Sixteenth Century Society Conference 2012 notes

The nice thing about SCSC, which I attended for the first time last week, is that the degree of separation between the many presentation topics and what I'm working on right now tends to be very low. At MLA and GSA and often at Kalamazoo, most papers are, for me, introductions to new topics or treatments of familiar ones that I'd never looked at in quite the same way before. At SCSC, in contrast, there were some papers where I already knew both the primary and the secondary literature, and it made possible a different kind of scholarly conversation.

There were several strong sessions and excellent papers. Here are a few personal favorites:

• Brendan Cook, Carthage College: "Thomas Heywood’s Sallust Translation and the Commentary of Lorenzo Valla." Humanist translations of the classics as a political and intellectual battlefield - who knew? An excellent demonstration of how exciting something like translation studies can be.
• Amy Burnett, University of Nebraska-Lincoln: "Print, Polemics and the Lord’s Supper in Ulm." I enjoyed this paper both for tracking down the actual author of a pamphlet falsely printed under the name of Konrad Sam, and for examining how rejection of Luther's sacramental theology was not a uniform "Zwinglianism," but instead a variety of dissenting positions.
• Michael Bruening, Missouri University of Science and Technology: "Martin Bucer's Eucharistic Debates with the Swiss." This paper, focusing on the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, was a very interesting application of psychological insights to the practice of history, what might be called an "affective turn."
• Andrew Thomas, Salem College: "Imperial Cities: Sacred Space and Imperial Power in Nuremberg and Constantinople/Istanbul ca. 1493." Hartmann Schedel and the Nuremberg Chronicle? Yes, I've written about it. End Time prophecies of a Last World Emperor like pseudo-Methodius? Yes, I've written about that, too. Combining both topics in order to compare the free imperial city of Nuremberg and Constantinople under the Ottoman Turks, and showing how there are many surprising parallels between them? No, I would never have thought of doing that. It's a fascinating project that I look forward to seeing in print.