06 May 2021
The Tenth Annual RefoRC Conference on Early Modern Christianity – and the first hybrid one – was off to a great start. Instead of the world coming to Budapest, Budapest went to everywhere between Edmonton and Seoul.
After opening words of Zsombor Tóth and the general director of the Research Centre for the Humanities Balog Balázs, the participants were introduced to the fascinating topic of the Long Reformation by plenary speakers Alec Ryrie and Zsombor Tóth.
Before the shortpapers with an even wider variety of topics started, a number of academic publisher shared their ideas on how COVID-19 also had positive effects on their work and how they would like research to continue and expand, and how important a network such as REFORC is for them. As to topics for new books it was found that quality is important: it starts with wonder to get a good book. Focusing on interrelations and other religions was also mentioned as a wish, like the Jewish and Muslim traditions in the Early Modern period. An interesting and important question for publishers is, how the relation between digital resources and printed sources should look like in the future.
“Digital” was a keyword in this roundtable, as it was in today’s shortpapers. Digitization opens up an immense arrange of possibilities, but Jutta Dresken-Weiland (Schnell+ Steiner) reminded us also of the haptic element: we want to just hold a book in our hands, with texts and with beautiful images.
Indeed, the REFORC conference is partly digital and that has its advantages, but we do miss the haptic element, meals, drinks and the walk along the Danube as well as the personal meetings.
