The Medieval Academy Blog

The Future Perfect of the Book – A Call for Papers

Book History Research Network: a one-day colloquium

Institute of English Studies (University of London), 25 November 2011

At a moment when the rise of e-Readers foretells the end of the printed book, the founder of the Internet Archive Brewster Kahle launches an initiative for the preservation of the book.  He is creating a storehouse for physical books in specially-adapted containers on the West Coast of the United States in order to preserve them as “backup copies” for posterity.  His idea came about as a reaction against the notion that books can be put beyond use (or thrown away) as soon as they are digitized.

While the future of the book is certainly an important topic for consideration, an initiative such as Kahle’s also begs the question how did past the past envision the future of the book – or of the predominant medium of the time.  Victor Hugo’s phrase, ‘ceci tuera cela’, spelt a new paradigm of mistrust when the printed book suddenly disrupted the foundation of manuscript culture and the transmission of the written. Although the digital revolution is possibly the most radical change in the history of writing, one can wonder how other similar transitions fared: from the scroll to the codex, from manuscript to printed book, from printing on the handpress to machine and offset printing, from writing by hand to writing on the typewriter and the wordprocessor?  More fundamentally, do the concerns of fifteenth-century critics of print like those of Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim have anything in common with twenty-first-century anxieties about the triumph of digital technology? Is access to knowledge and preservation, which champions of the digital revolution invoke, really a new concern? How much of the (old) culture of the book is retained in the new digital media?

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Center for Iconographic Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Rijeka

Department of Art History, Iconology Research Group

 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

 Institute of English Studies, SAS, University of London

 are pleased to announce the call for the

Sixth International Conference of Iconographic Studies

 Visions

Rijeka,  30 May – 1 June, 2012

This conference seeks to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue as well as to continue the cycle of sessions for scholarly discourse on significant subjects in iconographic studies. The conference presentations will deal with different subjects concerning “visions” with an emphasis upon the relation between mysticism and art in the European Middle Ages (other periods in Art history are included as well).

The themes and subjects for discussion are as follows:

–  concepts of visions
–  semantics of vision
–  visions in the Old Testament
–  visions in the Book of Revelation
–  visions of the medieval mystics
–  Christian mysticism between theory and practice
–  visions and political theory
–  visions and eternity
–  visions and the visual arts
–  visions “materialized” in different media

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

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, crossdisciplinary perspective by focusing on a number of key questions:

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