The Natural and the Supernatural in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds
Annual PMRG/CMEMS Conference
The University of Western Australia
7 October, 2017

Conference Website

Today, the natural and the supernatural are often viewed in stark opposition. In the medieval and early modern period, however, the supernatural infused every aspect of daily life. Prayers and rites punctuated everyday routines, and natural phenomena – such as earthquakes and eclipses – were often viewed with both suspicion and wonder or as divine portents. Miracle stories, rumours of witchcraft, and accounts of relic veneration all indicate that magic shaped medieval and early modern imaginations. The early modern period was also an era of European exploration, invasion and colonisation, which saw the increase of scientific knowledge though encounters with a number of societies around the globe. Natural histories, travel narratives, and objects circulated widely, creating new connections and shaping existing belief systems. As these sources demonstrate, however, persecution also abounded, and was often prompted by perceived differences in culture or beliefs about the (super)natural.

This conference will examine the numerous and various intersections of the natural and the supernatural. What qualified as natural and supernatural in diverse medieval and early modern societies? When was the world categorised in terms of a natural/supernatural binary? When was this not the case? How did people in medieval and early modern societies perceive and experience these phenomena? How and why did beliefs and structures based on understandings of the natural and the supernatural change in this period? What prompted persecution? How are these events represented and experienced through heritage today?

The conference organisers invite proposals for 20-minute papers on the following (or related) themes:

• Witchcraft, magic, superstition
• Miracle stories: belief, doubt, and civic pride
• Religious Reformations; religious change
• Understandings of nature and natural law
• Travel, exploration, and natural history
• Ghosts, fairies, spirits
• Relics, charms, and objects believed to harness supernatural power
• Sacred landscapes, journeys, and practices
• Cross-cultural understandings of the natural and the supernatural
• Heritage sites and the supernatural
• Crossing or breaking boundaries, lived and imaginary
• The natural and the supernatural in medieval and early modern literature or performance
• Modern recollections of medieval and early modern (super)natural history

Please send a paper title, 250-word abstract and a short (no more than 100-word) biography to pmrg.cmems.conference2017@gmail.com by 31 July, 2017.

The Marlowe Society of America’s 8th International Conference
Wittenberg, Germany
10–13 July, 2018

Hosted by MSA President Kirk Melnikoff, the conference will feature keynote presentations by Lukas Erne (University of Geneva), Kristen Poole (University of Delaware), and Holger Syme (University of Toronto). Tours of the Luther House, the Melanchthon House, the Castle Church, and Cranach Studios will complement special events, workshops, screenings, and productions designed specially for conference attendees. We hope you will join us—and participate.

Papers should be no more than fifteen minutes in length and present original research on any topic concerning the works of Christopher Marlowe. We welcome proposals for individual papers and complete panels. Please send the following by email to the conference Program Chair, Lucy Munro, University of London, King’s College: lucy.munro@kcl.ac.uk.

For individual papers, an abstract of 300–500 words;

For complete panels, an overview of the panel and abstracts of the individual papers, totalling 1200–1500 words.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday, July 28, 2017.

Interdisciplinary Shakespeare Beyond Theory
The Shakespeare Association of Korea International Conference
Chungbuk National University, Cheongju, South Korea
27-28 October, 2017

Well before the beginning of the new century the New Historicism, which had dominated Shakespeare studies and, by extension, the English literary criticism since the 1980s, had been criticized for its methodological discontents or limitations as theory-based criticism. Now Shakespeare studies is being re-energized by the explorations from various interdisciplinary perspectives beyond theory. To invigorate this trend in Shakespeare studies, The Shakespeare Association of Korea will host its international conference on Oct. 27-28, 2017 at Chungbuk National University, Cheongju, South Korea. The conference, the title of which is “Interdisciplinary Shakespeare Beyond Theory,” will explore new directions for research in Shakespeare studies by opening conversations between disciplines such as history, art history & archeology, philosophy, political science, religious studies, ethics, etc. with reference to Shakespearean texts/contexts and production/reproduction. Pedagogical methods, translations, and issues related to new media, and the history of performance will be also included in the conference discussions.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Brian Cummings (The University of York, U.K.)

Invited Speakers: Prof. Diana Henderson (MIT, U.S.A.); Prof. Tom Bishop (The Univ. of Auckland, New Zealand); Prof. Jason Gleckman (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Topics of discussion may include (but not restricted to):

• Legitimacy and Authority
• Nation and Nationalism
• Reformation and Counter-Reformation
• Apocalypse and Redemption
• Classics and Ancient History
• Law and Justice
• Rhetoric and Ethics
• Representation of Self
• Renaissance Humanism and Skepticism
• Memory, Historiography, and the Use of History
• Visual Representations
• New Media and Digital Culture
• Curriculum and Teaching
• Cross-Cultural Adaptations
• Political Appropriations
• Problems and Methods of Translation
• Shakespeare on Stage and Screen

Please send a 250 word proposal and a brief curriculum vitae with contact information to Prof. Hyosik Hwang (Chungbuk National Univ.) or Prof. Sujin Oh (Seowon Univ.) at sakorea2013info@gmail.com by May 31, 2017.

Texts and Contexts Conference,
Ohio State University
20-21 October, 2017

Conference Website

Texts and Contexts is an annual conference held on the campus of the Ohio State University devoted to Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, incunables and early printed texts in Latin and the vernacular languages.

The conference solicits papers particularly in the general discipline of manuscript studies, including palaeography, codicology, reception and text history. In addition to the general papers (of roughly 20 minutes), the conference also hosts the Virginia Brown Memorial Lecture, established in memory of the late Virginia Brown, who taught paleography at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies for some 40 years. We also welcome proposals for sessions of two to three papers which might treat a more focused topic.

Please send abstracts to epig@osu.edu. Deadline for abstracts: August 1, 2017.

Virginia Brown Memorial Lecture 2017: James Hankins, Harvard University

“All That Glitters”: Dressing the Early Modern Network Conference
Kunstgewerbemuseum & Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek, Kulturforum, Berlin, Germany
14–15 September, 2017

Since few garments survive from the early modern period, especially pre-1700, reliance on depictions of early modern dress in art is unavoidable. Dress and textile representations in paintings, drawings, prints, costume books, album amicorum, and sculptures form some of the main visual sources, which in addition to possibilities have various limitations with regards to reliability and interpretation.

From fantasy draperies and studio props to true to life portrayals of the sitter’s real garments, the implications of what pictorial representations can offer to dress historians are innumerable and complex. While in some cases depictions of dress and textiles can act as tools for interpretations of paintings, in others, such as some depictions of dress and fabric worn in the overseas colonies, these are merely akin to fantasy dress in art. Portrayals of the elite largely survive providing information about the dress worn by the upper echelons in society. However, do such portrayals depict innovations in dress style and textile patterns accurately or do they merely portray a traditional form of dress that conforms to the specific genres of the various visual mediums? Furthermore, such portrayals are scarce in regard to clothing worn by other classes of society and in many cases the context in which they were depicted may have affected the representation. The conference aims to generate a discussion about the extent to which visual sources can be reliable in providing an accurate representation and understanding of the changes and innovations in dress, textiles, fur, haberdashery and jewellery with regards to the context in which they are depicted and used.

PhD students and early career researchers are invited to speak using case studies about the reliability of visual representations in relation to mapping fashion in the early modern. We invite potential speakers to submit as a single document to the Dressing the Early Modern Network at info@dressingtheearlymodern.com:

1. A 300-word paper abstract, which should include the main question of the research project or paper
2. A paper title
3. A brief curriculum vitae and a short biography of 150 words maximum
4. Institutional affiliations
5. Contact information

Each speaker will be allotted twenty minutes. The deadline for submissions is 30 May, 2017. Notification of the outcome will be advised by e-mail on or before 15 June, 2017. Please note that funding is not provided for this event, so participants will be required to fund and arrange their own travel and accommodations.

Deviant Thinking: Early Modern Philosophy and the Enlightenment
Australasian Seminar in Early Modern IN PHILOSOPHY (ASEMP)
The University of Sydney
15-17 November, 2017

More info: https://wordvine.sydney.edu.au/files/844/15770/.

What the Enlightenment stands for has been subject to much discussion in recent years, and many valuable contributions have been made that help us to understand better the significance of this period. This conference takes this discussion further by connecting up the Enlightenment with the early modern period and the “rebellious” ideas that were already formulated and passed around during this time. We seek papers that bring into focus the many challenges philosophers of the 17th and 18th century posed to established intellectual, political, religious and social norms. These challenges touch on a diverse range of topics, spanning from fundamental questions concerning the status of the human being in the natural world, and the prospect of gaining knowledge of that world, to the redefinition of sentiment and affect as defining features of the moral potential of humanity. Reflections on the foundations of the state, self-governance and the rights of individuals and groups often followed on from these questions and thereby led to a novel engagement with the conditions that structure and shape human life.

SIHN’s Enlightenment Thinking Project will be hosting this conference, a central aim of which is to use the wider discussion of 17th- and 18th-century thought to launch a new series, the Australasian Seminar in Early Modern in Philosophy (ASEMP). In future years, ASEMP will be held at rotating locations at universities in the Australasian region. By establishing this conference series, we seek to provide a regular opportunity for high-quality discussions of research presentations in early modern philosophy, while encouraging closer collaboration and network opportunities between Asia-Pacific and Australian universities. Each conference will have a mentoring stream that teams up PhD students and early career researchers with senior scholars to prepare conference submissions for publication.

We are interested in receiving abstract submissions on the following subjects:

• Early modern and enlightenment ideas that in some important respects deviated from the norms established in 17th and 18th century thought.
• Philosophical thought that questioned or challenged ideas that are today understood as central ideals of the Enlightenment.
• Interpretations of early modern and enlightenment ideas/figures that deviate from standard interpretations of those ideas/figures.

We also welcome submissions (for both papers and panels) on early modern topics that fall outside the main conference theme.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts (max 800-1000 words) for conference papers (30 minutes presentation time) is 30 June, 2017. Please prepare your submission for anonymous review and add a separate cover sheet with your details.

Please email your submission to Anik Waldow.

Inside Out: Dress and Identity in the Middle Ages
38th Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval Studies
Fordham University, New York
24-25 March, 2018

Dress was a primary expression of identity in the European middle ages, when individuals made strategic choices about clothing and bodily adornment (including hairstyle, jewelry, and other accessories) in order to communicate gender, ethnicity, status, occupation, and other personal and group identities. Because outward appearances were often interpreted as a reliable reflection of inner selves, medieval dress, in its material embodiment as well as in literary and artistic representations, carried extraordinary moral and social meaning, as well as offering seductive possibilities for self-presentation.

This conference aims to bring together recent research on the material culture and social meanings of dress in the Middle Ages to explore the following or related questions:

• Given that very little actual clothing survives from the Middle Ages, how does our reliance on artistic, documentary, and literary representations affect the study of dress and its meaning?
• What aspects of medieval dress were most effective in communicating identity and what messages did they send? What strategies were served by dress, either embodied or in representation?
• How did religious, cultural, and economic factors, such as cross-cultural contact and trade and/or technology influence dress and its uses?
• Did ‘fashion’ or the so-called ‘Western fashion system’ actually begin in the Middle Ages? If so, what social and cultural changes did it inspire or reflect?

Please submit an abstract and cover letter with contact information by September 15, 2017 to Center for Medieval Studies, FMH 405B, Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458, or by email to medievals@fordham.edu, or by fax to 718-817-3987

Charlemagne’s Ghost: Legacies, Leftovers, and Legends of the Carolingian Empire
44th Annual New England Medieval Conference
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
October 7, 2017

Keynote Speaker: Simon MacLean, University of St. Andrews, “What Was Post-Carolingian about Post-Carolingian Europe?”

It is well known that the Frankish emperor Charlemagne (768-814) and his dynasty – the Carolingians – played an important role in the formation of Europe. Yet scholars still debate the long-term consequences of the collapse of the Carolingian empire in 888 and the diverse ways in which Charlemagne’s family shaped subsequent medieval civilization. This conference invites medievalists of all disciplines and specializations to investigate the legacies, leftovers, and legends of the Carolingian empire in the central and later Middle Ages. We welcome papers that consider a wide array of Carolingian legacies in the realms of kingship and political culture, literature and art, manuscripts and material artifacts, the Church and monasticism, as well as Europe’s relations with the wider world. We urge participants to reflect on the ways in which later medieval rulers, writers, artists, and communities remembered Charlemagne and the Frankish empire and adapted Carolingian inheritances to fit new circumstances. In short, this conference will explore the ways in which Charlemagne’s ghost haunted the medieval world.

Please send an abstract of 250 words and a CV to Eric Goldberg (egoldber@mit.edu) via email attachment. On your abstract provide your name, institution, the title of your proposal, and email address. Abstracts are due July 1, 2017.

Mapping the Emotional Cityscape: Spaces, Performances and Emotion in Urban Life
The University of Adelaide
Monday 18 September 2017

Enquiries: Jade Riddle (jade.riddle@adelaide.edu.au)

Since Henri Lefebvre suggested that space is socially constructed and constituted, cities have been reclassified from static ‘maps’ for human activities to performed spaces that draw together human behaviour, meaning, discourse, and material conditions in their production. Cities are not simply a background for movement, but a function of cultural and emotional practice. That cities are named, given boundaries and called home – and in turn that cities name, define and give identity to their inhabitants – has equally implicated emotion in their production, as a recent turn to emotional geographies and urban emotions reminds us. This symposium seeks to contribute to this burgeoning scholarship through exploring the productive relationships between emotions and cityscapes across time and space.

We are particularly interested in the relationship between urban geographies, architectures, buildings, and materialities and emotion. How are neighbourhood boundaries produced through and with emotion? How do emotional communities form and define themselves through urban space? How does architecture and the physical environment inform social relationships and behaviours and vice versa? And how do the emotional imaginings of urban environments impact on their histories, identities and communities? Moreover, what are the implications of such emotional productions of the cityscape for relationships of power, identity and more within them?

We seek proposals for 20 minute papers, or panels of three papers, from any disciplines dealing with the city and emotion. Interdisciplinary perspectives and ECR/PhD students are particularly welcome. Papers may wish to explore, but are not limited to:

• Defining and locating emotional boundaries within the city
• Producing urban emotions in/through city texts, maps and art
• Performing the emotional ‘other’ in urban spaces
• Emotions and street life
• Emotional investment in urban space
• Emotion and urban ideologies
• Emotional urban communities
• Mapping emotions on urban space

Convened by Katie Barclay and Jade Riddle, The University of Adelaide.

We aim to submit a proposal for an edited collection from proceedings.
Deadlines

• Call for papers: Thursday 1 June 2017
• Notification of acceptance: Thursday 15 June 2017
• Long abstracts for circulation: Friday 1 September 2017

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, and a short bio, should be emailed to Jade Riddle (jade.riddle@adelaide.edu.au).