Seeing, Hearing, Reading and Believing

Please visit also the conference site
http://www.glossa.fi/authorities


Seeing, Hearing, Reading and Believing. Authorities in the Middle Ages
will be arranged in Helsinki 20-23 September 2010. This international
conference seeks to offer a multidisciplinary forum for researchers and
academics, enhance interdiscpilinary discussion, promote scholarly
networking, and set up an innovative platform for scholars who engage with
questions of power and authority.

The conference is aimed at established researchers, doctoral students and
those working on their master's thesis in medieval history or art history,
archaeology, theology, philosophy or literature. Conference sessions will
be open to the public. The conference will be held in English.

The conference is organised by Glossa, the Society for Medieval Studies in
Finland, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS) and the
Written Culture in Medieval Finland Project at the University of Helsinki.

Selected conference papers will be published as a refereed theme issue in
Mirator, an electronic open access jourrnal on medieval studies.


Call for Papers
The Latin word auctoritas means not only authority and influence, but more
generally opinion, encouragement, decree or example. The concept thus
resonates deeply in the study of social structures, communication or
religious culture, for instance. Who had auctoritas, and how? How was
influence built and maintained, how was it lost? How was authority
contested? What about model and precedent?

Glossa - the society for medieval studies in Finland is arranging with the
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Sudies the multidisciplinary conference
SEEING, HEARING, READING AND BELIEVING. AUTHORITIES IN THE MIDDLE AGES in
Helsinki, 20-23 September 2010. The organisers seek proposals for papers
on the topic of authorities in the Middle Ages. Themes include (but are
not limited to) authority/-ies in politics, military history, trade and
communication, intellectual history, art and literature as well as
religious conformism, adaptation and dissidence. We invite explorations of
exercise of authority in different spheres of life, as well as of medieval
meditations on the nature of authority, or of the authority of texts and
traditions. The conference welcomes researchers across all scholarly
fields and disciplines.

Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor David Abulafia (University of
Cambridge), Professor Sverre Bagge (University of Bergen) and Professor
Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona).

We welcome working papers from established researchers, doctoral students
and those working on their Master's thesis. Please send proposals for
individual papers of twenty minutes or for whole sessions of three papers
with contact details and a 200 word abstract to Tuija Ainonen, at
tuija.ainonen@helsinki.fi by 15 December 2009.