The Medieval Academy Blog

To commemorate the 5th centenary of Ferdinand II of Aragon’s death (1452-1516) the Royal Studies Network is organizing two sessions for the next ESSHC conference, which will take place in Valencia (30 March – 2 April 2016) on the theme of “Rulership Reinforcement: Achievements and Limits in Medieval and Early Modern Societies”. The reign of Ferdinand II and his wife Isabel I, known jointly as “the Catholic Kings”, is considered to be a key moment in the consolidations of royal structures- with regard to the Spanish case particularly they are often seen as the origin of the modern state. Nevertheless their political ideas rose from the Middle Ages and were continually reformulated in the Early Modern centuries. These sessions aim to compare different national situations and methodological approaches. We are especially interested in papers about both female and male rulership in both a European and Mediterranean context. Topics to be discussed may include though are not limited to:

• “Betweenness”: The significance of rulers as midpoints between political and economical agents or regions; as collaborators and links between central institutions and local powers.
• Presenting a ruler’s authority: Representations of the sovereign and/or sovereignty: strategies, benefits, and risks.
• Motivations to serve the ruler: Benefits, reciprocal relationships and the influence of Royal Grace in the political system.
• Obedience or loyalty? Political discourses and their limits concerning the royal authority.
• Religion and royal religiosity in the political arena: How mainstream were beliefs and religious practices and to what extend did this pose a problem for public powers in past societies?
• Violent establishments of new dynasties and revolts against royalty. How did these events effect the construction of the royal image?

Abstracts of approximately 300 words for an individual paper can be sent to the organizers at monarchyconference@gmail.com by 15 April 2015. If you are interested in proposing joint papers or a complete panel of four, please email us to discuss ideas.

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.