The Medieval Academy Blog

Early European Puppetry Studies Conference
October 12-15 at Yale University

From moving statues to artificial animals to marionette performances, puppetry seems to have appeared in every sector of medieval and early modern European society. Jointed religious figures illustrated the liturgy, while dragon effigies processed through cities on feast days, and popular and courtly audiences enjoyed puppet shows of legendary and historical events. Despite the ubiquity of medieval and early modern puppets in Europe, scholarly consideration of these performing objects is often limited to case studies. Consideration of “puppetry” as a particular form with its own norms and commonalities is also uncommon, due in part to the marginal position of puppetry in Western culture. However, considering the variety and complexity of medieval and early modern European puppetry provides an opportunity to reassess the role of figural objects and performance in Western culture. As objects used in performance, puppets enrich expanding scholarship on the inter- and multimedial dimensions of medieval and early modern theater, liturgy, and entertainment. As imitative objects, puppets inform discussions about representation in medieval and early modern Europe. And as objects unsettling boundaries between animate and inanimate, puppets nuance conversations about object agency, object-oriented ontology, and the so-called “material turn” happening across the humanities.

This conference aims to bring together scholars from art history, history, European literary and language studies, theater, and other fields to formally establish early European puppetry studies as a cross-disciplinary field and scholarly community. To that end, sessions will provide an opportunity for collecting and sharing resources as well as sites for setting the terms and questions that structure early European puppetry studies. We intend to build on the conference’s presentations to produce the first edited volume in early European puppetry studies in the following year.

Considering a wide range of objects and practices under the rubric of puppetry, the conference is interested in what defines a puppet. How might movement, interaction, animation, liveliness, or spectatorship, matter? How do the contexts of puppet performance (professional, amateur, civic, courtly) or its sites (church, stage, fairground, street) affect its possibilities? How did puppetry operate as a site of cross-cultural encounter that allowed swift exchanges across the continent? In what ways does the materiality of a puppet shape its modes of embodiment as it plays characters ranging from human and animal to divine? How does actual puppetry practice complicate or resist prevailing cultural metaphors of puppetry in relation to power and aesthetics?

We invite work on all manner of performing objects that can usefully be examined or theorized in terms of puppetry. We welcome proposals from scholars already working explicitly on puppetry as well as those newly imagining their work in relation to puppetry. In particular, we are interested in papers that resist dominant cultural discourses that limit puppetry to “popular” or “folkloric” spaces, seeking instead to locate fruitful avenues for using puppetry as a framework to analyze art, literature, culture, and performance traditions in medieval and early modern Europe. In other words, we hope to expand the field of inquiry from puppetry as metaphor to puppetry as praxis.

To propose a paper, please submit a 300-word abstract to Michelle Oing and Nicole Sheriko at earlyeuropeanpuppetrystudies@gmail.com by May 1, 2023.

Further details can be found at earlyeuropeanpuppetrystudies.com.

a joint meeting of The Mid-America Medieval Association & the Medieval Association of the Midwest
___________________________________________

The Medieval Out of Time & Place
22-23 September 2023
University of Missouri – Kansas City

Plenary: Dr. Elizabeth K. Hebbard
Peripheral Manuscripts Project
French & Italian, Indiana University – Bloomington

200-word abstracts due 31 May 2023

https://forms.gle/uJqQZcKESS891iEbA

sample topics The Medieval Out of Time & Place

• medieval objects in new locales or contexts
• the reuse or recycling of the medieval in the modern age
• medieval saints celebrated in alternate geographies and temporalities
• medievalism as a framework for imagining the past
• the European past in the American/Midwestern present
• the Midwestern medieval, neo-gothic space and architecture
• monasticism in the Midwest
• medieval archives in the Midwest
• medieval objects in a digital world
• the digital medieval in the Midwest
• teaching the future, using the past
• the future for Medieval Studies in the Midwest

A limited number of bursaries are available for graduate student travel, thanks to a grant by the Committee on Centers and Regional Associations & The Medieval Academy of America.

Ancient – Medieval – Early Modern Greek and Latin Letter Collections
Methodological and thematic intersections
Durham University, 18-19 May 2023

Roy Gibson (Durham)
and
Simon Smets (LBI for Neo-Latin Studies / University College London)

Call for Papers: Deadline Friday 24 February 2023
Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to: roy.k.gibson@durham.ac.uk and
simon.smets@neolatin.lbg.ac.at

Modern scholarship rightly distinguishes between collections of letters and ‘letter collections’ with literary aspirations. Students of ancient literature have fully embraced the methodological challenges and interpretative opportunities this distinction brings about. For the middle ages, a wider range of letter collections has been preserved, and the careful composition of some of them has been acknowledged in a couple of case studies. The picture in that period is complicated by the development of so-called ‘artes dictaminis’, letter writing manuals that sometimes hold a position between utilitarianism and literary production. If we look at Latin and Greek epistolary production from the period after 1400 (belonging to the so called Neo-Latin and Neo-Ancient Greek literature), one is overwhelmed by the sheer number of extant examples, most of which remain unedited and are rarely studied. Letter collections were a very popular genre throughout all of these periods. But what were the differences and similarities? How, for example, does the balance between political, philosophical and personal content vary? And under what circumstances does this change?

Our conference tries to connect the study of letters, and especially letter collections, in various fields. Possible topics of investigation are:

• Methodological exchange between ancient, medieval, Neo-Latin literary studies; e.g. how to tackle the letter collection as a distinct genre, how to analyse different editorial phases of a collection.
• Reception of earlier letter collections in medieval and early modern meta-discourse, as well as in new letter collections (with a focus on the less studied reception of authors such as Pliny, the Church Fathers, Peter of Blois, Bernard of Clairvaux…)
• In line with the previous point, the influence of earlier letter collections on later examples; e.g. how was the practice of code-switching in antiquity taken up again to fashion early modern letter collections; the structure of collections as a reference to earlier models
• Fundamental shifts from one period to another, and the impact they had on the creation and dissemination of letter collections; e.g. the advent of the printing press, the development of scientific letter collections
• The role of education in letter writing and the divergences or similarities between different periods; e.g. preferred models in classroom contexts and the medieval and renaissance artes dictaminis

Findings from languages other than Latin and Greek will be considered, in as far as they throw light on matters relevant to one of these traditions

As part of its thematic series of co-sponsored sessions this academic year on “Iberian History as Global History” at major international conferences, the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS) has partnered with UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies (CEGS) to host a symposium on The Western Mediterranean and the Global Middle Ages, which will be held in person at the stately Royce Hall on the UCLA campus on October 20-21, 2023. We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations that explore the possibilities and/or underlying complexities of conceptualizing the early history of the Western Mediterranean in a global framework.

Geraldine Heng, who helped coin the term “Global Middle Ages” (GMA) in the early 2000s, has made the case that such “a global perspective of the deep past can transform our understanding of history and of time itself, enabling us to identify, for instance, not just a single scientific and industrial revolution that occurred once, exclusively in the West, but the recurrence of multiple scientific and industrial revolutions in the non-Western, nonmodern world.” Along these lines, how can the GMA paradigm inspire new inroads for exploring the interrelationship of variegated societies and cultures within the Mediterranean context? As Heng and others have recognized, pushing beyond traditional geographical boundaries in this way and eschewing Euro-centrism implicitly destabilizes ingrained periodizations, such as medieval/early modern and premodernity/modernity. What sorts of alternative spatial and temporal frameworks can enhance scholarly assessment of the intertwined histories of the individuals, groups, institutions, and political entities active within the Western Mediterranean and beyond? Finally, how can global, decentered approaches help scholars contend with or resist the deep-seated, largely Euro- or Christo-centric and often anachronistic and teleological historiographic legacies that have long influenced work on the Iberian Peninsula, Maghreb, and broader Western-Mediterranean environment. We welcome contributions that consider these inquiries as well as other questions pertaining to these themes from the standpoints of research, teaching, and public history and in light of the CEGS research axes.

The symposium will feature plenary lectures by Samantha Kelly, Professor of History and Associate Department Chair at Rutgers University, and Toby Yuen-Gen Liang, Associate Research Fellow of Academia Sinica and founder of the Spain-North Africa Project.

All presenters will receive complementary lodging on or near the UCLA campus and meals and refreshments for the duration of the conference. Selected participants will receive up to a $500 travel subsidy, dependent on available funding, with priority given to graduate students and early-career or independent scholars.

For consideration, please send proposals containing a title and abstract of approximately 250 words to barton@sandiego.edu no later than Sunday, February 19, 2023. Please direct any questions to this same email address. Presenters must be members of the AARHMS (click here to join). Note that we intend to publish expanded versions (approx. 6000 words) of a subset of the presented papers in a volume that will appear within the CEGS Cursor Mundi book series published by Brepols Press. Please indicate whether you would be open to participating in such a volume in your proposal.