The Medieval Academy Blog

British Archaeological Association
2016 Annual Conference
Paris c.500-c.1500: The Powers that Shape a City 

Call for papers

The British Archaeological Association annual conference for 2016 will be held in Paris. The city boasts a very rich archaeological history that is becoming increasingly well-known due to the ongoing work of the Commission du Vieux Paris, French based university teams focusing on the city’s material history, and scholars worldwide. Paris offers an embarrassment of riches to the archaeologist and art historian, and to set some limit on the possibilities, this conference will address the theme of ‘The Powers that shaped the City’ over the millennium between the end of the Roman Imperium and the Renaissance. Several powers converged and conflicted in the shaping of the city – royal power; the power of the secular and the monastic church; the power of the mendicant friars, the schools and colleges of the University of Paris; and the power and wealth of a vibrant urban patriciate.

The conference will take place from Saturday 16^th July 2016 to Wednesday 20^th July 2016.  Lectures will be held in the Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), at Rue Vivienne.

We welcome papers addressing any aspect of material culture in Paris (architecture, painting, decorative arts) that reflects on the theme of the powers that shape the city. If you would like to give a paper, please contact one of the convenors, Professor Meredith Cohen (mcohen@humnet.ucla.edu) or Professor Lindy Grant (l.m.grant@reading.ac.uk). Paper proposal deadline: 1 June 2015.

In 1973, Jo Ann 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 High Middle Ages.  This body of work has disproved the “exceptional” status accorded to elite women who exercised power. Nevertheless, despite everything we have learned in the last forty-plus years, it is still not unusual to see studies that assume that power belonged in male hands, and that characterize women exercising power as “exceptions to the rule.”

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”.

Featured Speaker: Miriam Shadis (Ohio University) and ?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

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

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

The deadline for proposals is June 1, 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)
• participant category (faculty, graduate student, undergraduate, or independent scholar)
• college/university affiliation
• mailing address
• email address
• audio/visual requirements and any other special requests

Texts and Contexts, A Manuscript Conference at the Ohio State University, October 30-31, 2015, sponsored by the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies.

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.  Information about the conference and the program may be found at http://epigraphy.osu.edu/texts-and-contexts-conference.  Please send abstracts to epig@osu.edu.  Deadline for abstracts: August 15, 2015.

This year’s Virginia Brown Memorial Lecture speaker is Erika Kihlman of the University of Stockholm. Erika Kihlman is co-director of the Ars Edendi group at the University of Stockholm which seeks to investigate new and innovative methods of editing medieval and renaissance texts. In conjunction with Prof. Kihlman’s lecture, we shall have a special session devoted to text editing.

Othello’s Island 2016

The 4th Annual Multidisciplinary Conference

on Medieval and Renaissance

Art, Literature, History, Culture and Society

Venue: CVAR, Nicosia, Cyprus

17 to 20 March 2016

CALL FOR PAPERS

a collaborative event organised by academics from

Sheffield Hallam University, the SOAS University of London

University of Kent and the University of Leeds

Convenors: ​ 

Professor James Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield

Professor Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University

Dr Sarah James, University of Kent

Dr Michael Paraskos, SOAS University of London 

​Benedict Read FSA, University of Leeds

About the Conference: 

Following its successful first three years this now well-established annual conference aims to explore Medieval and Renaissance artistic, literary, social, religious and cultural history in a truly multidisciplinary way. 

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Although based in Cyprus the conference is not only focussed on Cyprus. However Cyprus is a particularly appropriate location for the study of this period, as it was a time when the island what was arguably the zenith of its civilization and international influence. 

Under almost 400 years of French and Italian rule, Cyprus developed a unique courtly culture and trade links that extended throughout Europe, the Eastern and Western Mediterranean and the Near East. This had an immediate impact, but the legacy of this period lived on after the fall of Venetian Cyprus to the Turks in 1571, in literature, with Shakespeare producing his play Othello, and numerous operas and other theatrical productions stemming from the memory of Cyprus. 

For a number of speakers this might be of particular interest and relevance, but we are not only interested in Medieval and Renaissance Cyprus. This multidisciplinary conference aims to bring together academics, researchers and research students covering a wide range of topics relating to the Medieval and Renaissance periods, including art historians, social and economic historians, museum curators, archaeologists, literary historians. 

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Full Papers (20 minutes talk plus questions)

If you are interested in giving a talk at the conference please submit a proposal for a paper. Standard papers are 20 minutes long, followed by 5 or 10 minutes for questions.

We are very open minded on the topic of papers, so if you have an idea for a presentation that is not covered by the suggestions given above please feel free to submit a proposal, or contact us first to discuss the idea. 

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Proposals for papers should comprise a cover sheet showing: 

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1. Your title (eg. Mr, Ms, Dr, Prof. etc.) and full name 

2. Your institutional affiliation (if any) 

3. Your postal address, e’mail address and telephone number 

4. The title of your proposed paper 

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With this you should send a proposal/abstract for your paper of no more than 300 words and a copy of your CV/resume to mparaskos@mac.com with the subject line OTHELLO 2016. 

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All papers must be delivered in English. 

The deadline for submissions of proposals is 4 January 2016. Early submission is strongly advised. We aim to have a decision on the acceptance of papers within four weeks of submission.

Guided Poster Sessions (10 minutes talk plus “poster” display)

As an alternative to full papers, a new development for 2016 is an event called Guided Poster Sessions. Guided Poster Sessions are short presentations that are delivered in a far more informal and sociable way than full conference papers, and we are thinking of doing these at an evening event (to be confirmed).

What we ask presenters at the Guided Poster Sessions to do is provide an A2 size poster comprising at least one illustration and a body of text in English explaining some of the key points of their research. 

The posters should be kept as simple as possible and not attempt to be a written paper or essay. Bullet points and headlines with very short explanatory texts are preferable.

Those showing the posters will then have ten minutes to present their key ideas to the other delegates (called “talking to the poster”) and also answer questions on them. 

As stated, the aim is to be very informal with the Guided Poster Sessions, so these are particularly good for researchers who want to present provisional findings or speculative ideas for informal discussion, rather than more complete academic papers. Ideas could even be highly speculative or controversial and designed simply to provoke discussion.

Poster sessions might also be useful for younger or less experienced researchers who are not used to the formality of full conference delivery. However younger and less experienced researchers are very welcome to apply to give full papers as Othello’s Island and should not assume they can only give Guided Poster Session papers. Equally we welcome Guided Poster Session Papers from more experience researchers and even professors.

Proposals for Poster Session Papers should comprise a cover sheet showing: 

1. Your title (eg. Mr, Ms, Dr, Prof. etc.) and full name 

2. Your institutional affiliation (if any) 

3. Your postal address, e’mail address and telephone number 

4. The title of your proposed poster and short presentation 

​ 

With this you should send a proposal/abstract for your paper of no more than 150 words and a copy of your CV/resume to mparaskos@mac.com with the subject line OTHELLO POSTER 2016. 

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All posters and papers must be delivered in English. 

The deadline for submissions of proposals is 4 January 2016. Early submission is strongly advised. We aim to have a decision on the acceptance of papers within four weeks of submission.

Please refer to the website before submitting for further information: www.othellosisland.org

Religion and (the Master) Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Belief and Practice

University of Colorado Boulder | Second Annual CMEMS Conference
October 22-24, 2015

Recent scholarship on medieval and early modern religion has begun to question fundamental categories and to destabilize the meaning and chronological divisions between medieval Europe and Reformation Europe, the pre-Christian and the Christianized. A more complex and nuanced portrait of belief and practice has emerged. Where there was once a monolith – the homogeneity of medieval and Catholic Christianity – now we have a sense of the vitality of popular movements (cults of saints, poverty, Apostolic, and women’s movements) interfaith exchanges (among Jews, Muslims, Christians), and heresies (Wycliffites and Cathars). In addition, the Reformation has come to be seen less as an end to the Middle Ages than inextricably connected to it, another manifestation of religious reform. This conference seeks to bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to ask how we might best understand medieval and early modern religion and the narratives generated to explain religious change and continuity. Given that the legacy of the Middle Ages and Reformation persists in our own time, this topic is pressing and particularly timely. To this end, bringing medieval and early modern ideas about religion into conversation with twenty-first century accounts of secularity and religiosity, globalization, and religious plurality is one of the overarching goals of this conference.

Plenary Speakers Include:
Sarah Beckwith (English, Duke University), Kenneth Mills (History, University of Toronto/University of Michigan), Nina Rowe (Art History, Fordham University) and John Van Engen (History, University of Notre Dame)

We invite abstracts for papers (20-minutes in length). Potential lines of inquiry may include: the language(s) and categories of belief and practice (including visual languages); changing narratives of religious reform; the translation and/ or interpretation of religious texts; the creation and proliferation of images and material objects; drama, ritual, and performance; defining or redefining the Reformation; the relationship between gender and religious practice; the relationship between Jews, Muslims, and Christians; the dissemination of doctrine and theology among elites and non-elites; narratives about individuals or groups in text and image (one thinks of saints’ lives and foundation narratives as well as art concerning these); narratives that define or defy heresy; images and structures that index religious skepticism or heterodoxy; the printed image and religious dissent; religion in the early modern New World. We also welcome papers that address how narratives about medieval/ early modern religion have informed and continue to inform our contemporary moment.

Submission Deadline for Abstracts: May 15, 2015
Abstracts (of 300 words) accompanied by a brief biographical paragraph should be sent to: Anne E. Lester, Department of History, alester@colorado.edu OR Katie Little, Department of English, Katherine.C.Little@colorado.edu. More information can be found at https://cmems.colorado.edu