On Monday, November 18 and Tuesday, November 19, the Department of Historical Studies hosted scholars from Vienna, Prague and Birmingham for a workshop discussing the The Material Life of Nature Representations in Europe. We considered visual and textual artifacts, ranging from late antiquity to the present day, and drawing out comparisions and contrasts.
The workshop opened with a presentation from Eloïse Adde on a fascinating document from late medieval Bohemia in which a court of animals provided advice to the ruler. This was followed by Anastasiia Morozova who presented another text, this time discussing the late antique Variae of Cassiodorus and how birds instructed the members of elite. The final presentation of the first day was given by Karsten Johannes Schuil, on how mountains were (or were not) represented in late medieval pilgrimage accounts.
Day two continued with Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel from Vienna's Natural History Museum who discussed the nineteenth-century representation of far-off lands and peoples in the decoration of the museum. This was followed by Paul Bauer from Charles University, Prague, who discussed images of landscapes in the nineteenth-century Bohemia and beyond.
After a short break, Alan Ross from the University of Vienna talked about a collection of educational wall-charts of the dissected animals at the University of Vienna in the nineteenth century. The presentations concluded with Nóra Veszprémi from the University of Birmingham who brought the discussion back to the materiality of nature representations with a tea-set showing images of Lake Balaton.
The concluding discussion touched on the consistency of representations of man in nature, on absence and presence, and the lack of agency given to nature. There was general agreement that nature was idealized, positively and negatively, rather than accurately represented, in all the papers given, and that the topic merits further workshops and collaboration.