DunNETt Lecture Livestream September 12th 2026
DunNETt Lecture Livestream
September 12th 2026 at 11am BST (GMT+1), 8pm AEST
The speaker is John Gagné and the title of his talk is Despoiling the King in 1525: Capture, Plunder, and the Battle of Pavia
The online lecture will take place on the Society’s Zoom account.
The link is in your Whispering Gallery and September email newsletter.
John Gagné is Cassamarca Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. His research pursues the intersections between war, representation, material culture, and the human body. He is the author of Milan Undone: Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars (Harvard, 2021), and co-author with Timothy McCall ofFabric of War: The Material Culture and Social Lives of Banners in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2025). He has also co-edited a collection of essays on overlooked labourers in premodern warcraft titled Shadow Agents of Renaissance War (Amsterdam, 2023). His research has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Journal, Art History, and I Tatti Studies. He’s currently working on a book about the premodern iron prosthetic hand and its significance as a tool to imagined mechanised embodiment.
Following the 500th anniversary of Renaissance Europe’s most renowned battle, we return to the Park of Mirabello, the walled hunting grounds outside the old Visconti palace at Pavia. It was here that Imperial forces destroyed France’s army and captured King François I as he fought to regain the duchy of Milan. Leaving aside questions of military history, this lecture explores the cultural significance of ensnaring one of Europe’s great kings on an Italian battlefield. By focusing on the monarch’s capture, we investigate not just the seizure of the royal person, but also the plundering of objects charged with his charisma: armour, weapons, decorations, flags, and clothing. These despoiled objects authenticated Imperial victory and exalted their owners. The “disassembly” of the royal warrior produced a host of these battle relics, whose traces – both real and legendary – this presentation reconstructs.
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