Lecture II: Ulinka Rublack, Renaissance Dress and Social Change
The second lecture of this year's Natalie Zemon Davies Memorial Lecture series follows Dürer to Antwerp, towards the end of his life, and back home to Nuremberg, where his attention to dress would produce some of his most radical prints. The artist was now enjoying the pinnacle of recognition. This meant that he was deeply involved in networks of exchange among art lovers, who often circulated gifts of clothing. Antwerp became a global centre for the trade in fabrics and clothing. At the very end of his stay, and despite being in debt, the artist decided to commission an extremely expensive coat. This lecture answers the question of why he did this and shows how Renaissance dress could create social change and new masculinities.
The lecture will be followed by a reception on CEU campus.
Ulinka Rublack was born in Tübingen in 1967 and discovered the work of Natalie Davis while studying history, art history and sociology in Hamburg and Cambridge. She completed her doctorate at Cambridge and has been a lecturer in Cambridge History since 1996. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017. In 2018, the Humboldt and Thyssen Foundations jointly awarded her a lifetime achievement award for outstanding research and the promotion of academic exchange, the Reimar Lüst Prize. In 2019, her work as a historian and her book The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Defence of His Mother were recognized with Germany's most prestigious award for historians, the Deutscher Historikerpreis. Rublack has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and on methodological issues. Her books have been translated into six languages, including Arabic and Chinese, and her book on Johannes and Katharina Kepler has inspired a novel, a film and a new monument to Katharina. Rublack's latest book is Dürer's Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World (2023); out in German as Dürer in der Zeit der Wunder: Kunst und Gesellschaft an der Schwelle zu einer globalen Welt (2024).