Voices and Books, 1500-1800
Newcastle University and City Library, Newcastle.
July 16-18 2015

Organiser: Jennifer Richards, Newcastle University with Helen Stark, Newcastle University

Keynote Speakers:

• Heidi Brayman Hackel (University of California, Riverside)
• Anne Karpf (London Metropolitan University)
• Christopher Marsh (Queen’s University, Belfast) with The Carnival Band
• Perry Mills, Director of Edward’s Boys (King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon)

Although it is often acknowledged that early modern books were routinely read aloud we know relatively little about this. Oral reading is not embedded as an assumption in existing scholarship. On the contrary, over the last two decades it is　the studious and usually silent　reader, pen in hand, who has been placed centre stage. This conference invites contributions that explore the kind of evidence and research methods　that might help us to　recover this lost　history; that think about how reading/singing aloud relates to other kinds of orality;　that recover the civic and/or social life of the performed book in early modern culture; and that reflect on how　the performance of the scripted word might inform our reading of early modern writing today. We also welcome papers that think through what it might mean to make ‘voice’ central to our textual practice.

Proposals are invited (in English) that address the relationship between orality and literacy　in any genre in print or manuscript in any European language. The genres might be　literary, religious, musical, medical, scientific, historical or educational. We encourage proposals that recover diverse communities and readers/hearers. We also welcome papers that consider problems of evidence: e.g. manuscript marginalia; print paratexts; visual representations; as well as non-material evidence (voice; gesture). We will be particularly pleased to receive suggestions for presentations that include practical illustrations, performances or demonstrations.

Topics might include, but are not restricted to:

• The sound of print
• The physiology of voicing
• Singing and speaking
• Rhetoric: voice and gesture
• Performance and emotions
• Communities of hearers
• Acoustic reconstructions
• Children’s reading / reading to children

200-word abstracts for 20-minute papers from individuals and panels (3 speakers max) to be sent to voicesandbooks15001800@gmail.com. The DEADLINE is Friday January 16 2015.

There will be a small number of travel bursaries for postgraduate and early career researchers. If you are interested in applying for support please contact Helen.Stark@ncl.ac.uk. The DEADLINE for the bursaries is May 1, 2015.

Madness: Sacred and Profane
The Ninth International Conference of the Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies
National Taiwan University
23-24 October, 2015

Conference Website

Madness, as one of the most intriguing of all cultural questions, has challenged thinkers since antiquity. For instance, Plato in Phaedrus pointed out that divine madness can be associated with creative insanity of seers and poets. In Greek tragedies, madness at times was perceived as the form of divine punishment to drive heroes mad. While Cicero stated that virtue is the only medicine for the diseased mind, Galen’s humoral theory construed the body as the main cause of madness. In courtly poetry, “fol’amor” (mad love) indicated unbridled passion. Thomas Hoccleve lived his madness as divine possession and a humoral imbalance. Hieronymus Bosch’s 1480 painting depicts a doctor cutting the stone of folly from the forehead of a madman. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia’s madness is demonstrated through sexual deviance.

To explore madness as an important question, this conference welcomes papers from scholars working in all fields within Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance studies. We are especially interested in papers that investigate ways in which madness, in all its forms, has been conceived, presented, and interpreted. We also encourage new theoretical frameworks within which to consider madness.

Topics for consideration may include (but are not limited to):

• Critical explorations of madness/sanity/insanity
• Politics of madness (the subversive/prophetic/unrestrained)
• Boundaries of madness/normality/rationality
• Visualization of madness
• Sacred forms of madness
• Madness and art
• Madness and creativity
• Madness and the emotions
• Madness and gender
• Madness and language
• Madness and medicine
• Madness and the moralistic/legislative
• Madness and obsessions
• Madness and sexuality
• Madness and society
• Madness and wizardry

TACMRS warmly invites papers that reach beyond the traditional chronological and disciplinary borders of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies. Please submit proposals (250 words) along with a one-page CV to TACMRS.NTU@gmail.com by 1 February 2015.

The Conference will take place on 23-24 October 2015 at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. The conference will provide accommodation for all selected speakers from outside the Taipei area. The Conference is sponsored and administered by the Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies (TACMRS). For more information, please visit the 2015 TACMRS Conference website: http://www.forex.ntu.edu.tw/tacmrs.

Medicine of Words: Literature, Medicine, and Theology in the Middle Ages
St Anne’s College, Oxford
11-12 September, 2015

Plenary Speakers include:

• Mary Carruthers (NYU, All Souls Oxford)
• Vincent Gillespie (Oxford)
• Ralph Hanna (Oxford)
• Peregrine Horden (Royal Holloway)
• Denis Renevey (Lausanne)
• John Thompson (Queen’s University Belfast)

Words, whether in poetry or prose, have a power beyond their meaning. They are capable not simply of expression but also of action; they can hurt or they can heal. Throughout the Middle Ages the potency of words, their effect and force upon the mind, body, and soul is explored and engaged with, poured over and focused upon not simply by the arts of grammar and rhetoric, but by poetry and theology, by medicine and psychology. Medieval texts are pieces of linguistic craft and intention, their words chosen and arranged with a purpose in mind. Poems in this period can be as crafted as theological treatises, their meters and rhymes as intentional and purpose driven as any medical instrument. Words, whether spoken or heard, emerge from the mind and feed back into it through the senses. They possess a power over the body as well as the soul, and can manipulate the emotions as easily as speaking can manipulate the breath. Potentially medicinal or malign, words in the Middle Ages are seen as tools to be used to persuade, to please, to heal or to harm.

This conference will explore the interconnection between literature, medicine, and theology throughout the Middle Ages. Possible texts for exploration include prayers, charms, narratives of illness and health, medical manuals, texts of contemplation and religious instruction, devotional materials, accounts of conversion and healing, saints lives and prognostications, and texts that evoke and direct the emotions in Old and Middle English.

Possible topics for exploration include the ideas of narrative medicine; medieval poetic theory; the arts of grammar and rhetoric; medical manuscripts and medical humanities; science and literature; the medicalised body; the humors; the impact of the plague on the poetic imagination; the use of words to heal; the power of rhythm, metre, and cursus; and the connections between sin and sickness, and heaven and health during this period.

We welcome papers of 20 minutes addressing the issues outlined above. Please send a 300 word abstract to medicineofwords@ell.ox.ac.uk by 31 January 2015.

Cannibalism in the Early Modern Atlantic
The University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
15-16 June, 2015

Conference Website

On early modern voyages, people ate to survive. They fried, roasted, and stewed turtles; they netted fish—including sharks; and they gathered shellfish. During dire moments they sampled penguins and seals. And in even more extreme circumstances, they consumed each other. Last May archaeologists at the Jamestown Rediscovery Project excavation in Virginia unearthed bones that, for the first time, provide physical evidence suggesting that early American colonists ate each other during the Starving Time of 1609-10. Historians have long acknowledged documents detailing the events of that winter, but public interest in the new discovery testifies to the enduring power of cannibalism stories. Such tales, however, tend to deteriorate into debates over whether or not cannibalism occurred, or grisly anecdotes that elide a larger picture of the past. This conference asks participants to think broadly about what occurrences of cannibalism reveal about food history, Atlantic history, and maritime history. Questions that persist include: How did fears about cannibalism shape Europeans’ quest for food? How did early modern actors reconcile medicinal cannibalism with worries about anthropophagy? How did cannibalism tales influence exchanges of food between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans? How did the daily concerns of maritime travel result in occurrences of famine and man-eating? And how does cannibalism challenge the Atlantic World paradigm?

This two-day conference will take place at the University of Southampton from 15-16 June, 2015. It seeks to bridge disciplinary gaps between (but not limited to) anthropology, archaeology, history, and literature. Dr. William M. Kelso (Hon. CBE, FSA), Director of Archaeological Research and Interpretation at the Preservation Virginia Jamestown Rediscovery Project, will give the keynote address. It is expected that presenters will speak for twenty minutes. Thanks to the generous assistance of the Wellcome Trust, some funding is available to assist with food and lodging costs for conference presenters. Selected papers will appear as an edited volume under contract with the University of Arkansas Press.

A 250-word proposal and short CV (of no longer than three pages) should be submitted on the conference website (via the Call for Papers link) by 15 January 2015. Questions should be directed to Dr. Rachel Herrmann (R.B.Herrmann@soton.ac.uk).

The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100 – 1800 – “Shaping the Modern” Symposium:

Into the Woods: An ‘Emotions and Environment’ Symposium
The University of Melbourne
22 July 2015

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Professor Stephen Knight (Melboune)
• Associate Professor Linda Williams (RMIT)

Forests, and the stories we tell about them, often belong to our earliest memories, regardless of the amount of time we have ourselves spent in the woods. As Robert Pogue Harrison has suggested, the destruction of the the forest can be considered tantamount to the obliteration of cultural memories. This day-long symposium will consider representations of the forest in music, art, literature and history, from the Medieval period to the present day. Speakers are invited to consider the emotions associated with, and evoked by, the forest while also addressing the role of woodland and the imaginary.

Topics may include:

• forest fires
• forest adventures/revelry
• the forest as sanctuary
• animals and forests
• conservation
• forest management
• climate change and the forest
• settlers and forests
• memory and forests
• forests and fear
• enclosure
• deforestation/the endangered forest
• forests and indigenous culture
• ecology
• woodland soundscapes
• fairytales/folklore

Abstracts of no more than 200 words are required by 28 February 2015. You will be notified by 10 March 2015 if your paper is accepted. Please include a biographical statement of about 100 words with your submission. Please send proposals to: Into-the-Woods2015@unimelb.edu.au.

The Centre for the History of Emotions is grateful to the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia for partnering with us for this event. The RSAA conference, Re-reading Romanticism: Imagination, Emotion, Nature and Things, will take place between July 23-25, 2015. Further details at: http://conference.rsaa.net.au.

Symposium updates will appear on the CHE website at www.historyofemotions.org.au.

Late Antique Hagiography as Literature
Colloquium at the University of Edinburgh
20-21 May, 2015

Texts about ‘holy’ women and men grew to be a defining feature of the culture of Late Antiquity. There is currently an increasing interest among scholars from different disciplines (history, theology, languages, and literature) in these hagiographical writings. But more can be done to find ways to systematise our understanding of the literary affiliations, strategies and goals of these extraordinarily varied texts, which range from the prosaic and anonymous narrations of the martyr passions to the Classicising poems of Paulinus of Nola and the rhetorically accomplished sermons of John Chrysostom.

This colloquium is designed to bring together students and scholars working on a range of aspects of literary hagiography, to share insights, and to consider approaches for the future. We hope to situate late antique biographical production in relation to Classical literary sensibilities, as well as considering non-classical influences, and thus to identify areas of continuity and gradual development as well as areas of abrupt change in the form and function of such literature. While our emphasis is deliberately literary, historical and theological questions which feed into the significance of these works should not be ignored.

We understand ‘hagiography’ in the non-technical sense of ‘writings about (the lives of) saints’. The concept of ‘saints’, likewise, is here taken in a broad way to mean remarkable and exemplary Christian figures (whether real or fictional); the field is not restricted to those who at some point were officially canonised by the Church.

This colloquium is seeking to explore issues like the following:

• The definition of sainthood, e.g. through comparisons with texts about non-Christian saint-like figures (the ‘pagan martyrs’, Apollonius of Tyana)
• The portrayal of a saint in different texts; how are saints portrayed in their own writings compared to those of other authors about them?
• Characterisation, e.g. individuality and stereotyping: to what extent can a reader empathise or identify with a saint?
• Life imitating hagiography and resulting problems
• What can hagiography tell us about non-elite ‘popular’ literary culture?
• How have different genres given shape to hagiographical texts (from Damasus’ epigrams to the epic poems of Fortunatus and Paulinus of Périgeux), as well as texts resisting generic categorisation? E.g. is the so called Life of Malchus a vita or a diegesis?
• Intertextuality as an aesthetic and ideological strategy
• The emergence of stable hagiographical conventions, whose influence grew so powerful that it is often difficult to distinguish one saint from another
• What, if anything, can hagiography learn from panegyric?
• Literary approaches to un-saintly behaviour (trickery, committing suicide, etc.) of saints
• To what extent does a text’s rhetorical purpose undermine the author’s credibility as an honest record-keeper?
• Assessing the historicity of hagiographical texts
• Transmission and textual problems of hagiographical texts
• Reception and changes in the perception of authority (e.g. saints who wrote about saints, such as John Chrysostom and Augustine)

Proposals for 25-minute papers, in the form of abstracts between 200 and 400 words in length, should be submitted to Thomas Tsartsidis (T.Tsartsidis@sms.ed.ac.uk) or Christa Gray (christa.gray@gla.ac.uk) by 15 January, 2015.

Postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to contribute to this event.