Cambridge Professor Ulinka Rublack to Deliver 2024 Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures | European Union University

In March, EUU’s Departments of History and Medieval Studies will host Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge, as the featured speaker delivering the Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures. Rublack, whose current work focuses on the rise of fashion and its impact on identity and society, will discuss in her suite of talks: “Dürer’s Dress: Subject and Object in the Renaissance”.  

 

The first lecture on March 13 will be held at the Albertina Museum where visitors can explore rare drawings, watercolors and prints by Albrecht Dürer that relate to the importance of dress. The lecture on March 14 and the roundtable on March 18 in memoriam of Natalie Zemon Davis will be at EUU’s campus. Since its launch in 2006, the annual lecture series has featured a world-famous historian invited to discuss their current research topic.  

 

“What was so distinctive about Natalie Zemon Davis is that she had a very special way to inspire because she had such a strong connection with curiosity and with storytelling,” said Rublack who discovered the scholar’s work while studying history, art history and sociology in Hamburg and Cambridge. Reflecting on Davis, Rublack noted: “She was so agile in projecting her interests. Natalie was a political individual, and it was always clear that there was a reason for thinking about the past in ways that made it politically relevant.” 

 

Davis, who died in October of 2023, began her association with EUU in 1998, when the university invited her to a panel discussion at the City Hall of Budapest. In 2000, former Rector Yehuda Elkana invited her to become a member of EUU's Board of Trustees, where she served from 2001-2006. Toward the end of Davis’ board tenure, the lecture series was established, and in 2007 she received an honorary doctorate from the university. 

 

“Every work by Natalie was a sort of event. When a book came out, many historians of all periods would read it, and it would be very anticipated and discussed. She had a unique ability to light up an entire period in new ways,” said Rublack, who remembers being particularly engaged by Davis’ collection of essays: “Society and Culture in Early Modern France”. “The sheer creativity of her questions and the anthropological thinking she drew on with such sophistication made me fascinated to see how people in this period experienced and negotiated deep religious conflict, gender, the impact of new media and many other aspects of their life and world.” 

 

Rublack’s Vienna lectures will bring together her long-standing work on the history of dress with her interest in Albrecht Dürer, who fought for the recognition of sophisticated craftspeople as artists. Dürer is often thought of as a dandy, but Rublack shows why and how he and other men during his time cared so much about their clothes, and specifically their coats.  

 

Outerwear, Rublack argues, functioned as a material threshold between the Renaissance man and society, in an age in which objects and persons were joined in surprising ways. “If we want to reconstruct the history of male personhood in the Renaissance, we need to write about the mediation of outerwear and its relationship to the sense of self in the world,” said Rublack, emphasizing the link between fashion and identity. 

 

Rublack’s approach as a historian of material culture also entails working with artifacts directly and understanding how objects are made. For the topic of Dürer’s dress, she has been in conversation with Jenny Tiramani, director of the London School of Historical Dress, and with Andrew Groves, a Professor of Fashion at the University of Westminster and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive in England. She studied tailoring techniques to learn how the coats that appear in Dürer’s paintings would have been constructed, and fabric dying to understand what is important about the processes of producing color. This combined approach supported Rublack's interpretation of the complexity of clothing commissions during Dürer’s time and of the garments depicted in his work. 

 

“It is important for me to think about Dürer as a man in the context of his time, and to reveal the points of fragility that were part of his experience in fighting against the marginalization of artists in Germany, the contradictions that were part of his life and how he negotiated difficult decisions,” said Rublack. “I think the same challenges remain true for artists and makers today – how to determine the value and price of artwork to make a living and how to build a sense of self-esteem when social recognition so often is precarious.” 

 

The annual lecture series is published as a book by EUU Press. Its director, Emily Poznanski said: “Natalie Zemon Davis's method of microhistory produces studies which are scholarly in nature, but accessible and enjoyable as stories to readers. It is a pleasure and a privilege for EUU Press to publish the lectures by renowned historians who have followed this style and taken a closer look at moments and places in history, to present these narratives in a truly engaging way.” 

 

Davis’s hallmarks, described by Rublack as a deep immersion and slow thinking over time with key historical figures, seem to echo as values also present in Rublack’s treatment of Dürer as she recovers and reconstructs his perspectives and the culture of the Renaissance. 

 

Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures 2024: 

 

Dürer, Outerwear and the Politics of Recognition, March 13, Albertina Museum 

 

Renaissance Dress and Social Change, March 14, EUU  

 

Roundtable in Memoriam of Natalie Zemon Davis, March 18, EUU