The Medieval Academy Blog

What does it look like for historical expressions of dancing and movement arts to break out of traditional academic and performative boxes? How do scholars and practitioners escape the boundaries of discipline, chronology, geography, and methodology subsumed under the conventional appellation of “early dance”? Conversely, how can we demonstrate the ways in which our work complements and completes the work of other disciplines in light of these distinctions? This symposium explores early dance as an idea, a time, a place, a locus of cultural meaning and aims to draw together scholars working across disciplines and geographies who are nevertheless invested in “early” dance and movement.

We invite papers for this virtual symposium from scholars across disciplines, exploring aspects of dance and movement from all methodological perspectives, finding commonality in the antecedental nature of their work. Whether looking at the musical, literary, cultural, political, religious, or social contexts of dance, or expanding knowledge of its somatic and kinesthetic dimensions, we find unity in the chronological earliness of our work. We encourage papers that explore dance outside of Western European frameworks of knowledge and movement production, including comparative or transhistorical perspectives on pre-1800 or “early” dance.

Submission due date: Sept. 15, 2023
Notification of acceptance by Nov. 1, 2023
Submit proposals via submission portal:
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/earlydance/submit

Sponsored by Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain and International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

Organizers: Michael A. Torregrossa and Joseph M. Sullivan

Call for Papers – Please Submit Proposals by 15 September 2023
59th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)
Hybrid event: Thursday, 9 May, through Saturday, 11 May, 2024

Session Objective

Creating Camelot(s): The Idea of Community in Arthurian Texts (virtual)

Although we often refer to the Matter of Britain as the Arthurian tradition, the figure of King Arthur is merely the center point of the story. The tales are in fact about the community that Arthur builds and the ways those inside it (and outside as well) interact with each other. Through Arthur and those he surrounds himself with, Camelot becomes a living thing, and we experience its birth, maturity, and death, as well as its re-creation across the ages.

In this session, we’d like to highlight the multiple ways that Arthur’s realm has been constructed from the Middle Ages to the present. Submissions can explore the Arthurian legends from across time and/or space as represented through diverse genres and media.

We seek contributions from a range of scholars–those within the disciplines of Arthurian Studies and/or Medieval Studies as well as those in outside fields, including beyond the humanities–as they consider at least one of the following questions:

• What are the origins of Camelot? How do Arthur’s literary and/or historic predecessors (Ambrosius Aurelius, Arthur of Dal Riada, Constantine, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Lucius Artorius Castus, Riothamus, Uther Pendragon, Vortigern, ) influence the creation of his home base? What real locales inspired the idea or site of Camelot?
• Moving forwards, how has Camelot been built as a physical place whether in the Arthurian past or in post-Arthurian re-creations? What does the site look like? How does it function as a space where individuals live and work?
• Also, how has Camelot been shaped as a communal space, a location for people to come together in fellowship, and who has been included within this group? In what ways does the community grow and change under Arthur and/or his successors?
• Alternatively, who has been excluded and/or expelled from the space(s) of Camelot, and in what ways have those individuals dealt with this loss?
• Similarly, who has been invited to join the community at Camelot but resisted its entreaties and/or rebelled against Arthur and his rule (or that of his successors)? What are the reasons for their rejection of Camelot? How do their actions impact the Arthurian world?
• Lastly, do those removed from and/or repelled by Camelot ever integrate (or re-integrate) and become part of the community? How does this acceptance shape them and/or the world of Camelot?

Submission Information

All proposals must be submitted into the Confex system at https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/call by 15 September 2023. You will be prompted to complete sections on Title and Presentation Information, People, Abstract, and Short Description.

Be advised of the following policies of the Congress: “You are invited to make one paper proposal to one session of papers. This may be to one of the Sponsored or Special Sessions of Papers, which are organized by colleagues around the world, OR to the General Sessions of Papers, which are organized by the Program Committee in Kalamazoo. You may propose an unlimited number of roundtable contributions. However, you will not be scheduled as an active participant (as a paper presenter, roundtable discussant, presider, respondent, workshop leader, or performer) in more than three sessions.”.

Thank you for your interest in our session. Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at KingArthurForever2000@gmail.com.

For more information on the  Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, please visit our website at https://KingArthurForever.blogspot.com/.

For more information on the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB), please visit our website at https://www.international-arthurian-society-nab.org/ and consider becoming a member of our organization.

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, June-Ann Greeley, and Rachael Warmington

Call for Papers – Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2023
55th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association
Sheraton Boston Hotel (Boston, MA)
On-site event: 7-10 March 2024

Session Rationale

Medievalisms Today: Aspects of the Medieval Past in the 21st-century World (Panel)

A frequent conception of the medieval period is that it was a barbaric, fanatical, and unenlightened era, yet, despite these (actual or perceived) faults, there remains an appeal to the era in modern culture. As Umberto Eco wrote a number of decades ago, “it seems people like the Middle Ages,” and this statement continues to ring true today in 2023. Regardless of the centuries (and often geography) that separate them from this time, creators worldwide are still engaged with adapting, adopting, appropriating, and/or transforming elements of the medieval past. The resulting works (referred to as medievalisms) appear in a startling array of media and have been employed (both positively and negatively) for a variety of purposes, including in materials with commercial, educational, entertainment, and propagandist motives.

Recently, medievalists have begun to widen the scope of their analysis of these works, and they have strived to explore the reception of the medieval on a wider scale than the expected sites of medieval re-creation (such as Europe, Canada, and the United States) to highlight the production and dissemination of medievalisms (as recent studies phrase it) as global, international, and/or world phenomena. Medievalists have also looked more deeply at how the creators of these new works impact the local culture around them.

These studies have made a promising start toward widening the scope of medievalism, but much work remains to be done to more fully catalog and assess these materials, especially as their numbers keep increasing.

Our intent in this session is to shine the spotlight onto new and recent works of medievalism from across the planet that haven’t yet received much (if any) attention and explore how and (perhaps) why creators still find the Middle Ages so interesting and (despite their distance from the period) relevant in the twenty-first century to their own experiences, places, and times.

Presentations might highlight and engage with examples of the medieval in comics, drama, fiction, film, games, manga, memes, music, politics, streaming video, television programming, and/or translations. Other approaches are also welcome.

Please see Helen Young and Kavita Mundan Finn’s online bibliography from Global Medievalism: An Introduction (available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/global-medievalism/E555F6DCC12217351536A00E22E862E5) for ideas and support.

Submission Information

All proposals must be submitted into the CFPList system at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20591 by 30 September 2023. You will be prompted to create an account with NeMLA (if you do not already have one) and, then, to complete sections on Title, Abstract, and Media Needs.

Notification on the fate of your submission will be made prior to 16 October 2023. If favorable, please confirm your participation with the chairs by accepting their invitations and by registering for the event. The deadline for Registration/Membership is 9 December 2023.

Be advised of the following policies of the Convention: All participants must be members of NeMLA for the year of the conference. Participants may present on up to two sessions of different types (panels/seminars are considered of the same type). Submitters to the CFP site cannot upload the same abstract twice.(See the NeMLA Presenter Policies page, at https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/policies.html, for further details,)

Thank you for your interest in our session. Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at MedievalinPopularCulture@gmail.com.

For more information on the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, please visit our website at https://MedievalinPopularCulture.blogspot.com/.

The Experience of Local Officialdom in Europe and the Mediterranean, c.1000-1500: Between Order and Disorder

Local officeholders and petty officials were integral components of medieval political life across Europe and the Mediterranean, central to the configuration and experience of power but whose presence and absence could also signify crisis and confusion. Modern scholarship and medieval sources alike have acknowledged that local officers could just as easily be sources of disorder as order, generators of crisis as well as crisis managers. This strand builds on such insights to consider local officers in relation to order and disorder within their immediate local and broader sociopolitical contexts. Our approach is broad, encompassing a variety of officers—civic, royal, ecclesiastical, seigneurial, etc.—as well as challenges to the notion of ‘officialdom’. It proposes a social and experiential history which highlights the roles, profiles, and possibilities of a range of officers in their individual as well as institutional and social contexts, by considering how they supported or challenged models of political and social order prevalent in their communities or promulgated by their superiors.

Proposals of around 250 words including a brief biography, full contact information, academic affiliation, and an indication of whether you would be participating virtually or in-person should be sent to Charlie Steinman at ces2273@columbia.edu and Nathan Meades at nm263@st-andrews.ac.uk by Friday 8th September 2023.

Proposals might like to consider but are not limited to:

– Questions of justice, jurisdiction, authority
– Formulations and conceptions of office and officialdom, both theoretical and practical
– Prosopographical and biographical studies of local officers
– Accountability, both financial and in the sense of holding officers to account
– Relations between officers and local communities, including reactions, resistance and dissent
– Officers in explicit crisis situations (political, economic, social)
– Notions of corruption, morality and the ethics of officeholding
– Officers as mediators or brokers between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’

The Painted Page: Medieval Manuscripts Through a Comparative Lens
(chair: Dr. Ann Shafer, Providence College, Rhode Island)

This virtual session examines premodern illuminated books from the sacred traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam within a larger context of visual influences from other media across space and time. Often individually studied in a vacuum with very specific aims, these books have nevertheless belonged to fluid and far-reaching communities of makers and readers whose physical and spiritual needs have varied over time and space. This session asks simple comparative questions. For example, how old is the practice of illuminating text, and what can ancient stone carvings – from Guatemala to Assyria – tell us about the role of imagery in the Medieval book? What do ink makers in Japan have to teach us about the devotional aspect of European scribal practices through time? How can contemporary artists in the Middle East show us subtle social and political relationships between the texts and the communities that produced them? Possible research questions in this space of free inquiry are endless and might dovetail with issues of materials and techniques of production, communal practices of learning and exchange, and the ontological nature of the sacred word. With the aim of bringing together scholars from different fields, we hope to gain new perspectives on familiar texts and broaden the scope of manuscript studies.

Papers that compare across cultures are especially welcome.

To submit a 250-word CFP before the August 31st deadline:

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html