Join the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship at the MLA Convention in Washington, DC, January 6-9, 2022 | PROPOSALS DUE March 15, 2021

1. Magic and Gender in Medieval Literature
Magic was omnipresent in the Middle Ages: theorized by natural philosophers, debated by theologians, written about in a wide variety of practical texts and literary genres, and undertaken by a wide range of practitioners, including what Richard Kieckhefer has described as “a clerical underworld.” Unlike the early modern obsession with witches, most medieval magical instruction books limit the knowledge they hold to learned men. Yet in literature, gender seemingly is no barrier for who can cast spells, create potions, or divine the future. While the “authority” of magic is recorded in books understood as the parvenu of men and in particular, of clerics, the practice of magic throughout the medieval period is undertaken by male and female, alike. In fact, more often women, particularly women of the fey and euhemerized goddesses, are wielders of powerful magic. This panel investigates the gendered slipperiness surrounding depictions of magic in medieval literature.

Submit 300-word abstracts and a brief bio for 15-20-minute papers to Melissa Ridley Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu) and Kersti Francis (kersti.francis@gmail.com) by March 15, 2021.

2. Gendered Violence in Old English Literature
The Old English MLA forum and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship are proposing a jointly-sponsored session on gendered violence in Old English literature. The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in research on the relationship between gender and violence in the Middle Ages, with new studies exploring the construction of gender through violence and women as its victims. Gender theory and feminist studies have done much to refine methodologies used in this research, especially in the late Middle Ages. Still, there is a great deal of work to be done in the area of gendered violence, in particular in the literature of the early English era.

Submit 300-word abstracts and a brief bio to Melissa Ridley-Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu) or David F. Johnson (djohnson@fsu.edu) by March 15, 2021

Panel co-sponsored by the Old English Forum and the Society for Medieval Feminist Studies. This panel is not guaranteed.

For more information and suggested topics please see the PDF below.

Flinders University, Adelaide | 21 June 2021

The twelfth biennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England will be held in four different locations in June 2021: Winchester, UK; Montreal, Canada; Leiden, Netherlands; and Adelaide, Australia. The conference will take place either in a hybrid fashion (online and in-situ) or fully online. This means that it will always be possible for you to attend and/or deliver your paper online; if circumstances allow it, you will be able to attend one (or more) days on location.

The Flinders hub in Adelaide particularly welcomes papers that fall under the following four themes:

1. Interpretation, transmission, adaptation and reception
2. Emotions
3. Trade, travel, maritime power and the sea
4. Science and Medicine

Details for the conference as a whole can be found here. For the Adelaide venue, including the full CFP and application portal, see here.

Old Age Care in Times of Crisis, Past & Present
Symposium 8-9 April 2021
Birkbeck & London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London

Rarely in recent history has a global event such as the current pandemic brought care for older people into sharper focus. Now, as in the past, many struggle physically and/or mentally, due to a range of bio-psycho-social factors. The provision of care for older people has involved a host of actors from international agencies and NGOs, national and local governments, charities, campaigners, medical and care professionals, and, of course, families and community networks. What has happened to these endeavours, and to old age care as a whole, in times of crisis? Does crisis bring change – for better or worse – in the practices, ideas, cultures, laws, and structures surrounding care for older people?

In a two-day, cross-disciplinary symposium, we will consider how social care, medical treatment, and the rights of older people have been affected by major events such as war, pandemic, plague, famine, economic depression and austerity, industrialisation, political extremism, enslavement, colonialism, or environmental damage/collapse.

Reflections on old age care in times of crisis are welcome from any discipline across the humanities and social sciences at the symposium which will be held over two afternoons BST on 8 and 9 April 2021. For more information and to submit a proposal by 7 December, please visit the symposium blog.

41st Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum: Scent and Fragrance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Friday and Saturday April 16-17, 2021

Call for Papers and Sessions
We are delighted to announce that the 41st Medieval and Renaissance Forum: Scent and Fragrance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will take place virtually on Friday, April 16 and Saturday April 17, 2021.

We welcome abstracts (one page or less) or panel proposals that discuss smell and fragrance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Papers and sessions, however, need not be confined to this theme but may cover other aspects of medieval and Renaissance life, literature, languages, art, philosophy, theology, history, and music.

This year’s keynote speaker is Deirdre Larkin, Managing Horticulturist at The Cloisters Museum and Gardens from 2007 to 2013,who will speak on “Every Fragrant Herb: The Medieval Garden and the Gardens of The Cloisters.”

Deirdre Larkin is a horticulturist and historian of plants and gardens. She holds an MA in the history of religions from Princeton University and received her horticultural training at the New York Botanical Garden. She was associated with the Gardens of The Cloisters for more than twenty years and was responsible for all aspects of their development, design, and interpretation. Ms. Larkin was the originator of and principal contributor to the Medieval Garden Enclosed blog, published on the MMA website from 2008 through 2013. Ms. Larkin lectures frequently for museums, historical societies, and horticultural organizations. In 2017, she was a Mellon Visiting Scholar at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden, where she researched the fortunes and reputations of medieval European plants now naturalized in North America. Her gardens in upstate New York serve as a laboratory for further investigations in the field.

Students, faculty, and independent scholars are welcome. Please indicate your status (undergraduate, graduate, or faculty), affiliation (if relevant), and full contact information (including email address) on your proposal.

Graduate students will be eligible for consideration for the South Wind Graduate Student Paper Award. More information about this new award will be available soon.

We welcome undergraduate sessions but ask that students obtain a faculty member’s approval and sponsorship.

Please submit abstracts and full contact information on the google form available at https://forms.gle/CHdqrEK8pVps7Wa89.

Abstract deadline: January 15, 2020

Presenters and early registration: March 15, 2020

Veteran Politics and Memory: A Global Perspective

Department of History, University of Warwick
16th and 17th April 2021

From the fields of Gettysburg to the beaches of Normandy, the participation and presence of former soldiers has been an integral part of the memorial culture of many conflicts. As survivors of war, veterans are often portrayed a group imbued with a unique knowledge whose experiences should not be forgotten. Yet while public commemorations have sought to establish consensus about the meaning of the past, veterans’ memories have also been a source of conflict and contestation, engaged in struggles over rights, recognition, and the authority to remember the past and speak for the future.

In a recent article in War & History, Grace Huxford et al. note that the historically unprecedented number of veterans across the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has ensured not just that veterans ‘occupy a significant place in modern history but that they are also a vital lens through which to analyse the changing relationship between war and society’. Veterans, however, are from being a modern phenomenon –estimates suggest that a larger proportion of the English population fought in the Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century than in World War One. Moreover, though veteran studies has become a rich field of interdisciplinary enquiry, studies tend to be embedded in their own geographic and historical contexts: the transtemporal and transnational study of veterans remains in its infancy.

This conference seeks to bring together scholars from across time and space to explore the experience of veterans, and particularly the politics of veteran memory and commemoration, from a global, comparative perspective. We hope to publish the resulting papers in an edited collection that will approach veteran memory from a range of different disciplinary, temporal, and geographic perspectives.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers that discuss any aspect of veteran politics and memory, from the ancient world to the present. Complete panel proposals are also very welcome (panels/papers which seek to explore different conflicts/countries/periods are especially encouraged). Possible themes include, but are by no means limited to:

• Commemoration and memory
• Veteran social movements and associations
• Veteran cultural contributions (documentary evidence, art, etc.)
• Political power of veterans
• Veteran trauma, health and emotions
• Veteran protest and dissent
• (Inter)national veteran networks
• Family and intergenerational memory
• Monuments, statues, and re-enactments
• Travel and battlefield tourism
• Museums and heritage

Please submit paper abstracts (max. 300 words) and brief bio(s) to both imogen.peck@warwick.ac.uk and timo.schrader@warwick.ac.uk by 29th November 2020. Participants will be notified of decisions by the end of December 2020.

Female Experience in Early Modern England | 6-7 November 2020, University of Auckland

This two-day conference is sponsored by the Alice Griffin Fund and organised by the School of Humanities at the University of Auckland. We invite academics and postgraduate students to submit proposals for 20-minute papers on the topic of female experience in early modern England.

The last fifty years have seen an expanding interest in women’s history in the early modern period, from the everyday lives of ordinary and élite women to their artistic production and involvement, disproving Virginia Woolf’s assertion that Shakespeare’s sister ‘died young – alas, she never wrote a word’.

In 2020, this conference asks, where has this interest in female experience brought us and what are the areas that remain vibrant or underexplored? Were women the authors of their own experience, is that experience different from what scholars previously believed, and if so, how? We are seeing a surge of women in humanities disciplines, encouraging the comparison between women as ‘authors’ of their experience now and in early modern England. What does the work of emerging scholars have to contribute to the discussion of the female experience in early modern England?

Papers should address some of these questions. They may raise questions of ‘authorship’ in regards to literary or artistic production. They may consider women’s experiences of early modern life and the ways in which they or others organised that experience, in a real or representational context. We also welcome proposals for workshops that offer hands-on insight into female experience, whether performative (song, theatre, dance, games, letter writing) or practical (making medicines or cosmetics). We envisage these workshops to be either 30 minutes or 1 hour each.

We have chosen England as a topic of discussion because of its centrality in previous discussions of early modern female experience. The conference aims to challenge the ever-evolving contemporary perspective that we know all there is to know about how women lived in the past and to fashion one or two surprises. In particular, this conference aims to foster new discussions on a topic that is no longer ‘new’ but still in need of continuing study. It aims to incorporate interdisciplinary perspectives, acknowledging the multi-faceted ways in which female experience was lived and imagined. We encourage talks that engage with the practical aspects of female experience, including marriage and household management, personal care, adornment and medical care; as well as female creative and performative experiences.

The keynote speaker will be Associate Professor Sarah Ross, Victoria University Wellington, whose lecture is entitled, Woe is She: “Female Complaint” and Women’s Songbooks in Early Modern England.

We are calling for submissions by both established scholars and by PhD candidates/MA students. New Zealand speakers who are not based in Auckland may be eligible for a travel bursary. Applications for presentations from scholars based overseas via Zoom are welcome. The conference is free and we plan to offer online access.

Please submit a 150-200 word abstract and a short CV for your paper by 30 September 2020 to Susannah Whaley: swha390@aucklanduni.ac.nz. If you would like to apply for a travel bursary, please notify Susannah, who will supply further details when they are available.

Contacts:
Susannah Whaley, postgraduate coordinator: swha390@aucklanduni.ac.nz
Associate Professor Erin Griffey: e.griffey@auckland.ac.nz
Professor Tom Bishop: t.bishop@auckland.ac.nz

Enemies in the Early Modern World 1453-1789: Conflict, Culture and Control, Live from the University of Edinburgh, 27-28th March 2021

From Luther’s insistence that the Pope is the antichrist, to Cortes’s justification of the conquest of Mexico on the grounds of Aztec human sacrifice, from the expulsion of Jewish people from the Iberian peninsula following the Reconquista to the subjugation and enslavement of human lives to fuel the trans-Atlantic slave trade, from Dutch trials for homosexuality in the 1730s, to accusations of witchcraft during the British Civil Wars, the conflicts and exploitations of the Early Modern World were often fueled and ‘justified’ by a belief in an enemy. Such belief systems would inspire textual, visual and auditory polemic, and propel physical action, thereby ‘othering’ people of a different religion, ethnicity, culture, dynastic allegiance, gender and sexuality into imagined enemies, justifying the need to control and inflict violence upon them. This conference, open to researchers of history, literature, visual culture, politics, theology, philosophy and archaeology etc, will explore the processes by which individuals, communities, and countries were fashioned into the role of the enemy, as well as the dreadful consequences, such as war and persecution.

By moving from the local to the national, from the national to the global, and through an interdisciplinary vantage point, we aim to reconstruct the construction of enemies in the Early Modern World. We invite papers from researchers at every stage of their academic journeys, and PhD students and Early Career Researchers are particularly encouraged to apply.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic this conference will be completely online
via a TBD conferencing platform.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to
early.modern.enemies@gmail.com along with a brief bio of circa 100
words addressed to Thom Pritchard and Eleonora Calviello by the 30th
September 2020.

For more information see the attached flyer.