Allegory in the Early Modern World: Image, Body, Text is a CRRS (Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies) Working Group that met monthly from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025. The Working Group's year-long activities culminated in a public one-day colloquium held on April 17, 2025 from 9:30am to 5:00pm at the Victoria College Chapel in the University of Toronto. 

The group proposes to rethink allegory and its cultural manifestations between 1350-1700. Instead of the narrow definition of Early Modern allegory as a textual phenomenon, we propose an interdisciplinary approach that highlights allegory’s intermedial, performative, and multi-sensorial aspects. Moreover, as Barbara Johnson argues, the inherent tension in allegory between corporeal signifier and abstract signified introduces a “difference between self and other” at the heart of this interpretive form, which makes it prone to potential slippage, interpretive failure, and playful misinterpretation. This makes allegory a productive site for the study of the ways gender, race, and other identities were negotiated in the Early Modern world.

A partial list of themes we are interested in exploring includes: allegory and embodied cognition; female and women’s allegorical representations in sacred art and the roles of gender and sex in allegory; transatlantic and transnational circulation of allegorical interpretations, debates, and artworks through texts, images, and objects; allegory in the colonial contexts and allegories of race; historical shifts from medieval to early modern allegory; allegory and misinterpretation; multi-sensorial and performative reception of texts and works of art.

The meetings are organized by Dr. Eleonora Cappuccilli and Eyal Pundik.