1.       Anatomizing Melancholy and Reliving Depression (a roundtable)
This session will be open to a diverse range of approaches, but we will be particularly interested in medievalists’ open experiences of mood disorders and how their work on the Middle Ages has helped, hindered, or informed their experience of depression—and, naturally, if and how modern experiences of depression help us understand the experience of melancholia. By exploring these issues transhistorically, I hope that this roundtable will both further our understanding of medieval melancholia and contribute to efforts among contemporary medievalists to foreground mental health issues in the academy that are increasingly affecting our colleagues and students.

2.       Getting Down with Anglo-Saxons: Depression and Related Conditions before the Conquest

 The second session will be a panel of three or four papers that focuses on the phenomenology of “depressive states” in Anglo-Saxon England. Our goal will be to identify, if possible, commonalities between negative mental/emotional states in Anglo-Saxon society and culture that allow us to formulate and perhaps explain a pathology of mood disorders that is specific to this time and place, just as modern-day depression is thought to be a product of our social and cultural environments. Following on from the work of scholars like Leslie Lockett and Antonina Harbus, this session builds upon recent work in cognitive approaches to Anglo-Saxon culture, as well as tapping in to current trends in the burgeoning field of the “history of emotions.”

Please contact Chris Abram (cabram@nd.edu) with proposals or requests for further information.

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Christopher Abram

Associate Professor of EnglishUniversity of Notre Dame 

International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo 2018

CFP: Bede and Material Culture (I and II)

Sponsored by: BedeNet.com

 Organized by: Paul Hilliard, University of St. Mary of the Lake, Sharon M. Rowley, Christopher Newport University, Peter Darby, University of Nottingham,  Máirín MacCarron, University of Sheffield

 Fueled by recent discoveries and benefiting from over 70 years of meticulous labor, the study of insular material culture has become essential to any scholar seeking to understand the societies located in early medieval Britain and Ireland.  The relationship between Bede, the primary textual source, and that material record continues to be a source of dialogue and debate.  While both the study of insular material culture and the understanding of Bede have greatly developed over the past thirty years, these new perspectives have not always been brought together.  It seems fitting then to facilitate further dialogue and integration by focusing our two sessions on Bede and material culture.

 For these sessions the theme of Bede and material culture is broadly understood and may include the impact of material culture on Bede and the use of material culture for understanding the age of Bede.  Additionally, papers are also welcome which place Bede himself in a thick context of early Anglo-Saxon material culture and/or advance ways in which the study of material culture helps us to read better Bede’s own scholarly writings.  In short, these sessions are dedicated to explore what things have to tell us about Bede and his world. Please contact Paul Hilliard at philliard@usml.edu with questions and submissions. 

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Dr. Sharon M. Rowley
Professor
Department of English
Director of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Christopher Newport University
1 Avenue of the Arts
Newport News, VA 23606
757.594.8874
fax 757.594.8870

Identifying Creative Impulses in Early Medieval Art and Culture

Special Sessions organized by Eric Ramírez-Weaver (emr6m@virginia.edu) and Lynley Anne Herbert (lherbert@thewalters.org)

I. Creative Modes of Activating the Early Medieval Manuscript

The way a manuscript behaves when used “in the flesh,” so to speak, can at times reveal layers of creativity built into them, which must be actively experienced rather than passively seen. Often as modern scholars we work from digitized images of individual folios, or at best openings, and “page flipping” technologies (such as the Walters’s “Ex Libris” platform or the British Library’s “Turning the Pages” program) provide a false sense that we are experiencing the physical book. Evidence of the performative qualities of a manuscript can at times be rediscovered, not just in the sense of how a reader might perform the text written in the book, but how the user activated the book as an object during use.  Does an image show through a page and become part of the visual experience on the other side, and was there intentionality there? Do images interact across an opening? Does imagery function together from recto to verso? How is the artist creating an experience for the user, or conversely, how did the user alter the book to create a personal experience? This session seeks papers that explore creative approaches that open up new possibilities regarding how early medieval manuscripts functioned as objects.

II. Creative Strategies of Intellectual Engagement with Tradition and the Auctores

Recent scholarship (consider Benjamin Anderson, Lynda Coon, Paul Edward Dutton, Rosamond McKitterick, Lawrence Nees, Eric Ramírez-Weaver, and Immo Warntjes), has increasingly emphasized the creative strategies for intervention and manufacture of meaning that were acutely linked to early medieval eastern and western engagements with various aspects of the liberal art traditions. From star pictures to poetic acrostics, devotion to erudition and pious personal reform transformed the possibilities for innovation that proliferated during the Carolingian period. Interlocking networks of artists, chroniclers, historians, and poets communicated their translations, textual redactions, and visual records of classical tradition and contemporary study with one another, engaged in debate or collaboration, but advancing science. This session seeks papers willing to reconsider methodologically apposite ways to reinterpret the various brands of early medieval creativity manifest in texts pertaining (as broadly as possible) to the seven liberal arts, including texts of astronomical, computistical, rhetorical, geometric, arithmetic, musical, lyrical, philosophical, diagrammatic, or historical significance.

  

Eric M. Ramírez-Weaver, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Director of the Undergraduate Program (Office Hours: Fridays, 9am-1pm)

University of Virginia

McIntire Department of Art

Carl H. and Martha S. Lindner Center for Art History

303 Fayerweather Hall

P.O. BOX 400130

Charlottesville, VA 22904-4130

[T] 434-924-7710

[F] 434-924-3647

[C] 434-227-2910

Sponsored by the Research Group of Manuscript Evidence

http://manuscriptevidence.org/wpme/2018-international-congress-on-medieval-studies-call-for-papers/

Abstracts to: Linde M. Brocato, linde.brocato AT gmail.com 

>>>DO NOT CLICK "REPLY" AS YOUR MESSAGE WILL GO TO THE ENTIRE LIST<<<

Alfonso X, “the Wise,” of Castile was a polymath himself and sponsored many more across the various communities of Iberia.  His court was the political center of Castile, at least until the rethinking of law and politics he promulgated in the Siete Partidascombined with his (invited) Ghibelline bid for the Holy Roman Emperorship to provoke a civil war in his realms, led by his second son Sancho IV.  Iberia was also a crossroads of travelers – scholars, pilgrims, diplomats, merchants – from all over the world, with destinations like the courts of Castile and of the Crown of Aragon.  

Among the vast corpus of works he either directly or indirectly composed, Alfonso X’s book on games and gaming, the Libros de ajedrez, dados y tablas (also known as the Libro de los juegos), likely finished in the early to mid-1280s at the end of his life, seems to have reflected these intellectual and political dynamics, and recorded many such travelers and dwellers of his court.  In spite of a facsimile from the late 1980s, it has until recently garnered very little attention, particularly attention that considered it beyond the domains of chess and gaming, and art history.  

With Sonja Musser Golladay’s 2007 dissertation and Olivia Remie Constable’s article of the same year, however, and more recent studies, analysis of the book and its context have begun to contribute to our understanding of many other aspects of the 13th century, due to its incredibly rich representation of layers of information, ranging from the portraits in its miniatures to the intertextual networks of translation in multiple domains.  

In this era of “big data” and datamining, the Libro de los juegos offers a very interesting counter-case: one specific manuscript of only moderate length that provides insight into multiple domains.  It is “small data,” but data so rich that it produces big results when placed in productive tension across domains and disciplines.  It is a book that lends itself to interdisciplinary conversation, and to conversations that trace its contents and its effects over time, as part of a particular corpus and part of a concrete library. 

The purpose of this session is to encourage a lively interdisciplinary discussion of its texts, images, and the physical book from a variety of domains, perspectives, and methods in order to address a broad array of questions both related to and beyond its explicit topic, games and aristocratic leisure, and, as such, invites participants from all quarters interested in cross-disciplinary analysis and discussion of the Libro de los juegos.

A pdf of the CFP is also available on my academia.edu page:

https://www.academia.edu/33912138/Alfonso_Xs_Libro_de_los_juegos_Big_Results_from_Small_Data

CFP: “From Intolerance to Inclusion: Intersections between Teaching and Research of Persecution in the Middle Ages” (May 2018)

The panel, “From Intolerance to Inclusion: Intersections between Teaching and Research of Persecution in the Middle Ages,” proposes to look at the ways research and teaching of intolerance and persecution of marginalized groups in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean can promote a more inclusive vision of the Middle Ages. In recent years, public perceptions of medieval societies as culturally and racially homogeneous—explicitly antithetical and hostile to modern concepts of diversity—have gained a particularly problematic currency among conservative and right-wing groups. Many a critic has noticed that this interpretation casts the Middle Ages, with a sense of wistful nostalgia, as “the good old days”: racially pure, sexually normative past dominated by universal Christianity and patriarchy. It is up to medievalists—as educators, as well as scholars—to dispel this dangerous misinterpretation of the Middle Ages among our students and the public.

This panel’s organizers would like to suggest that medievalists have championed, researched, and taught a more inclusive vision of the Middle Ages for decades, especially in works of scholarship and courses that deal—perhaps surprisingly—with intolerance and persecution during this period. Studies of and courses on medieval heresies and inquisition, interreligious violence, suppression of non-normative manifestations of gender and sexuality demonstrate, first and foremost, that the Middle Ages were racially, culturally, religiously, and sexually diverse. This panel will invite its participants to discuss their experience with both studying and teaching persecutions of marginalized groups in the Middle Ages and to share their approaches to teaching a more inclusive and multicultural vision of this period to their students and the general public.

Key questions include, but are not limited to the following:

-          Strategies for promoting a balanced and inclusive understanding of the period in the classroom and beyond

-          How discussion of persecuted minorities in the Middle Ages can be usefully placed in modern context; what is gained or lost in the process?

-          How to emphasize medieval diversity in the classroom beyond mere “tokenism”

-          What scholars of the Middle Ages can do to counteract the “alt-right’s” attempts to claim the period as ultra-conservative utopia

We hope that the panel will initiate conversations and stimulate future scholarship.

Please send abstracts of up to 300 words, current CV, and the Participant Information Form (available on the Congress’ Submissions page, http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions) to esmelyan@uci.edu by September 10, or sooner if possible.

CFP: A Feminist Renaissance in Anglo-Saxon Studies

Special Sessions at the 2018 International Congress on Medieval Studies

10-13 May 2018

Western Michigan University

Kalamazoo, MI

A Feminist Renaissance in Anglo-Saxon Studies I: Interdisciplinary/Extramural

This session seeks papers focused on ways that a Feminist Renaissance in Anglo-Saxon studies can resonate inside and outside the university. Ideally, papers will combine traditional academic analysis of Anglo-Saxon artifact(s) (text, object, etc.) with reflection on ways that feminist analysis can or should function outside of traditional academia. We anticipate that some presenters will also grapple with the definition of the term “feminist” in 2017/2018, both in and out of the field.

A Feminist Renaissance in Anglo-Saxon Studies II:

Projects in Process (a roundtable)

Rather than the more usual roundtable of 6-8 short presentations, this roundtable seeks 5-6 scholars to describe feminist works-in-progress in the context of 2-3 specific questions about the state of the field and its future. Each panelist will take no more than 7 minutes, leaving time for substantial conversation after the initial, brief remarks. We plan to share these questions (over social media, listservs, etc.) before the Congress in order to give potential audience members and the presenters time to reflect on these issues and lay the groundwork for fruitful, substantive discussion that includes audience members as well as panelists. These questions could include: How does your current feminist project fit into your teaching? How does your current feminist project address the ongoing “crisis in the humanities”? How do you engage your non-medievalist colleagues in your feminist project? How do you convince your department head/dean/provost that your feminist project is worthwhile and thus worthy of institutional support? With input from digital communities, the organizers will finalize these centering questions in January of 2018.

Submit abstracts as PDF attachments to:

Mary Dockray-Miller

Humanities Dept.

Lesley University

mdockray@lesley.edu

Review of abstracts will be ongoing until the Congress deadline of 15 September 2017.

https://mdockraymiller.hcommons.org/2017/07/14/cfp-a-feminist-renaissance-in-anglo-saxon-studies/

CFP: A Feminist Renaissance in Anglo-Saxon Studies
Special Sessions at the 2018 International Congress on Medieval Studies
10-13 May 2018
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI

A Feminist Renaissance in Anglo-Saxon Studies I: Interdisciplinary/Extramural

This session seeks papers focused on ways that a Feminist Renaissance in Anglo-Saxon studies can resonate inside and outside the university. Ideally, papers will combine traditional academic analysis of Anglo-Saxon artifact(s) (text, object, etc.) with reflection on ways that feminist analysis can or should function outside of traditional academia. We anticipate that some presenters will also grapple with the definition of the term “feminist” in 2017/2018, both in and out of the field.


A Feminist Renaissance in Anglo-Saxon Studies II:
Projects in Process (a roundtable)

Rather than the more usual roundtable of 6-8 short presentations, this roundtable seeks 5-6 scholars to describe feminist works-in-progress in the context of 2-3 specific questions about the state of the field and its future. Each panelist will take no more than 7 minutes, leaving time for substantial conversation after the initial, brief remarks. We plan to share these questions (over social media, listservs, etc.) before the Congress in order to give potential audience members and the presenters time to reflect on these issues and lay the groundwork for fruitful, substantive discussion that includes audience members as well as panelists. These questions could include: How does your current feminist project fit into your teaching? How does your current feminist project address the ongoing “crisis in the humanities”? How do you engage your non-medievalist colleagues in your feminist project? How do you convince your department head/dean/provost that your feminist project is worthwhile and thus worthy of institutional support? With input from digital communities, the organizers will finalize these centering questions in January of 2018.

Submit abstracts as PDF attachments to:
Mary Dockray-Miller
Humanities Dept.
Lesley University
mdockray@lesley.edumdockray@lesley.edu
>

Review of abstracts will be ongoing until the Congress deadline of 15 September 2017.

https://mdockraymiller.hcommons.org/2017/07/14/cfp-a-feminist-renaissance-in-anglo-saxon-studies/