Event Date: 01 Jul 2020 to 04 Jul 2020

Panel at the ‘Kings and Queens 9‘ conference, Luxembourg 

Steven Zwicker said of Restoration England and its literary culture that it was a period particularly ‘conscious of its cultural demarcation’. This is a recurring trope of both contemporary and later scholarship on the re-establishment of the monarchy under Charles II. The proposed panel(s) for the ‘Kings and Queens 9’ conference aims to put this idea into context of both other monarchical restorations and other points of creation or recreation of ‘new’ monarchies. Approaching such times through the ideas of transformative ‘moments’ in histories of royal power and monarchical government it particularly wishes to consider concepts of time, change, and continuity in the representation and practice of monarchy in both contemporary thought and later perceptions. Topics may be drawn from any chronological or geographical context and might include but are not limited to,

• Revolutions involving the replacement of one royal ruler with another
• A change of ruling dynasty (through battle, succession, abdication, election, usurpation, constitutional or international intervention etc.)
• Restoration of former ruling sovereign or dynasty
• (Re)creation of monarchy in a new or re-formed nation state
• Establishment of constitutional monarchy
• Reforming or reconstituting the powers of a monarch or monarchy (either in a hard form through law change or soft form in terms of particular (perhaps ‘modern’) modes of conducting royal business eg in the role of ministers, consorts or wider members of the royal family
• Changes to succession law – particularly the inclusion or exclusion of female heirs – motivations and effects of this change
• Balancing drawing legitimisation from the past with optimistic ideas of change/modernity/ improvement of present and future monarchy
• Forming a new ‘nation’ around a ‘new’ monarchy.
• Did anything really change at this ‘moment’? 
• How crucial was timing – could transformation have happened without a particular combination of events or actions – could/should this transformation have happened at a different time.
• Popular memory of particular ‘transformative’ moments in royal history.

Abstracts of c.250 words and a brief bio or CV should be sent to Sarah Betts at skc501@york.ac.uk by 21st November 2019

Submission date for papers: 21 Nov 2019

Source: http://rensoc.org.uk/news/revolution-restoration-reconstitution-temporality-and-transfer-and-transformation-royal-power