Organised by Michail Leviadiotis, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities".

Byzantine reliquaries, icons and sacred objects reached the West as diplomatic gifts or looted goods. They trace the mobility of pilgrims, crusaders or refugees, telling stories of loss, trauma, desire and recovery. The conference aims to read exilic identities and diasporic agencies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the light of the striking account of Byzantine scholars who narrated themselves as "the relics of the Greeks". Thus, in addition to the mobility of objects, images and motifs, the translatio of the textual tradition of the Greek East in Italy and the rest of Europe will be revisited and understood as a gesture of reverence and plunder, salvation and exploitation of relics.

In recent years a number of influential studies, such as the volumes Teachers, Students and Schools of Greek in the Renaissance [Ciccolella & Silvano (ed.)], Making and Rethinking the Renaissance [Abbamonte & Harrison (ed.)], Receptions of Hellenism in Early Modern Europe [Costantinidou & Lamers (ed.)], Anachronic Renaissance [Nagel & Wood], have explored the field of Western interaction with the Byzantine heritage after the fall of Constantinople, "modes of receiving and responding to Greeks, Greece, and Greek". The conference aims to explore the various ways in which the recovery of Greek language and culture has taken place in the West, considering mobility as a key factor in the meaning of cultural agency, processes, and products.

In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Western narratives, the intellectual and material culture produced or preserved in the Greek-speaking East embodies a complex antinomic appeal: desired, despised, fetishised, it becomes plunder, a treasure to be rescued, knowledge to be transmitted, or even a source to be exploited. We aim to examine the penetration of Greek culture into the West and the ways in which it was negotiated, re-signified and then absorbed (or rejected). Research in this area is dominated by the Western narrative of salvation through cultural appropriation, in which the arrival of Greek in the West is inextricably linked to the activities of a few intellectuals. We aspire to shift the focus to issues of diasporic agency, mobility and transformation, cultural exploitation, the rhetorics and narratives of trauma and exile, the micro-history of ideas and motifs in their local reworking, local differentiations of cultural agency as a result of political circumstances or ideological programmes.

The conference aims to broaden our view of a range of phenomena related to the contact between the West and Greek culture, especially in the context of cultural mobility and the intersection of textual and visual culture, agency and ideology, rhetorics and politics. We focus on networks and assemblages of people, texts and objects as events in processes that have contributed to the construction of a modern, European self-narrative. We pay particular attention to the movement of people, texts, objects, images, cultural forms, epistemic narratives, motifs, concepts and ideas; we examine their interconnectivity as a critical factor in their new functions and new meanings in a context of exile, diaspora, displacement and (cultural) mobility.

We invite papers on these and related topics and issues:

• The cultural agency of Byzantine scholars in the West.
• The movement of objects as icons, heirlooms etc. in their new homes and their new acquisition of meaning.
• The journeys of books and texts in new languages, libraries, collections etc., their re-significations and new functions in their new socio-political environments.
• How the interaction of agents, texts and objects gave space to the reformulation of ideas and common narratives.
• The German-speaking world as a reception context: similarities and differences with the reception of scholars, texts and objects in Italy.

Please submit your proposal (250 words) to Michail Leivadiotis by 31 March 2025 via michail@leivadiotis.eu.