How Can a Gathering of Things Be Transformed into a Scientific Collection?
March 28 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Lisa Regazzoni, a visiting fellow at Bard Graduate Center, will give insight into her efforts to transform the objects from the study of Reinhart Koselleck into a scientific collection with epistemic value. Regazzoni uses these guiding questions in her pursuit: How can new meanings be attributed to these objects, beyond their auratic value, which some might suspect of being the product of a personality cult? What answers can these objects provide to specific research questions? What is the role of material witnesses and, more generally, of the sensorial in accessing the past?

Heavenly Pearls: Nature, Religion, and Politics in Habsburg Spain
March 29 at 6 pm
Zoom / 38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Mónica Domínguez Torres (University of Delaware) explores the connotations and functions that pearls acquired in Spain under Habsburg rule, using the image of Our Lady of the Sagrario that was placed at Toledo Cathedral in 1616. The Virgin is splendidly covered with various pearl-studded garments, including a cloak embroidered with 78,000 natural pearls, coinciding with the “pearl rush” that occurred in the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Cental America throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.