The 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies takes place May 13-16, 2010. Hundreds of sessions are now being set up, and we are providing details about various sessions that are looking for partipants. If you would like your session to be added to this list, please contact us at medievalists.net@gmail.com
Picturing Crusade: Remembrance and Negotiation
The task that confronted the earliest crusaders to the Holy Land was the formation of a new kingdom and, by extension, the establishment of that kingdom’s character. Conventional pictorial expressions of identity were insufficient for the unique geographical, political, religious, and cultural context that defined the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, subject as it was to the historical exigencies of the eastern Mediterranean and the shifting demographics of its component principalities. Arguably, the success of the synthetic “crusader art” that emerged in response to these needs may be gauged by its persistent influence on the imagination of the West, long after the definitive loss of Latin holdings in the Levant.
Accordingly, this session hopes to sketch the parameters of a new crusader art, an art that emerged in the wake of the failure of the enterprise that was the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. We aim to address new or little-explored visual modes occasioned by the loss of territories in the East and the attendant cultural aftershocks. With this goal in mind, appropriate topics include (but are not limited to) the assertion of poignant relations to the history of the Latin Kingdom, manifestations of cultural or religious identity predicated on the crusades, the adoption of new political or devotional practices, commemorations of the crusades, and articulations of loss or desire after the collapse of the Latin Kingdom.
DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: September 15, 2009
Abstracts and enquires should be directed to:
Richard Leson, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
(leson@uwm.edu)
Lisa Mahoney, Northwestern University
(l-mahoney@northwestern.edu)
Maritime History of the Early Crusades (before 1204)
Organizer: Dana Cushing
Email: SPAMdana.cushing@SPAMalumni.utoronto.ca
At some point in the journey, every Crusader had to travel across water to reach Jerusalem – prior to the sack of Constantinople in 1204, however, historians have paid scant attention to this fact. Papers may address any aspects of the water and sailing as it relates to the early Crusades for example – but not limited to – ships and shipping, water as warfare (blockades, moats; the physical need for water to sustain life), pirates and sailors, maritime technology such as navigation or design, religious experiences at sea, maritime cultures and artefacts, laws of the sea, and interesting incidents to do with water (saints rescuing ships, swimming spies, etc.)
Denizens of Hell: Devils, Demons and the Damned
In past years a number of sessions have been arranged on the devil, demons, and the damned in the middle ages. Be this as it may, there still remains a great deal to be said about this fascinating topic. Whether in images or in text, the depictions of the residents and prisoners of Hell reveal a great deal about the societies from which they arise. As Peter Dendle writes in his book Satan Unbound, “The devil consistently exhibits a fluidity, an elasticity, that allows him to bleed over into overlapping regions of time and space, of heart and world, of history and allegory” (Dendle, p.8). Yet this applies not only to the devil himself, but also to his servants and his subjects: whether it is the Anglo-Saxon distinction between the bound Lucifer and the wandering devil, the depictions of the bodies of the damned changing to show their sins in physical form, or the Nicodemian debate between Satan and the anthropomorphized Hell, the denizens of the underworld exist in a fluid space, one that allows for a marked flexibility of expression not present in many other areas of theological consequence. As such, any exploration of these topics cannot help but reflect greatly on the society that formed these conceptions, and thus helps to generate in us a better understanding of those who lived in those times.
Proposals of no more than 300 words for 15-20 minute papers are now invited. Those interested should note that there is no requirement that papers stay within the constraints of a single discipline (e.g. art history, literature, etc.), so long as they remain on topic.
Deadline for proposal submission is 31 August 2009.
All proposals should be sent to Richard Burley (r.a.burley@gmail.com) and should include a completed participant information form, downloadable at the ICMS webpage (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF).
Late Antiquity
The Society for Late Antiquity will be sponsoring three sessions at the International Medieval Studies Congress. As in the past, topics are open. One-page abstracts for 15-minute papers are invited relating to the history, literature, religion, art, archaeology, culture, and society of Late Antiquity (that is, the European, North African, and Western Asian world ca. 250-750). Attention should be given to how the paper relates to Late Antiquity as a discrete period with its own individual characteristics. Abstracts may be forwarded, preferably by e-mail, to Ralph Mathisen at ralphwm@illinois.edu and ruricius@msn.com. Deadline for receipt of abstracts is September 15, 2010.
Thinking Small: Scale and Meaning in Medieval Art
Organizer: Ben C. Tilghman (Walters Art Museum)
This session will consider the important role that the size of an art object, particularly smallness, plays in shaping the way that its beholders relate to it and thus understand it. Scale is one of the most important physical aspects of a work of art: large and small objects require different investments of time and resources, elicit different responses from their beholders, and reflect the varying purposes which works were meant to serve. Nonetheless, scale has rarely been considered in depth by art historians. The works of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gaston Bachelard, and Susan Stewart form a basic theoretical foundation for considering small things, and John Mack has recently offered a general consideration of small art across cultures, but we remain far from a full account of the phenomenology of smallness in art.
Medieval art offers a particularly rich field for pursuing such an account. Whether in miniature books of hours, intricately carved ivories, portable altars, or architectural reliquaries, miniaturization plays a key role in many works of medieval art. This session is open to both broad-based thematic surveys and focused studies on specific objects, but all the papers will deepen our theoretical understanding of miniaturization and smallness as a whole. Possible themes to be considered include but are not limited to: economics and trade, portability and dislocation, gender differentiation, meditation and absorption, the concept of the simulacrum, intimacy and distance, sentimentality, marginalization, and magic.
DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: September 15, 2009
Abstracts and enquiries should be directed to Ben Tilghman at:
btilghman@gmail.com (preferred)
or
The Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles St
Baltimore, MD 21218
“Can These Bones Come To Life?”: Insights from Re-construction, Re-enactment, and Re-creation.
Ken Mondschein
Higgins Armory Museum
100 Barber Ave # 11
Worcester, MA 01606-2444
No calls, please
Email: mondschein@fordham.edu
Visit the website at http://historicalfencing.org
We invite dancers, musicians and musicologists, historical fencers, armorers, brewers, theater historians and performers, textile researchers, and scholars in other fields to submit papers for a unique interdisciplinary session on the insights into history that can be gained from attempts to reconstruct medieval arts, as well as the historiographical issues involved in such work. Proposals for papers should discuss practical insights gained from such projects, how these insights modify existing scholarship or solve a research question, and the historiographical issues involved therein-i.e., to what extent we can hope to play music, perform passion plays, ride horses, weave cloth, brew mead, make armor, or wield swords as medieval people did, and why.
Celtic Studies Association of North America
The Celtic Studies Association of North America (CSANA) is organizing two panels of papers to be presented under CSANA sponsorship at the 45th annual International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan during May 13 -16, 2010. The general headings for these two panels, “New Work by Young Celtic Studies Scholars” and “Sex, Gender, and Marriage in Celtic Texts and Cultures,” are deliberately quite broad to accommodate a wide range of topics and approaches. Scholars who would like to propose paper topics for inclusion in one of these panels should send their proposals to Fred no later than September 15, with priority given to proposals received earlier. Proposals should include a provisional title, a brief summary explaining the topic and the approach to be taken in the paper, and contact information (including full name and postal address, e-mail address, and telephone number.) Papers should be written for a presentation time of approximately 20 minutes.
Please feel free to pass on this information to other scholars and listserves and to encourage young scholars to offer proposals. Contact Information for Fred:
Postal Address; Professor Frederick Suppe, History Department, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, USA
E-mail address: fsuppe@bsu.edu or fsuppe@gmail.com
Office telephone number: 765-285-8783
FAX telephone number: 765-285-5612
Law as Culture: Lordship, Profit, and Rationality
Both economic and legal argument draws deeply on notions of reason and logic. These are found among ordinary men and women far from the schools. As economic historians document, medieval people (prudent peasants, as McCloskey puts it) were perfectly capable of responding to economic incentives. Moreover, law played a crucial role in shaping those incentives. We welcome proposals for papers that explicitly link legal history with economic history in explaining the dynamics of medieval life and culture.
Here are some examples of possible topics:
– The canon law generated regulations concerning Usury, the Just price etc. during the “long” Twelfth Century. Meanwhile, secular laws sought to regulate markets (through laws on forestalling, regrating, engrossing, Assize of Bread and Ale etc.) and boosted those on coining offenses. This sustained attempt to restrain economic activity through law must be largely explicable from the context of economic change against which it was made. How might the Legal Revolution (the whole or any part) and the rising “Profit Economy” (Lester Little) be causally linked?
– Why did England’s Angevin reforms of land law precede by at least a generation the provision of common law remedies for defaults by economic agents (action of Account) and the alienation of capital assets by tenants for life (action of Waste)?
– How far can economics (e.g., far fewer seigniorial demesnes) explain why the Capetians and other European rulers did not transform their land law in a similar way to the English?
– Did the development of accounting practices (e.g., input-output, like the English Pipe Rolls, double-entry, profit-and-loss, etc.) advance the cause of rationality in commerce and law in any material way? The lexicography of ‘reason’ and associated words would be interesting in this context. So might possible changes in the themes of literature such as fabliaux, such as the balance between sexual and financial trickery in the victories of women and other supposedly disempowered characters over their superiors.
– What measure of economic analysis was possible before words like capital, interest, profit entered European languages in the generations surrounding 1200?
– Were advances in numeracy as relevant to legal history as they patently are to the development of economic rationality?
Most generally, we welcome contributions along the following lines:
– What economic phenomena can be better understood as driven, or at least influenced, by legal change?
– What medieval social phenomena previously thought to be beyond the domain of economics can be explained as rational behavior by goal-oriented agents maximizing their utility subject to constraints?
– Can the tools of modern economics such as game theory, contract theory, or behavioral economics enhance our understanding of medieval history?
– To what extent can we explain legal change itself as the response of particular people in power to economic incentives?
Alexander Volokh, Emory Law School, 1301 Clifton Rd., Atlanta, GA 30322, volokh@post.harvard.edu .
Paul Hyams, History Dept., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4601, prh3@cornell.edu .
Sculpture and the Medieval City
Sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)
Organizers: Mark Rosen (University of Texas at Dallas) and Ittai Weinryb (Bard Graduate Center, NY).
This session aims to explore the role, meaning, function, and even dysfunction of sculpture in the medieval city. From the ontological value of their being objects occupying space, sculpture has always been part of an environment. This session invites papers that ask how the use and re-use of sculpture shaped the medieval city’s definition of itself, how sculpture illuminated medieval daily life, and how meaning was generated through the performance of sculpture, its interaction with its site, and its adaptation of pictorial themes resonant to local
populations. Church facades, governmental buildings, antique monuments, fountains, and even wellheads are all suitable topics for this session.
Disciplinary and interdisciplinary developments in scholarship over the past forty years have resulted not only in the transformation of our understanding of sculpture and its function within civic space but also our understanding of what medieval space and specifically medieval civic space meant in the Middle Ages. We are seeking papers that will illuminate, revisit and even rephrase old notions of the relationship between the place, the media and the materiality of sculpture within the medieval city. Papers on issues of centrality and marginality of sculpture around sacred or secular spaces within the medieval city are also welcomed.
DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: 15 September 2009
ALL PROPOSALS AND INQUIRIES SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO:
Mark Rosen
Arts and Humanities
University of Texas at Dallas
Mailing Station JO 31
800 W. Campbell Road
Richardson, TX 75080
medieval.sculpture.city@gmail.com
