In Europe and in China a lasting historical revolution was made by antiquaries—scholars who
combined textual studies with close observation of old things, natural things, and different
kinds of people. And in both cultures the peak of this intellectual creativity was linked to an
explosion of the arts and sciences. Often, interest in antiquarianism has been an annex to a
much more intense focus on the arts of the period. In this conference we propose to consider
the phenomenon of antiquarianism in its own terms, through the ways and means of its
wide-ranging scholarship. And rather than hewing to well-worn chronological paths we move
beyond the Song Period and the Renaissance. We also consider the impact of European antiquarianism on Chinese scholarship, and that of Chinese antiquarian scholarship on Europeans
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conference takes a comparative approach and
brings together eminent historians of European and Chinese art, science, religion, literature,
and culture.
March 25
THE PAST
Leon Botstein
Bard College
Welcome
Peter N. Miller
Bard Graduate Center
François Louis
Bard Graduate Center
Opening Remarks
Alain Schnapp
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris
East and West: The Different Patterns of Antiquarianism in Ancient and Modern Context
Christopher S. Wood
Yale University
The Credulity Problem
Ingrid D. Rowland
American Academy in Rome
Curzio Inghirami’s Etruscan Forgeries
Ingo Herklotz
University of Marburg
The Academia Basiliana: Greek Philology and Ecclesiastical History in Barberini Rome
Martin Mulsow
University of Munich
Antiquarianism, Libertinism, Religion: Antonius Van Dale
Ankeney Weitz
Colby College
Collecting ‘The Records of the Sages’: Archaic Bronzes as Sacred Text and Economic Commodity in Song-Dynasty China, 960–1276
Craig Clunas
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
At Play with the Ancients: Pleasure, Power and Antiquity in Ming China
Bai Qianshen
Boston University
Novelty and Archaism in Late Ming and Early Qing Calligraphy
Michael Nylan
University of California at Berkeley
Remaking the Past:The Wu Family Shrines
Bruce Rusk
University of California at Los Angeles
Artifacts of Authentication: People Making Texts Making Things in Late Imperial China
March 26
NATURE
Nathan Sivin
University of Pennsylvania
The Sky and the Past at the High Point of Chinese Astronomy, 1280
Roger Hart
University of Texas
Forging Antiquities: “China” and the “West” in Seventeenth-Century China
Kenneth Hammond
New Mexico State University
Wang Shizhen and Li Shizhen: Archaism and Scientific Thought in Sixteenth-Century China
Georges Métailié
C.N.R.S., Paris
The Botany of Cheng Yaotian (1725–?1814): Multiple Perspectives on Plants
Benjamin A. Elman
Princeton University
Comment
Nancy Siraisi
C.U.N.Y
Styles of Medical Antiquarianism
Claudia Swan
Northwestern University
Accounting for Nature in the Sixteenth Century: Authority, Legitimacy, and the Role of Experience
Brian Ogilvie
University of Massachusetts
“Philosophy, Physick and Antiquity”: Natural History, Cultural History, and Sense of Place in the Seventeenth Century
Ralph Häfner
Free University, Berlin
The Antiquarian Exploration of Celestial Archetypes in Early Enlightenment Philology. Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Astral Poetry
Florence Hsia
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Enlightened Antiquarianism and the Chinese Astronomical Tradition
March 27
PEOPLES
Brian Curran
Penn State University
Real Hieroglyphs: Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Invention in Early Renaissance Egyptology, 1436 –1500
Sabine MacCormack
University of Notre Dame
The Romans Imagined and For Real: Historical and Antiquarian Research in Sixteenth-Century Spain
Jan Papy
University of Louvain
Far and Away? Japan, Egypt and the Ruins of Ancient Rome in Justus Lipsius’ Intellectual Journey
Thomas Cerbu
University of Georgia
Byzantine Studies in the Seventeenth Century: An Intellectual Property Dispute?
Noel Malcolm
Oxford University
The Study of Islam in Early Modern Europe: Obstacles and Missed Opportunities
Joan-Pau Rubiés
London School of Economics
India, China and the World History of Religion
David Mungello
Baylor University
Whose Antiquarianism? Europe Versus China in the Chinese Rites Controversy
Hu Minghui
University of Chicago
Accommodation and Conflict: The Paradoxical Dynamics of Joachim Bouvet’s Classical Studies in Early Qing China
Leo K. Shin
University of British Columbia
Thinking About “Non-Chinese” in Ming China
Laura Hostetler
University of Illinois
Qing Views of Europeans in the Huang Qing Zhigong Tu (Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples)
Jonathan Spence
Yale University
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