Impressions from The 61st Annual Meeting of the RSA in Berlin, March 26–28, 2015. Part 1: Finding the right session (wersja polska poniżej)

Going to my second conference with the Renaissance Society of America, I was convinced that this time my choice of papers will prove more accurate thanks to the experience gathered two years ago. But finding the right session was as difficult as always. It had to do with two major limitations: incomprehensibility and irrelevance (from the perspective of my research, of course).  

 

Society's and conference name from the cover of the book of abstracts

Starting with the first point: I discovered that too quick and careless pronunciation of native speakers, rather than foreign accents, presented often the biggest obstacle to understanding. Those whose first language was other than English usually proceeded more slowly with their presentations and thus could be followed more easily. 

But the problem of comprehension does not end there – papers are not only read aloud rather than spoken, but also have style and form of a written article rather than an oration they should, I think, resemble. Most notable example is a completely ‘typographical’ phrase ‘quote-unquote’, which breaks the rhythm of a sentence, making it very hard to understand.

Finally, one notices the problem of presenters so familiar to a given topic they forget to provide other scholars with sufficient information on it. Sure, they are talking to specialists. But the specialties are so narrow nowadays that only very limited common knowledge should be assumed. 

Yet comprehensibility alone does not suffice. A given topic has to be moreover perceived as relevant by the audience. There, the paper’s title and its abstract should provide necessary information. However, they rather tend to lead to confusion. Behind very ‘inclusive’ titles and abstracts, which promise considerations interesting for many, hide presentations on very limited, narrow topics. Authors probably hope to attract bigger audiences this way, but somebody who expects, say, an analysis of theological trends in the sixteenth century yet ends up hearing about a single Italian manuscript will be only frustrated.

 

Given these limitations, one can imagine the number of ‘successful’ choices to be quite small, but at least papers in this group will be long remembered for their outstanding quality.