The Medieval Academy Blog

CALL FOR PAPERS: Texts and Contexts, October 21-22, 2016, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Texts and Contexts is an annual conference held on the campus of the Ohio State University devoted to Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, incunables and early printed texts in Latin and the vernacular languages. The conference solicits papers particularly in the general discipline of manuscript studies, including palaeography, codicology, reception and text history. In addition to the general papers (of roughly 20 minutes), the conference also hosts the Virginia Brown Memorial Lecture, established in memory of the late Virginia Brown, who taught paleography at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies for some 40 years.  We also welcome proposals for sessions of two to three papers which might treat a more focused topic. Please send abstracts to epig@osu.edu.  Deadline for abstracts: August 15, 2016.

Methodology, Interpretation and Typology of

Maritime Graffiti in the Mediterranean.

Nicosia, 14-15 October 2016

Pictorial and textual graffiti have attracted the attention of archaeologists, anthropologists,
epigraphists, historians and philologists since the very early stages in the development of
humanities as academic disciplines. Such graffiti have been considered as unique testimonies of everyday life in antiquity, otherwise very hard to detect. Moreover, the practice of writing messages and making drawings on any surface available for scratching has been diachronic and surprisingly perennial; if the thousands of graffiti documented in Pompeii can be considered as indicative, then it seems probable that the graffiti phenomenon was as widespread in antiquity as it is in modern times. Recent monographs, such as Langner 2001, Baird and Taylor 2011 and Keegan 2014 have provided a particularly rich body of new data as well as a holistic approach to this particular body of evidence.

Graffiti depicting ships, in particular, have been extensively used by specialists as important ship iconography sources, which provide information on ancient ship types, rigging and gear, or naval architecture (e.g. Crumlin-Pedersen and Munch-Thyem 1995; Auger-Sergent 1996, Gonzales and Font 2007), with Lucien Basch’s (1987) work still being the most comprehensive publication for the ancient Mediterranean. For the historical periods that followed the Roman Empire, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, numerous studies have resulted in a significant body of evidence (see e.g. Goudas 1911, Basch 1986, Ovtcharov 1995, Imhaus 2009, Babuin and Nakas 2011, Damianidis 2014), and ship graffiti have appeared in diverse publications with a broader scope, regarding ship iconography or graffiti in general. A comprehensive study to address the multilevel significance of their analysis, however, is still lacking.

In 2014, a new research programme was initiated in the University of Cyprus, funded by the Leventis Foundation, entitled KARAVOI: The Ship Graffiti on the Medieval and post-
Medieval Monuments of Cyprus: Mapping, Documentation and Digitisation. One of the main objectives of the project is to create a corpus of the island’s ship graffiti, thus allowing for a holistic approach to their study which could involve not only standard aspects of it, such as ship’s types and provenance, seafaring, trade connections and maritime activities, but also human behavior and identity, religious practices, ritual, ideology and social identity in Medieval Cyprus. This conference is one of the project’s deliverables and aspires to bring
together for the first time scholars that work in the eastern Mediterranean in order to discuss diverse aspects of ship graffiti, such as:

1. Maritime graffiti other than ships
2. Typology and shipbuilding analysis
3. Spatial distribution
4. Interpretation of the maritime graffiti in their multiple contexts (anthropological,
historical, geographical, spatial, symbolic, religious or other)
5. Recording and documentation methodologies
6. Theoretical approaches to graffiti.

English will be the official language of the conference and each paper should last no longer
than 15-20 minutes.

We invite specialists and researchers to submit titles and abstracts (300 words
maximum) for a presentation related to one of the above mentioned subjects or to new
material.

Please send your application and title no later than 15 April 2016 to: demesticha@ucy.ac.cy.

Abstracts will be submitted by 15 May 2016.

After Chichele: Intellectual and Cultural Dynamics of the English Church, 1443 to 1517 

Where: St. Anne’s College, Oxford

When: 28-30 June 2017

Description:

An international conference organised by the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, this event builds on the success of the 2009 Oxford conference, After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, which resulted in a book of essays (ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh) that vigorously interrogated the nature of religious and intellectual culture in England in the long fifteenth century. After Chichele adopts a similar investigative and interdisciplinary approach. The period has been chosen precisely because the inner workings of English intellectual and religious life during these years have proved challengingly resistant to the formation of grand critical narratives. What are the chief currents driving the intellectual and cultural life of the church in England during this period? What happened to intellectual questioning during the period, and where did the Church’s cultural life express itself most vividly? What significant parochial, regional, national and international influences were brought to bear on English literate practices? In order to address these questions, the conference will adopt an interdisciplinary focus, inviting contributions from historians, literary scholars, and scholars working on the theology, ecclesiastical history, music and art of the period, and it is expected that a wide range of literary and cultural artefacts will be considered, from single-authored works to manuscript compilations, from translations to original works, and from liturgy to art and architecture, with no constraints as to the conference’s likely outcomes and conclusions. It is intended that the conference should generate a volume of essays similar to After Arundel in scope, ambition and quality.

Plenary speakers: David Carlson, Mary Erler, Sheila Lindenbaum, Julian Luxford, David Rundle, Cathy Shrank.

Possible topics for discussion:

Religious writing and the English Church; the emergence of humanism and the fate of scholasticism; literature and the law; cultural and ecclesiastical patronage; developments in art and  architecture; the liturgical life of the Church; the impact of the international book trade and of print; palaeography and codicology; the Church’s role in education, colleges and chantries; the impact of travel and pilgrimage.

Please send 500 word abstracts (for proposed 20-minute papers) by Friday, 12^th August 2016 to Vincent Gillespie, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford OX2 6QA (vincent.gillespie@ell.ox.ac.uk).

HAMSA – Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies, 3 l Call for Papers

Onomastics of Muslims and Jews

Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies, # 3 l Onomastics of Muslims and Jews
Hamsa 3 is devoted to the onomastics of Muslims and Jews, in a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective. It intends to summarize recent researches and analysis about the subject in order to promote the comparison between both communities in specific contexts.

+ information at: http://www.cidehus.uevora.pt/atividades/noticias/%28item%29/19071

As part of its ongoing commitment to Byzantine studies, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture seeks proposals for a Mary Jaharis Center sponsored session at the 42nd Annual Byzantine Studies Conference to be held held at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, October 6–9, 2016. We invite session proposals on any topic relevant to Byzantine studies.

Session proposals must be submitted through the Mary Jaharis Center website site (http://www.maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/42nd-annual-byzantine-studies-conference). The deadline for submission is March 14, 2016. Proposals should include:
—Proposed session title
—CV of session organizer
—300-word session summary, which includes a summary of the overall topic, the format for the panel (such as a debate, papers followed by a discussion, or a traditional session of papers), and the reasons for covering the topic as a prearranged, whole session
—Session chair and academic affiliation
—Information about the four papers to be presented in the session. For each paper: name of presenter and academic affiliation, proposed paper title, and 500-word abstract. Please note: Presenters must be members of BSANA in good standing.

Session organizers may present a paper in the session. If a co-organzier is proposed for the session, the co-organizer must also give a paper in the session. Session chairs cannot present a paper in the session.

Applicants will be notified by March 21, 2016. The organizer of the selected session is responsible for submitting the session to the BSC by April 1, 2016. Instructions for submitting the panel proposal are included in the BSC Call for Papers (http://bsc2016.weebly.com/uploads/7/0/3/4/70342729/2016_bsana_call_for_papers_revised_2.6.2016.pdf).

If the proposed session is approved, the Mary Jaharis Center will reimburse session participants (presenters and chair, if the proposed chair is selected by the BSC program committee) up to $600 maximum for US residents and up to $1200 maximum for those coming from abroad. Funding is through reimbursement only; advance funding cannot be provided. Eligible expenses include conference registration, transportation, and food and lodging. Receipts are required for reimbursement.

Please contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.