Conferences – 44th Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies

44th Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies, 13–14 October 2017
Vatican Film Library, Saint Louis University
St. Louis, Missouri

Organized annually since 1974 by the Vatican Film Library, part of the Saint Louis University Libraries Department of Special Collections, this two-day conference features papers on a wide variety of topics in medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies — paleography, codicology, illumination, book production, texts and transmission, library history, and more.

2017 Guest Speaker:
Dr. Marianna Shreve Simpson (Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania)
“Persian Manuscripts and the Meaning of Masterpiece”

2017 Conference Sessions:

  • Antiquity Reimagined: Medieval Commentaries on Ancient Authors
  • Islamic Manuscripts
  • Manuscripts from Greater Asia
  • Oriental Manuscripts Encountering European Traditions
  • Manuscripts from Little-Studied Contexts
  • Manuscript Patronage in Medieval Bologna
  • Editing the Antique: Copies of Illustrated Antique and late Antique Manuscripts in the Long Tenth Century

Conference Program and Registration Information
For further information, visit the conference webpage or contact vfl@slu.edu or 314-977-3090.

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2017 New England Medieval Conference – Registration now open

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN
Charlemagne’s Ghost:  Legacies, Leftovers, and Legends of the Carolingian Empire
44th Annual New England Medieval Conference
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Keynote Speaker:  Simon MacLean, University of St. Andrews
“What was Post-Carolingian about Post-Carolingian Europe?”

Saturday, October 7, 2017
Building E51-Room 315
2 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA

For more details and registration information, go to:
https://newenglandmedieval.org/upcoming/

Contact:  Mabel Sorett, mchin@mit.edu

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Call for Papers – Memory and Lineage in Medieval Romance

Memory and Lineage in Medieval Romance

The 25th Leeds International Medieval Congress has a special thematic strand of ‘memory’. Medieval romance lends itself to thinking about memory, in many ways, and not least because of its preoccupation with lineage. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of memory and/or lineage in medieval romance.

The brief is deliberately broad, so please feel free to interpret according to your interest. Some thematic and theoretical approaches to consider may be:

  • inheritance / heritage / legacy
  • remembering and recognition
  • family histories and family politics
  • textual lineage.

Please email proposals (250 words max.) to Kirsty Bolton (University of Southampton) and Grace Timperley (University of Manchester) at lineageinromance@gmail.com by 25 August 2017.

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A response to: West, Charles. “Monks Aristocrats, and Justice: Twelfth-Century Monastic Advocacy in a European Perspective.”

A response to: West, Charles. “Monks Aristocrats, and Justice: Twelfth-Century Monastic Advocacy in a European Perspective.” Speculum 92/2 [2017]:372–404; doi:10.1086/690661.

Reader’s Response: (Jonathan Lyon, Associate Professor of Medieval History, University of Chicago)

Dr. Charles West’s article in the April 2017 volume of Speculum entitled “Monks, Aristocrats, and Justice: Twelfth-Century Monastic Advocacy in a European Perspective” seeks to make a new argument about monastic advocacy, a rich subject in German and French historiography for more than 150 years. As Dr. West and many others know, I am presently at work on a book-length study of this subject based on four years of research, including two years in Germany and Austria. I thank Dr. West for acknowledging me at the start of his article for our occasional conversations on this subject and for citing two of my articles. Unfortunately, while the broad question of the geography of advocacy that Dr. West raises is an excellent one, he does not present a convincing argument in this article or properly account for other research on the topic. Dr. West misrepresents, at a fundamental level, the relationship between monastic advocacy and justice in the Reich. For this reason, I do not believe this argument should have been published in its current form.

Dr. West’s thesis states, “With a focus on the decades around 1100, it [this article] pays particular attention to the judicial dimension of monastic advocacy, more clearly defined than the generic protection or political patronage universally sought by monastic communities everywhere in the Latin West; and it concentrates on old, wealthy, and well-established Benedictine communities, leaving to one side other forms of advocacy, notably those relating to bishops and to the emerging Cistercian group of monasteries. Above all, instead of concentrating on what aristocratic families did with their monastic advocacies, it looks at what monastic communities in the Reich did with their advocates, and how comparable communities elsewhere managed without them” (374). The limitations that Dr. West imposes on his own argument in this thesis are worth noting. The title references the twelfth century, but here he mentions only the decades around 1100, vaguely defined. Moreover, the article opens with a quotation from ca. 1250 by Abbot Herman of Niederaltaich, who lists protection first, justice second when describing the role of monastic advocate, suggesting protection was the more important issue for him (372). Yet, Dr. West puts the issue of protection entirely to the side, focusing here only on justice. Further, he not only sets aside episcopal advocacy and advocacy within the Cistercian context, but also makes no reference to the advocacies for Augustinian and Premonstratensian houses. Indeed, though scholars identify the decades around 1100 as one of the most intensive phases of monastic foundation in the history of the medieval Reich, none of these new houses are addressed here. Dr. West thus asks us to rethink the institution of church advocacy on the basis of brief discussions of only a dozen or so old Benedictine houses in the Reich and another dozen or so from the rest of Europe—a small and, frankly, highly tendentious basis for the broad claims he is making here about a far-reaching twelfth-century phenomenon.

Central to Dr. West’s thesis is his view of why advocacy flourished in the Reich but not elsewhere. He writes, “Rather than considering monastic advocacy as merely reflecting the nature of the Germanic aristocracy or political circumstances, we might see it instead, or as well, as expressing something of the nature of monasticism in these regions: specifically, a profound anxiety about monks carrying out, whether in person or through direct delegation, the full range of secular justice” (395-96). He also states, “The notion that clerics and monks ought not to act as judges themselves was occasionally articulated in the ninth century. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, it seems to have become more strongly and consistently expressed by a range of writers in the Reich” (396). To make this broad argument, Dr. West names only four authors from the Reich: Gerhoch of Reichersberg, the author of the Liber de unitate ecclesiae conservanda, Sigebert of Gembloux, and Abbot Berengoz/Benzo of St Maximin. As Dr. West admits, not a single one of these writers links a concern with monks exercising secular justice directly to advocacy. In other words, Dr. West does not provide any evidence that explicitly supports his argument that monastic writers in the Reich understood advocacy in the religious terms he claims. Just as importantly, Dr. West makes no mention of Otto of Freising or the numerous twelfth-century monastic authors in the Reich who wrote at length about monastic advocates without expressing any “profound anxiety” on the question of why they were necessary. Though Dr. West cites my article about Otto of Freising, he does not address its arguments about ecclesiastical authors’ perceptions of their churches’ advocates [“Otto of Freising’s Tyrants: Church Advocates and Noble Lordship in the Long Twelfth Century,” in Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen, ed. David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 141-167].

While the religious dimensions of Dr. West’s argument are therefore problematic, his understanding of justice more significantly undermines the article. He states in his Conclusion, “In short, the answer to the conundrum with which we began—why only monasteries in the Reich and the surrounding regions had advocates who, though outsiders, played a role in the internal administration of the monastic communities’ judicial affairs—could be that only there did monks accept that such figures and such involvement might be necessary for the fulfillment of the monastic vocation in changing social and political conditions” (404). There are two flaws to this conclusion.

First, Dr. West does not distinguish between an advocate’s role in overseeing capital crimes (as the opening quotation from Herman of Niederaltaich defines it) and monasteries’ judicial affairs more generally. Advocates did not necessarily manage everything pertaining to justice. By the twelfth century, abbots and monks in the Reich did not need advocates when they went to court over property disputes (West, 399, seems to suggest otherwise when arguing why there were no advocates further west). Moreover, they could hold their own courts and serve as judges over some types of cases [see, for example, the mid-twelfth-century document from the monastery of Garsten that is the basis for my article “Noble Lineages, Hausklöster, and Monastic Advocacy in the Twelfth Century: The Garsten Vogtweistum in its Dynastic Context,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (2015): 1-29]. They also delegated judicial authority to people besides their advocates. An 1157 privilege issued by Emperor Frederick I for the Bavarian monastery of Tegernsee, an old Benedictine house (but one that Dr. West does not use in his argument), states, “An advocate may henceforth appoint no local judges. The abbot may provide for that office suitable men, whom he prefers” [MGH DD F I, n. 160, p. 275: “Scultetos advocatus de cetero nullos instituat. Ad quod officium abbas viros aptos, quos voluerit, provideat”]. In his Conclusion, Dr. West contends that German monastic attitudes toward justice were already changing by 1150 (402), leaving this privilege and the Garsten document outside the rather narrow chronological frame of his argument. Even so, Dr. West needs to address such evidence, which points to other people besides advocates—including abbots and monks themselves—having a role in monasteries’ judicial affairs. His argument presumes that advocates possessed a monopoly over monasteries’ judicial affairs without offering any direct evidence of such a monopoly.

Second, Dr. West’s assertion of a significant difference between the exercise of justice inside and outside the Reich remains unsubstantiated. For the Reich, his argument relies on the mid-thirteenth-century Abbot Herman of Niederaltaich: “‘For,’ explained Hermann, ‘it does not pertain to clerical dignity to exercise judgment of blood,’ so dealing with theft, murder, rape, and other capital offences required a layman’s involvement” (372). His citation of the original Latin in the footnote reveals that Dr. West has neglected to translate “vel vindictam” in the phrase “iudicium vel vindictam sangwinis exercere.” Nor does his discussion of this passage include the clause that comes after the list of cases that advocates were to judge: “in these cases, an ecclesiastical person could be made irregular [according to canon law], if he should inflict the punishment. [MGH SS 17, 373: “per quas [causas] possit irregularis effici persona ecclesiastica si puniret”]. I take both “vindictam” and “puniret” to refer to the act of punishment, i.e. the execution of those found guilty. Herman thus considers the personal consequences for abbots and monks, should they carry out such violent penalties, as the main justification for secular advocates overseeing capital crimes. Dr. West does not mention whether abbots and monks outside the Reich personally wielded the sword for capital sentences. But to prove his argument that ecclesiastics in the Reich had more anxiety about secular justice than ecclesiastics elsewhere in Europe, it is necessary to demonstrate that the monks of Bury St Edmunds and other monasteries in England, France and Italy were more directly involved than those in the Reich in the violent punishment of criminals [My forthcoming article “Rulers, Local Elites and Monastic Liberties: Tegernsee and Bury St Edmunds under the Staufens and Plantagenets” will address this issue in more detail].

This short blog post does not allow me to elaborate further on these criticisms or mention others. Nevertheless, I hope to have shown that the main argument of this article does not hold up to scrutiny. In an effort to say something new on an old subject, Dr. West fails to provide any evidence that convincingly undermines the arguments of generations of excellent scholars who have shown that monastic advocacy is best understood through the lens of lordship rather than religious anxiety.

 

Author’s Response (Charles West, Reader in Medieval History, University of Sheffield, UK)

Professor Jonathan Lyon is a thorough and careful historian, for whom I have always had a great deal of respect, and from whose work – as is evident from the footnotes to the Speculum article in question – I have drawn many insights. So while I am pleased that my article has come to his attention, and flattered that he considers it worth such a lengthy response, I confess to being more than a little surprised by what he has to say.

His unsparing criticism opens with the assertion that my article does not “properly account for other research” on the topic. That would indeed be a serious weakness. But Professor Lyon does not specify the research that he has in mind, nor does he explain what difference this research would have made to my argument. It is perhaps worth pointing out that over almost 150 footnotes, the 19,000 word article cites around 150 works of scholarship, not including source editions. For all its undoubted flaws, it is hardly a superficial study.

Professor Lyon further draws attention to the “limitations” or parameters of the article, which explicitly excluded the new orders (though footnotes 32 and 142 do provide some references to work upon them, including the Premonstratensians, contrary to Professor Lyon’s assertion), focused on the decades around 1100, and concentrated on justice rather than protection. These parameters seem to him illegitimate.

Yet in any piece of research, one makes choices about what to include and what not. I chose a broad geographical scope, drawing on a score of comparable archives from England, Italy, Germany, Belgium and France, to bring out a central and to my mind overlooked aspect of ecclesiastical advocacy, as the culmination of over a decade of research into the topic since my first archival visit to study advocacy charters in 2005. In his published work to date, Professor Lyon has preferred a rather narrower geographical scope combined with a broader chronology. In other words, Professor Lyon would have written my article differently. That is not enough to justify his dramatic declaration that the article should not “have been published in its current form”, any more than his failure – say – properly to consider Italian evidence necessarily invalidates his own published work.

Nor I am convinced by his further assertion that the article fails to provide enough evidence that monastic writers viewed advocacy in religious terms. How much evidence is enough to prove a historical point, and how explicit that evidence needs to be, is a moot question, especially for research into the Middle Ages. But the works of four major and contemporary authors from the Reich (to at least two of whom entire books have been devoted), contrasted with several equally significant writers from elsewhere and set in the context of a multitude of charters, is far from a “small and, frankly, highly tendentious” body of material.

In any case, Professor Lyon would presumably agree that these writers were religiously committed figures, who spent their lives in the service of God alongside their fellow religious. Could he be suggesting that medieval monks and nuns did not view advocacy through a religious lens – that for this single aspect of their lives, they laid down their habit? That would be an intriguing and boldly counter-intuitive claim.

Finally, there is the question of the administration of justice. Professor Lyon finds fault with my rendering of a short passage by Herman of Niederaltaich, in which I presented “iudicium vel vindictam sangwinis” as “judgement of blood”. Perhaps that was closer to paraphrase than translation. But behind that rendering was my reading of Herman’s vel as conjunctive, taking vindicta to mean something like “just vengeance” (cf. Romans 12:19), in other words a synonym for iudicium that I felt was not necessary for the sense in English.

Professor Lyon instead suggests that vindicta here means the act of execution itself, reading the whole passage as forbidding abbots and monks from physically and personally despatching criminals, and further adds a reference to “canon law”, which Herman at no point mentions. This seems to me a forced reading of a text intended primarily to explain the reasons that clerics should not oversee the judicial process, reasons that “were anciently established for the peace and freedom of churches” [pro ecclesiarum quiete et libertate sunt antiquitus constituta].

The reader can make up her own mind about how best to construe Herman’s Latin (the whole text is here on the MGH website). Rather more significant than differing interpretations of that passage – anyway merely used as a convenient introduction to the themes of an article that could have functioned perfectly well without it – is what I consider to be Professor Lyon’s fundamental misunderstanding of the argument that followed. He thinks the article “presumes that advocates possessed a monopoly over monasteries’ judicial affairs [in the Reich]”. That would certainly be a grave misrepresentation “at a fundamental level” of the relation between monastic advocacy and justice, as Professor Lyon declares.

But it is not at all what I argued, as indeed the article’s very first case-study, drawing on material from the Reichenau, makes obvious. The argument’s starting point was rather that abbots in certain geographical regions valued the involvement of advocates, in various ways – and sometimes minimally or even only ceremonially – in their interactions with formal structures of justice, while abbots in other regions did not. Whether these abbots sometimes appointed local judges or even held their own courts is incidental to that observation, as too is whether they “personally wielded the sword” (a rather unlikely scenario).

Rather, what interests me is whether for the legitimation of their judicial activity, an advocate’s involvement, presence or even simple existence was deemed necessary or advisory – and on what basis that attitude rested, and what its consequences were. I argued that this attitude was in part a reflection of a religious anxiety about secular justice, which naturally does not mean that abbots were in a state of perpetual anxiety about their advocates, nor that they always approved of what their advocates did. Of course, it is ultimately the fault of the author if an article’s arguments are misinterpreted by its readers, and maybe I was being over-subtle; yet none of the several historians who read the article in draft drew the conclusion reached by Professor Lyon.

And it is perhaps a consequence of this misreading that Professor Lyon’s response ends as it does, calling for a return to the tradition represented by the “generations of excellent scholars” who have emphasized lordship rather than religion as the key to understanding advocacy. In no way at all am I undermining the achievements of these historians, and still less those of Professor Lyon himself. In the article, I emphasized that my conclusions did not exclude but rather complemented other approaches that have thus far been unable to resolve a crucial question. As I stated, thinking about the religious dimensions of advocacy “could be” a way of explaining why it was found in some regions and not in others. Though based on rigorous and extensive primary source research, the article was explicitly intended to open fresh angles and to stimulate constructive debate, building on previous work and not sweeping it aside. I fear I may not be quite so radical as Professor Lyon perceives me to be.

Yet it is also the case that many of those eminent scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, upon whom both he and I rely, were working in a historiographical framework that is increasingly outdated. Their reliance on lordship (Herrschaft), a historiographical concept greatly developed by fellow-travelers of the Nazis such as Otto Brunner, is arguably a case in point. So too, albeit in less disquieting fashion, is the (happily fading) habit of historians to remain confined within national historiographical traditions, for linguistic or other reasons. It is the task of historians carefully and conscientiously to reflect upon the historiographical foundations of their work, not all of which are as innocent as they seem. Uncritically to follow in predecessors’ footsteps would be an unflattering kind of pietas.

In summary, Professor Lyon’s criticisms of my article are all on matters of interpretation, or rest on misunderstanding of the argument. I look forward nevertheless to reading Professor Lyon’s considered and evidenced opinions on these matters in his book when it is published. After all, I am sure he will agree that our collective knowledge of the past is best advanced through open-mindedness, collaboration, and collegiality.

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Conferences – Neighbours and Strangers

Neighbours and Strangers Conference, 21 October 2017, Southampton, UK

Registration is now open for Neighbours and Strangers

An SSMLL/Medium Aevum One-Day Conference, hosted by the Department of English and Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, University of Southampton

How did medieval individuals and communities engage with those around them, both locally and further afield? In what ways did textual, performative and interpretative practices serve to police, challenge or re-negotiate these relationships? And where were distinctions between neighbours and strangers unstable, ambiguous or malleable? In 2017, at a moment when relationships between international neighbours are the focus of intense political attention, and fraught conversations continue about how we might construct ‘neighbours’ and ‘strangers’ within our communities, this one-day conference will turn these charged, timely questions of identity and interaction back to the Middle Ages. Participants will include Joanna Bellis, Aisling Byrne, Clare Egan, Helen Fulton, Bart Lambert, Ryan Lavelle, John McGavin, Miri Rubin; see our full programme at https://neighboursstrangers.wordpress.com/about/

All are welcome to attend. Discounted rates are available for students, retired, unwaged, and members for the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. For more information and to book your place, please visit the dedicated conference website at https://neighboursstrangers.wordpress.com/ or contact Marianne O’Doherty (mod1w07@soton.ac.uk) or Catherine Clarke (c.a.clarke@soton.ac.uk).

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Call for Papers – Economic inequality in pre-industrial societies: causes and effects

Call for Papers
Applications due: 15 October 2017
Economic inequality in pre-industrial societies: causes and effects

51st Study Week (Settimana) of the Fondazione Datini (Prato, Italy): 12-15 May 2019.

Recent interest in inequality has focused on its real or perceived effects on economic growth and social development, in contrast to past debates which concentrated more on the injustice of income inequality. Both scholars and policy makers are now asking how democratic and inclusive societies can function effectively with high inequality; the OECD has voiced concerns about the negative effects on economic growth, while the UN is worried about the effect of inequality on societal vulnerability. These negative effects may materialize directly in terms of people’s participation in the economy, human capital formation, or productive investments, or indirectly, through the growing leverage of the wealthy, the erosion of societal cohesion and resilience, or even outbursts of conflict and unrest.

The insights offered by historical developments have been a major feature of these recent debates about inequality. Especially striking is the scholarly attention paid to pre-industrial periods in assessing the causes and effects of inequality; indeed, few works postulate any fundamental divide between the pre-industrial and industrial periods. This scholarship, however, tends to look at very long, grand developments, generally at a macro-level, often defined as the ‘nation-state’ of the nineteenth century, a perspective that neglects the essential regional and local organization of the economy in the pre-industrial period. Figures at the level of national statistics by themselves do not say a lot, but an historical approach that contextualizes inequality by reference to social relations, institutions, access to power, and the cultural or religious legitimation of power facilitates a better understanding of the mechanisms that drive inequality and its effects.

The study week consists of four components:

I. Sources and methods:

How can we best measure economic inequality in the pre-industrial period? What do the figures assembled on forms of economic inequality actually say? Is it possible to compare levels of inequality?

II. Causes of economic inequality:

What was the role of privileges, monopolies, markets and market competition, and institutional arrangements more generally in the development of economic inequality? How did such factors as religion, legislation, guild regulation, taxation, communal agriculture, and charity create, legitimize, or mitigate inequality? Were these factors explicitly aimed at reducing inequality or did they only indirectly do so?

III. Effects of economic inequality on the economy:

How did economic inequality affect welfare levels and living standards? What were the effects of inequality on investments and economic growth? What were the effects of inequality on economic policies?

IV. Effects of economic inequality on society:

How did economic inequality affect different social groups? What were the effects of economic inequality on social coherence, on social peace, violence and revolts? What were the effects of wealth inequality on political power/ leverage? How did economic inequality affect societal resilience vis-à-vis disasters? How did it affect ecological sustainability, use of natural resources, and human capital formation?

Expected results

Research papers selected for the Settimana conference will will be presented and discussed at Prato in the course of the Study Week 2019. After the discussion at the Settimana sessions, scholars may complete and revise their texts by 30 June 2019. All contributions received by the institute will be subject to anonymous adjudication before publication.

 

Call for papers

Scholars are invited to send their proposal by compiling an abstract that will be reviewed by the Scientific Council Committee. The application form is available at: http://www.istitutodatini.it/temi/eng/call.htm

The paper should represent an original contribution and either generally comparative or a specific case-study that speaks to the larger questions set out here.

Papers proposed by projects or collaborative groups that link scholars from different countries and institutions will be assessed with particular interest if they offer a comparative analysis in geographical or diachronic terms across two or more related research themes. We will also consider innovative session formats for these type of proposals.

The completed format must be received at the following address by 15 October 2017:
Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini”
Via ser Lapo Mazzei 37, I 59100 Prato, ITALY
e-mail: datini@istitutodatini.it

The Scientific Council Committee will only take fully completed formats into consideration and will decide whether they have been accepted by January 2018, when authors of the selected proposals will be notified. Depending on the Institute’s financial resources, at least 25 scholars will be provided with hospitality at Prato for the Study Week. The Council may also invite up to 20 additional scholars to participate in the project without any right to hospitality or reimbursement.

In addition: The Fondazione Datini will award for the Prato conference up to 10 Travel Bursaries to cover travel costs for the conference to the maximum of 250 euros per grant for selected postgraduate doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars who do not hold a full-time academic position.

Applicants must send the request for the travel bursary to the Fondazione Datini with their paper by 31 March 2019. The grant will be paid during the conference on the presentation of travel receipts.

The members of the Council are: Erik Aerts (Leuven, President), Laurence Fontaine (Paris, Vice-President), Carlo Marco Belfanti (Brescia, Vice-President), Giampiero Nigro (Florence, Scientific Director), Hilario Casado Alonso (Valladolid), Sergej Pavlovic Karpov (Moscow), Olga Katsiardi-Hering (Athens), Maryanne Kowaleski (New York), Paolo Malanima (Catanzaro), Michael North (Greifswald), Luciano Palermo (Rome), Gaetano Sabatini (Rome).

All submitted contributions must be original and not previously published or translated from previous publications.

The provisional texts of the selected contributions must reach the Fondazione Datini by 31 March 2019. They will be put online (with protected access reserved for the participants of the project and members of the Scientific Committee) in the Institute’s webpages before the Study Week in order to allow a deeper discussion of their contents.

At the Settimana participants will offer a summary presentation of their contribution lasting 20 minutes.

The definitive texts of the paper, revised by the authors following the discussion (maximum 60,000 characters) must be sent to the Institute by 30 June 2019.

They will be subject to anonymous adjudication. Texts that pass the assessment stage will be published in a special volume (together with two abstracts prepared by the author) within a year. For the purpose of publication, texts will be accepted in Italian, French, English, Spanish and German. Simultaneous translation from and to Italian and English will be carried out during the Study Week.

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Jobs for Medievalists

Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Palaeography (University of York)

Location: York
Salary: £38,183
Hours: Full Time
Contract Type: Permanent
Placed on: 7th July 2017
Closes: 28th August 2017
Job Ref: 5854

The Department of English and Related Literature seeks to appoint a Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Palaeography with expertise in English literature written between 1250 and 1550 and medieval palaeography and manuscript studies. Our primary criteria are excellence in teaching and research, and a willingness to contribute to the University of York’s leading interdisciplinary profile.

You will have a strong commitment to teaching excellence, leading lectures, seminars, tutorials and other forms of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. You will also be be expected to take the lead in postgraduate teaching in palaeography and manuscript studies across the medieval period as a member of the University’s interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval Studies. You will contribute to, or otherwise complement, our existing research strengths, which include early, high and late medieval English and European literature, history of the book, gender studies, medievalism, and history-writing. You will also be developing an outstanding research record by undertaking high-quality, innovative research and seeking to publish in leading venues.

A PhD in any area of Medieval Literature is essential, together with an appropriate academic teaching qualification or a willingness to complete the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice. You must have extensive knowledge of a research field and be able to use a range of teaching techniques and methodologies. Evidence of a research profile and publishing of articles and papers in academic journals is required.

Starting salary will be: £38,183 a year on grade 7 of the University’s salary scales. The post is full-time and available from 1 January 2018.

If you’re interested in finding out more, please do not hesitate to contact Dr Nicola McDonald nicola.mcdonald@york.ac.uk or Professor Elizabeth Tyler elizabeth.tyler@york.ac.uk.

For further information and to apply on-line, please click on the ‘Apply’ button below.

The University of York is committed to promoting equality and diversity.

Source : Jobs.ac.uk

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Call for Papers – “Writing the human/animal continuum in the Middle Ages”,

CfP: “Writing the human/animal continuum in the Middle Ages”, special session at the ICMS Kalamazoo 2018

CfP deadline: 15th September 2017

The distance between human and non-human across medieval culture could be populated by a plethora of hybrid beings whose identity lingered between the two categories, creating a space of indeterminacy, of life in-between species. Humanoid monsters with animal features, or animals with disturbing resemblances to humans, traced a constellation of possibilities of life in the continuum. While scientific and theological texts tended to present this variety of beings as a sheer demonstration of the variety of God’s creation, the hybrid could not but channel also fear and fascination. Wherever these monsters appeared in art, literature and science, the possibility for the human body to merge with the animal brought along reflections concerning ethnic identity, cultural norms, relation with the environment, social and political order.

This session aims to highlight the role of human/animal hybrids of medieval imagination in a centuries-long meditation around an open and fluid concept of human. To this purpose, we encourage medievalists to interrogate pre-modern examples of indeterminacy in the human/animal continuum by interrogating scientific and fictional texts, chronicles, works of art, pieces of material culture, produced in Europe across the Middle Ages. The papers of this session should address one or more of the following questions: how do these hybrids substantiate the concept of human? how do human/animal hybrids establish a connection with humans or animals and what do they mean for them? where does the epistemological and cultural framework of the author or the audience/user stand in relation with the hybrid? how does the use of the hybrid change across time and languages?

We invite paper proposals from scholars at all levels and from all fields of medieval studies (literature, philosophy, history, archaeology, history of art). Please submit an abstract of 250 words to antonella.sciancalepore@uclouvain.be by September 15, 2017.​

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Jobs for Medievalists

Houghton Library is seeking applicants for the position of Head of the Rare Book Section, who leads, manages, and supports Houghton Library’s efforts to catalog, preserve, and provide access to rare books, graphics, and other printed holdings in all formats and across Houghton’s curatorial areas. The position is assigned Harvard salary grade 058, with a minimum starting salary of $72,900. An abbreviated description can be found below; for the full description, and to apply, visit https://hr.harvard.edu/search-jobs and search for the job number 42894BR. Review of applications will begin August 7, 2017.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

  • Provides leadership and management for the Rare Book Section by developing and articulating strategic vision, building and maintaining a team spirit, managing day-to-day operations and special projects, collaboratively establishing priorities, and coordinating work within the unit and with other library units.
  • Supervises a current staff consisting of 4.5 regular and project employees through delegation of tasks and projects, establishment of goals, performance reviews, and provision of training.
  • In collaboration with the Associate Librarian for Technical Services, Curatorial, Public Services, and Rare Book Section staff, sets cataloging priorities for Houghton print collections.
  • Trains staff and reviews catalog records and other descriptive output to ensure quality and adherence to standards.
  • Supports the creation, enhancement, and maintenance of authority metadata, both for local use and to contribute to the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO).
  • Collaborates with Houghton, Harvard, and/or external colleagues to explore, propose, and implement new technologies that promote and facilitate discovery and use of rare printed material.
  • Works collaboratively with the Harvard Library’s Information and Technical Services on cataloging projects, best practices and policies, and implementation of new tools and standards such as BIBFRAME and other linked data initiatives.
  • In concert with colleagues, develops and implements a long range and comprehensive plan to effectively process and catalog Houghton backlog collections.
  • Participates in grant writing efforts, creating work plans and developing budgets for cataloging projects.
  • Oversees the development and maintenance of documentation for cataloging, and other Section activities.
  • Working with the Head, Manuscript Section and the Technical Services Librarian, assists in planning and policy creation for the Technical Services Department.
  • Catalogs rare books, graphics, and other printed material.
  • Represents Houghton within the Harvard cataloging and library community, both informally through communication and collaboration, and formally by serving on committees and working groups.
  • Maintains an active presence in local and national professional organizations.

Basic Qualifications

  • B.A., M.L.S. from an ALA-accredited academic program required.
  • Five years of professional experience with increasing responsibility in special collections, preferably in an academic or research library.
  • Extensive experience cataloging rare books and printed materials, including graphics.
  • Demonstrated knowledge of cataloging standards and principles, including but not limited to: RDA, DCRM, MARC21, LCSH, Library of Congress/PCC rules and authority control practices.   Demonstrated knowledge of integrated library systems and bibliographic utilities (OCLC).  Experience with Aleph/Alma and Aeon preferred.
  • Supervisory and managerial experience required, with the ability to communicate complex ideas to others of varying skill sets.
  • Demonstrated project management experience.
  • Demonstrated knowledge of descriptive bibliography and book history is essential.
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Call for Papers: The Animal in Medieval Romance, at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies (2018)

Call for Papers: The Animal in Medieval Romance, at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies (2018)

The ‘animal turn’ is one of the newest and most exciting developments in medieval scholarship. Researchers are increasingly interrogating the role of animals in society and culture, the interaction between human and beast, and the formation of human and non-human identities.

The Medieval Romance Society is hosting two inter-related sessions on the role of animals in romances at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies 2018, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. We welcome papers which draw on a broad range of methodologies and address a variety of themes relating to animals.

Session I: The Animal in Medieval Romance I: The Animal as Friend
This session invites papers examining the co-dependent relationships between animals and humans in romances. We encourage a broad interpretation of this theme, including cross-species friendships, sexual and romantic couplings, domestication and farmyard animals, and animals as parental surrogates.

Session II: The Animal in Medieval Romance II: The Animal as Product
This session welcomes papers which examine how animal bodies are exploited in medieval romances. Even after death, animals continue to exert their presence in romance narrative through their earthly remains. The genre’s commodification of bestial bodies also extends beyond texts to the physical product of vellum upon which they are transmitted. Papers might explore themes of butchery, the wearing of skins and furs, the use of bone and ivory, and the production of parchment and manuscript-binding.

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words to Tim Wingard at tw659@york.ac.uk by 15th September 2017. For more information, visit: medievalromanceanimal.wordpress.com/

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