The Medieval Academy Blog

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 

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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

Conference Title: The Cleric’s Craft: Crossroads of Medieval Spanish Literature and Modern Critique

Date: October 22-24, 2015

Location: University of Texas at El Paso

Description: The term “mester de clerecía” was first articulated by Manuel Milà i Fontanals in 1865. Over the subsequent 150 years the expression has been used to refer to a wide range of clerical poetry, astonishingly rich and varied, composed in the Iberian Peninsula during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Recent research has deepened our understanding of many aspects of this literature, and now is the time for scholars to come together to examine the past, present and future of its study. In the beautiful fall weather of the U.S Southwest, scholars from a variety of disciplines and from across the globe will gather at the bilingual campus (Spanish and English) of The University of Texas at El Paso to mark this important milestone, to reassess this literature and its study, as well as to chart new directions for the field.

Call for Papers: The organizers seek proposals for 20-minute papers on all aspects of this literature and the context in which it was produced. Papers from related fields (history, musicology, art history, comparative literature, historical linguistics, etc.) are especially welcome. To find out more about the conference (including the preliminary schedule of events and invited speakers) and to submit an abstract, please visit our website at:

http://clerecia150.at.utep.edu/

In contemporary thought, the field of emotion studies represents a very potent framework that allows anthropologists, historians, neuroscientists and philosophers to think of the possible ways in which subjects engage with their own sensory experience and with larger practices that enable them to articulate such experiences in in meaningful ways. Nevertheless, “How do I feel?” is a question that was equally quintessential in the pre-modern Western system of thought even if the contemporary significations of the word “emotion ” did not become concrete until the 17th century.  In their attempt to capture pre-modern emotional modes and systems of feelings, contemporary medievalists, especially under the influence of poststructuralism, considered emotions primarily as discursive entities that shape collective and individual subjectivities. Barbara Rosenwein’s influential notion of “emotional communities,” which inaugurates this trajectory in medieval studies, turns away from the Cartesian split between mind and body and, instead, presents emotions as discursive regimes consisting of strategies, tactics and the conscious ways in which subjects engage with these.  However, while emotions are indeed discursive cultural constructs producing collective subjectivities they also possess a sensorial aspect that simultaneously escapes being captured by the social while being constitutive of it. This was the special contribution of the affective “turn” in contemporary theory: the epistemological need to distinguish between emotions as discursive constructs, and affects as flashes of sensory experience and feelings.

This volume aims at complicating Rosenwein’s existing notion of emotion as discursive practice and, at the same time, investigating how medieval subjects talked about their somatic, sensorial and affective practices. If emotions belong to the complexities of social dynamics, we ask how are they incorporated in textual artifacts and cultural productions stemming from often conflicting social events, groups and discourses? How do they act as facilitators between the author and its audience, between the period and its meaning, between the genre and its writing? The emotional and affective dimension of a text cannot be rationalized as either its objective or its point of origin. It is more a textual and factual paradigm around which the author develops her intellectual environment, creating the cultural and political dimension for the text. However, it is within this territory of the text, as a socio-cultural entity orchestrated by the auctorial persona, that a whole archive of emotions and affects is disseminated.

We are interested in essays that investigate the constituency of such “archives of feelings” (Cvetkovich) through the study of the affectivity and emotionality of both literary and non-literary texts, such as political and theological treatises, mystical texts, medical works, scientific tracts and pamphlets, hagiographies and encyclopedic compendiums. While we welcome submissions of articles dealing with such topics in different geographic areas, we are particularly interested in late-medieval and Renaissance French texts.

Articles may examine, but are not limited to questions related to:

• discourses and practices of emotions and affect
• the somatization of the emotional act
• affect and emotions in poetry
• emotions, affect and gender
• queer emotions and affects
• emotions, affect and race
• psychogeographies of emotions and affect
• rhetorics of affect or emotions
• emotional rewritings of historical events

Please send 300-word abstracts in English, as well as a short biography with university affiliation and email address, to Andreea Marculescu (marculescu.andreea@gmail.com or amarcule@uci.edu) and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier (cmorandm@uvm.edu) before June 1^st . Selected abstracts will be notified on July 1^st, and the complete papers will be due on November 1^st.

Representation and Reality in the Medieval Church
Rowan University’s Second Annual Symposium on Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Sponsored by Rowan University and the University of Kent

From historical accounts to literary satire, the medieval Church has ever been a subject of discussion and controversy.  This symposium will explore the ways in which the Church presented itself, the extent to which these representations corresponded with reality, and how the commentaries of contemporaries, both lay and clerical, impacted the Church at large, locally and internationally.

These fascinating complexities of the Church in the Middle Ages will be the subject of the Second Annual Symposium on Medieval & Early Modern Studies, co-sponsored by Rowan University and the University of Kent.  As an interdisciplinary conference, papers from all subjects and perspectives are welcome.  This year’s symposium will be held on Friday and Saturday, 31 July — 1 August 2015, at Rowan’s main campus in Glassboro, NJ.

Keynote presentations will be given by Dr. Barbara Bombi and Dr. Sarah James, both of the University of Kent.

Abstracts of 200 words are invited from both professional scholars and postgraduate researchers.  Papers are to be approximately 20 minutes in length; proposals for three papers in themed sessions are also welcome.  In addition, there will be one undergraduate session of  15 to 20-minute papers; interested undergraduate students of any discipline are encouraged to submit their 200-word abstracts, as well.  To submit a proposal, please email rowanmedievalsymposium@gmail.com; for any questions or further information, please email the conference organizer, Jon-Mark Grussenmeyer, at jg482@kent.ac.uk.  The deadline for abstract submissions is 1 May 2015.

For more information, visit our website at http://rumedievalsymposium.wix.com/medieval-symposium.