The aim of this international and interdisciplinary conference is to ascertain if, how and to what degree movable type influenced the early modern significance of the aura and appearance of the word. This will be done through a series of papers that reflect on how texts could gain or bestow meaning through their relationship to their material support and physical contexts or in the process of the act of writing itself. What was the significance of the unique existence of writing at the place where it happened to be? And what about the moment when, the way in which and the person by whom it was created? Did writing lose its aura when mechanically reproduced, as Walter Benjamin believed to have been the case for images? Was it altered, or, as the German art historian Horst Bredekamp has argued for devotional images, unaffected by it?
Keynote lectures by Adrian Armstrong (Queen Mary, University of London) and Christopher Wood (Yale University).
For more information, visit the conference website: http://www.auraoftheword.ugent.be