The 2019 SAES conference will question the complex notion of ‘exception(s)’, a concept which finds particular resonance within seventeenth and eighteenth-century studies. We invite papers and panels to ponder the notion of exception as the precursor of renewal and change, often ‘the unthinkable, the eccentric and the transgressive’.
An exception is dual by nature, condemned by some as a mistake, an erroneous and temporary deviation from the norm whose model it challenges, but hailed by others as the trailblazing sign towards new artistic, political and religious directions. In this atelier, we will question the status of the exception as the harbinger of transformation.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attempts at stabilizing the world through the conception of norms and the application of rules seemed proportionate to the many upheavals of the dominant codes of the time. The era developed a marked interest in the careful policing of exceptions and the theorizing of the rules governing all aspects of the world. Political thinkers, poets and artists tried to unlock the timeless rules by which the world was governed, from Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the work of grammarians striving to shape the English language clearly (Hermes, James Harris, 1751), or Adam Smith and his theorization of economics. Yet the idea of the exception seemed constantly to emerge, it evoked an escape from rules and conventions which no longer applied. When in 1754 Hogarth published The Analysis of Beauty, attempting to give a template to the artists of the day through which to achieve harmony, he wrote that ‘it is a constant rule in composition in painting to avoid regularity’. Either in literary circles, with the development of the novel and its refusal to comply with any genre of the time, or in artistic terms, with the emergence of new schools claiming to represent modernity, exceptions appeared to dictate the new direction of taste and style.
Such tension between the stability fostered by rues and the change heralded by exceptions to those rules was felt sharply in both British and American political and religious institutions. After the Reformation, English Catholicism was no longer the norm but rather an exception, an anomaly to be eradicated. Later, the civil wars of the 1640s sent a legitimate monarch to his death and his heirs into exile, whilst conferring power to a man of lowly extraction and bringing down the unity of the established Church of England. Later still, the Glorious Revolution entirely rewrote the criteria for royal legitimacy, and installed a foreigner on the throne. Such changes were all deeply transgressive of long-established norms, and their outcomes would have been unimaginable to many of their contemporaries. Similarly, the American Revolution, while deeply influenced by British thought and philosophy, eventually became a transition towards the shaping of a new American identity, based on an ever-growing feeling of exceptionalism and a sense of national destiny.
In a broader geopolitical context, the multiplication of upheavals and wars, sometimes spanning several continents and the transformation of European and overseas territories led to the emergence of revolutionary states, which in turn questioned the very nature of exceptionality, since a revolution is by definition a state of exception supposed to bridge the gap between two stable regimes. Yet the idea of a revolutionary spirit, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had become less of a transgression and more of a manifesto of youth and renewal.
Transgression of norms and rupture with tradition thus heralded new eras and produced new norms. The establishment of an American Constitution following the Philadelphia Congressional Congress of 1787 as well as the ratification of a Bill of Rights formalized these new norms, transforming a revolutionary moment into a model for other nations, and the Founding Fathers into rule makers rather than rabble rousers. The historians both of America and of the British Isles contributed to the fashioning of a narrative of exception for their respective nations, building what has since been debunked as a Whig myth of greatness and unity which, whilst hailing the elect nation as exceptional, in fact took care to homogenize and normalize what it meant to be ‘American’ or ‘British’. But in the process, such historiographies entirely neglecting those at the margins of that grand narrative, such as those outside of the established Protestant norm, or those outside of normative reproductive heterosexuality, or women, the young, the poor, the natives, Afro-American peoples, or any group standing outside a norm which was white, male and Protestant.
How then can an exception be defined? Is it but a transition between two norms, or the impetus for the creation of new ones? Can its transgressive aspects be digested and included into the new templates it creates? Self-defining one’s art, society or religion as an exception necessitates the conception of an identity in constant flux, and the possibility of an endless revolutionary state. Yet exceptions both defy and define norms in their time, by creating either a reaction or a school of thought. An exception can thus appear as a prophet for the new, but also as a limiting category in which transgression, instead of being encouraged, is paradoxically enshrined.

Papers will not exceed 25 to 30 minutes maximum.
Proposals of 300 words (in English, in Word.doc format), accompanied by a brief bio-bibliography, should be sent to Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Sara Watson by 1st November 2018 at: laurence.sterritt@univ-amu.fr and sara.watson@univ-amu.fr
Papers will be considered for publication in the Varia of XVII-XVIII (25,0000 to 40,000 characters, to be returned to the general editor by the end of June 2019, formatted according to the stylesheet available on the journal’s website).

List of topics for papers / panels (non-exhaustive):

– Exceptions and exceptionalism

British and American revolutions as exceptions, templates or transitional states
States of exception in political history of the period

-Exceptional spaces

A new world order creating spaces of exception inside European Empires (colonial exceptions)
Globalization and transmission of models of exception: are revolutions contagious?

-The exception in literature and art: oddity, transition or establishment of the new norm?

The question of new literary forms emerging during the period and their relationship to older established forms
Modernity versus tradition in art
Deliberate literary transgressions and the emergence of new manifestos

-Religious exceptions and revolutions

New religious minorities and exceptions during the 17^th century
The transition from exception to establishment

This seminar invites individual papers or panels of two or three speakers to explore the concepts of exception and exceptionality in early modern history and literature.  It would like to gather researchers specialising in history, literature (theatre, poetry, prose) and visual arts to reflect these concepts in context and in connection and contrast with current understandings of these notions. The seminar also wishes to observe the actual nature of normative rules and models and how much they were followed politically, aesthetically, socially and religiously. It will analyse how the early modern era relied on exception as a method of improvement of normative rules.

The seminar welcomes proposals dealing with exceptionality from a legal, political and theological point of view. In the wake of Diego Pirillo’s forthcoming study of The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Cornell, 2018), we would like to focus on political, religious, commercial and artistic agents, women and men working both “within and outside formal state channels through underground networks of individuals who were able to move across confessional and linguistic borders, often adapting their own identities to the changing political conditions they encountered”. Papers may focus on exceptional individuals (scientists, writers, painters, politicians, religious refugees, dissenters etc) in exceptional situations and the consequences of such exceptionality on political, social, sexual and religious norms. This exceptionality should be seen in terms of gender and social ranking as well as of confession. Cross-borders literary and non-literary perspectives are also welcome.

Subsequently, papers are invited to discuss the concept of tolerance and the evolution from comprehension to toleration. It also examines early modern criticisms of toleration such as George Wither’s views of toleration as conspiracy in Prince Henry’s Obsequies (1612) and the development of a rhetoric of exclusion in literary and non-literary texts.

As the barriers between literature and history did not exist in the Renaissance, this seminar will naturally explore how art and, in particular, theatre and poetry contributed to these philosophical and political debates.  It will examine how early modern male and female artists promoted or opposed exceptions and exceptionality to change aesthetic views and practice. For Keir Elam, theatre “allow[s] the individual’s context to be alienated and an alternative state of affairs to be perceived as more immediately real.” (The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama). Papers may consider then how the visual arts and literature made use of exceptions and exceptionality to question mimesis on a purely aesthetic level but also on the political level. The example of Shakespeare’s reconfiguration of the views on beauty in the wake of the sonnets to the dark lady should lead to a study of the ways the early modern era either encouraged or debunked normative and conservative views of gender, race and sexuality. It will raise the question of the fluctuating views of exemplarity and regularity during the early modern era.

Notwithstanding the importance and the impact of exceptions and exceptionality, the papers may also explore the limits of this concept in terms of our understanding of the early modern era. Peter Brook writes that “all the exceptions blur the truth” (The Empty Space), and we should also reflect on the limits of exceptionality in terms of political as well as aesthetic agency and of our vision and the representation of history. The seminar thus invites reflexive contributions on how contemporary visions on the Renaissance turn the early modern era into an “exceptional” era which some would blindly emulate, and others would dismiss altogether. This debate applies both to the strict content of early modern studies and the place of the Humanities in today’s episteme, but also to the place of early modern studies in the Humanities today.

List of topics for papers / panels (non-exhaustive):

 – Tolerance, Toleration and Exceptions: from Comprehension to Exclusion

– Religious and territorial diversity in early modern polities (government, representation, local and geopolitical perspectives)

– Literary discussions of comprehension, toleration and exception (religious, territorial, sexual diversity in theatre, poetry, prose)

– Radical iconoclasm as a major feature of English religious identity (visual arts)

– England and exceptionalism: from toleration to exclusion

-Early Modern Theatre and Rule-Breaking: The Poetics and Politics of Exception on the Stage:

-When the exception is the rule: making exceptions, creating new norms?

-Off-centering normative performance: staging early modern drama anew (anti-traditionalist theories and performances…)

-The theatre exception: an exceptional space for new epistemes

-Norms and exceptions: rethinking norms and normality

– The rule of exemplarity? : the evolution of role models in early modern literature and history

            – Discussing early modern views of regularity

-Debunking Normative Beauty: The Exception of the Dark Ladies in Early Modern Literature

-From Petrarchan beauty to Black is Beautiful

-Poetry and stage performance then and now

– “Exceptional and Unacceptable” (Elizabeth Honig, “Lady Dacre and pairing by Hans Eworth”, Renaissance Bodies): The Agency of Early Modern Women on the Political and Cultural Stage

-The cases of Bess of Hardwick, Arbella Stuart et al. as art dealers and political intermediaries

-Early modern women writers and their actual agency: exception, transgression and renewal

-New approaches to teaching and researching Renaissance Studies (History and Literature) 

-Shakespeare, the Canon of the Exception: from exception to norm to exception again.

-Early Modern Studies in the contemporary world: the limits of exceptionality

Papers should be no more than 25-30 minutes long.

Please send proposals of individual papers (250 words) or two-to-three-paper panels to Nathalie Rivère de Carles (nrivere@univ-tlse2.fr) and Jean-Louis Claret (jean-louis.claret@univ-amu.fr) by 1^st November 2018. Proposals should include a short biography of the participant(s).