The Medieval Academy Blog

The 10th International Conference of the Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies

21-22 October 2016

National Pingtung University, Taiwan

Encounters: Friends, Foes, and Companions

Human civilization often entails various kinds of encounters. One of the most fundamental is interpersonal contact from which friendship, animosity, and companionship are born. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, friendship is defined in terms of ethical virtues, while in patristic writings friendship refers to a shared sense of being children of the one Father and brothers in Christ. From the Renaissance down to the modern era, there have been engaging discussions about forbidden friendships. In contrast, hostile feelings, especially jealousy and hatred, have long been favorite topics for writers such as Shakespeare who draws from the book of Proverbs in Julius Caesar and Othello to represent how the kisses of an enemy may be profuse.

On a broader scale, encounters can also be examined with reference to the contacts among different cultures and subsequent ideological transmission, conflict, hybridity, assimilation, and transformation. Ever since Classical Antiquity, communication between the East and the West has triggered a series of crucial cultural exchanges and interfaith interactions that can be inexhaustible subject matters for profound deliberation and academic research.

In addition to investigations into encounters in human societies, surveys of cross-species and eco-critical perspectives are welcomed so as to stimulate dialogue on environmental problems from both the viewpoints of the exploiters and the exploited. This discourse may help elucidate how human beings envision environments as their companions or adversaries and how human preconceptions determine the literary representation of human-animal and human-environment relationships. Therefore, aside from conventional approaches, this conference also aims to look at how the works of pre-modern environmental advocates square with the more popular drama, poetry, and even political discourse of the time and how these matters form an important part of literary, cultural, social, and environmental histories.

Within the purview of human contacts with the physical world, we would also welcome studies concerning engagement with nonphysical entities–the demonic and the heavenly—to shed light on the supernatural or transcendental perception of human encounters via different religious beliefs.

Within this four-stratum framework, this conference aims to proffer a forum for investigating human encounters that engender affection and enmity.

Topics for consideration may include (but are not limited to):

Philosophy of friendship in various cultures

Friendship from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance

Forbidden friendship & homosexuality

Male friendship and female friendship

Friendship and patronage

Friendship and betrayal

Affiliation and politics

Human-nonhuman relationships

Humanism vs. anthropocentrism

Environmental encounters

Pre-modern environmental imagination

Representation of landscape and dreamscapes

Environmental impact on human psychology

Utopian imagination and new world order

Cross-species encounters

Bestiary and animal studies

Cross-boundary encounters

Wars and cultural encounters

Commerce and cultural encounters

Cosmography and the human world

Cosmology east and west

Pilgrimages and healing environments

Exorcism vs. healing practices

Interfaith encounters

Religious notions of friendship and relationship

TACMRS cordially invites papers that reach beyond the traditional chronological and disciplinary borders of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies. Please submit abstracts of 250 words and a one-page CV to Sandra Yu or Phoebe Yang at 2016tacmrs.nptu@gmail.com with a subject line stating “Submission for the 10^th TACMRS Conference” by 3 February 2016.

For more information, please visit the 2016 TACMRS Conference website: http://www.english.nptu.edu.tw

Beyond Borders: 

Mutual Imaginings of Europe and the Middle East (800-1700)

Barnard College’s 25th Biannual Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference

Saturday, December 3, 2016

Call For Papers

Recent scholarship is challenging the stark border between Europe and the Middle East during the long period between 800-1700.  Rather than thinking of these areas in isolation, scholars are revealing the depth of their mutual influence. Trade, war, migration, and scholarly exchange connected Europe and the Middle East in ways both cooperative and adversarial. The distant world was not only an object of aggression, but also, inextricably, of fantasy and longing. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers looked to each other to understand their own cultural histories and to imagine their futures.  Bringing together art historians, literary scholars, historians, scholars of the history of science, and scholars of religious thought, this interdisciplinary conference will explore the real and imaginary cultural interchanges between Europe and the Middle East during their formative periods. The conference will feature plenary lectures by Professors Nancy Bisaha of Vassar College, and Nabil Matar of the University of Minnesota.

This conference is being organized by Professors Rachel Eisendrath, Najam Haider, and Laurie Postlewate of Barnard College.

Please send an abstract (with title) of approximately 200 words and CV to lpostlew@barnard.edu. Presentations should be 20 minutes. Deadline: April 10, 2016.

Steven Vanderputten, Tjamke Snijders and Micol Long (UGent, Belgium), present Horizontal Learning within High Medieval Religious Communities, an interdisciplinary conference on medieval educational practices taking place in Brussels on September 1-2, 2016.

This conference will center on the medieval practices of learning within a community, understood as a body of people who practice communal living and share an understanding of what binds them together, even though this understanding is constantly being renegotiated. Our aim is to focus on the ways in which co-habiting peers learned from one another. This “horizontal learning” has received much less attention than the vertical master/student approach, and yet it emerges as an important part of the learning experience, especially as we are interested in “learning” in a broad sense: not only acquiring factual knowledge or skills, but also developing ideas and beliefs and adapting to behavioral patterns. In short, everything that could make a monk a better and more efficient member of the community. Whereas other projects thematize the institutional history of learning, the transmission of propositional knowledge in formalized educational contexts, or the importance of networks of learning, this project distinguishes itself through its focus on day-to-day interactions by community members.
Our starting point is the investigation of communal learning in the practices of high medieval religious communities. Progressing beyond the old view that they were closed, homogeneous, and fairly stable social groups, we intend to approach these communities as the product of a continuous process of education and integration of new members. Contributions will investigate the way in which inter-personal exchanges of knowledge between peers concretely functioned, and what this teaches us about medieval learning within the context of a community.

The organizers invite proposals for both case studies and theoretical reflections on the subject. Proposals should be submitted to horizontal.learning@UGent.be by February 1th, 2016, and should consist of a title, a 400-word abstract and a CV.

More information about the organizing committee, the scientific committee and the confirmed participants can be found at http://www.horizontallearning.ugent.be/home/call-for-papers/