Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Friday, October 27, 2017 in Conferences, Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC.

Enlightened Princesses: Britain and Europe, 1700-1820, an international symposium held October 29-31 in London, will bring together eminent academicians and museum scholars to investigate the role played by royal women—electresses, princesses, queens consort, reigning queens, and empresses—in the shaping of court culture and politics in Europe of the long eighteenth century.

Christopher Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, will present the lecture, “Two Queens and a Villa: Enlightenment Sociability in Turin,” on October 31 in the Tower of London. Other venues are Kensington Palace and Hampton Court Palace.  Papers will explore such themes as royal women as political agents; royal women: networks and conversations; royal women as patrons of art and architecture; royal women and the crafting of image, and royal women: engaging with technology and nature.

Recent research has explored how in fulfilling these roles they made major contributions to the arts; the development of new models of philanthropy and social welfare; the promotion and support of advances in science and medicine; as well as trade and industry; and the furthering of imperial ambition. While local contexts may have conditioned the forms such initiatives took, their objectives were rooted in a European tradition of elite female empowerment.

The three-day symposium was organized by Historic Royal Palaces, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, in association with the exhibition ‘Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World‘, on view at Kensington Palace from June 22 through November 12, 2017.

*Garden facade of Villa della Regina,Turin, Italy