The Medieval Academy Blog

April 4-6, 2013
Featuring Plenary Speaker
Dr. Richard North, Professor of Old English Literature, University of London

The conference is slated to be held on our beautiful campus in Huntsville, Texas.

Deadline to propose a Special Session: July 15, 2012
Deadline for abstracts: October 15, 2012
Notification of acceptance: December 15, 2012

You are invited to send your 250-300-word abstract to Dr. Darci Hill, Conference Coordinator, on any topic dealing with Medieval and/or Renaissance thought.  If you would like to propose a special session, you are welcome to do that as well.  We welcome papers, posters, and performances on any aspect of this time period.  Papers dealing with language and linguistics, literature, music, philosophy, history, art, music, and theatre are all equally welcome.

Please send all inquiries and abstracts electronically to:

Dr. Darci Hill,
Eng_dnh@shsu.edu
Conference Coordinator,
Department of English
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, Texas 77340
Phone: 936-294-1473

48th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo [MI], Western Michigan University). – Session Un/making mistakes in Medieval manuscripts (organized by B. M. Eggert, Humboldt University, Berlin – Ch. Schott, Erskine College, South Carolina). – Call for papers (until 25.VIII.2012).

While scholars of medieval manuscripts usually focus either on the craftsmanship of the codex or on how the copy work affects the text, the purpose of this session is to shed light on errors, mistakes and obscurities in handwritten texts – and what happens when they are noticed. Scribes often made mistakes when taking dictation or copying a text, which manifest themselves in dittography or omission of words as a result of eyeskip, etc. Likewise, the physical supports themselves could be faulty, containing holes or irregular edges that forced scribes to adjust or alter their copying activities to accommodate their materials. Sometimes it remains obscure whether a textual phenomenon was regarded an error or mistake, for example when illuminators of manuscripts ignored written instructions concerning iconography or colours. Errors, mistakes and obscurities could be handled in different ways: they could be corrected openly, hushed up with more or less skill, marked with a comment – or remain as they were. Each decision marks a distinct understanding of whether correctness of a text was regarded as the most important aspect of a manuscript – or whether a clean page and uninterrupted textual surface was deemed more valuable.

By inviting paper proposals from both scholars of text as well as scholars of images, this session aims to explore the nature of errors, mistakes and obscurities in medieval manuscripts as well as the “corrections” thereof to gain insight into the contemporary assumptions about what a text should look like.

Please send your abstract, along with a short cv and the paper proposal form (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/files/pif-2013.pdf) to B. M. Eggert (BarbaraMEggert@aol.com) and Ch. Schott (cms8ud@virginia.edu).

The prior of a community of Augustinian canons near Amiens from ca. 1132 until his death ca. 1173-74, Hugh of Fouilloy produced six known treatises on the monastic life: De avibus, De claustro animae, De medicina animae, De nuptiis, De rota verae et falsae religionis, and De pastoribus et ovibus.  These enjoyed wide diffusion, with De avibus and De claustro animae being the most popular according to the large number of surviving manuscripts.  In particular, Hugh’s works were popular among the Cistercians, which indicates that they are significant documents for the history of the twelfth-century monastic reforms.

Awareness of Hugh of Fouilloy has increased significantly among medievalists due to recent work by scholars such as Willene B. Clark, Mary Carruthers, Christiania Whitehead, Baudouin Van den Abeele, Franco Negri, and Rémy Cordonnier.  The intention of this collection of essays is to provide a foundation for future work on Hugh.  While not a “companion,” the volume will provide up-to-date information on Hugh’s life and his works, as well as including a current list of manuscripts.  It will also contain a number of essays that will demonstrate his importance as a teacher and writer and that will establish the state of research on Hugh and his works.

Anyone interested in contributing to the collection should submit an abstract of 500 words accompanied by a 100-150-word author’s biography by October 1, 2012 to either Mary Agnes Edsall (maedsall2@gmail.com) or Rémy Cordonnier (artuslemerle@gmail.com).

AVISTA, the Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Technology, Science, and Art in the Middle Ages, is pleased to announce FOUR sessions at the International Congress for Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo next year, which will be held from 9-12 May 2013:

• New Studies of the North Transept of Reims I: Archeology & Architecture
• New Studies of the North Transept of Reims II: Sculpture
• Metal Production & Design
• Metals in Architecture

In addition, we are in negotiations to have a live iron smelting demonstration at the ICMS, likely on Saturday.  Once details are finalized, we will be accepting volunteers to assist the smith as smelting apprentices.

For full information on the sessions, grant opportunities, and to see past AVISTA activities at the ICMS, please see www.avista.org under ‘Conferences’.

Call for papers
The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: Literature and Language
7-8 June 2013, University of Bern
Conference Organisers:
Prof. Dr. Beatrix Busse (University of Heidelberg)
Prof. Dr. Annette Kern-Stähler (University of Bern)

The study of the historical and cultural formation of the senses has attracted increasing scholarly interest in recent years. We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers from medievalists and early modernists (in English literary and cultural studies or in linguistics). Topics may include but are not limited to
* sensory environments
* sensory metaphors
* sensory hierarchies
* sense impairments
* gender and the senses

Papers might explore
* how sensory experiences are expressed and ordered by language
* how literature grows out of and evokes sensory experiences
* how sensations were interpreted in the late medieval and early modern periods
* how the meanings of sensory terms have changed with time
* how the knowledge of sense perception was transmitted

To maximise the interaction among the conference participants, there will be no parallel sessions. The concluding session of the conference will include a panel discussion of the outstanding problems in the fields and the trends for future research.

Confirmed keynote speakers
Professor Vincent Gillespie, University of Oxford
Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, King’s College London
Professor Richard Newhauser, Arizona State University

Please send an abstract (max 250 words) and a bionote by 15 February 2013 to
annette.kern-staehler@ens.unibe.ch