Grad Student Conference

Here be Monsters: Beasts, Beastliness and Hybridity
> in the Long Middle Ages
>
> 3rd Annual Medieval Studies/Pearl Kibre Medieval
> Study
> Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
>
> March 28, 2008: CUNY Graduate Center, New York
> In the middle ages, beasts decorated the margins of
> manuscripts,
> offered symbolic import in tales and fabliaux, were
> classified
> scientifically, kept as part of real households, and
> reached legendary
> proportions as part of travelogues. In religious and
> secular thought,
> animals – whether anthropomorphized or in
> interaction with humans –
> often figured as the other which could mark or blur
> the limits of the
> human or the familiar.
> We invite papers from graduate students in all
> academic disciplines
> that address the role of beasts, beastliness,
> monstrosity and hybridty
> from late antiquity through the early modern period.
> How do these
> concepts intersect? How were ideas about animals
> constructed? How did
> these various constructions inform concepts of
> monstrosity, race,
> religion, and social mores?
> Topics may include but are not limited to:
> Fabliaux
> Chivalric animals
> Transformations and Metamorphoses
> Limits of the human
> Monstrous or hybrid humans
> Temporal Hybridity
> Dragons and other mythic beasts
> Quests for beasts
> Heraldric animals
> Monsters in travelogues
> Monsters in marginalia
> Monsters elsewhere
> Bestiaries
> The motif of the Hunt
> Devils, Devilishness and Devilry
> Theatre of Beasts and Festivals
> Concepts of medieval beasts in other eras
> Beasts and sexuality
> Taming and Falconry
>
>
> Please submit abstracts of 250 words to
> medieval.beasts@gmail.com by
> February 14, 2008.
>
> Professor Susan Crane of Columbia University will
> deliver our keynote
> address. "A Taxonomy of Creatures in the
> Second-Family Bestiary"
> proposes a new way to read bestiaries such as the
> well-known Book of
> Beasts translated by T.H. White. The bestiaries'
> attentiveness to
> animals and their concern for spiritual teaching
> converge in a world
> view that is taxonomic: their classification of
> animals expresses a
> theory of creation's logic.
>