CfP: From imagination to remains, from remains to imagination: literary representations of ancient Greece in its materiality (14th-19th centuries)
February 25-26, 2027 at the French School of Athens
ERC Advanced Grant AGRELITA The Reception of Ancient Greece in pre-modern French Literature and Illustrations of Manuscripts and Printed Books (1320-1550): How invented memories shaped the identity of European communities
Direction: Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas https://agrelita.hypotheses.org/
The AGRELITA project was launched on October 1st, 2021. It is a 6-year project (2021-2027), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement n° 101018777).
This conference aims to explore representations of the material realities of ancient Greece in literary works written between the 14th and 19th centuries, and to examine how authors constructed images of ancient Greece based on its materiality, as they appropriated and incorporated it into various texts. Its purpose is to analyze how the materiality of ancient Greece (monuments, buildings, ruins, works of art, objects, clothing, etc.) was imagined or reproduced, reconstructed, reinterpreted and re-imagined, both before and after the discovery of material remains during travels, explorations and archaeological excavations. It thus focuses on the shifts and, above all, the interactions between, on the one hand, the constructions of the imagination and thought, and, on the other, the material remains of ancient Greece discovered over the centuries, which are reflected in literature.
We deliberately consider the corpus of literary texts in its broadest sense, as it was understood throughout most of the centuries under consideration: novels, poetry, historical texts, travelogues, antiquarian literature, literature on art and architecture, archaeological treatises, accounts of archaeological expeditions, educational texts… The aim will be to cross-reference analyses of writing forms that are often treated separately. Attention will be focused on the texts and also on the visual images that may accompany them, which depict material remains associated with ancient Greece, as well as the practices linked to them (political, artistic, religious, funerary, etc.).
The material realities depicted by the authors are, in fact, sometimes the product of the imagination alone. We are thinking here particularly of texts from the 14th and early 15th centuries, though not exclusively. More often, they reflect and rework Greek realia or elements identified as such: reproduction, transformation, and the projection of the imagination and/or conceptual frameworks are thus intertwined. The authors of the texts under consideration sometimes had direct access to the Greek realia they depict—travelers, antiquarians, archaeologists…—and/or wrote on the basis of various intermediary sources and their own vision of Greece. Their thinking and imagination may have shaped the representation and interpretation of this materiality, discovered directly or indirectly, to the point of reinventing it. Which aspects of the materiality of ancient Greece have interested authors over the centuries, through which modes of representation and for what purposes? How do different representations of the materiality of ancient Greece relate to one another from one era to the next, within the same era and sometimes within the same work? How does the reception of this materiality also vary from one cultural sphere to another?
From the growing fascination with ancient Greece that emerged in the 14th century through to the birth of modern archaeology in the 19th century, this conference aims to explore the fantasized material representations of ancient Greece found in literary texts. Its goal is to trace the evolution of the perspective taken by numerous authors on the material remains of Greece, and that of their representations—that is, their modes of appropriation. In this regard, we believe it is essential to place the works under study in their historical context in order to better understand the issues (aesthetic, political, identity-related, etc.) underlying these representations.
Proposals (including a title and an abstract of 200–300 words, and a brief CV) should be submitted by 15 May 2026 to Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas and Lorène Bellanger at the following addresses:
Proposals may be submitted in French or English.
To ensure publication before the end of the ERC project, we ask authors to send us their text by 23 December 2026. Changes may be made after the conference.
The articles resulting from the contributions will be published by Brepols in the book series “Recherches sur les Réceptions de l’Antiquité”: http://www.brepols.net/ Pages/BrowseBySeries.aspx?TreeSeries=RRA.