The Medieval Academy Blog

Beyond Exceptionalism

Extended CFP – 22 June 2015

In 1973, Joann McNamara and Suzanne Fonay Wemple wrote “The Power of Women through the Family” which established the paradigm for understanding elite women’s access to power in the early medieval period, and its decline starting in the late eleventh century. Since the early 1980s, the study of elite women (noble and royal) has flourished and undermined both the timing and extent of elite women’s loss of power during the Central Middle Ages.  This body of work has disproved the “exceptional” status accorded to elite women who exercised power.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to foster new avenues and interpretations of elite women and power in the high medieval period, c. 1100-c. 1400 to move the field “beyond exceptionalism”.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

elite women and bureaucracy
networks and alliances
lordship
feudalism
monarchy
patronage
warfare
monasticism

Invited Speakers: Miriam Shadis (Ohio University) & Theresa Earenfight (Seattle University)

This conference will be held at The Ohio State University at Mansfield (Mansfield, Ohio), 18-19 September 2015.

The deadline for proposals [panels, round-tables, graduate student work in progress workshop sessions (pre-circulated papers), or individual papers] is June 22, 2015. Session chairs and individual presenters will be informed of acceptance no later than June 30, 2015. Those wishing to participate should please submit an abstract of approximately 250 words to tanner.87@osu.edu. Please attach your abstract to your email as a Microsoft Word or PDF file. Included with 250-word abstracts or session proposals (including individual abstracts) should be the following information:

• name of presenter(s)
• mailing & email address
• college/university affiliation
• audio/visual requirements & other special requests

The Call for Papers for the 34th Annual Haskins Society Conference, 6-8 November 2015, held at Carleton College, is now available on the Haskins Society website at: http://www.haskinssociety.org/conference2015 with a deadline of July 17, 2015. We welcome proposals for individual papers and full sessions, and we will host two additional kinds of forums for scholarly discussion and exchange, one focused on new research or research in progress, the other on using the interdisciplinary expertise of Haskins attendees to explore problems in objects and manuscripts. See the Call for Papers for more details.

Call For Papers

Animal Languages:
Interspecies Communication in the Middle Ages

Editor:
Alison Langdon
Western Kentucky University

Until relatively recently, scholars have tended to focus on the symbolic valence of nonhuman animals, to read their behavior and characteristics as representative of explicitly human interests and concerns. With the advent of critical animal studies, new work has begun to critique traditional humanist scholarship by challenging any absolute distinction between the categories of “human” and “animal.” This has led to new readings of animals in the medieval world as living creatures rather than merely figurative representations of human experience and values.

Language provides a particularly rich locus for this exploration. Drawing on a tradition stretching back to Genesis, many medieval writers identified the capacity for language as evidence of possession of reason, that faculty which was seen to separate humans from all the rest of God’s creation. At the same time, many animals were understood to possess language of their own and in some cases to participate in human language. Although medieval philosophers generally deny intention and significance in animal vocalizations, a range of medieval textual traditions suggests that animals were commonly seen to communicate within and between species.

This interdisciplinary volume seeks articles of 6,000-9,000 words from all fields of medieval studies exploring language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. How, when, and with whom did animals talk in the medieval world? What kinds of communicative strategies did medieval people recognize in the animal world, and how were they interpreted? How was human meaning imposed on animal vocalizations? How does the use of animals as symbolic language in verbal and visual texts draw upon empirical understanding of nonhuman communication (body language, etc.)? How might nonhuman animals remind us of the embodied nature of language itself?

Proposals of 300-500 words should be submitted by e-mail to Dr. Alison Langdon at the following address: alison.langdon@wku.edu. Deadline for proposals is August 1, 2015. Notification of accepted proposals will be made by August 15, 2015, with complete chapters due by June 1, 2016. The volume has been invited for submission to Ashgate and Amsterdam University Press.