Transgressing boundaries. Times, spaces, and people, 1400-1630

The newly launched Fribourg Institute for the Study of the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period (IRF) at the University of Fribourg brings together researchers from various fields such as history, literature, art history, and musicology in order to explore Renaissance societies, politics, art, religion and science in an interdisciplinary dialogue. To this end, the IRF plans to organize workshops and conferences at the University of Fribourg on a regular basis. The transgression of boundaries lies at the heart of the ways in which Renaissance people made sense of themselves and formed cultural and epochal identities. In temporal terms, trans-historical recourses and reconnections made epochal boundaries per- meable and were crucial for updating and transforming bodies of knowledge and aesthetic patterns. In linguistic terms, the dissolution and dynamization of linguistic boundaries resulted in group formations both between different vernacular languages and between vernacular languages and Latin. Geographically, knowledge and educational horizons were formed by transregional and intercontinental transgressions of boundaries by people, objects and knowledge which in turn instigated processes of self- assertion and cultural demarcation. Such transgressions of boundaries, however, should not be understood exclusively as transgressions of empirical, pre-existing borders. Instead, boundaries were attributed cultural and historical meaning by people who, by establishing and transgressing boundaries, created individual and collective Renaissance identities. The IRF’s inaugural colloquium therefore adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to reflect on the transgression of boundaries as a social practice as well as a cultural (self-)reflection. It asks how these transgressions contributed to the formation of the specific epistemological and cultural profile of the Renaissance.