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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CALL FOR PAPERS
Gothic Ivory Sculpture: Old Questions, New Directions
Friday 23^rd March 2012, Sackler Centre, Victoria and Albert Museum

Proposals are invited for papers to be presented at this one-day conference, jointly organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Courtauld Gothic Ivories Project, to be held at the V&A in 2012. The papers will be presented in three sessions, each composed of three speakers, with papers lasting twenty minutes.

The conference takes as its starting point the observation that in recent years there has been an unprecedented revival of scholarly activity in the study of Gothic ivory carvings, a class of object which survives in large numbers (nearly 4,000 known examples), but which has largely been regarded as an area of minor interest by medieval art historians. In recent years, led by such scholars as Danielle Gaborit-Chopin and Charles Little, much new work has been carried out on these artworks, ranging from the re-dating of accepted groupings, to detailed analysis of individual pieces. A particular impetus has been given to the field thanks to the inception of the Gothic Ivories Project (www.gothicivories.courtauld.ac.uk) at the Courtauld Institute of Art, which aims to provide catalogue records and images of the majority of the surviving works scattered around the world. In parallel, the V&A will shortly issue a comprehensive new scholarly catalogue of its holdings in this area, one of the most important collections in the world.

Papers are invited on a wide variety of themes and topics emerging from the study of gothic ivory carving. These may range from the focused study of individual objects or groups from a physical, iconographic or stylistic standpoint, to more synthetic approaches seeking to contextualise ivory carving in terms of its relationships to other media, ownership or use. A further issue for discussion will be the afterlives (nachleben) of gothic ivory carvings, both in private collections and in museums. Any discussion of gothic ivories also raises the issue of authenticity, restoration and forgeries, and proposals for papers on these topics would also be welcomed.

Proposals should take the form of a short text of one or two paragraphs, outlining the paper’s title, the main themes to be considered, and the objects on which the study will concentrate. Some indication of where the research sits within the historiography would also be of use.

The deadline for submissions is Monday, 7^th November. Potential speakers should be contacted about whether or not their paper has been accepted by the first week of December.

Contacts: Glyn Davies (g.davies@vam.ac.uk) and Catherine Yvard (catherine.yvard@courtauld.ac.uk).