Proposals are invited for the seminar “(Re)constructing history through landscape and practice”, to be held as part of IONA: Early Medieval Studies on the Islands of the North Atlantic – Transformative networks, skills, theories, and methods for the future of the field (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, April 11-13, 2019).

Seminar organisers: Dr Pamela O’Neill and Associate Professor Jay Johnston (University of Sydney)

This seminar will draw together academics and practitioners to investigate how we experience, represent and ultimately construct history. It will consider the creative processes that are triggered when the subject is physically immersed in the landscape: archaeologists who seek to authentically reproduce artefacts and sites, historians and toponymists who travel hypothesised early routeways, folklorists who seek to replicate encounters with the otherworld, artists who create through physical immersion in landscape, religious practitioners who (re)enact pilgrimage, heritage bodies who curate historic sites, writers who publish or blog their travel experiences. This seminar aims to explore multiple questions regarding the relationship between discursive academic and creative modes of enquiry including:

• In what ways do we create historical, artistic and other narratives in response to immersion in landscape?
• In what ways do such narratives differ from those created in a disengaged, physically separate context traditionally espoused by scholarship?
• Of what value are such narratives to historians and other scholars working in the traditional mode?
• What does a close physical experience of landscape add to scholarly understanding?
• What could be the ultimate effect of a physically immersive model of scholarship being integrated into the academic endeavour?
• How do these modalities of research and exploration relate to Critical Practice (practice-based methodology)?
• What could such scholarship contribute to the understandings and experiences of the general public?

We invite expressions of interest from all who are keen to take part. Please include:

• a very short biographical statement (100 words),
• a brief explanation of your interest in the seminar
• and a suggestion for a presentation you could contribute (200 words).

Please send expressions of interest to:

pamaladh@gmail.com AND jay.johnston@sydney.edu.au by 31 July 2018.

‘Lives and Afterlives’
The Sewanee Medieval Colloquium
University of the South in Sewanee, TN
April 12-13, 2019

Conference Website

The Sewanee Medieval Colloquium invites proposals for panel themes engaging with the lives and afterlives of medieval cultures for its 2019 meeting. These sub-themes address a particular aspect of our general theme, and could be the basis for either one or two panels. As a rule of thumb, panel themes should be broad enough to encourage numerous applicants, and interdisciplinary proposals are particularly encouraged. Possibilities might include the theologies of heaven, medieval ecologies, everyday life in the Middle Ages, the production of reliquaries, ordering of public space, and popular medievalism. If a panel theme is accepted, organizers will be responsible for selecting participants (from abstracts submitted through the website by October 26, 2018) and choosing a commenter (a well-established expert in the field) to respond to the papers at the panel session.

Panel theme proposals should include a description/rationale of the panel theme, a list of possible commenters (organizers may serve as commenters), and the CVs of the organizers, all submitted via e-mail to medievalcolloquium@sewanee.edu. Panel proposals are due July 27, 2018. Commenters are generally established figures in the field with a significant record of publication; participants in the Colloquium are generally limited to holders of a Ph.D. and those currently in a Ph.D. program.

The Sewanee Medieval Colloquium also invites proposals for individual papers engaging with any aspect of our 2019 theme, ‘Lives and Afterlives.’ Possibilities might include the theologies of heaven, medieval ecologies, everyday life in the Middle Ages, the production of reliquaries, ordering of public space, and popular medievalism. Papers should be twenty minutes in length, and commentary is traditionally provided for each paper presented. We invite papers from all disciplines, and encourage contributions from medievalists working on any geographic area. A seminar will also seek contributions; please look for its separate CFP soon. Participants in the Colloquium are generally limited to holders of a Ph.D. and those currently in a Ph.D. program.

Please submit an abstract (approx. 250 words) and brief c.v., via our website (http://medievalcolloquium.sewanee.edu), no later than 26 October 2018. If you wish to propose a session, please submit abstracts and vitae for all participants in the session. Completed papers, including notes, will be due to commenters no later than 12 March 2019.

You may also propose a complete panel of either two or three papers; please submit all abstracts together, and attach all relevant CVs. Complete panel proposals will be due at the same time as our general call, October 26, 2018.

Baths and Spa Waters in the Culture and Literature of Early Modern England
Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA), France
11-13 October, 2019

Organizers: Pr. Sophie Chiari and Dr. Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme

Under the aegis of the French Shakespeare Society

Keynotes:

• Dr. Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University)
• Dr. Amanda Herbert (Folger Institute and Amherst College)
• Pr. Tiffany Stern (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
• Dr. Tiffany J. Werth (UC Davis, University of California)

Water has been used for recreational or therapeutic purposes, shaping landscapes, cleansing bodies and spirits alike throughout the centuries. Cities such as Bath in England, Spa in Belgium, and Vichy in France, have prospered because of their spa activities. While balneology has frequently been studied in connection with classical Antiquity or with more recent times (in particular the nineteenth century, often seen as the Golden Age of spa activities), much work remains to be done regarding its significance in the early modern period. This conference will highlight the various uses of water in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century England, while exploring the tensions between those people who praised the curative virtues of waters and those who rejected them for their supposedly harmful effects.

During the Middle Ages, steam baths, whose purpose was more recreational than regenerative, flourished in many Christian cities. Yet the bad reputation of stews (dry or moist heated baths) was early established: over time they were increasingly regarded as places that facilitated prostitution and promiscuity. No wonder that, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Vincentio describes how corruption will ‘boil and bubble / Till it o’er-run the stew’. After his ascension to the throne, Henry VIII came to regard public baths as places of debauchery in which infections and contaminations easily spread. When he developed syphilis, he ordered that the baths be closed down. As a result, in the Tudor era, they became synonymous with forbidden practices. Turkish baths, famed for their exoticism, were seen as privileged places for female eroticism, as is suggested in Thomas Washington’s translation of The Navigations, Peregrinations, and Travels Made in Turkey (1585). In the seventeenth century, many people feared that hot water could infuse their bodies with dangerous humours; they turned, domestically, to waterless grooming achieved by rubbing or wiping the skin. The habit of bathing became general relatively late, when public baths reopened in London at the end of the century, and only in the mid-1750s did bathing come back into fashion as a medical resource. Cold water was favoured since it was thought to be invigorating and to regulate blood circulation.

The early modern period marked a parallel shift in spa activities. What healing waters were thought to be differed according to faith: Catholics understood them ritualistically and superstitiously, Protestants pragmatically. The medical treatises of the period, meanwhile, no longer systematically described water as a sacred or sacramental element, examining instead its curative properties. Dr William Turner, a pioneer of spa medicine in England, drafted the first English-language treatise on hot springs called A Book of the Natures and Properties of the Baths in England and other baths in Germany and Italy. Published in 1562, the volume recorded the healing properties of spa waters for nearly a hundred diseases, compared Bath with spa towns on the continent, and pleaded for improvements to be undertaken in the English city. A few decades later, in 1626, Elizabeth Farrow discovered a spring in Scarborough. The publication in 1660 of Scarborough Spaw or A description of the Nature and Virtues of the Spaw at Scarbrough in Yorkshire by Dr Robert Wittie made Scarborough one of the most important spa resorts of the time. Wittie’s observations were extended in the second edition of the book (1667) in which he provides a description of the benefits of water on nerves and lungs as well as on mental health. According to him, water could even cure ‘hypochondriack melancholly and windiness’. While Bath, Bristol, and Harrogate were recognized as established spa towns, Scarborough’s reputation soared when spa treatments developed there and when sea water baths were introduced in addition to spring water ones.

Beyond their medical dimension, the social and cultural life of spa towns, frequently described in the literary productions of the early modern period, need examination. For example, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Bath became a fashionable holiday destination for the English aristocracy and the upper middle classes. Queen Anne’s visit in 1702 and the arrival there of Richard ‘Beau’ Nash in 1704 turned Bath into the most elegant resort in Georgian England. Not only did people go to Bath for spa treatments, but also for entertainment: concerts, dances, card games and gambling thrived in this ‘curative’ city. The international ‘Baths and Spa Waters’ conference will be held in Vichy which, along with Bath and nine other European spa towns, has submitted a joint nomination for inclusion in a UNESCO World Heritage List of ‘Great Spas of Europe’. The symposium will take stock of current research on the connections between literature, culture, baths, and hydrotherapy in early modern England. We welcome a diversity of approaches and a wide variety of sources, such as pamphlets, poems and plays extolling, condemning or deriding baths, travel narratives that depict baths, and scientific treatises that either praise or criticize the curative use of water. Contributors are also invited to examine sources of information such as travel guides and conduct manuals that became popular in the eighteenth century, as well as newspapers and gazettes describing the activities and daily life in spa towns.

Please send your 500-word abstract along with a short biographical note to Sophie Chiari (sophie.chiari_lasserre@uca.fr) and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme (samuel.cuisinier-elorme@uca.fr) by September 15th, 2018.

Participants will be notified in November 2018.

Histories, Theories, and Uses of Waste Paper in Early Modern England
Balliol College, University of Oxford
15 June, 2019

This one-day multidisciplinary conference will explore the manifold afterlives of waste paper in early modern England. Manuscript and printed sheets were frequently reused to wrap later volumes, to stiffen spines and cover the inside of bindings, to line boxes, to serve as notepaper, or (in the words of the poet Henry Fitzgeffrey) ‘to wrap Drugg’s’, ‘dry Tobacco in’, and package ‘Pippin-pyes.’ While this cycle of use has long been understood as destructive, it also speaks to a distinctly pre-modern sense of how texts might endure beyond their initial form and function. The archive of waste can help us think about the shifting fate of books across time and within distinct institutional settings, exposing a partially hidden record of the past. How should literary and textual histories incorporate these materials that were cast aside in their own moment?

We seek 15-minute papers that consider the origins, functions, and legacies of waste paper, as well as related practices of textual use, destruction, and care. Multidisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome, as are both archival and theoretical presentations.

Possible topics might include:

• the archival discovery of waste paper;
• the thick and multitemporal histories of waste objects;
• the juxtaposition of waste and host texts;
• ways in which waste unsettles linear narratives of periodization and national boundaries;
• best practices for cataloguing and conserving fragmentary texts;
• waste paper and the literary imagination.

With plenary papers from Kate Bennett (University of Oxford) and Whitney Trettien (University of Pennsylvania).

This conference is being organized by Megan Heffernan (DePaul University), Anna Reynolds (University of York), and Adam Smyth (University of Oxford).

Please send an abstract (with title) of approximately 200 words and a brief CV to megan.heffernan@depaul.edu, by 1 October 2018. Papers will be 15 minutes.