This interdisciplinary conference is part of a joint project initiated by the Università L’Orientale, Naples (Italy), and the Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse (France), and entitled “Textiles and the texture of ideas in early modern Europe (1589-1801): How the craft and its products interacted with philosophy, literature and the visual arts”. It will be held at the Université de Haute-Alsace from 21st to 23rd May 2026″. It follows up on a conference hosted by the Unviversità L’Orientale in September 2025. We invite papers with a focus on the interaction between the material and the immaterial aspects of the craft of weaving, approached from various angles, in the early modern period. The aim is to explore aspects of the interactions between textile manufacturing and its products and the individual or collective imagination, intellectual life as well as the ‘world picture’ and mental representations in the early modern period. We welcome interdisciplinary papers at the crossroads of, but not limited to, any ones of the following: cultural history, social history, microhistory, history of ideas or intellectual history, the history of technology, philosophy, linguistics, literary studies, material studies, visual arts studies, crafts, aesthetics, memorial studies, intermedial studies.

Please send your paper proposals in English (300 words approximately) as well as a short biography to Anna Maria Cimitile (amcimitile@unior.it) and Laurent Curelly (laurent.curelly@uha.fr) by 15 September 2025.

Responses to paper proposals will be given by 15 October 2025.