Daily Archives: 26 November 2017

Hagiography Beyond Tradition – book series

New book series at Amsterdam University Press: Hagiography Beyond Tradition.

Amsterdam University Press invites both formal proposals for the series, and more informal queries, from all interested parties.

Hagiography Beyond Tradition provides a home for cutting-edge scholarship on medieval saints and sanctity, combining rigorous attention to historical context with heuristics drawn from modern critical theories. The series seeks to publish incisive, impactful, and broadly interdisciplinary work. What’s more, the series aims explicitly to foreground the work of innovative early-career researchers and put them on equal terms with more established senior academics.

The series’ vital statistics are collected below, and full details can be found online at: http://en.aup.nl/series/hagiography-beyond-tradition. To download a series flyer as .pdf, please visit: http://www.aup.nl/wosmedia/5678/hagiography_beyond_tradition.pdf.

If you have any general queries or questions about the series, in the first instance please contact Shannon Cunningham (Acquisitions Editor for European History at Amsterdam University Press), S.Cunningham@aup.nl.

Series Details:

· Proposals for monographs and cohesive edited collections are welcome.
· Expected word count of final publication: 70,000-110,000.
· All publications will be in English.
· Geographical scope: all of medieval Christendom, including Byzantium.
· Chronological scope: ca. 500-1500.
· Series Editor: Alicia Spencer- Hall (Queen Mary, University of London).
· Editorial Board: Bill Burgwinkle (University of Cambridge); Martha Newman (University of Texas); Sarah Salih (King’s College London); Anna Taylor (University of Massachusetts).
· Acquisitions Editor (at Amsterdam University Press): Shannon Cunningham.
· Complementary to the Hagiography Society’s existing series, Sanctity in Global Perspective, which elicits comparative rather than more theoretical studies. We very much hope for cross-fertilisation whenever possible between the two series.

Series Abstract

The study of sanctity in medieval Europe is starting to elicit cutting-edge, innovative and genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship that destabilizes what people have conventionally considered to be hagiography. This is demonstrated in the topic range of panels sponsored by the Hagiography Society at recent landmark medievalist conferences. While hagiography has traditionally been understood only in religious terms, recent scholarship moves beyond such frameworks to consider alternate ways of identifying and representing exemplary people. So doing, such research emphasises modern cultural analogies and resonances with medieval figures.