The University of Otago Centre for the Book is pleased to announce our sixth annual research symposium. In 2017, we are teaming up with Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature to offer a 3-day extravaganza engagement with books and culture. The Centre for the Book Symposium will start on Tuesday evening, November 28th, with our usual public lecture at the Dunedin City Library. The lecture will feature Warwick Jordan, proprietor of Hard to Find Books, talking about his wide experience as a bookseller and the variety of book users that he supplies. The symposium proper will take place on the University campus all day Wednesday, November 29th, at the College of Education and will feature a slate of presentations on the theme “Books and Users.”

The two-day UNESCO Creative Cities symposium will follow, with international and local keynote speakers on Thursday November 30th, followed on Friday by facilitated workshops at the Dunedin Athenaeum in the Octagon. Please note: Thanks to generous support from the University of Otago Centre for the Book, the NZ National Commission for UNESCO and the Dunedin City Council, both of these events will be free to attend, with delegates responsible for providing their own lunch. Delegates are welcome to register for specific days or all three days.

The theme for the Centre for the Book 2017 Symposium is “Books and Users.” Before the advent of electronic text storage, a whole realm of print existed to record and store information. From instruction manuals to phone books and encyclopedias, these publications were to be consulted rather than read. Today, increasingly, many of these works are no longer printed on paper. They are instead disseminated to users in electronic formats, often only when they are requested. This shift in media has made readers more conscious of how they use books. It also raises questions about which sort of books work well in electronic format and which do not. This symposium seeks to investigate all the ways people use books, not just consciously or as intended, but for any purpose. Some may be propping up an item of furniture in the corner; some used for artistic design; some for elegant wallpaper. Even those books that are actually read are used in many different ways: for self-exploration; for escape; for gifts to others; for inspiration. And there are the readers, an equally diverse lot: some fold down corners; some write in books (some even in ink); some insert all sorts of items such as bookmarks or for storage; others handle a book so delicately that a second reader cannot tell the book has ever been opened. Indeed, in medical contexts, ‘users’ may refer to those in control of their habit or to those harmfully addicted. Is this also true in the book world? Traditionally, libraries recorded the frequency with which books were used. Today, especially because of increased privacy concerns, such information is less publicly available, but is still being used. Indeed, publishers often place restrictions on how many times an e-text maybe loaned. Institutions face pressure, often having to buy another copy after the set number of loans has been reached. The variety of uses for books and of users of books creates areas both of mutual benefit and of potential conflict. The codex is a superbly efficient and highly evolved technology with a well-established set of design conventions that permit quite distinctive uses. Change is in the wind, and the book beyond the codex is evolving in new directions, some of which will no doubt succeed and others of which are bound to fail.

Call For Papers
All of these topics are of potential interest for the Centre for the Book symposium. Whether you are an adept or an addict, whether books for you are primarily physical, spiritual or cerebral, and whether you prefer to look up information online or in print, you undoubtedly have thoughts on this topic. So please email a 250-300 word abstract of your ideas to books@otago.ac.nz and set aside the end of November for a thought-provoking few days of reflection and engagement with books and users of books. Abstracts must be received by 1 October 2017, with a final programme announced by mid-October. If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Donald Kerr (donald.kerr@otago.ac.nz) or Dr. Shef Rogers (shef.rogers@otago.ac.nz) See https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/cfb/ for details.

Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

The IASEMS Graduate Conference at the British Institute of Florence – Call for Papers

CONVERSIONS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE Florence, 20 April 2018

The 2018 IASEMS Graduate Conference at The British Institute in Florence is a one-day interdisciplinary and bilingual English-Italian forum open to PhD students and researchers who have obtained their doctorates within the past 5 years. This year’s conference will focus on the theme of conversion, a fascinating phenomenon, a promise of newness that blends elements of individual experience with larger problems of historical change.

The ideological and spiritual life of early modern Britain finds a special interpretative key in the notion of conversion, whether perceived as an individual response to a religious and political challenge, a community reaction to political upheaval, or a social change brought about by the innovations of modernity.

The goal of this Conference is to develop an understanding of conversion that will address epistemological, psychological, political, spiritual and technological kinds of transformation, perceived both as subjective and collective change. Therefore conversion is to be understood in its broadest possible sense, and nor merely as a religious phenomenon.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

– forms of conversion, sacred and secular, i.e., awakening to a new faith, an intensification of existing beliefs, an embracing of a (radical) political movement, etc.

– conversional thinking and practice

– early modern textual ‘conversions’, i.e., from manuscript to print, from one format to another, from one genre to another

– relationships among transformation, freedom and power

– forms of religious dissent in early modern British culture – religious change and gender

– how early modern English theatre and other theatrical practices represent, adopt, transform, relocate forms of conversion

– conversion narratives – the phenomenon of forced conversion

 – authenticity and pretense in conversion

– religious conversion as catalyst of other transformations (e.g., translation, alchemy, enthusiasm, etc.)

– technologies of transformation

Candidates are invited to send a description of their proposed contribution according to the following guidelines:

– the candidate should provide name, institution, contact info, title and a short abstract of the proposed contribution (300 words for a 20-minute paper), explaining the content and intended structure of the paper, and including a short bibliography;

– abstracts are to be submitted by Sunday 29 October 2017 by email to ilaria.natali@unifi.it;

– all proposals will be blind-vetted. The list of selected papers will be available by the end of November 2017;

– each finished contribution should not exceed 20 minutes and is to be presented in English (an exception will be made for Italian candidates of departments other than English, who can give their papers in Italian);

– Candidates whose first language is not English will need to have their proposals and final papers checked by a mother-tongue speaker

– participants will be asked to present a final draft of the paper ten days before the Conference.

Selected speakers who are IASEMS members can apply for a small grant (http://www.maldura.unipd.it/iasems/iasems_about.html)

For further information please contact Ilaria Natali (ilaria.natali@unifi.it)

CFP for Vagantes Conference 2018:

The 17th Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies is currently seeking paper abstracts on any topic related to the Middle Ages. The conference will take place from March 22nd-24th, 2018 at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities.

Vagantes is North America’s largest graduate-student conference for medieval studies. Since its founding in 2002, Vagantes has nurtured a lively community of junior scholars from across all disciplines. The 17th Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies will feature thirty graduate-student papers and three distinguished keynote speakers. Out of consideration for graduate students’ budgets, Vagantes never charges a registration fee. The organizers of Vagantes believe that a diverse and inclusive view of the medieval period is essential. As such, graduate students in all disciplines are invited to submit paper abstracts of no more than 300 words on any topic relating to the Middle Ages.

The deadline for submissions is Friday, November 3rd, 2017. The online CFP is live and accessible here – http://bit.ly/2pZcJIE

Questions? Contact the organizers at organizers@vagantesconference.org

‘Sangalli Institute Award for the Religious History 2017’ – Call for publications

Here is the third edition of the ‘Sangalli Institute Award for the Religious History’, in collaboration with the Department of University and Research of the Municipality of Florence and under the auspices of the same Municipality. Also this year, our award is joining the ‘Premio Ricerca Città di Firenze’ and it is addressed to young Italian and Foreign researchers, offering them the possibility of publishing two books concerning the religious history  from Middle Ages to the Contemporary Era, in an inter-disciplinary and inter-religious perspective. The essays will appear in a dedicated book series of the Firenze University Press. This year, on the judging panel also some renowned Foreign scholars. Deadline: 1st November 2017.

http://www.istitutosangalli.it/en/news-en/sangalli-institute-award-for-the-religious-history-2017-call-for-publications/

Crimes Before the Law: Sexuality, Nature, Disorder

Call for Papers for panel at Sewanee 

Authorities within and without the medieval church highlighted practices that were deemed contra naturam, that is, against nature. At the same time, same-sex attraction was considered part of Nature, and thus, consistent with natural law; thus, rhetorical and logical gymnastics had to be employed to make condemnation stick. Sodomy and other so-called deviant sexual practices constituted a growing range of practices and beliefs that were marked as both sinful and unnatural, and natural and inevitable. Indeed, in his Book of Gomorrah, the 11th century condemnation of clerical sodomy, Peter Damian is loath to think of homosexuality or deviant behavior between clerics as anything but unnatural. It is, in his words, a sin so heinous that before the Law was codified, it was considered a sin and contra naturam. He is unflinching in his declaration that sodomy appears before the Law as one of the worst sins. Yet, in other clerical poems, same-sex attraction is explored as Natural, the law of the church and the law of nature places sexuality and sexual practice in a murky space. Sodomy, same-sex attraction, and sin weave a sticky web around ethical and moral concerns regarding behavior, bios, and law. We may be inclined to dismiss medieval attitudes towards sexuality as a relic, one whose thinking about sexuality is dangerously backwards, but we would be blind to the construction of often contradictory and harmful legal attitudes toward sexuality in contemporary America.

From bills protecting the “religious” right to deny service to laws such as HB1 in North Caroline criminalizing bathroom usage, modern crime and punishment seems to focus on sexuality as much as Damian and his Book of Gomorrah. This transtemporal thread linking the medieval and postmedieval in terms of nature, sexuality, law, and disorder, is one that we would like to see further explored. How do medieval conceptions of nature and contra naturam incorporate sexuality? How do medieval attitudes toward law and disordered sexualities continue to affect modern regimes of sexuality? How are regimes of nonnormative sexuality still subject both to law and order, even disorder?

Abstracts due October 26th 

Organizers: Will Rogers, University of Louisiana, Monroe (youngman@ulm.edu); Christopher Roman, Kent State University (croman2@kent.edu)

CFP: Ancestral Roots: Memory and Arboreal Imagery across Cultures International Medieval Congress, Leeds 2-5 July 2018 Submission Deadline: 20 September 2017

Organisers: Naïs Virenque, Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Université François Rabelais, Tours Pippa Salonius, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University, Melbourne

Call for Papers: Memories of our ancestors mould us. Key to determining our identities and shaping our sense of self, they help us construct our own microcosms of belonging. Blood ties bind us together building communities. These memories give us a sense of belonging, they are inclusive and as social animals, we gain strength from them. As parts of a historical and genealogical whole, in Medieval Christian thought we all stem from the same seed, that of Adam.

We seek papers that explore the use of arboreal imagery to convey concepts of lineage, genealogy and descent. Tree diagrams were used in the Middle Ages to organise ethics and knowledge. They express hierarchy and classify categories and sub-categories visually. They rendered difficult intellectual concepts accessible to the wider audience and helped scholars put complex issues in order. In both cases, trees were performative and carried their own significance. With their roots deep in the earth and their branches reaching towards the heavens, trees span the distance between the earthly realm and the divine. As mnemonic devices, their branching nature hints at the possibility of infinite multiplication and growth, urging viewers to engage with the data they contain. In the medieval West a renewed interest in mnemotechnic treatises and artefacts, together with a growing tendency for listing processes, increased the use of arboreal imagery in the twelfth century. From the thirteenth century, the use of tree structures together with the translation and dissemination of treatises on the art of memory and the development of vast encyclopaedic projects, constituted an important part of monastic, mendicant and university education. By the fifteenth century the tree had become the most common method for mapping knowledge in medieval Europe.

Tree diagrams are not static in time, but reach across it. Not only do they present knowledge, they encourage its future development and generation. Neither were they geographically confined. Trees flourished in the imaginary of many cultures as memory stimulators and storage. The world trees in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, Māori purakau (stemming from rakau, the root word for tree), tales told for didactic purposes, represent but a few examples. We seek to identify and explore both the similarities and differences in this nexus between trees, lineage and memory across cultures. In the interest of establishing an interdisciplinary global platform, we encourage proposals that examine arboreal frameworks of lineage and memory across medieval cultures, throughout Christendom and beyond, to include the indigenous cultures of America, Asia and the Pacific. ‘Arboreal’ and ‘imagery’ are used in the broadest sense of the terms in order to encourage interdisciplinary enquiry into both visual motifs and arboreal images conjured up by words, movement and/or sound.

Possible topics and perspectives include but are not limited to:

• Metaphors of knowledge: Seeds, trees and ideas.

• Links between human ancestry and botany: Arbor consanguinitatis, Arbor affinitatis?

• Arboreal imagery as a pedagogical device.

• Songlines: Arboreal frameworks for memory and mapping.

• Medieval Music and the Tree.

• Sacred Trees and Human History.

• The transitory nature of death in the Middle Ages: The tree as intermediary between the world of the living and that of the dead.

• Trees in Juridical Thought: Authority, Jurisdiction, Prohibition. • Arboreal imagery in architecture: columns and pilasters, decoration and structure.

• Trees and the art of memory. Tree diagrams.

• Trees and world order.

• Materiality: The meaning of wood, bark and foliage in (ceremonial) dress and gifts.

• The Tree at the centre.

• The Tree of Life (‘Gunungan’ in Javanese shadow puppet plays, in the Jewish/Christian Tradition, etc.)

• Family Trees.

Submission Guidelines: Please note that individual contributors must send their abstracts to us, as we have to submit them together as a session. (Do not submit your abstracts directly to the Leeds IMC). We aim to present multiple sessions at Leeds so that we might then consider them for publication.

1. Submission deadline: 20 September 2017.

2. Abstracts must be circa 100 words.

3. A title must be provided.

4. Please specify your surname, your forename(s), your academic title and affiliation.

5. Please specify your full address (including post code, city and country), telephone and email.

6. All IMC sessions come with a PC/laptop, data projector (‘beamer’), and internet access as standard. Please list any additional equipment required for your presentation.

7. Please submit a brief author biography of around 100 words with your abstract to Pippa Salonius, p.salonius@gmail.com and/or Naïs Virenque, nais.virenque@univtours. fr NB. Only one abstract per conference by author or co-author may be submitted.

IMC, Leeds, 2018 

In line with the IMC focus of Memory for 2018, which has also been named as the European Year of Cultural Heritage, the newly-launched MARTRAE network is organizing sessions on ‘Commemorating Saints and Martyrs in Medieval Europe’. The focus of these sessions is to explore the multifaceted ways in which saints and martyrs are remembered and how forms of commemoration functioned in creating, perpetuating or transforming collective cultural heritage. Papers may focus on tangible as well as intangible forms of commemoration, including (but not limited to): devotional and liturgical practices; material aspects of commemoration in the form of relics, devotional objects and manuscripts; the conceptualisation of martyrdom and sainthood; the legacy and function of medieval forms of commemoration in the modern world; harmony and disharmony in remembering; landscapes as vehicles or anchors for commemoration; and the role of martyrdom in shaping or manipulating identities.

Please send abstracts of ca. 250 words to Nicole Volmering at volmern@tcd.ie or Ann Buckley at buckleai@tcd.ie by September 20th.

CFP: International Congress on Medieval Studies “Kalamazoo” 2018 – Medieval Settlement and Landscape: the medieval in the modern May 10-13 2018

“Medieval Settlement and Landscape” builds on the success of the three sessions organized on this theme during the previous two ICMS. The positive levels of engagement stemming from these sessions have duly encouraged us to commence working towards an edited volume that will highlight the major findings presented at ICMS. This publication will reflect the intellectually stimulating conversations provoked by the combined sessions.

The session for ICMS 2018 will engage with the dynamic interdisciplinary sub-field of medieval settlement studies. Medieval settlement and landscape studies, more generally, have combined theories and techniques from a variety of disciplines, most overtly those of history, archaeology and geography. Interdisciplinarity has to some extent become something of a buzzword in medieval studies, but it is an integral aspect of any successful academic study into settlements and landscapes. The ICMS session will bring together colleagues from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to strengthen collaborative efforts and assist in answering common research questions. We particularly encourage the inclusion of young scholars with innovative work in our panel.

We encourage the exploration of technology to understand the place of medieval settlements and landscapes in the modern world. These multidisciplinary approaches include digital humanities and computer applications, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Lidar, and 3D printing, but also scientific contributions. Our session further engages with textual research. In particular, manuscript materials in archives still remain underutilized by practitioners. Digital scholarship will alleviate many of these logistical problems. The session will provide methodological examples of best practice for scholars with interests in applying medieval evidence sources from outside their field of study.

We aim to incorporate perspectives from across Europe, especially when considering the modern heritage issues presented by these medieval settlements and landscapes. This is an issue of serious scholarly and public concern. Today, with far-reaching economic limitations, heritage preservation is a worrying issue for all practitioners. It is beneficial for the disciplines as a whole to contemplate the efforts made by scholars from a variety of multidisciplinary fields and geographic regions in addressing these concerns. We must also remember that a further benefit of working with physical places and spaces is providing a means of engaging with the public. Presenters will be urged to consider this positioning of the medieval within the modern and to highlight the innovative contributions their research can make to this common experience.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a short bio and a completed Participant Information Form to session organizers Vicky McAlister vmcalister@semo.edu or Jennifer Immich immichjl@gmail.com by September 15. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.

CfP: The Old and the Young: Medieval Bodies Ignored

Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds 
Sponsored Sessions at Kalamazoo, May 10-13 2018

These sessions will concentrate upon the experiences and bodies of the old and the young. Recognising that the medieval normative body (male, middle aged and white) has influenced the way we look at the MA, the intention of these sessions is to highlight the experiences of children and the elderly which are outside the boundaries of said norm. Furthermore, we wish to gain a greater understanding of how other factors (gender, race, ability, wealth, bodily status, power) intersect with and impact upon the experiences of elderly and young people. While medieval childhood studies is by no means a neglected field, historiography has recently turned away from a ‘panhistorical and essentialist’ child-centric model. This allows us to examine the experiences of a child within culturally specific contexts in which it might be neglected, abandoned or dismissed. Meanwhile, the old are often marginalised in scholarship, within the medieval discourse and in our lived reality. The hope is that by examining their experiences in concert with one another, we will be able to build up a clearer understanding of the lived experience of the old and the young in the Middle Ages.

Intersectional, interdisciplinary abstracts would be particularly welcomed.

Possible Topics Include:

Specific historical experiences of being young and old
Body as physical entity and as a site of rhetoric
Dual nature of body: site of discourse and identity
Descriptions of old and young bodies

Please submit a 250-word proposal for a 15- to 20-minute paper as well as a Participant Information Form to medievalbodiesignored@gmail.com by September 15, 2017.

Call for papers: MNEMONICS IN WORD AND IMAGE  (Leeds IMC, 2-5 July 2018).
Session sponsored by Huygens ING, De Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen

Medieval manuscripts are replete with mnemonic devices. Chronologies, scientific speculations, schoolroom commonplaces from grammatical and rhetorical books, and even material for prayers and sermons were visually and verbally arranged to facilitate ease of recollection. Historians have drawn attention to the range of devices used by medieval scholars, but have tended to treat graphical and discursive models separately. These sessions aim to bridge the divide, reconnecting the two fields of mnemonics in order to better understand how form related to function. As ancient techniques were inventively reinterpreted under the influence of new or rediscovered texts, varied practices of memorization made fresh contributions to medieval intellectual life.

We invite 20-minute papers for two sessions on the production or use of mnemonic devices – verbal, visual, or both – in any medieval culture.

Please contact Seb Falk (sldf2@cam.ac.uk) with your proposed title and a brief summary of your paper.

Deadline: 15th September.

Session organisers:
Seb Falk, University of Cambridge
Amanda Gerber, UCLA
Irene O’Daly, Huygens ING