The Worlds That Plague Made

Call for Papers

The Annual Conference at the Medieval and Renaissance Center will be held on April 13th and 14th. This year’s theme will be “The Worlds That Plague Made: Cultures of Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern Period.” Keynote speakers will be Ann Carmichael, Indiana University, and Susan Jones, University of Minnesota.

We invite submissions from any discipline in Medieval and Renaissance Studies on any aspect of the history of plague and disease.

Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis until January 15th 2018. Please submit a 250 word abstract and a brief CV to marc.center@nyu.edu (put “Conference Submission” in the subject line).

Illuminating Hidden Figures 

Diversity and Difference in the Middle Ages

New England Medieval Studies Consortium Brown University March 17-18, 2018

The diversity of medieval Europe has come under close scrutiny from all sides. As medievalists have, with increasing vigor, insisted on complex and nuanced understandings of the constitution of both normative European soci- eties and their interactions with those surrounding them, popular ideological movements have sought to claim the medieval past as a homogeneous, `white’ male space. Whether it is studied through art, literature, theology, history, gender and sexuality studies, or any of the other manifold disciplines that comprise medieval studies, the question of diversity and dierence in the mid- dle ages thus represents not only an increasingly fruitful avenue of scholarly inquiry, but also a vital interface between academia and the public at large. This conference therefore invites papers which explore this question and its modern implications through intellectual history, scriptural exegesis, art and material culture, pedagogical approaches, philology, literary studies, digital humanities, or any other ways in which diversity and dierence in the middle ages can be understood. We also invite papers that address the exchange of culture and material from outside Europe.

We welcome both individual papers and full panel proposals. We also welcome volunteers for chairing panels. Papers should be 20 minutes in length, and may be from any discipline or geographic specialization. Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to nemsc.2018@gmail.com by January 1, 2018.

Graduate students whose abstracts are selected for the conference will have the opportunity to submit full papers for consideration for the Alison Goddard Elliott Award.

Meetings, Conflicts, Exchanges: Mediterranean Space in the Middle Ages

23rd and 24th March 2018 Université de Montréal

Fernand Braudel writes in his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II: “The Mediterrenean has no unity but that created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow” [1972: 276]. The position of the Mediterranean, at the intersection of three continents, has made it a vital location in these movements of men, women and children. These movements continue, sometimes with tragic consequences, to this day. In the Middle Ages, the meeting of peoples and cultures enabled the exchange of ideas, traditions, texts, languages, and things. In recent years, scholars of Medieval Studies have made significant progress in defining and increasing our knowledge of the interactions in this Mediterranean space. From the art and architecture of the Taifa kingdoms to the phases and waves of Frankish colonisation in the Latin East, from the political and cultural role of religious military orders throughout the Mediterranean to the rich literary and cultural output of the eastern kingdoms, from the multiple roots of medieval Jewish thinking to the specific type of eastern Mediterranean French, medieval scholars of multiple disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches, have opened up new ways of studying and conceiving of these cultural interactions.

Some students of the Centre d’études médiévales present Meetings, Conflicts, Exchanges: the Mediterranean Space in the Middle Ages conference, which will take place in the Carrefour des Arts et des Sciences at the University of Montréal on 23rd and 24th March 2018. The conference looks primarily to address graduate students and early career scholars. Meetings, Conflicts, Exchanges aims to promote the sharing of ideas, methologies and avenues of research, with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches (from the fields of Literature, History, History of Art, Religious Studies, Languages, Philosophy, Theology, etc.).

Please send a single document to alessio.marziali.peretti@umontreal.ca containing:

1. An abstract with a title (150 to 200 words)

2. A short biography (specifying author’s name, affiliation, and contact information)

Presentations will be 20 minutes long with an additional 10 minutes for discussion. Presentation languages: French and English.

Deadline: 31st December 2017

Conference website: https://cetmedcolloque.wordpress.com/

The Sacral and the Secular: Early Medieval Political Theology 

Call for Papers

Ever since Ernst Kantorowicz popularised the term ‘political theology’ in the 1950s, scholars have known that the political and religious thought of the early Middle Ages cannot be separated. But since the 1990s there has been a resurgence of interest in this field. The traditional focus on sacral kingship has been replaced by an awareness of the early Middle Ages as a world of debate and contestation where a wide variety of political theologies existed. This one-day conference will explore the latest thinking on early medieval political theology, with particular attention to the idea of the secular during the period.

Robert Markus influentially argued that the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe witnessed a progressive ‘de-secularization’ as a monolithically Christian society emerged. Recent work, however, has questioned this analysis, with Peter Brown suggesting that elements of late antique secularity survived until at least the seventh century. On the other hand, the trend in scholarship of Carolingian political theology has been to abandon older distinctions between Church and State, moving towards a vision of ninth-century society where there was no place for the secular. As confidence in the progressive secularization of the contemporary world has faltered in the past generation, now seems an appropriate time to explore how concepts of the secular and de-secularization can shed light on the early Middle Ages.

The conference welcomes papers on any aspect of the political theology of the early medieval period (which will be broadly defined both chronologically and geographically), especially those which touch on questions relating to the secular. Papers which deal with the evidence of art, archaeology and material culture, as well as textual sources, are welcome. Graduate students and early career scholars are particularly encouraged to submit since the conference aims to showcase new research which will help shape the direction of the field over the next generation.

All enquiries and paper abstracts (250 words max.) should be sent to Conor O’Brien (cpo32@cam.ac.uk) via email. Papers are to be 25-30 mins in length and there will be ample time for discussion and the exchange of ideas on the day. Abstracts are due by 15 January 2018.

Churchill College and the G.M. Trevelyan Fund of the Faculty of History, Cambridge, have generously supported the organisation of this conference.