The Medieval Academy Blog

Call for Papers:
Gender, Work and Service in Late Medieval Europe (1300-1600)
International Conference, University of Cologne
29^th –30^th  September 2022

Organisers: Eva-Maria Cersovsky (University of Cologne), Dr. Julia Exarchos (RWTH Aachen University)

Deadline: 31^st January 2022. Please send proposals to cersovse@uni-koeln.de and exarchos@histinst.rwth-aachen.de

Work has long been recognised as crucial in both articulating and shaping gendered norms about one’s role and place within a given society. Medievalists have gained important insights by attention to gender, reassessing the very nature of work and blurring the lines between home and workplace, productive and reproductive labour, remunerated and unpaid work. Focussing on women’s work in particular, they have broadened the scope beyond the adult male worker to shed light on the varied economic contributions of women which were not only central to the survival and prosperity of medieval families and households but also crucial to the entire medieval economy and society. Yet, the conditions under which different men and women worked could vary tremendously as reflected by gendered regulations, earnings, work status, levels of coercion and autonomy, and cultural values attached to specific types of work. Thus, there is still considerable disagreement amongst scholars about the effects patriarchal structures had on women’s and men’s working opportunities, particularly during the late medieval period.

This conference aims at revisiting the complex relations between gender and work in Europe from 1300 to 1600, both in urban as well as in rural contexts. It seeks to bring together medievalists at all career stages currently working on any aspect of the field, providing a forum for international discussion. However, we would especially like to draw more sustained attention to service as an understudied but important socio-historical reality of work and working relationships. This includes e.g., domestic service, service work within institutions such as hospitals or brothels, at ports and on ships as well as services provided for a city via public office. We also encourage approaches that view gender within a matrix of other factors examining the flexible and complex interrelations of different labels, identities and experiences (e.g. socio-economic status, age, life cycle, marital status, religion, ethnicity). Papers attentive to men and masculinites are especially welcome, too. We invite speakers to present unpublished work in progress and focus on still-unresolved methodological or theoretical problems.

Possible topics in relation to gender include, but are by no means limited to:

• Working experiences
• Work, migration and mobility
• Training and skills
• Working relationships (collaborative, interdependent, or mutually dependent)
• Forms of bondage and coercion, e.g. slavery
• Positions of authority or leadership
• Navigating and negotiating legal, social or cultural constraints of work
• Visual, material or literary representations of work
• Changing ideas and landscapes of work, e.g. at times of epidemics, famines or religious change

Please submit abstracts of 300-400 words (in English) for 30-minute papers to Eva-Maria Cersovsky (cersovse@uni-koeln.de) and Dr. Julia Exarchos (exarchos@histinst.rwth-aachen.de) by 31^st January 2022. The proposal should also include the paper title as well as your name, contact information and academic affiliation.

Our aim is to hold a face-to-face event and we hope to be able to provide funding for travel and accommodation expenses. However, depending on the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in September 2022 the conference might be held as a virtual meeting. We also plan on publishing an edited volume with extended versions of the conference papers.

The 28th Biennial Conference of the Middle Ages and Renaissance Studies Program at Barnard College

Saturday, December 3, 2022

PLENARY SPEAKERS:
Kristina Richardson (CUNY)
Mitchell B. Merback (Johns Hopkins)

2022 marks a dubious anniversary: exactly one thousand years ago, in 1022, 13 Cathars were burned at Orléans—the first recorded instance of such punishment of Christian heretics. Exactly five hundred years later, a new sign of internal dissension erupted: In 1522, Martin Luther published his German translation of the New Testament, and in the same year, the Diet of Nuremberg staged an ultimately unsuccessful papal effort to suppress Luther, who had been declared a heretic in the 1521 Edict of Worms. Europe was far from unique in such efforts to suppress internal divisions, which also had a long history in the Middle East, where, for example, during the Mihna in the ninth century CE, the Abbasid caliph had similarly attempted to enforce a theological orthodoxy through centralized or systematized forms of persecuting heresy—attempts that, as in Europe, ultimately failed.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as now, cultures often negotiated their identities by protecting their boundaries against external threats, but equally by marking, and often trying to suppress, enemies within. This conference will focus on cultural anxieties generated by internal challenges, both within the boundaries of a polis and within the boundaries of an individual, exploring how binaries like internal/external, enemy/ally, and related terms, become unstable or unpredictable vectors across periods of time. We invite paper proposals that speak to this issue in its most capacious sense, not only in the religious sphere but equally in the arts, literature, history, and history of science.

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a 2-page CV by March 30, 2022 to Rachel Eisendrath, reisendr@barnard.edu.

PLEASE NOTE THAT, IF THE PANDEMIC ALLOWS, THIS CONFERENCE WILL BE HELD IN PERSON AT BARNARD COLLEGE in NYC. We will announce by the end of summer 2022 if instead we have to hold the conference on Zoom.

Consuming the Middle Ages: 2022 Medieval Studies Student Colloquium

The Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University is pleased to announce its thirty-second annual graduate student colloquium (MSSC), which will focus on the theme of ‘Consuming the Middle Ages’. The conference will take place on the 23rd of April, to be held virtually over Zoom. The colloquium will be preceded by a small lecture series.

We invite 20-minute papers that investigate consuming the Middle Ages as defined within a range of different disciplines and perspectives. Consuming can denote both a physical consumption as well as the act of consuming and making sense of the medieval past through scholarly productions, creative media, and cultural phenomena and practices. How were medieval feasts organized and what socio-cultural function did food and the act of consuming it serve? What are possible connections between the life cycle stages of consumed goods (e.g., from cultivation, to processing, to consuming, to disposal, etc.) and climate, migration, economics, etc.? What material and immaterial substances were subject to consumption and what religious or cultural roles did they play? How do postmedieval writers and thinkers configure the medieval? What are the ramifications of consuming the past and is this the nature of periodization? How are the traces, artifacts, or influences from the medieval past consumed by later or contemporary individuals, communities, and cultures? Papers may respond to (but are not limited to) one of these questions.

Preference will be given to papers from underrepresented backgrounds and disciplines. We strongly encourage submissions that expand these themes and categories of inquiry beyond Christian, Western European contexts. We invite submissions in all disciplines allied to Medieval Studies, including Asian Studies, Africana Studies, Critical Race Studies, Indigenous Studies, Near Eastern Studies, literature, history, the history of art, archaeology, philosophy, classics, theology, and others. Abstracts on all topics will be considered, though priority will be given to those which address our thematic strand.

Please send abstracts by January 30, 2021, to Sarah LaVoy at sfl39@cornell.edu.

Beyond Exceptionalism II, c. 500-c. 1500

12-14 July 2022

Call for Papers and Sessions

Abstract deadline: 1 February 2022

contact email:  tanner.87@osu.edu & huneycuttl@missouri.edu

We are delighted to announce the Beyond Exceptionalism II conference which will take place on 12-14 July 2022 at John Rylands Library in Manchester, UK. The conference will adopt a hybrid format that simultaneously offers sessions both in-person and via Zoom.

In 2015, Beyond Exceptionalism I addressed the troubling situation that after over fifty years of intense research and publication, the study of medieval European women had not reversed the entrenched notion that elite woman with the authority and ability to influence their families, communities, and realms were somehow all exceptions to the normal situation of female powerlessness and passivity. The conference centered on a rhetorical question: how many ‘exceptional’ women in positions of authority does it take before active females become the rule? Hosted by Heather Tanner at the Ohio State University, the ‘Beyond Exceptionalism’ conference resulted in new avenues of research, fresh approaches to medieval women’s experiences and an edited volume: Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400: Moving beyond the Exceptionalist Debate (Palgrave 2018).

Six years and one global pandemic later, the question still resonates. The assumption that medieval women were marginalized remains at the center of medieval studies. Beyond Exceptionalism II will be an interdisciplinary conference that continues to address this misapprehension by fostering new avenues and interpretations of medieval women– elite and non-elite, secular and religious – and exploring new methodologies. We encourage papers that draw upon material culture, network analysis, gender, and space. Presentations that address a non-European perspective are most welcome. Papers that utilize items in the JRL collection are especially welcome.  We also welcome submissions from scholars at all levels, from doctoral students to senior scholars.

Keynote Speakers:

Valerie Garver, History Department Chair, Northern Illinois University

Amy Livingstone, Head of School of History and Heritage, University of Lincoln

Talia Zajac, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies

Abstracts & Panels:

Possible topics include but are not limited to: lordship, manorialism, monasticism, crusades, literacy, monarchy, guilds, pilgrimage, warfare, towns, castles & manors, networks and alliances, medicine, patronage, lay religious life, law and custom

Those wishing to participate should please submit an abstract of approximately 250 words to tanner.87@osu.edu and huneycuttl@missouri.edu.

Types of sessions: traditional (3 speakers & chair), roundtable, “flash” presentations by graduate students (5-10 minute presentation & informal discussion after)

Please attach your abstract to your email as a Microsoft Word or PDF file. Included with 250‑word abstracts or session proposals (including individual abstracts) should be the following information:

• name of presenter(s)
• participant category (faculty, graduate student, or independent scholar)
• college/university affiliation
• mailing address
• email address
• audio/visual requirements and any other special requests

Abstract deadline: 1 February 2022. Session chairs and individual presenters will be informed of acceptance no later than 1 March 2022.