The Medieval Academy Blog

Remembering the Middle Ages? Reception, Identity, Politics
Conference Dates: April 5^th-6^th, 2019
Abstract Deadline: January 7^th, 2019

We invite submissions of abstracts for 20-minute papers to be presented at the two-day conference, “Remembering the Middle Ages? Reception, Identity, Politics,” to be held at Fischer Hall, the University of Notre Dame’s London campus, on April 5th-6th, 2019.

The conference aims to unite an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation about the uses of the “medieval” period across time. Particularly, we ask how the concept of a “cultural memory” of the Middle Ages can be useful (or not) in understanding how and why scholars, artists, audiences, and other users have resourced or imagined the Middle Ages, in any post-medieval period. We ask participants to interrogate the linguistic, material, and social networks that have been created by medieval things over time.

Papers considering the intersections of medievalisms, cultural memory, and concepts of identity are particularly welcome. Potential topic areas might include, but are not limited to: discourses of race or ethno-nationalism; medievalisms that remember a multiple and complex Middle Ages; antiquarian scholarship; visual and performance art; translation theory; heritage discourses; global remembrances of the European Middle Ages; assemblages of the European and non-European in medievalist projects; cultural memory of the Middle Ages; the politics of medievalism; periodization; intersections between nativist dialogues and medievalism; right-wing and/ or left-wing medievalisms; medievalisms that disrupt stereotypes.

We encourage researchers at all career stages to apply. Please submit 300-word abstracts and a short bio to mensley@nd.edu and francesca.allfrey@kcl.ac.uk by 7 January, 2019

Time/ Le temps

Symposium of the International Medieval Society, Paris
Paris, 8–10 July /juillet 2019
L’appel à communications français suit l’appel anglais.

Call for Papers:

“What is time?” asked St. Augustine. “Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time?”

From the diverse reckoning of historical dates to the calculation of the date of Easter and the elaboration of the liturgical calendar, medieval scholars counted time. The movement of the bodies in the night sky allowed medieval viewers to calculate the hour, and so did such instruments as the sundial, the water clock, the candle clock, and eventually the mechanical clock. Architects, sculptors, illuminators, and artisans strove to represent time iconographically in different media, and complex programs of images employed allegorical or anagogical relations in order to interweave narratives. Narrative writers experimented with ways to represent the passage of time and organize narrative action, while lyric poets used patterned repetition to turn time back on itself. In the domain of musical notation, late medieval theorists developed different ways of indicating rhythm, a phenomenon whose absence from earlier notation, such as that of vernacular monophony, has inspired debates among modern scholars.

In the medieval monastic context, time consisted of nested cycles that determined daily, monthly, and annual practice by building concrete associations between time and types of labor, reading, and eating. In this, time not only corresponded to, but was a feature of, a material world that could be transcended through contemplation. For their part, philosophers and theologians reflected on the points of articulation between different temporalities: the linear and finite time of human life, the cyclical time of the liturgy, the eschatological time of Salvation.

Today, historians ask with Jacques Le Goff, “Must we chop up history into slices?,” and some question the traditional period markers that separate Antiquity from the Middle Ages and the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, as well as the effects of that periodization for conceptualizing the historical object.

How, therefore, can we best reflect on duration, on the event, on the moment? How can we reflect on the experience of time’s dilation, or of its depth?

For its 16th annual symposium, the International Medieval Society Paris invites scholarly papers on any aspect of time in the Middle Ages. Papers may deal with the experience or exploitation of time, its reckoning or measuring, its inscription, its theorization, or the question of how or why or whether we should demarcate the “Middle Ages.” Papers focusing on historical or cultural material from medieval France or post-Roman Gaul, or on texts written in medieval French or Occitan, are particularly encouraged, but compelling papers on other material will also be considered.

The annual symposium of the International Medieval Society Paris is an interdisciplinary, international, bilingual meeting of faculty, researchers, and advanced graduate students. We welcome submissions in French or English from art history, musicology, studies of ritual or liturgy, history of dance, literature, linguistics, philosophy, theology, anthropology, history, history of science and technology, or archaeology.

An abstract of no more than 300 words (in French or English) for a paper of 20 minutes should be sent, along with a CV, to communications.ims.paris@gmail.com by 30 November. Abstracts will receive a preliminary blind review before the final selection and should give a clear idea of the topic and anticipated argument of the paper. Presenters will be notified of their selection in January 2019.

To commemorate the IX centenary of Pedro Ansúrez’s death the Instituto Universitario de Historia Simancas has organized an international conference, which will take place at the University of Valladolid, 21-23 February 2019. Organizers seek to bring together specialists in Castile, the Iberian kingdoms and the European realms during the late 11th and early 12th centuries.

We welcome scholars whose research focuses on topics related to medieval history. Proposals should include title, an abstract of c.500 words, and the participant’s information (name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address). A participant information form is currently available on http://eventos.uva.es/go/condeansurez. Applications should be submitted, in .pdf form, to congreso.ansurez@uva.es and will be evaluated by the organizing committee. The languages of the conference will be Spanish, English, French and Italian.

Deadline

Deadline for papers is December 15, 2018

Topics

Ansúrez was a prominent political figure in medieval Iberia, known for his leadership during the repopulation of the kingdom and, specifically, the foundation of Valladolid. Regarding this, potential topics for papers may include, but are not limited to:

• Pedro Ansúrez and his time: the medieval aristocracies of the Iberian Peninsula and Western Europe
• Conflict, war and villages in the Europe of the Full Middle Ages
• Economy and productive activities during the medieval expansion
• The Duero river basin: political evolution and international confluences
• Medieval urbanism and constructive impulse
• Secular and ecclesiastical powers: their role in the articulation of the medieval population
• Medieval urban life
• Material culture and urban artistic creation
• Medieval sources and document analysis
• Reorganization of the urban power in the 11 and 12 centuries
• Memory and dynasty: patronage of medieval nobility
• Women and their contributions
• Literature and mentalities in medieval times
• Representations and myths of the great founders of the medieval Europe
• The recasting of the foundation: historical uses of the medieval past
• Survival: villages and their founders in the 2020 European Horizon

Bursaries 

The Spanish Society for Medieval Studies (SEEM) has collaborated with this congress to provide two assistance scholarships (150 euros each) for members under 30 years of age. These will be granted by strict order of application to the email: secretaria@medievalistas.es