The struggle between science and faith, truth and falsehood, and between people of good intentions and charlatans (forgers, deceivers, propagandists, etc.) has gone on since the advent of Man.

We might disagree as to when the public discussion of science and faith, truth and falsehood, FIRST emerged, or first became important.  But we can NOT disagree that the Rinascimento (aka Renaissance) in Italy, FIRST raised the subject to the level of "exhalted discourse".

Therefore, I was struck by the NEGATIVE inference of the Conference title, toward Italy, as if Italy were the cradle, or midwife of "falsehood".

I would have thought that a title of "Italy, the Crucible of Science vs Faith Battle", would have been far more accurate, positive, and even "honest". :)

Another example of the "perils" of allowing those who have been "propagandized" negatively, or harbor antipathy toward your culture, to write it's history.
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Thanks to H-Italy, Paul Apria, Editor

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD IN EARLY MODERN ITALY

The Second Biennial Villa Spelman Conference Villa Spelman, The Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies Florence, Italy  October 15-17, 2004

Between 1300 and 1700, Italy saw the destabilization of notions about truth and falsehood on a number of fronts, from the personal, intimate, and sexual, to the public, philosophical, and religious.

Litterati, philosophers, and religious figures railed against falsehoods while struggling ever harder to discern and define truths.

Popes and antipopes proliferated, councils rebelled against them all; popes and emperors sacked and burned their own and one another's domains. Jews and Muslims seemed more than ever to mock the Church's pretension to truth by their stubborn refusal to convert; they were joined after 1400 by ever-more frightening enemies of the faith: witches, magicians, and the revivers of pagan philosophies
from Platonism to Epicureanism.

Philologists threatened to "ruin the sacred truths" by exposing them as human artifacts of precise times and places. The destruction of Constantinople echoed Lorenzo Valla's deconstruction of the donatio Constantini.

Forgers of all stripes in all fields blurred the boundaries between artistic or literary imitation and venal or ideological forgery: Michelangelo produced pseudo-antique sculpture that proved his artistic virtù, the renegade scholar Annius of Viterbo created an entire pseudo-antiquity that dethroned Athens and Rome while making
Christianity all but superfluous.

Like "man," women became a topic of debate in themselves: what constituted proper femininity, what was women's place, and how should they behave as either mother, wife, virgin, or whore? What roles best suited them? The same questions affected children and their education.

Topics to be explored may include: - the search for religious or philosophical truth about human nature, society, men, women, or children - legitimacies (of rule, of birth) - legitimate and illegitimate deception or dissimulation in the arts, politics, or
personal life - language and truth (Latin vs. vernacular, the questione della lingua) - the codification of artistic mediums and genres (epic vs. romance, paragoni) - truth in medicine and science - monsters, marvels, and miracles - philology, forgery, and imposture - the imagination as vehicle of truth or falsehood.

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Proposals of roughly 250 words must indicate how the problem of truth and falsehood will be specifically addressed in papers presented, include a one-page cv, and be submitted by March 26, 2004. Organizers: Walter Stephens and Julia L. Hairston

Address all inquiries and submissions to julia.hairston@uniroma1.it or
jlhairston@eapitaly.it, or via fax: +39 06 5744801