The `Sensoryscape' of the Good Friday Procession in an Early Modern Venetian Town

The ‘Sensoryscape’ of the Good Friday Procession in an Early Modern Venetian
Town

This paper explores the multiple sensory registers through which urban events were encountered and experienced in early modern Bergamo, located on the westernmost boundaries of the Venetian Terraferma. It focuses speci¿cally on the sensory politics of the Good Friday processions that were organised by the Confraternity of the Misericordia Maggiore, and considers how these events were encountered by embodied spectators. The Misericodia was a highly prestigious confraternity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the liturgical and secular processions they staged around the Venetian-ruled town were spectacles of multisensory experience where sight, scent, sound and space were entangled in celebration and worship. Examining the expansive sensorial field of the Confraternity of the Misericordia Maggiore, this talk presents the concept of ‘sensoryscapes’ to capture the intra-active entanglements between material environments, objects and the human sensorium during processions in the early modern period. By bringing historical sources from the confraternity’s archives into dialogue with the field of sensory studies, it is argued that these multisensory events were vital tools of civic self-fashioning through which the Confraternity could demonstrate its power and wealth to an embodied public in Bergamo.

Dr Emanuela Vai is a cultural historian and digital humanities scholar working at the intersection of early modern history, music and material culture studies. She is Head of Research and Senior Fellow at Worcester College, and she leads on all conservation, research, and curatorial aspects at the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments in the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford. Previously she held positions at the University of Oxford (as Scott Opler Fellow), the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York, the Royal Academy of Music Museum and Villa I Tatti – the Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies. She is the Principal Investigator of a British Academy-funded project on “Marvellous and Monstruous Musical Instruments”, and the Principal Investigator of an EU-funded project on “Fantastic Musical Instruments of the Global Renaissance”, based with the Hill Collection of Musical Instruments at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. She is also the academic lead for the “Digital Humanities and Sensory Heritage Network” at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). She has published on musical instruments, soundscapes, space and the senses in Renaissance social life; and her work has been funded by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the EU Commission, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the Newton Trust at the University of Cambridge, among others.

*El seminario es un evento mixto: para asistir contactar con Paloma Heredia (Paloma.Heredia@uab.cat) e indicar si la asistencia será presencial o virtual. Seminario impartido en inglés, con debate en castellano, catalán, italiano e inglés. Seminario computable como actividad formativa del programa de doctorado de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Organitzat per Tess Knighton:
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Asistencia en persona o virtual, contacte Paloma Heredia Ruiz:
Paloma.Heredia@uab.cat