Cultural biography society

12th Annual Conference of the International Society for Cultural History

26–29 June 2019
Tallinn University, Estonia

It is fair to say that globalisation has forced and inspired historians to search for spatial alternatives in making sense of the past, to pay more attention to supranational and transregional connections and networks. These searches have given rise to a number of approaches that, under various names such as transnational history, connected history, entangled history or global history, share the same desire to move beyond conventional geopolitical articulations and discrete civilisations, to take structured integration of the world as its primary context, to turn the concept of space again into a significant theoretical category in historical research.

The 12th Annual Conference of the International Society for Cultural History invites cultural historians all over the world to think about the interconnected world as the point of departure for cultural-historical research, and to discuss the circulations and interactions of things, peoples, ideas, and institutions across cultural and geographical zones. We invite to consider global history as a new form of cultural-historical analysis in which systems of representation and meaning making practices are placed in global contexts. We invite to focus on mobility and exchange, on hybridity and entanglement, on various cultural-historical processes that transcend borders and boundaries.

Peter Burke (University of Cambridge)

Globalising the Renaissance: the Role of the Jesuits

Peter Burke is a Life Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, UK.

Professor Burke has published extensively on the cultural and social history of Europe. His research interests include the history of the Renaissance, the history of historical thought and writing, and the social history of language and knowledge. He has also explo

Study of cultural activity and evolution of traditions over time

Not to be confused with Historical culture.

Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and politicalmilieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales. It combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.

Description

Many current cultural historians claim it to be a new approach, but cultural history was already referred to by nineteenth-century historians, notably the Swiss scholar of Renaissance history Jacob Burckhardt.

Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with the French movements of histoire des mentalités (Philippe Poirrier, 2004) and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it is closely associated with the field of American studies. As originally conceived and practiced in the 19th century by Burckhardt, in relation to the Italian Renaissance, cultural history was oriented to the study of a particular historical period in its entirety, with regard not only to its painting, sculpture, and architecture, but to the economic basis underpinning society, and to the social institutions of its daily life. Echoes of Burkhardt's approach in the 20th century can be seen in Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919).

Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as: carnival, festival, and public rituals; perform

 In the International Society for Cultural History (ISCH), our shared interest is the discussion, exchange, and support of global cultural history throughout all periods and world-wide in all interested academic disciplines. The ISCH meets annually, bringing together cultural historians from all continents. Moreover, we publish a book series and a journal, and we support a diversity of other activities related to cultural history. Learn more about our conferences, publications, ISCH prize, and how to become a member.