Tuesday, August 11, 2015

CFP: Holy Celebrity: Saints and/as Social and Economic Capital

CfP: Panel at International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo (USA), 2016

With apologies for cross-posting! Please feel free to share this CfP with all relevant parties.
“Holy Celebrity: Saints and/as Social and Economic Capital” – panel sponsored by the Hagiography Society

Scholars have often commented on the link between sanctity and celebrity. Both the saint and the celebrity are elevated above the everyday, with identities carefully crafted by cultural producers to respond to the needs and desires of an audience, region, or temporality. Sacralisation/celebrification entails a series of processes which (re)formulate a subject into a product fit for social, political, and economic consumption. Yet sanctity/celebrity is not simply exploitative, but enjoyable and perhaps even empowering. What does it really mean to be a medieval celebrity? How does celebrity intersect with sanctity? What does such a categorization add to the study of hagiography? Can fame resonate on both a social and spiritual level, and how does the medieval idea of fame generate, overlap with, and inform contemporary discourses of fame, celebrity, and sanctity?

Relevant topics for this session include:
- Saints as commercial products and/or economic agents
- The construction of Sanctity and Communal Identity
- Audience reaction(s) to a saint and textual reception
- Power dynamics between celebrity/saint and star-maker/confessor or hagiographer/cleric/scribe
- The social function of celebrity/sanctity
- Film theory’s contribution to the study of sanctity more generally

If you’re interested in speaking on this panel, please submit an abstract of roughly 250-300 words and aParticipant Information Form (PIF), which can be found at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF. Deadline for submissions: 1 September 2015. Please email your abstract and PIF to the panel organisers, Alicia Spencer-Hall (aspencerhall@gmail.com) and Barbara E. Zimbalist (bezimbalist@utep.edu).

CFP: Touching Hoccleve

Call for Papers for 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI: "Touching Hoccleve"

Deadline: September 15

Please send abstracts and inquiries to hocclevesociety@gmail.com
..."We invite papers that touch upon Hocclevean recovery in all of its facets and forms, including his poetic descriptions of recovery and its attendant affects, the recovery of Hocclevean material, the medieval medical contexts of Hoccleve’s infirmities, the work of memory as an act of recovery in the past and the present, the place of the text in all of its materiality as a document of recovery, and the blurring of financial, psychic, and physical recovery. In other words, we ask what is touching about Hoccleve's poetry - what does it mean to be touched by it, to touch on it, or to handle its material?..."


Please see:
Touching Hoccleve - ICMS 2016, Kalamazoo | cfp.english.upenn.edu for more details at
call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu

Also, please contact Travis Neel (traviseneel@gmail.com) for more information.

CFP on Late Old English Verse

Late Old English Verse

This session focuses on Old English poetry datable to between c. 950 and 1150. Many of these poems are embedded in late annals in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; most of them were snubbed by being excluded from volume 6 of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. As a result, late Old English poems as a group are severely understudied. Indeed, because Old English verse is written out in unlineated text blocks in manuscript, and because most theories of Old English meter are based on putatively pre-950 poems like Beowulf, scholars disagree about the exact number of extant late Old English poems. As recently as 2007, Thomas Bredehoft could identifyan entirely new, never-before-discussed poem. This session explores what the study of short, late, and (often) topical Old English poems might contribute to critical conceptions of Anglo-Saxon literary culture and early English literary history.

Possible paper topics include: metrical form; manuscript contexts and textual transmission; historical allusions; authorship and audience; problems of definition between verse and prose; and transitions to Middle English language and literary cultures.

Submit abstracts by e-mail to eric.weiskott@bc.edu no later than September 15, 2015.

Networks of Transmission: Histories and and Practices of Collecting Medieval Manuscripts and Documents


Call for Papers
Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts Sponsored Session
at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 12-15, 2016
We seek proposals for the following session:

Networks of Transmission: Histories and and Practices of Collecting Medieval Manuscripts and Documents

This session will focus on the mapping of those networks of sale and purchase through which medieval manuscripts have been pursued and on the collectors and collecting that have catalyzed this transmission across the centuries. This session – like The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts itself – is rooted in the belief that studying manuscripts’ provenance can have dynamic and profound effects not only on our understanding of these medieval materials as objects to be bought and sold but also on their texts through mapping their circulation and reception. We particularly welcome proposals that explore diverse topics from the role of digital technologies such as the SDBM in conducting provenance research, the relationship between institutional and private ownership of manuscripts, specific case studies of collecting practices, the transatlantic travels of medieval materials, collectors’ roles in the dispersal of libraries and the fragmentation of manuscripts, collectors and manuscript preservation, and how a manuscript’s provenance history can effect its value and collectability on the rare books market, to how collectors and the act of collecting can shape and influence interpretations of manuscript evidence.

Please send proposals with a one-page abstract and Participant Information Form (www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html) to Lynn Ransom (lransom@upenn.edu ) by September 1, 2015.

CFP: Medieval Landscapes of Disease

Medieval Landscapes of Disease

Kalamazoo, MI -- May 12-15, 2016


Following on a successful session last year, I'm offering another session on Medieval Landscapes of Disease this year at Kalamazoo.

In recognition that diseases are manifestations of their environment, this session seeks papers that place medieval diseases within their environmental context. Just as a seed must be placed in good soil to grow, infectious disease requires a permissive environment to develop into an epidemic (or epizootic) and an ideal environment to bloom into a pandemic or panzootic. I am open to all manner of studies and disciplines that address these issues.

Examples of acceptable topics:

- Historic impacts of epidemics and/or epizootics
- Endemic disease in medieval environments
- Environmental causes of disease such as malnutrition or industrial
pollution related disease
- Health effects of human-animal interactions
- Applications of the One Health Approach to medieval disease
- Archaeological assessments of human health and disease
- Landscape alterations intended to improve human or animal health
- Ecology of the built environment


Abstracts of no more than 300 words and the Participant Information Form should be sent to Michelle Ziegler at ZieglerM@slu.edu by September 15. Pre-submission queries are welcome.

The Participant Information Form and additional information be found at
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html .

Call for Papers: Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Lyric

Call for Papers: Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Lyric
Special Session at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan (May 12-15, 2016)
Rachel May Golden (University of Tennessee) and Katherine Kong (Independent Scholar), co-organizers

This session employs gender as a critical category of analysis to examine the voiced nature of, and expressions of emotion in, medieval French literature, lyric, and song. In so doing, the panel seek to bring together interdisciplinary approaches, such as from literature, musicology, gender and sexuality studies, philology, and history.

While studies of gender often focus on women’s experiences, this session proposes to employ gender inclusively to consider masculinities, femininities, their intersections, marked absences, and manifestations. This kind of analysis is particularly apt for medieval French literatures because of the explicitly voiced quality of these repertories and texts. From the first-person desires of the troubadours, to the gendered dialogues of the chanson de geste, medieval French texts powerfully speak in ways that continue to influence western cultural assumptions and inspire new intellectual investigations.

In particular, we aim to examine how writers, texts, and songs encode or shape gendered positions, variously complying with or subverting cultural expectations. Further, we seek to interrogate how emotion is voiced and enacted in gendered ways, especially emotions that are typically coded as masculine or feminine, such as epic grief, maternal lament, the sufferings of fin’amour, or knightly bravado and camaraderie. We also welcome interrogations of how such gendered voices are both performed and embodied as sites of desire, violence, dominance, and power.

Abstracts for papers of 15-20 minutes are welcome through September 15 to Rachel Golden (rmgolden@utk.edu) or Katherine Kong (kkong1@gmail.com)
Submission guidelines and the required Participant Information Form are available at http://wmich.edu/medieval/files/medieval-call-for-papers-2016.pdf

Religious Exemption and the State in the pre-modern world, 400 – 1300


Religious Exemption and the State in the pre-modern world, 400 – 1300
University of Sheffield, Thurs 14 – Sat 16April 2016

Call for Papers (deadline Friday 19th September)
Throughout history, religious groups across the world have claimed exemption from their rulers’ demands, with a considerable degree of success. Such exemptions were prevalent in the pre-modern world, from Buddhist monks’ accumulation of tax-free lands to Latin clerics’ assertion of ‘benefit of clergy’ and Islamic charitable waqf.

Yet though undoubtedly important, a full appreciation of these exemptions’ significance in the pre-modern world is hampered on the one hand by their embedding in traditional narratives such as the rise of the modern (Western) state, to which they are often represented as obstacles, and on the other by the conceptual difficulties posed by the categories at the historian’s disposal, such as ‘religion’, ‘secular’, and indeed ‘state’, when applied to this period of time.

This conference seeks to engage with these problems as a contribution to a comparative global historical understanding of religious exemption from state demands in the pre-modern world. Confirmed participants include RI Moore (Newcastle), Andrew Wareham (Roehampton) and Naomi Standen (Birmingham).

The conference will address three key questions. Firstly, how common were these exemptions on a global scale, and what kind of commonalities did they share? Secondly, what kind of structural role did these exemptions play: did they weaken the states that conceded them, or did they rather – as some recent research has suggested – strengthen them, whether by providing legitimacy or by supporting the informal networks underpinning the formal exercise of power? Thirdly, how should the demarcation they created best be conceptualised in an age thought not to have been structured by the modern secular/religious distinction?

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers addressing these questions, whether on the basis of case studies (from anywhere in the world) or through critical engagement with specialist historiography, with a preference for the period 400-1300 CE. Limited travel funds are available, and accommodation for the duration of the conference will be provided for speakers.Paper proposals and all other queries to c.m.west@sheffield.ac.uk, by Friday 19 September.

A version of this CFP is also available at http://turbulentpriests.group.shef.ac.uk/religious-exemption-and-the-state-400-1300-14th-16th-april-2016-call-for-papers/

Traces of the Hand from Africa to Asia: A Symposium on the Palaeography of Arabic-Script Languages

Traces of the Hand from Africa to Asia: A Symposium on the Palaeography of Arabic-Script Languages

24 August 2015, King's College London, Strand Campus, London, UK


Dear Colleagues,

The Islamic Manuscript Association, in collaboration with the Department of Classics at King’s College London and the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, is pleased to announce a symposium on the palaeography of Arabic-script languages at King’s College London’s Great Hall on the Strand, London, on Monday, 24 August.

Compared with the well-established Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Coptic palaeographic traditions, the study of Arabic scripts is still in its infancy. However, as the increasing number of studies published by scholars such as François Déroche, Adam Gacek, and Yusuf Raghib shows, interest in the field is growing.

In this symposium, five distinguished speakers will critically appraise the state of the field and explore new directions for study. The keynote address by Adam Gacek, author of multiple books and articles on the codicology and palaeography of Arabic manuscripts, includingArabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers(Brill 2011), and retired faculty lecturer and research associate at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, will assess the last quarter-century of palaeographic scholarship and suggest areas of future research. Additional presentations will explore current research and lacunae in scholarship on Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, and Jawi palaeography in more detail.

Admission is free of charge, but registration is essential. Presentations will be in English, and simultaneous Arabic interpretation will be available.

For further information and to register, see our website.

CFP: International Pearl-Poet Society

The International Pearl-Poet Society is sponsoring the following two paper sessions at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 12-15, 2016) at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI:

I: Speech, Sermons, and Silence in the Pearl-Poems
II: Places and Spaces in the Pearl-Poems

We invite abstracts from scholars of all levels, dealing with one or all of the Pearl-Poems. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes long. Submissions should include one-page abstracts and the completed Participant Information Form (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html). Please send these by September 13, 2015 to:

Kara Larson Maloney
kmalone3@binghamton.edu
Department of English, General Literature & Rhetoric
Binghamton University
PO Box 6000
Binghamton, NY13902-6000

Graecum-Arabicum-Latinum Encoded Corpus (GALEN©)* Usama Gad (Heidelberg)


Graecum-Arabicum-Latinum Encoded Corpus (GALEN©)*
Usama Gad (Heidelberg)

GALEN is a long-term project to produce the first comprehensive digital
corpus of translations between Greek, Arabic and Latin. The project
seeks not only to include the medieval translations from Greek into
Arabic (8th-10th Century AD) and again from Arabic into Latin (11th
-13th Century AD), but also to comprise the modern translations of Greek
and Latin literature into Arabic (19th -21st Century AD). Moreover, the
project would ideally include Arabic translations of Greek and Latin
Papyri found in Egypt. The main idea behind this project is then to
integrate as much Graecum-Arabicum-Latinum sources as one could in both
Arabic and classical studies, presenting these sources to both scholars
and students in a digital format with open access license CC BY-SA.

ALL WELCOME

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk,
Hugh.Bowden@kcl.ac.uk, Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk, S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk or
Charlotte.Tupman@kcl.ac.uk, or see the seminar website at
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2015.html

The University of California, Berkeley Program in Medieval Studies invites papers for two sponsored sessions at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held from May 12-15, 2016:

The University of California, Berkeley Program in Medieval Studies
invites papers for two sponsored sessions at the 51st International Congress on
Medieval Studies, to be held from May 12-15, 2016:

Post-War Scholarship and the Study of the Middle Ages I: Huizinga

Post-War Scholarship and the Study of the Middle Ages II: Panofsky

These sessions are an extension of the series that began at the 49th Congress, with panels on Auerbach and Kantorowicz, and continued at the 50th congress, with panels on Arendt and Curtius. As in the past, each session this year examines one of the major intellectual figures of the post-war period, considered in light of their own contemporary moments and their lasting influence in our own. The first session is dedicated to the work of Johan Huizinga and the second to Erwin Panofsky. Each of these scholars has contributed to our understanding of the Middle Ages and to the methodologies we use in our studies--literary, historical, philological, political. Their work has also helped the Middle Ages to remain in the peripheral vision of those scholars working in other and later fields. Huizinga, in many ways one of the founders of cultural history, presented us with a decadent late Middle Ages and a world in decline, a vision of the period that still sets the terms of the debate about the period both for the broader public and in the work of many scholars. Panofsky’s homology between the structures of Scholastic thought and the architecture of the gothic cathedral stressed the importance of habitus, a concept that influenced the work of his early French translator, Pierre Bourdieu, and has continued to be an important concept in sociology and discourse analysis. Despite citations of their work by Medievalists declining steadily since the 1980s, their ideas have become ever more ingrained in scholarly assumptions about the Middle Ages. It is time now to revisit these ideas and directly address the intellectual contexts in which they were formed.

We invite papers from all disciplines that engage with the scholarship
of Huizinga or Panofsky. Please submit abstracts of no more than one page
along with a participant information form
<http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF> to
berkeleymedievalstudies@gmail.com by September 10th, 2015.

The Visionary Cross Project announces a free beta test of its viewer for the Ruthwell Cross

The Visionary Cross Project announces a free beta test of its viewer for
the Ruthwell Cross

You can access the test viewer at the following URL:

http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/cross/
About the test

We are using this test to gain initial feedback on usability and use
cases
for the viewer including corrections, advice for further development,
and
discussion of potential uses. As a result we are particularly interested
in:


-

Suggestions for improvement and additional features that you would
like
to be added for it being a useful product for all the intended users.
-

Comments on shortcomings or problems with the viewer quality.
-

General feedback and comments on the viewer


We will be collecting comments via a simple feedback questionnaire at
the
end of your session. The data we collect will be used to assist us
refactoring the interface for future official release. Nothing will be
shared with third parties or used for other purposes.

Potential use cases

We anticipate that this edition of the cross will be useful for
teaching,
popularisation activities and self-study. The edition provides a
moderately
detailed 3D representation of the Ruthwell Cross (optimised for use over
the web) that can be rotated and manipulated by the user in various ways
(zoom in, turn on and off colour, rotate horizontally and vertically,
and
examine with a “light source” that can be used to throw features into
relief). Annotation aimed at the lay person is associated with each face
of
the cross and its panels.

Licence and copyright

The material in this viewer is being released under a Creative Commons
Attribution Only 3.0 licence (CC-BY)
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/>. This means that you can
Share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format)
and/or
Adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose,
even
commercially) provide you give appropriate credit
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/#> (as indicated on the
beta
test site), provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were
made
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/#>. Use of the Beta test is
free of charge.

About the project

The Visionary Cross project is an international, multidisciplinary
research
project whose principal objective is the development of a new kind of
digital archive and edition of texts and objects associated with the
Visionary Cross tradition in Anglo-Saxon England. The material this
project
represents includes some of the most studied and most popular artefacts
from the Anglo-Saxon period: the Ruthwell Cross, Bewcastle Cross,
Brussels
Cross and Vercelli Book Dream of the Rood and Elene poems.

Taking its cue from recent developments in digital editorial theory and
practice, the project takes a data-centric, distributed, and
generalisable
approach to the representation of cultural heritage texts, objects, and
contexts in order to encourage broad scholarly and popular engagement
with
its material.

This is a collaborative project between University of Lethbridge,
University
of Leeds, Università degli Studi di Torino, University of Pennsylvania
Libraries, ISTI-CNR, Pisa.

We are now collecting and publishing these digital representations as
part
of a thematically organised, Open Access, and extensible, multimedia
digital library. We will also develop two other forms of mediated
access: a
research/educational edition aimed at researchers and students and a
more
popular interpretative portal designed to work with tourism and cultural
heritage outreach activities. We intend to release the final version
aimed
at:


-

General public/ tourists
-

Scholars working with the artifacts involved
-

Lecturers/Teachers for pedagogical usage


The project has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research
Council (O’Donnell, PI; James Graham, Wendy Osborn, Co-applicants), the
University of Lethbridge CREDO (O’Donnell, PI), the University of Leeds
(Karkov, PI), and the Università degli Studi di Torino (Rosselli Del
Turco,
PI).

CFP: Music & Liturgy: In Memory of Clyde Brockett; Music Analysis; Music, Text, and Image; Musical Sources and Materiality; Music and the Medieval Soundscape

The program committee for Musicology at Kalamazoo (Anna Kathryn Grau, Cathy Ann Elias, Daniel DiCenso) invites abstracts for the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 12-15, 2016. The topics include: Music & Liturgy: In Memory of Clyde Brockett; Music Analysis; Music, Text, and Image; Musical Sources and Materiality; Music and the Medieval Soundscape.

We hope these topics can foster dialogue between musicologists and scholars in other areas, so we encourage specialists in fields other than Music to submit proposals. Please keep in mind that we intend these session titles mostly as "hooks," rather than limitations, on which a multitude of proposals can be placed, so send us your best work.

Abstracts should be submitted by 15 September. Electronic submissions are strongly encouraged. Please send submissions to musicology.kzoo@gmail.com, and write in the subject part of the e-mail the following: KZOO 2016.

If you use US mail, send material to:
Anna Kathryn Grau
5430 S. Drexel Ave., Apt. 3N
Chicago, IL 60615

You'll also need to complete and submit the “Participant Information Form” from the conference website, available at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF. This is very important, not only because it is your only chance to make A-V requests, but because it is required by the Medieval Institute. It is available as either a Word or PDF document.

If you have any questions, please contact the committee at musicology.kzoo@gmail.com. We look forward to seeing you in Kalamazoo next May.

Call for Papers: International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2016

Call for Papers: International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2016

Sponsored by Anglo-Saxon Hagiography Society (ASHS)
Organizers: Johanna Kramer (University of Missouri) and Robin Norris (Carleton University)

Deadline: 15 September 2015

Following up on the success of our sponsored sessions at the Congress over the last three years, we are organizing another session dedicated to anonymous Anglo-Saxon hagiographical prose, both Old English and Anglo-Latin. While there is a long tradition of studying vernacular saints’ lives in Anglo-Saxon Studies, a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention has been given to verse hagiographies and to those by Ælfric of Eynsham, the most famous named author of Old English prose saints’ lives. Even though 40% of the extant vernacular prose corpus is non-Ælfrician, there remains a considerable gap in scholarship when it comes to anonymous Old English prose; similarly, Anglo-Latin saints’ lives present a wide field that demands attention.

Recent publications on anonymous lives, such as the essay collections: Anonymous Interpolations in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints (ed. Norris, 2011) andHagiography in Anglo-Saxon England: Adopting and Adapting Saints' Lives into Old English Prose (c. 950-1150) (ed. Lazzari, Lendinara, Di Sciacca, 2014) as well as ongoing text editing projects, for example for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library Series (Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints, ed. Clayton, 2013; and Anonymous Old English Saints' Lives, ed. Kramer, Magennis, Norris, in progress) indicate increasing interest in hagiography. Such active scholarly engagement with hagiography also shows that we can gain valuable insight into later Anglo-Saxon religious culture and its concerns by approaching these texts as independent literary products in their own right. At the same time, such study can then also usefully reflect back on the Ælfrician hagiographical corpus alongside which some anonymous vernacular lives were produced and collected. While we hope to organize a series of sessions over the years that explore a range of aspects in relation to anonymous saints’ lives (such as literary themes, narrative strategies, sources, transmission, manuscript evidence, linguistic issues, rhetoric/style, early versus late anonymous accounts of English saints, etc.).

For this year, we are again organizing a session with an open topic to continue what we hope will become a sustained conversation about and exploration of the vernacular and Latin anonymous hagiography of Anglo-Saxon England.

Submit abstract to:
Johanna Kramer and Robin Norris
kramerji@missouri.edu and Robin.Norris@carleton.ca

Also send a completed Participation Information Form(http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF).

Debating relics. Reflections on relics in the Middle Ages and problems of methodology

Debating relics. Reflections on relics in the Middle Ages and problems of methodology
This strand of sessions, emanating from the research (NWO-Vidi) projectMind over Matter. Debates about relics as sacred objects c. 350-c.1150, deals with debates about relics and the ways modern scholars can get access to these debates. On the basis of the enormous corpus of hagiographical texts and the magnificent buildings, inscriptions, liturgical celebrations and art created in the saints’ honour, the medieval cult of the saints seems omnipresent, self-evident and uncontested; a phenomenon that came naturally to (illiterate) medieval Christians. But was this really the case?

Our hypothesis is that relics as sacred matter were under discussion and that people worried long before the Reformation about how the divine interacts with the material world. We would like to take the opportunity of this strand of sessions to explore this hypothesis, while also taking into account the methodological problems that students of relic cults encounter during their research. How were relics perceived in the medieval period? How did they ‘work’ according to medieval believers? What language, metaphors, images and objects were used to represent relics and disclose or question their meaning? How did reflections on relics relate to reflections on other sacred objects, such as icons and the Eucharist? How did attitudes towards relics change over time?

We define ‘debate’ broadly; we do not understand it as an intellectual exchange between only a few scholars, or as a one-sided attempt on their part to civilise an unruly ‘popular’ religion, but as a dialogue between the elite and the localities, between theory and practice (if such a distinction is useful), that involved all layers of society and different kinds of media, including the physical setting of cults sites, their inscriptions, images and materiality.

We propose the following three questions as a starting point for what we hope will be three sessions (for further details, see the attachment):
- Relics and writing: What did the act of writing do for relics?
- Relics and narrative text: What did topoi do for relics?
- Relics and ideas: What did theology do for relics?

If you are interested in giving a paper addressing these issues, or if you would like to be a moderator or respondent, please send an email by: 
24 August to J.E.Raaijmakers@uu.nl (Janneke Raaijmakers).

Please include the following information if you would like to present a paper: 1) paper title; 2) an abstract indicating the topic of your paper (max. 250 words); 3) your contact details and affiliation; 4) Equipment needed? (Laptop, Beamer, etc.) 

Unfortunately we are unable to cover travel, registration and accommodation expenses for the participants. For information on bursaries and general information regarding this conference, see:http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/125137/international_medieval_congress

CFP for the Mystical Theology Network Conference Art and Articulation: Illuminating the Mystical, Medieval and Modern St Hilda’s College Oxford, 8th-9th January, 2016

CFP for the Mystical Theology Network Conference Art and Articulation: Illuminating the Mystical, Medieval and Modern St Hilda’s College Oxford, 8th-9th January, 2016

The relationship between word and image, and the ways in which medieval art (be it visual, textual, or both) operates as a means of expressing the inexpressible, will be explored in a two-day conference held 8th-9th January 2016 at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. This interdisciplinary conference will bring together art historians, literary scholars, and theologians to examine the ways in which various forms of artistic expression are used to articulate the mystical or that which cannot easily be spoken.

Keynote speakers:
Barbara Baert, Inigo Bocken, Sheila Gallagher, Vincent Gillespie, Catherine Karkov, Michael Kuczynski, Bernard McGinn, William Prosser

We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers and proposals for sessions of three 20-minute papers. We are particularly keen to ensure that the Anglo-Saxon period is well represented.

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to the conference organisers at artandarticulation@gmail.com by 1st September 2015.

“The Exeter Book’s Digital Decade”

“The Exeter Book’s Digital Decade”


Co-organized by Brian T. O’Camb and Matthew T. Hussey
sponsored by Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile

The 2006 publication of Bernard J. Muir's "The Electronic Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter, Dean and Chapter MS 3501" (Exeter) represented a remarkable milestone in the history of Exeter Book studies and prompts thoughtful reflection ten years later. As far back as 1980, Fred C. Robinson sharpened the necessity of looking at Old English poetry in its manuscript context, and his call was reinvigorated by Joyce Tally Lionarons’ 2004 volume of essays on the same subject. This session seeks to stimulate a conversation about the significance and utility of Muir's digital edition of the Exeter Book---and by extension all digital manuscript editions---by assessing how scholarship of the Exeter Book’s paleography, codicology, history and poetry has developed in the decade-long wake of access to stunningly high-resolution images of the Exeter Book.

We invite paper proposals that respond to the following questions: How has our knowledge of the Exeter Book developed, changed, or been reshaped with access to quality images of this important Anglo-Saxon manuscript? What can looking at the manuscript in light of these last ten years of technological advancements and critical/theoretical developments, tell us? Do high quality digital images really change scholarship or is sustained and detailed attention to the manuscript itself still necessary? If so, how? If not, why not?

The Exeter Book is one of the major cultural artifacts of the Anglo-Saxon period, and the ways in which it is studied are always evolving. The tenth anniversary of the manuscript's digitization marks an opportune moment to assess how the tools we build to study literature and its material contexts condition our discoveries.

Send paper proposals to Matt Hussey: mhussey @ sfu.ca by September 1, 2016.  

CFP: What Devils Say


What Devils Say

Name of Organization: Texas Medieval Association (TEMA): International
Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan: May 12-15, 2016.

Devils are everywhere in medieval literature, disturbing, challenging, and violating conventional spatio-temporal constraints as they move freely between worlds in order to torment the holy, spread disease, and tempt good Christians by making sin seem sweet. They appear as enchanters, tempters, playful tricksters, masked tormentors, terrifying beasts, mankind’s lawyerly accusers, and on occasion, as sympathetic figures who happened to be on the losing side of a cosmic war. Although much has been written about how devils are staged, their appearance, and their interaction with those they torment, very little has been written about what devils actually say. How do devils represent
themselves and their spaces of punishment? When, how, and to whom do they speak? How does their rhetoric reflect social, cultural, and religious beliefs and practices in the Middle Ages? What do rhetorical gaps or silences signify?

This panel focuses on what devils have to say not only about those they torment, but also about other devils, Satan, their hellish domain, and ultimately, about themselves. Papers that explore the rhetoric of devils and diabolical figures are welcome.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a completed
Participant Information Form to Kathy Torabi (Texas A&M University) at
torabik@tamu.edu. Proposals should arrive by September 15, 2016. The
Participant Information Form can be can be downloaded at:

Medieval Worlds

Medieval Worlds
New open access online journal – first issue has come out! For the first issue, follow this link or access it through http://medievalworlds.net/7849-1inhalt. Authors of the first issue include early medievalists such as Patrick Geary, Ian Wood and Ann Christys, Eduardo Manzano, Michael Borgolte, but also a number of renowned scholars from other fields.

Medieval worlds is a biannually, peer-reviewed open-access journal published by the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Medieval Worlds fosters interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Specifically it encourages and links comparative research between different regions and fields and promotes methodological innovation in transdisciplinary studies. There is no publication charge.

Call for Papers
Medieval worlds is inviting papers on any comparative topic for Volume 3, Issue 1 which is scheduled to be published on 1 July, 2016.
Medieval worlds publishes research articles of 5.000 to 10.000 words and shorter articles of 2000-5000 words (including footnotes and reference list) in three categories: comparative papers, pairs/clusters of papers addressing comparative issues and reports on ongoing major research projects.
If you are looking for a potential partner to publish a pair/cluster of papers addressing a comparative common issue, please send a request tomedievalworlds@oeaw.ac.at. We are looking forward to bring together scholars from different areas of interest and encourage interdisciplinary groups to publish focused sets of articles.
If you intend to submit a paper, please drop us a note indicating provisional title and area of interest to medievalworlds@oeaw.ac.at.

Submission deadlines:
Abstracts: 27 February, 2016
Full paper: 31 March, 2016
Registration and login are required to submit abstracts and papers online and to check the status of current submissions. You will receive a notification of acceptance within 7-10 days from the date of manuscript submission.
For more information on submissions, visit http://medieval.vlg.oeaw.ac.at/index.php/medievalworlds/index.

Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts Sponsored by the Stanford University Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

51st International Congress on Medieval Studies
May 12-15, 2016
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI

Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts
Sponsored by the Stanford University Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

DEADLINE: September 15, 2015

The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, amulets, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines.So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences—most prominently emotion—has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other.This session draws the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.Papers should address some of the varied ways that the experiences of the senses could be communicated (or constructed) through medieval objects.

Proposals for presentations of no more than 20 minutes should be sent to Fiona Griffiths (fgriffit@stanford.edu) or Kathryn Starkey (starkey@stanford.edu) no later than Sept. 15.

Proposals should be accompanied by the Participant Information Form, available athttp://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF


Elaine Treharne, FSA, FRHistS, FEA
Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities
Co-Director of CMEMS; Director of Stanford TexT
Department of English
Building 460, 450 Serra Mall
Stanford University, CA 94305-2087
Tel: 650 723 4609
https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu/
https://english.stanford.edu/people/elaine-treharne

CFP: Slavery in the Medieval World

“Slavery in the Medieval World”:
A Call for Papers and Sessions for participation in the 2016 Leeds International Medieval Congress

The study of slavery in the Medieval World has been largely marginalized in the past.Despite large amounts of evidence, medievalists have traditionally opted to focus their attentions elsewhere or to have seen slavery as being of only marginal importance in the societies and economies of the world from late antiquity until the opening of the Atlantic trade.While some important studies have been done in the past, a new interest in the subject has been growing with research looking more and more at the subject and its ramifications.

While it seems that the International Medieval Congress at Leeds this summer has barely ended, it is already time to begin thinking about next year.This summer, of course, there were more papers and sessions devoted to the subject of slavery (and related topics) in the medieval world than everbefore.As a result, some were even scheduled to run against each other.In order to avoid this next summer and to better promote understanding of the topic, it is hoped to organize a strand of sessions to be held next year at the IMC Leeds 2016 (4 to 7 July 2016, at the University of Leeds).

The overall topic will be ‘Slavery in the Medieval World’ with separate sessions focusing on various eras and topics under the overall theme.

The individual sessions will be numbered and will have sub-titles relevant to what their particular focus is (as well as individual session organizers).Possible topics might include such areas as "Slavery in Medieval Arabia", "Manumission", "Children in Slavery", "Slavery and the End of the Western Empire" and so on and so forth.

The total number of sessions will, of course, be determined by the number of participants; ideally, we will have a mix of early career and more senior scholars as well as of people working on a range of geographic and temporal areas.

By bringing together scholars working on different areas and periods of the history of medieval Europe, Asia, and Africa, we hope to address the question of whether there is a single subject of slavery in the medieval world, whether some practices and activities can be seen as being of global importance, and how the earlier modes of slavery found in antiquity shaped later practice.Whether the teachings of the monotheistic religions served to ameliorate slave-systems inherited from the past or whether they served to make them stronger could be discussed while the role of slavery itself in the systems of exchange and of personal relationship might also be usefully addressed.

All proposals addressing the topic, whether of single papers or of organized sessions, are welcome and will be examined.

Practical issues
If you are interested in giving a paper or organizing a session, please send an email by 23 August 2015 to medievalslavery@gmail.com

While we look forward to proposals for individual papers, we also encourage potential collaboration, respondents, and moderators.Of course, please feel free to forward this call for papers to any student or colleague who might be interested in participating in our strand!

When you write, include the following information:
1) paper title
2) a short abstract/brief description indicating what the paper will be about (max. 200 words)
3) your contact details and affiliation
4) Equipment needed? (Laptop, Beamer, etc.)

We will determine how papers of 20 minutes each best fit and we’ll let you know the results as soon as possible (no later than mid-September). We are unable to cover travel, registration and accommodation expenses for speakers. Please consider the bursary application offered by the IMC (deadline 17 October): https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet?*context=IMC&*id=0&*formId=83&conference=2016&*servletURI=https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet
For general information on the IMC, see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/125137/international_medieval_congress
We’re looking forward to lots of interesting papers and proposals!

CFP: Modeling semantically Enriched Digital Edition of Accounts (MEDEA)

Call for Papers
Modeling semantically Enriched Digital Edition of Accounts (MEDEA)

Account books have long been used as primary sources for economic and
social history since they allow scholars to explore the development of
economic behavior on both a macro- and micro-structural level. A number
of projects in Europe and the United States have begun to explore models
for digitizing such sources.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has developed useful models to encode
texts and digital scholarly editions, and the semantic web offers
opportunities to collect and compare data from multiple digital
projects. The MEDEA project looks at these methods with the goal of
developing broad standards for producing semantically enriched digital
editions of accounts. It will foster discussion of benefits and
deficiencies in existing standards by bringing together economic
historians, scholarly editors, and technical experts to discuss and test
the emerging methods for semantic markup of account books. For this
purpose we call for contributions of scholars with experiences in the
scholarly edition of historical financial records and ideas about how to
use digital methods within this context.

We invite proposals for participation in our first workshop, which will
be held in *Regensburg (Germany), Oct. 22-24, 2015*. Participants will
present current research projects using data from historical account
books, describe the encoding models of their projects, and share ideas
for a common model. The discussions and examples will focus on a set of
questions intended to elucidate the features of accounts of greatest
interest to scholars. Thus the activities will focus on the following
issues:

● How might we model the economic activities recorded in these
documents? In particular: What models of bookkeeping were followed
historically and how can they be represented formally? Are data models
developed for modern business reporting helpful?
● How can we model the economic reality behind the texts? Can we
establish common resources on metrics and currencies or even the value
of money that can be reused in other projects? Is it possible to build
common taxonomies of commodities and services to facilitate the
comparison of financial information recorded at different places and
times? That is, can we develop references on the order of name
authorities and standards for geo-referencing?
● How might we integrate topological information of the
transcription with its financial interpretation? Is the “table” an
appropriate method? What possibilities are offered by the TEI
Manuscripts module and use of the tei:zone element?
● How can we integrate a topological/documentary approach and the
growing linguistic interest in the texts with the interpretations that
economic and social historians extract from the documents?

Proposals should not exceed 700 words and should be submitted to
medea.workshop@ur.de by August 24, 2015.
The programme committee will assess the proposals and notify applicants
no later than September 2, 2015.
We particularly encourage proposals from early-career researchers from
Europe and from the United States. A limited budget is available to
support costs of travel and accommodation.
If there remain any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact
us.

See more details on the project at http://medea.hypotheses.org/ .


Kathryn Tomasek, Associate Professor of History

Wheaton College
Norton, Massachusetts


Ass.-Prof. Dr. Georg Vogeler

Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung – Austrian Centre for Digital
Humanities
Universität Graz
Elisabethstr. 59 / III
A-8010 Graz


Prof. Dr. Mark Spoerer / Kathrin Pindl M.A.

Universität Regensburg
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte
93040 Regensburg

Kalamazoo 2016: Recipe for a Better Peer Review

Kalamazoo 2016: Recipe for a Better Peer Review

Session Organizers: Asa Simon Mittman and Myra Seaman

Peer review has long stood as the gold standard for academic
publications, trusted to determine if a work’s methods and conclusions
meet the discipline’s requirements and thus prove it is “serious
scholarship.” Peer review is at times “blind,” in which the reviewer
remains anonymous, and sometimes “double-blind,” in which both author
and reviewer remain — at least in theory — unknown to one another. This
system is the bedrock of scholarly production and an integral part of
the hiring, tenure, and promotion processes. But does it continue to
work for today’s scholarly community the way it once did? Does it
function to foster new ideas and approaches, to improve the writing we
do, and to maintain appropriate “standards,” however defined? We believe
that this vital and influential process should not be taken as a given,
as currently practiced. This session will present a series of practical
proposals for renovation or replacement, rather than providing a forum
for documenting the problems with peer review. We invite participants in
all parts of the process, including editors from academic presses and
journals, academic grant officers, digital humanities publishers,
authors, and administrators who oversee the tenure and promotion
processes that often depend on publications. We welcome presentations on
recently adopted variants, as well as pledges for new approaches. Topics
for discussion might include: anonymity; reward for reviewers;
accountability; effects on innovation; basic goals of the process; and
whether, in fact, peer review ought to remain the standard model.

Please send abstracts of 300 words, a brief bio, and the ICMS PIF
(http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF
<http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF>) to Myra
Seaman (seamanm@cofc.edu <mailto:seamanm@cofc.edu>) by Sept. 15, 2015.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Edirom-Summer-School

Edirom-Summer-School

Edirom-Summer-School, which will take place 7–11 of September at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute at the University of Paderborn, Germany:http://ess.upb.de.

The Edirom-Summer-School 2015 is organized by the Virtual Research Group Edirom and the german eHumanities project DARIAH-DE.

Our courses and workshops follow three level tracks (most held in German):
-The "entrance" track will offer introductions to the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as well as to our Edirom Tool Set for compiling and publishing digital (music) editions.

-The "advanced" track deals with general workflows and techniques when working with XML files and MEI metadata. We also offer an introduction to tool development with eXist-db.

Within the "workshop" track we will discuss different problems and questions about technical workflows and project organization as well as legal issues concerning different types of "data" in the context of digital research and edition projects.

Please find our full program at http://ess.upb.de/2015/programm.html. Registration is open until the end of July at http://ess.upb.de/2015/registrierung.html.

In case of any questions concerning the ESS2015, please feel free to contact the organization team at ess@edirom.de.

Benjamin Bohl
The Virtual Research Group Edirom is based at the Musicology Seminar Detmold/Paderborn, which is a co-faculty of the University of Paderborn and the Hochschule für Musik Detmold.
DARIAH-DE is the German part of the EU eHumanities research project Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Please find further information at http://de.dariah.eu.
The ESS2015 on the internet: http://ess.upb.de
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/edirom or #edirom2015

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Gender and Emotion

Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2016
The University of Hull
Gender and Emotion
6th – 8th January 2016
Call for Papers

The grief-stricken faces at Edward’s deathbed in the Bayeux Tapestry; the ambiguous ‘ofermod’ in The Battle of Maldon; the body-crumpling anguish of the Virgin witnessing the Man of Sorrows; the mirth of the Green Knight; the apoplectic anger of the mystery plays’ Herod and the visceral visionary experiences of Margery of Kempe all testify to the ways in which the medieval world sought to express, perform, idealise and understand emotion.
Yet while such expressions of emotion are frequently encountered by medievalists working across the disciplines, defining, quantifying and analysing the purposes of emotion and its relationship to gender often proves difficult.  Are personal items placed in early Anglo Saxon graves a means for the living to let go of, or perpetuate emotion, and how are these influenced by the body in the grave?  Do different literary and historical forms lend themselves to diverse ways of expressing men’s and women’s emotion?  How does a character expressing emotion on stage or in artwork use body, gender and articulation to communicate emotion to their viewer?  Moreover, is emotion viewed differently depending on the gendered identity of the body expressing it?  Is emotion and its reception used to construct, deconstruct, challenge or confirm gender identities?
This conference seeks to explore the manifestations, performances and functions of emotion in the early to late Middle Ages, and to examine the ways in which emotion is gendered and used to construct gender identities. 
Proposals are now being accepted for 20 minute papers.  Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:
·       Gender and emotional expression: representing and performing emotion
·       The emotional body
·       Philosophies of emotion: theory and morality
·       Emotional objects and vessels of emotion
·       Language and emotion and the languages of emotion
·       Preserving or perpetuating emotion
·       Emotions to be dealt with: repressing, curtailing, channelling, transforming
·       Forbidden emotion
·       Living through (someone else’s) emotion
·       The emotions of war and peace
·       The emotive ‘other’
·       Place and emotion
·       Queer emotion
We welcome scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, literature, art history, archaeology and drama.  A travel fund is available for postgraduate students who would otherwise be unable to attend.
Please email proposals of no more than 300 words to organiser Daisy Black at d.black@hull.ac.uk by the 7th September 2015.  All queries should also be directed to this address.  Please also include biographical information detailing your name, research area, institution and level of study (if applicable).
Further details will be available on the conference website:

www.medievalgender.co.uk

New Approaches to Old English Biblical Poetry

Kalamazoo 2016 #Kzoo2016

Call for Papers:

51st International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University
12-15 May 2016 in Kalamazoo, Michigan

Session Title: New Approaches to Old English Biblical Poetry
Session Organizer: Jill Fitzgerald
Session Sponsor: Dept. of English, United States Naval Academy

This session welcomes papers that examine fresh methodological and critical approaches to Old English poems recounting both Old and New Testament events. Biblical poems such as Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus, Daniel, and Judith (to name a few) continue to invite scholarly attention because they reveal predominant Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards issues such as lordship, land, inheritance, exile, invasion, migration, corruption, warfare, rebellion, and conquest. Possible paper topics for this panel might include, but are certainly not limited to: those addressing sources (patristic, apocryphal, liturgical, iconographic), cultural and historical contexts, manuscript contexts, translation and the vernacular transmission of biblical concepts, how biblical poems offer insights into early medieval social groups, reforming communities, Christian identity and subjectivity, and how Anglo-Saxons understood their place within salvation history.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and the Participant Information Form to Jill Fitzgerald at jfitzger@usna.edu by September 15th. The Participant Information Form and additional information can be found at:

http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/#PIF