Kairos in Berlin
My RSA experience this year ended with ‘Seizing the Moment: Rethinking Occasio in Early Modern Literature and Culture’, the panel put together by the Grasping Kairos network, which was scheduled for the very last session on the last day of the conference. It was wonderful to have a whole panel devoted to kairos in Berlin: to hear more about the work Joanne Paul, Kristine Johanson, and Marina Ansaldo are doing in relation to kairotic temporality; and to get feedback on my own research into kairos in early seventeenth century revenge tragedy. However, other network members also presented at RSA this year, and their papers connected with concepts of kairos / occasio in a variety of ways.
Matthew Champion, St Catharine’s College Cambridge, organised a wonderful panel on ‘Ringing the Hours: Temporalities of Sound in Early Modern Europe’, and presented a fascinating paper himself on ‘Chanting the Hours: Mechanical Bells in the Early Modern Low Countries’. Matthew perhaps got closest to concepts of kairos when he showed his audience an image of the Annunciation from a Flemish Book of Hours, which depicted the Angel Gabriel pointing to a clock. If you could let us know the reference for that image, Matthew, we’d be very grateful! The idea that Gabriel is ‘starting the clock’ on the end time with this gesture, and in this most theologically important of moments, is fascinating, and certainly works, as Matthew suggested, to destabilise our association of religious liturgy with bell time and the secular development of capitalism with the evolution of the mechanical clock.
Simona Cohen, Tel Aviv University, gave a rich and broad-ranging paper on ‘Transmission and Transformations of Time Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance translatio Propaganda’, as part of a panel focused on ‘Translatio as a Key Renaissance Concept’, which took place on the first day of the conference. She spoke directly about kairos at several points in her talk: she contemplated Cicero’s definition of decorum; and the classical concept of kairos as a time of both ‘doing’ and ‘not doing’. She made the important point that scholars often ignore the development of the concept of kairos during the middle ages, jumping from classical to early modern conceptualisations of kairos and failing to recognise it’s resonances in the medieval period. She spoke of the representation of kairos as deaf and naked in the twelfth century, and chiming with Matthew’s paper, she considered the creation of the moment of the Annunciation as a moment of kairos in the fourteenth century. She analysed a fascinating range of artistic depictions of kairos, from artists such as Francesco Salviati (Prudence seizing occasio), Giulio Romano (kairos crowning chronos) and Agnolo Bronzino (the allegory of Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time). She contemplated the relationship between kairos and the early modern concept of veritas filia temporis, as well as the moral relativisim which the concept of kairos enables. I am still waiting to get my hands on Simona’s latest monograph, Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art, recently deposited in the British Library, and am very excited to find out more.
If you would like more information about kairos in Berlin, please do get in touch!
