Daily Archives: 3 August 2012

Themed issues of Parergon (2014 and 2015) – Call For Proposals

Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Call for proposals for a themed issue of Parergon
http://www.parergon.arts.uwa.edu.au/

The journal Parergon, in print since 1971, regularly produces one open issue and one themed issue annually.

The most recent themed issues have been:

  • 2011, 28.2 Reason of State, Natural Law and Early Modern Statecraft guest-edited by David Martin Jones and Cathy Curtis
  • 2012, Early Modern Women and the Apparatus of Authorship, guest-edited by Sarah C.E. Ross, Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (in press)
  • 2013, Thinking About Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, to be guest-edited by Tracy Adams (forthcoming)

We now call for proposals for future themed issues, most immediately for 2014 (31.2) and 2015 (32.2).

Parergon publishes articles on all aspects of medieval and early modern studies, from early medieval through to the eighteenth century, and including the reception and influence of medieval and early modern culture in the modern world. We are particularly interested in research which takes new approaches and crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Proposals which deal with medieval material, in part or exclusively, will be particularly welcomed in this next round. Themed issues contain up to ten essays, plus the usual reviews section. The guest editor is responsible for setting the theme and drawing up the criteria for the essays.

Proposals should contain the following:

  1. A draft title for the issue.
  2. A statement outlining the rationale for the issue.
  3. Titles and abstracts of all the essays.
  4. A short biographical paragraph for the guest editor(s) and for each contributor.
  5. An example of a completed essay if available. (This is not essential).

The editorial process:

Once a proposal has been accepted:

  1. The guest editor will commission and pre-select the essays before submitting them to the Parergon editor by the agreed date.
  2. The Parergon editor will arrange for independent and anonymous peer-review in accordance with the journal’s established criteria.
  3. Once the essays have been peer-reviewed, the Parergon editor will communicate the feedback to the guest editor.
  4. The guest editor will then be asked to work with the authors to bring the submissions to the required standard where necessary.
  5. Occasionally a commissioned essay will be judged not suitable for publication in Parergon. This decision will be taken by the Parergon editor, based on the anonymous expert reviews.
  6. Essays which have already been published or accepted for publication elsewhere are not eligible for inclusion in the journal.

Time line:

Proposals for the 2014 issue (31.2) are required by 30 January 2013, and completed essays by 30 January 2014 for publication in late 2014.

Proposals for the 2015 issue (32.2) are required by 30 January 2014, and completed essays by 30 January 2015 for publication in late 2015.

Preliminary expressions of interest are welcome at any time.

Proposals will be considered by a selection panel drawn from members of the Parergon Editorial Board who will be asked to assess and rank the proposals according to the following criteria:

  1. Suitability for the journal
  2. Originality of contribution to the chosen field
  3. Significance/importance of the proposed theme
  4. Potential for advancing scholarship in a new and exciting way
  5. Range and quality of authors

Parergon, is available in electronic form as part of Project Muse (from 2005), Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Wilson’s Humanities Full Text (from 2008); it is included in the Thomson Scientific Master Journal List of refereed journals and in the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), and is indexed for nine major database services, including ABELL, IMB and Scopus.

Please correspond with Anne M. Scott, Editor Parergon (The University of Western Australia): anne.scott@uwa.edu.au.

The Uses and Abuses of Time: Anachronism/Achronicity in the Premodern Era – An Interdisciplinary Conference

The Uses and Abuses of Time: Anachronism/Achronicity in the Premodern Era
An Interdisciplinary Conference
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
March 21-23, 2013

Conference Website

Anachronism is a term that seems to presuppose a fixed and dominant temporal order, a chronological sequence within which each element or event occupies its own proper coordinates within the orderly flow of time. A Greek term, the “anachronistic” has become inseparable from its close Latin counterpart, the “preposterous”—literally, the before-behind. Anachronism has often been seen as a fault; a fault either testifying to a given culture’s lack of historical consciousness and historicist sensibilities, e.g. the Middle Ages’s supposed inability to think in historicist terms, or else as a type of scholarly error. Anachronism is an accusation, an error, a transgression, a stigma. The charge of anachronism seeks to reveal a critical failure to understand the pastness of the past. This perceived failure in turn exposes to ridicule scholars, artists, and entire cultures that are guilty of this charge.

Yet arguably, even the most academically disciplined ways of thinking historically cannot proceed without disavowed acts of anachronism. As scholars of the “medieval” and “early modern” eras, we know that the very names attached to our historical fields of specialty are the product of creative anachronism. The Middle Ages could not become its middling self until the moment of its death, the advent of the Renaissance. What is more anachronistic than the idea of “The Renaissance,” imagined as a phoenix-like return to antiquity that completely circumvents history—the “Middle Ages” itself?
Furthermore, medieval and early modern texts bear evidence of a multiplicity of temporalities that allow for various and varied experiences of time. This heterogeneous premodern notion of time includes Biblical time, historical time, seasonal time, and times for worship. It recognizes diverse practices of typological or allegorical reading that coexist with literal reading, and it suggests a complex understanding of notions such as originality, authenticity, and authority. In the context of this conference, achronicity refers to this productive multiplicity of temporalities.

This conference, organized by the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Early Modern Times at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies at King’s College London, will provide a select group of scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplinary fields in the humanities an opportunity to investigate together the creative potential of anachronism and/or achronicity. It addresses the ways in which temporality was conceptualized, experienced, strategically exploited, aesthetically constructed and ideologically challenged in the medieval and early modern periods. Some of the questions driving this conference are: How can anachronism/achronicity be strategically deployed to highlight problematic aspects of temporality? How can anachronism/achronicity be used to signify competing temporal frames? How does anachronism/achronicity contribute to expressing complex schemes of history, e.g. by linking the eschatological to everyday experience? How does anachronism/achronicity point to the materiality of the historical object itself?

Sponsored by:

Freie Universität Berlin
Zentrum Mittelalter-Renaissance-Früe Neuzeit
(Interdisciplinary Centre: Middle Ages, Renaissance, Early Modern Times)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Nicole Hochner: Public Lecture – University of Melbourne

For those in Melbourne in the next week, a lecture of interest:

“(E)Motions and Humours or Anxiety about Motion in Late Fifteenth-Century Political Thought” – Nicole Hochner, Head of Cultural Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Date: Wednesday 8 August 2012
Time: 6.15pm
Venue: North Lecture Theatre, Level 2 Old Arts, The University of Melbourne

Many definitions have been given to the word emotion, though its etymology is certain. The word itself is thought not to have existed before the sixteenth century. Dictionaries place its first usage in 1534 in France. It came from the Latin roots: ‘to move out’. It originally referred to the fluctuation of the humours of ancient medical theory.

Humours engaged not only our bodies but also our minds; and therefore blood pressure was not a medical matter alone but an inclination to feelings such as anger, anxiety, or love. But in the sixteenth century ‘emotion’ referred to popular motion in the political sphere, not to a variation of mood or character. It designated popular movement or popular rebellion, rather than its present meaning of feeling or sentiment. It referred to a moving and disturbing humour in the body politic.

The lecture will argue that changes in attitude towards motion in the late fifteenth century support the argument that the word emotion expressed anxiety about political disarray, leading to a new vision of nobility constructed on race and blood.

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Nicole Hochner is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Head of the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on early modern France, and more specifically on the years 1480-1520. Her publications include Louis XII: Les dérèglements de l’image royale (Seyssel, Paris 2006) and a co-edited volume with Thomas Gaehtgens L’Image du roi de Francois Ier à Louis XIV (Paris, 2006). Her many articles have covered topics such as the emblem of the porcupine, the figuration of the biblical Esther, the notion of propaganda, the display of tears in official pageants, and the political thought of political thinkers such as Guillaume Budé, Pierre Gringore, Claude de Seyssel and Niccolò Machiavelli.

Her current projects include a study of social mobility in early modern France, which emphasizes the ‘birth’ of the word emotion and the importance of the medical gaze; a project on Machiavelli and love; and a political reading of Pierre Gringore’s works which focuses on satire.