial modes of analysis so as to foster interdisciplinary discussions and research in the spatial humanities. Our geographic scope is global; our frame of reference ca.1400-1800. Contributions from all humanities disciplines are encouraged.

Possible paper themes include but are not limited to:

• Visualizations and Virtuality: Contemporary virtual reconstructions of the evolution of specific spaces; new modes of interacting with the layered histories of cities and global spaces; new understandings of architectural sites, landscapes, and social and urban spatial experience.
• Community and Culture: Early modern spatial constructions of identity, including nation, state, group, community, and town; representations of the temporal, geographic, and material aspects of specific communities and cultures; constructions of past, present, or future imagined communities; markers of inclusion, exclusion, and intermixing; reciprocal exchanges between spatial practices and broader social constructs such as ideology, class, etcetera.
• Space and Sense: New understandings of sites of encounter and exchange; the construction and transgression of boundaries; the effects of real or imagined distance or proximity; ways in which groups transformed or otherwise each others’ experience of space; the impact of space and spatial representations upon early modern sense, emotions, and experience.
• Movement and Motion: Ways in which knowledge, traditions, communities, objects, people, and texts traveled over time and space during the early modern period. Spatial histories of demographic and social factors, resources, institutions, and ideas; considerations of early modern mobile phenomena such as travel, migrations, processions, and pilgrimages.
• Renderings and Representations: The relationship between artistic, cartographic, literary, historic, intellectual, and other forms of early modern visual representation and early modern spatial experience; disjunctures and convergences between representations of place or space; comparative and/or crosscultural representations of space.