The Medieval Academy Blog

Abstracts from graduate students are now being accepted for the 29^th annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference, to be held at Yale University on Saturday, March 31st, 2012. The theme will be “Audience in the Middle Ages.”

The organizers hope that this broad heading will elicit proposals for papers from all disciplines of medieval studies. Among many potential areas of focus are performance; orality; spectacle and spectatorship; transmission and circulation; decrees, bulls, charters, and other public documents; drama; liturgy and sacred music; sermons, lectures, and disputation; reception history; and coteries. Further, we look forward to receiving proposals that take more theoretical approaches to ideas of audience in the medieval period. We also welcome investigations of the post-medieval reception of medieval life and thought.

The conference will feature a plenary lecture by Elaine Treharne, Professor of English at Florida State University. Professor Treharne is the author of Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220 (Oxford, forthcoming), Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 2006) and Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts (Boydell and Brewer, 2010), among many others.

Papers are to be no more than twenty minutes in length and read in English.  Abstracts of up to 250 words should be sent by e-mail to audience.yale@gmail.com, or a hard copy may be mailed to:

Audience in the Middle Ages
c/o Joseph Stadolnik
Department of English

Yale University
P.O. Box 208302
New Haven, CT 06520-8302

The deadline for submissions is January 1, 2012.  Graduate students whose abstracts are selected for the conference will have the opportunity to submit their paper in its entirety for consideration for the Alison Goddard Elliott Award.

5-7 July 2012, University of Oxford
Call for Papers

The Oxford/Cambridge International Chronicles Symposium (OCICS) is a biennial conference devoted to the interdisciplinary study of historical and related texts in the medieval and Early Modern periods.

The theme for the 2012 conference is ‘Bonds, Links, and Ties in Medieval and Renaissance Chronicles’.

Keynote addresses will be given by Prof Pauline Stafford (Liverpool), Dr Elizabeth van Houts (Cambridge), and Dr James Howard-Johnston (Oxford). The conference will take place at Oxford’s Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers of 20 minutes must be submitted to the organizers via e-mail (at ocics@history.ox.ac.uk) by 31 January 2012.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
* genealogies (real or imagined)
* family bonds
* textual links
* breaks and discontinuities
* links between past, present, and future
* ties of religion and faith
* law, order, and disruption
* oaths, promises, and betrayals
* local, regional, and national identities

A limited number of graduate student bursaries will be available.

www.ocics.co.uk

Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS)
Binghamton University
Call for Papers
April 26-7, 2013

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) stands on the threshold between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a time of rapid transition in the political, economic, artistic, and literary realms, all of which were touched in some way by his legacy. In the course of his lifetime, Boccaccio was a merchant-banker, courtier, scribe, philologist, mythographer, geographer, literary scholar, social critic, lecturer, cleric, and ambassador of the Florentine republic, as well as fiction-writer, biographer, and poet. Boccaccio’s corpus of Latin and Italian texts offers a summa of established (classical, Christian, romance) genres and discourses, and at the same time anticipates many of the formal and topical innovations that emerged in early modern literatures and that remain evident in contemporary narrative genres. His substantial correspondence offers a window on the changing worlds of fourteenth-century Europe.

In honor of the 700th anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth, the 2013 CEMERS conference at Binghamton University (SUNY) will provide an interdisciplinary forum in which to rethink all aspects of this last (but not necessarily least) of Italy’s three crowning writers, in order to re-contextualize and revitalize his place in history, as well as in the literary pantheon. Scholars who work in the wide variety of fields relating to the biography and texts of Boccaccio, as well as the history of late Medieval Europe, are invited to submit papers or session proposals on his life and his literary career, as well as on his texts and their reception in medieval, early modern, and modern culture.

Of particular interest are papers and sessions that address Boccaccio’s texts—both Latin and vernacular—and their relation to:

Italian and European Humanism

The Angevin court of Naples

Northern Italian politics and relations among city-states

The history of the Church and the religious orders

Medieval mercantile practices and global trade

The study of gender and sexualities

Medicine and magic

Manuscript illumination and the other visual arts

Dante and Petrarch

Renaissance theatre and chivalric epic

The novella tradition

The emergence of narrative realism in fiction

Global literature, music, and cinema

We hope to receive proposals that explore the intertextual networks that provided sources for Boccaccio’s Latin and Italian texts, as well as their subsequent global itineraries. We also invite submissions for papers and sessions that approach the Boccaccio corpus as source-material for historical inquiry, whether cultural or social.

Papers should not exceed 20 minutes in length and may be delivered in English or Italian. Send abstracts and brief CVs by September 15, 2012, to cemers@binghamton.edu. Inquiries may be directed to Professors Olivia Holmes (oholmes@binghamton.edu) or Dana Stewart (stewart@binghamton.edu). We anticipate publishing a volume of selected conference proceedings.

Dear colleagues and students,

We warmly invite you to the Studientag zum englischen Mittelalter (SEM XIV) which will take place at the Universtiy of Göttingen on March 8-10, 2012.

As usual, the SEM offers a platform for advanced students to present their papers in the field of English Medieval Studies to a forum of students and scholars. Topics may include any area concerning the research and teaching of the language and literature of the Middle Ages in England. Following the procedure of previous years, all papers will be forwarded to all participants before the conference, and will then be presented in a short summary by senior scholars who will then offer their help and comments and lead the discussion. The SEM offers a unique opportunity for up-and-coming medievalists to take the first steps on the academic stage in an open and friendly environment, to test and improve their ideas, and to become part of an inspiring network of scholars. Take the chance!

Everyone interested in submitting a paper should inform us about their intentions (please include a short abstract or a few sentences about the topic, and a working title if possible) until December 10, 2011.

Contributions should be in the form of an .rtf, or .doc, or a .pdf-file of about the length of twenty pages. Please send it to mediaeve@gwdg.de until February 10, 2012.

If you are planning to attend the conference we would be grateful if you could let us know before the end of 2011 so that we can make the necessary preparations. If you wish to volunteer for the presentation of a student paper please respond to wrudolf@gwdg.de.

Please forward this Call for Papers to all those you think may be interested in participating, and especially to those students working on an M.A. or PhD. We are happy about every contribution.

We are looking forward to hearing from you and hope to see as many of you as possible at the SEM next year.

Human / Animal
9th Annual Symposium of the International Medieval Society – Paris
CALL FOR PAPERS

Dates: Thursday 28 – Saturday 30 June 2012
Location: Paris, France
Deadline for submissions: 15 January 2012

The International Medieval Society in Paris (IMS-Paris) is soliciting abstracts for individual papers and proposals for complete sessions for its 2012 symposium organized around the theme of human/animal in medieval France.

Animals – both real and fantastical – were frequently central to medieval culture, thought and artistic production. This symposium addresses a particular aspect of this centrality: the relationship between humans and animals and the way this was imagined, defined and re-defined across the historical and cultural spectrum of the Middle Ages. The distinction between human and animal that modern culture often takes for granted is far from clear-cut in medieval contexts and was subject to historical and cultural change. Historians have suggested that the concept of the animal and the extent to which it represented a form of life distinguishable from that of human beings underwent considerable alteration in the twelfth century. This may be seen in shifts in the terms used to describe animals; developments in the ways animals were represented in literature and art; and the evolution of key texts such as the Physiologus and its variants, the bestiaries. Within this context, the boundaries between humans and animals – which might be established through elements as diverse as the possession of language, a capacity for laughter, or legal responsibility – were subject to change and negotiation. The conference aims to interrogate the questions that the fluctuating relationship between human and animal in the Middle Ages raises from an historically inclusive, cross-disciplinary perspective by focusing on a number of key questions:

– How was the relationship between human and animal conceptualised, represented and discussed in medieval cultural traditions (philosophical, literary, artistic, architectural, musical or other)?
– What significance does the relationship and/or distinction between humans and animals have in the social and legal contexts in which they interacted?
– To what extent were human and animal thought of as separable or confusable categories? How is this related to behavioural, linguistic, physical, cultural, or other factors?
– In what ways does thinking about animals in the Middle Ages serve to define a notion of the human? Is it possible to conceive of the animal in a way that does not reflect on the human?

Participants are free to interpret these questions broadly, in line with their particular areas of specialism. Priority will be given to papers that address French and Francophone topics. Please send a proposal of 400 words or less (written in English or French) for a 20-minute paper should be e-mailed to contact@ims-paris.org no later than 15 January 2012.
In addition to the proposal, please submit full contact information, a CV and a tentative assessment of any audiovisual equipment required for your presentation.

The IMS-Paris will review submissions and respond via e-mail by 6 February 2012. Titles of accepted papers will be made available on the IMS-Paris web site. Authors of accepted papers will be responsible for their own travel costs and conference registration fee (35 euros, reduced for students, free for IMS-Paris members).

The IMS-Paris is an interdisciplinary and bilingual (French/English) organization founded to serve as a centre for medievalists who research, work, study, or travel to France. For more information about the IMS-Paris, please see our website: www.ims-paris.org.