Call for Papers

The Mid-America Medieval Association’s 41^st annual meeting

Saturday, September 16, 2017

at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

Conference Theme: Networks

Plenary Speaker: Dr. Cynthia J. Brown, Distinguished Professor of French, University of California-Santa Barbara

Plenary title: “Paratextual Cues in Late Medieval Books: Detecting Family Female Networks”

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers on the conference theme or on any medieval topic.  Panels of 3-4 papers are also welcome. The conference theme of “Networks” might include topics such as: family networks; monastic and other religious networks; intellectual, artistic, professional, or political networks; networks of texts, of manuscripts, of artworks, etc.

Dr. Brown’s most recent monograph, The Queen's Library: Image-Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477-1514 (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) examines book production for late medieval elite women in France, including Anne of Britanny’s contemporaries (including Louise de Savoy and Margaret of Austria) and successors, most notably her daughter Claude.  As a recent review puts it, Dr. Brown mobilizes “a truly interdisciplinary range of critical tools to analyse these books’ texts and paratexts, she makes a rigorous and deeply contextualized case for the complex negotiations and political stakes at play in the verbal and visual representation of such women.”  Dr. Brown’s plenary talk is drawn from her newest project which extends her examination of networks of female book owners beyond French borders to the city states of Italy.

Abstracts or panel proposals (with abstracts) to Dr. Kathy M. Krause (krausek@umkc.edu) by Saturday, May 20, 2017.

Graduate students are invited to submit their paper for the Jim Falls Paper Prize.  Full conference papers should be sent tomama@umkc.edu by September 1, 2017.  More information will be available shortly on the MAMA website: http://info.umkc.edu/mama/