42nd Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies
Vatican Film Library—Saint Louis University Libraries Special Collections, St. Louis, MO
16–17 October, 2015

Conference Website

The Vatican Film Library invites paper submissions or session proposals for the 42nd Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies, to be held at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, MO, 16–17 October 2015. The conference is organized annually by the Vatican Film Library and its journal, Manuscripta, and is the longest running conference in North America devoted exclusively to medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies. The two-day program each year offers sessions on a variety of themes relating to medieval book production, distribution, reception, and transmission in such areas as paleography, codicology, illumination, textual transmission, library history, cataloguing, and more.

Guest Speaker for 2015:
Stella Panayotova (Keeper, Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

Papers or session proposals should address the material aspects of late antique, medieval, or Renaissance manuscripts. Submissions may address an original topic or one of the session themes already proposed (see below). Papers are 20 minutes in length and a full session normally consists of three papers. If you are interested in organizing one of these sessions, or wish to suggest a paper or session of your own, please contact us as soon as possible.

Proposed Sessions

Submissions are welcome for any of the following sessions already proposed.

Old Book, New Book: Refurbished Manuscripts in the Middle Ages
Even when they were tailored to the taste of specific patrons, it was understood that manuscripts would outlast their owners: they were future family heirlooms, to be circulated in networks of gift exchange, inheritance, and resale. In what ways did the patrons and producers of manuscripts anticipate the inevitable change of hands? Under what circumstances did new owners expand or alter legacy manuscripts, and how did they respond to the taste of previous owners? This session calls for papers that examine the social, political, and intellectual import of secondhand medieval books.

Gravity vs. Levity
“Man is a rational, moral animal, capable of laughter.” (Notker Labeo, d. 1022). While this may be considered a truism by some, the question of the role played by humor in medieval manuscripts remains somewhat indistinct. Is a joke in a manuscript ever just a joke? Subversive, witty, parodic, didactic, and broadly entertaining imagery is the focus of this session. What role did humor play in society and how is that displayed in a concrete fashion within the pages of books?

A Good Read: The Production of Vernacular Texts in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Italy and their Public
While there is a great deal of documentary evidence for the production and readership of vernacular texts in Italy in the fifteenth century, we know relatively little about their thirteenth- and fourteenth-century patronage and the process of their production. Nonetheless, a considerable number of prose and verse manuscripts written in French, Franco-Italian, or Franco-Venetian survives, often resplendently illustrated and obviously produced for wealthy patrons. See the Fordham University website created to explore this topic: http://legacy.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/medieval_studies/french_of_italy/index.asp. This panel seeks papers that consider the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century production and circulation of these manuscripts in Italy, discuss their patrons and readers; and examine the organization of their production by individuals or workshops based in urban, court, or private milieus. At this time university textbooks were being produced under university supervision for quality control; what evidence can we find for the regulation of quality in this manuscript genre?

Please send a title and an abstract of not more than 200 words to Susan L’Engle (lengles@slu.edu) by 1 March 2015. Those whose proposals are accepted are reminded that registration fees and travel and accommodation expenses for the conference are the responsibility of speakers and/or their institutions.

For more information, contact Erica Lauriello, Library Associate for Special Collections Administration, at 314-977-3090 or elauriel@slu.edu. Conference information is posted at http://libraries.slu.edu/special_collections/stl_conf_manu.

Influences of the Dominican Order in the Middle Ages
Lincoln College, Oxford and Blackfriars, Oxford
10-12 September, 2015

From the modest group of St Dominic and his sixteen followers, the Dominican Order grew rapidly in the first century of its existence, establishing itself across Europe as a learned Order of Preachers. This interdisciplinary conference will seek to explore the influences of the Dominican Order on all aspects of medieval life. The conference theme of ‘influence’ can be interpreted in its broadest sense, encompassing the large-scale influences of the Order and the legacy of its prominent figures, or can be examined on the personal level, such as the impact that the Order had on those that came into contact with it, both within and outside the Order.

Papers might address topics such as:

• how the Dominican Order influenced other religious orders and medieval life more generally (papers may consider this influence with regard to art, architecture, universities and education, book-making, theology, liturgy, legislation, or other relevant disciplines)
• influential Dominicans, such as St Dominic, Humbert of Romans and Thomas Aquinas, and their legacy to the Dominican Order or the use of their teachings outside of the Order
• preaching and other means by which Dominicans sought to influence the local populations they encountered;
  controversies resulting from Dominican influence (e.g., in the universities, in ecclesiastical government, etc.)
• Dominican education and the training of novices: the shaping of the Dominican religious life

The conference will be held at Lincoln College, Oxford and Blackfriars, Oxford from Thursday 10th to Saturday 12th September 2015. This conference is interdisciplinary and open to scholars working in any field of medieval studies. Papers of 20 minutes are welcomed, although other formats may be considered. Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, and include with it your paper title, name and affiliation (if any), contact email, AV requirements, and a short biography (this has no bearing on the evaluation; it is simply for distribution to chairs). All abstracts should be submitted by 1st March 2015. All enquiries and proposals should be sent to Eleanor Giraud: eleanor.giraud@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.

2016 Annual Meeting Of The Medieval Academy Of America
Boston, MA
February 25-27, 2016

The Program Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal, excepting those who presented papers at the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy in 2014 or 2015; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy.

Location: Boston is home to numerous universities, art museums, and performing arts companies. Hosted by several Boston-area institutions, the meeting will convene at the Hyatt, across the street from the renovated Opera House and in the heart of Boston’s theater district. The final reception will be held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Theme(s): Rather than an overarching theme, the 2016 meeting will provide a variety of thematic connections among sessions. The Medieval Academy welcomes innovative sessions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or that use various disciplinary approaches to examine an individual topic. To both facilitate and emphasize interdisciplinarity, the Call for Papers is organized in “threads.” Sessions listed under these threads have been proposed to or by the Program Committee but the list provided below is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive.

Proposals: Individuals may propose to offer a paper in one of the sessions below, a full panel of papers and speakers for a listed session, a full panel of papers and speakers for a session they wish to create, or a single paper not designated for a specific session. Sessions usually consist of three 25-minute papers, and proposals should be geared to that length, although the committee is interested in other formats as well (poster sessions, digital experiences, etc). The Program Committee may choose a different format for some sessions after the proposals have been reviewed.

The complete Call for Papers with additional information, submission procedures, selections guidelines, and organizers is available here.

Please contact the Program Committee at MAA2016@TheMedievalAcademy.org with any questions.

THREADS:

CAROLINGIAN WORLDS
“Contacts with Islam”
“Frontiers”
“Transformations, 877-987″

THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
“The 1000th Anniversary of Cnut the Great (1016/2016)”
“Art and Architecture in the Eleventh Century: An Age of Experiments”
“Creative Liturgies in the Eleventh Century”

MONASTICISMS
“Monastic Visual Cultures”
“Monastic Identities”
“Ascetic Bodies in the Late Middle Ages”

LYRIC TRANSFORMATIONS
“The ‘Lyric’ Dante”
“Poetic Form”
“Petrarch between the Vernacular and Latin”

GREEN WORLDS/MEDIEVAL ECOLOGIES
“Garden, Park, Wasteland”
“Material Ecologies”
“Medieval Anthropocenes”
“Water Worlds and Seascapes”
“Mediterranean Landscapes”

WORKS: UNFINISHED, TRANSFORMED OR IN RUINS
“Unfinished Books, Incomplete Texts”
“Medieval Art and Architecture as Work(s) in Progress”
“Ruins”

MEDIEVAL STUDIES AND THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES
Papers are invited for a thread devoted to the exciting new ways in which medieval studies and digital humanities intersect. Topics might include (but are not limited to) issues of visualization and the re-presentation of medieval spaces, soundscapes, the implications of digital archives for the editing of medieval texts, the digital (re)construction of medieval collections and libraries, GIS and mapping projects, social network analysis, text encoding, and computational approaches to texts and scribal behaviors.

SESSIONS:
“800th Anniversary of the Dominican Order”
“800th Anniversary of Pope Innocent III’s Death”
“Mortality / Facing Death”
“Margins of War”
“Images of Coercion and Dissent”
“Dangerous, Deviant, and Disobedient Women in the Middle Ages”
“Vernacular Exegesis”
“Drama/Performance”
“Literature of Pastoral Care”
“Boston Area Medieval Manuscripts”

Connectivity from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
The University of Auckland
21 April, 2015

On the 21st of April 2015 the Disciplinary Area of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Auckland, with support from the Australian Early Medieval Association, will host a workshop entitled “Connectivity from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages”.

This workshop will explore the theme of connectivity as it applies to the periods of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (c. A.D. 350 – 1000). Connectivity is the measure of cohesion and interaction between groups and individuals in a society. Key questions for this workshop are: how did individuals and groups maintain and build connectivity in their societies? Did traditional networks and systems, such as Roman amicitia, remain or were they replaced by new networks and systems? Did the societies of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages remain ‘connected’ in a time of disruption to older networks?

We welcome papers on a wide range of topics that engage and discuss the theme of connectivity, including, but not limited to: friendship; letter writing; social cohesion, geographic connectivity; social, economic, religious, and political networks; and ethnic identity.

Papers should be between 20-25 minutes long. Abstracts (100-200 words) should be submitted by the 1st of March.

Presenters are also encouraged to consider submitting their paper to the 2015 volume of the Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association.

Please send abstracts to Dan Knox dkno024@aucklanduni.ac.nz along with any enquires about the workshop.

Download the Connectivity Workshop CFP.

Sovereignty and Metaphor
NYU English Grad Student Conference
September 24-25, 2015

The graduate students of the Department of English and MARC and NYU invite proposals for papers that explore the reciprocity between sovereignty and metaphor in English and continental (Latin and vernacular) writing from the medieval to early modern period.

Speakers include: Victoria Kahn, Paul Strohm, John Rogers, Kathleen Davis, Brandon Chua, and Jacque Lezra.

Travel grants available.

Submit 250 word proposals for 20 minute papers to sovereigntyandmetaphor2015@gmail.com by May 15.