Final call for papers

K'zoo 2018 -- Eustache Deschamps -- Deadline, Sept. 10, 2017

Eustache Deschamps -- Gourmet, Bailiff, Courtier, and Social Critic: 

A Fourteenth-Century Gentleman Looks at Life

Organizer:  Deborah Sinnreich-Levi (Stevens Institute of Technology)

The work of Eustache Deschamps (1340-1406) survives principally in one immense, complete manuscript (BNF ff 840).  Contained therein are some 1500 poems offering insights into the life the poet who served generations of nobility.  Although the poet fulfilled his societal obligations to his royal masters, his main delights stemmed from capturing in verse the foibles and fashions of those around him, great and small.  The food of Paris, Brie and Champagne was beyond reproach:  that of Germanic lands, beyond contempt; the manners of courtly diners, atrocious; people’s grimaces, amusing; and ladies’ under garments, torture devices.  His own appearance was such that he styled himself the King of the Ugly.  Diseases and their cures; the study of the seven liberal arts; the practical jokes of Oton de Grandson and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and Guillaume de Machaut; and the life styles and deaths of the rich and famous – all fascinated Deschamps, and all have been preserved in his poems.  His Livre de memoire does not survive, but hundreds of shorter poems attest the focus that Deschamps had on his contemporaries and the peculiarities of life at court in the fourteenth century.  The reigns of Charles V and Charles VI, the battle of Nicopolis, the Hundred Years’ War; outbreaks of the plague; the death of Bertrand du Guesclin – all these are chronicled by the poet alongside cheeses and wines; meals of fish and fowl; condiments and convicts; arms and armor; seduction and satiety; fevers and fat waistlines.

Papers on any aspect of Deschamps’ take on medieval life are welcome.

Feel free to post this CfP widely with my thanks.

Deborah

Prof. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi
Stevens Institute of Technology
Email:  dsinnrei@stevens.edu
Office Hrs:  T W TH 8-10 and by appt. in M327
Tel:  201.216.5403  Fax:  201.216.8245                                             
*http://www.stevens.edu/cal/faculty-profile?id=912  

The Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee invites applications for its Lindsay Young Visiting Regional Faculty Fellowships. These non-service fellowships are intended to bring scholars from Tennessee and the neighboring region to UTK, where they can make use of research resources in late antique, medieval, and Renaissance fields to further their research agendas and take part in the intellectual life of the Institute.

The fellowship carries a stipend of $600/week, and also covers one-time round-trip travel costs to and from Knoxville.

Application deadlines:

• September 15, 2017 (for fellowships held between December 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018)

• March 15, 2018 (for fellowships held between June 1 and November 30, 2018)

For further details and information on how to apply, visit: http://marco.utk.edu/ly-visiting-fac-fellowship/

The Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

601 Greve Hall

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Phone: 865-974-1859

Fax: 865-974-3655

Mailing Address:

915 Volunteer Blvd.

Dunford Hall, Sixth Floor

Knoxville, TN 37996-4065

Web: marco.utk.edu

Facebook/Twitter: marcoinstitute
Join the Friends of Marco Listserv: http://eepurl.com/ck1L0z

Two sessions “Identifying Creative Impulses in Early Medieval Art and Culture” will convene at the 53^rd International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 10-13, 2018) in Kalamazoo, MI.

Papers are solicited that encourage novel—even experimental—approaches, to the exploration and identification of various conceptions of early medieval, creative cultural activity.  

The first panel seeks to engage with the actual haptic and experiential practice of manufacturing, reading and studying the early medieval book.

The second panel focuses upon culturally apposite forms of interpretative and compositional fashioning that can be discerned in manuscripts belonging to the liberal arts traditions of the Early Middle Ages.

Abstracts and paper proposals of not more than 250 words can be submitted via email on or before Friday, September 15, 2017 to the session organizers: Lynley Anne Herbert (lherbert@thewalters.org) and Eric Ramírez-Weaver (emr6m@virginia.edu).

Please copy both co-organizers when submitting a proposal, posing a question, or requesting additional information via email.

Complete panel descriptions follow. We particularly encourage inventive strategies promising new approaches to the investigation of early medieval creativity.

Warm regards,

Lynley AH and Eric R-W

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.

Explore Frankish Skies…

~~

A Saving Science: Capturing the Heavens in Carolingian Manuscripts is available from Penn State University Press! http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-07126-8.html

~~

Eric M. Ramírez-Weaver, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Director of the Program in Medieval Studies

Director of the Undergraduate Program in Art History

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

Apologies for cross-posting.

53^rd International Medieval Congress, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI (May 10–13, 2018)

CALL FOR PAPERS: Mediterranean Materiality and Consumption

Session sponsored by the CU Mediterranean Studies Group/Mediterranean Seminar

This session addresses the study of materiality and consumption in the Medieval Mediterranean. What was the specific material culture of the medieval Mediterranean? What was consumed and by whom? Papers may focus on any related themes, for example, the relationship between material and immaterial, the fabrication of objects and texts and the perception of these works, the circulation of objects, and the networks that made that circulation possible. Papers that adopt a comparative perspective, including one which examines Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures and their interaction, or those that propose novel approaches and methodologies are particularly welcome.

Contact Nuria Silleras-Fernandez at silleras@colorado.edu for further information or to submit a proposal (300-word abstract, one-page CV, and media equipment request by 15 September 2017).

________________________________

Núria Silleras-Fernández, PhD
Associate Professor
Associate Chair for Graduate Studies
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Director of the Consortium for Doctoral Studies in Literature and Culture
University of Colorado at Boulder
278 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0278
USA

e-mail: silleras@colorado.edu
office phone: 303-492-5864
fax: 303-492-3699

In their 2011 volume in the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks Series, The Carolingian World, the authors raise the question of whether such a place or concept existed in eighth- and ninth-century Europe.[1] They conclude that indeed there was a “Carolingian World,” amorphous and difficult to define as it was, and that most scholars tie it to the political, religious, and cultural plans of the Carolingian elites, whose domains spanned most of western and central Europe from the mid-eighth until the end of the ninth century. Thus, the “Carolingian World” did not map onto any specific borders or boundaries so much as it reflected the influence and ambitions of its rulers and thinkers who imagined their unique place in history and the world. What is not clear, however, is the extent to which those living under Carolingian rule and influence experienced a “Carolingian World.” These sessions on “Living in the Carolingian World” invite papers to consider this fundamental question from a variety of perspectives, drawing inspiration both from Heinrich Fichtenau’s Living in the Tenth Century, which explored post-Carolingian Europe through the actions and points of view of those who lived in it, and from recent scholarly work that has expanded investigation of early medieval Europe in both methodological and conceptual terms. We welcome papers on topics that address this question, particularly proposals that focus on the daily lived experience of those who inhabited the Carolingian empire, whether male or female, free or unfree, young or old, plant or animal, but who were not part of the Reichsaristokratie. In short, these sessions will test the limits and usefulness of the “Carolingian World” as a framework for understanding life in eighth- and ninth-century Europe.

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words before 15 September 2017 to the session organizers, Valerie L. Garver and Noah Blan, at noahblan@umich.edu.

---

[1] Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9-16.

Valerie L. Garver, PhD

Associate Professor and

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of History

Co-Coordinator, Medieval Studies

Northern Illinois University

Submissions Editor, Medieval Prosopography

https://wmich.edu/medievalpublications/journals/prosopography

815-753-6823

vgarver@niu.edu

The International Anchoritic Society is seeking proposals for our Kalamazoo 2018 sessions:

 

[Roundtable] New Directions in Anchoritic Studies: a roundtable providing overviews of new directions in the study of vocational withdrawal, with emphasis on Q&A. This is important to establish how the field has grown and changed.

 

[Panel] Ecocritical responses to anchoritism: this is a topic that has not yet been widely addressed in reclusive studies; however, since anchorites are fused with their cells, and the anchoritic life is dependent upon constructions of the desert, there are rich avenues of investigation available.

 

 

I will take abstracts until Monday, September 25. Please email them directly to me, along with your PIF.

 

Thank you!

 

 

-- 

Michelle M. Sauer, PhD
Professor of English & Gender Studies
University of North Dakota
Department of English; Stop 7209
276 Centennial Drive
Grand Forks, ND 58202

Sponsored by Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures

Organized by Albert Lloret (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Jeanette Patterson (Binghamton University, SUNY)

The prevalent use of digital tools and online environments to edit medieval texts is resulting in a myriad of projects in which unique solutions are deployed to offer optimal representations of very different textual objects. Single manuscripts, library collections, authorial corpora, and works preserved in several witnesses, for instance, all beg for different editorial and archival approaches. The possibilities for study and representation, in addition, are multiplied not only by the technologies employed or designed ad hoc for each project, but also by the scholars’ ideas on the very nature of what is being studied. We invite paper submissions that reflect on the theory, developments, and challenges of editing and archiving medieval texts, including, but not limited to:

•theories of digital edition.

•the making of digital editions.

•technologies employed in the making of digital archives.

•examples of digital editions and archives. 

Please send a 100-word abstract and a Participant Information Form (available here: https://wmich.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/u434/2017/medieval-pif-2018.doc ) to Albert Lloret at lloret@umass.edu by September 15.