The editorial team for Bloomsburyʼs Cultural History of Monarchy welcome proposals for the six volumes in their collection. Of particular interest to ANZAMEMS membership will be the volumes on the Medieval Age, the Early Modern Era, and the Long 18th Century.
Note that this call is different to a normal edited collection where authors propose topics on varied subjects which relate specifically to their research. Instead, the editors are looking for proposals from authors who are interested in writing one of the specific chapters in one of the particular volumes of the series. Each volume will contain chapters under the headings:
Conceptualizing Monarchy Rites, Ritual and Ceremonial Religious, Intellectual and Cultural Patronage Place and Space Image and Representation Intradynastic, Imperial and International Networks Court, Counsel and Community Legacy: Funerary Culture, Memorialization and Myth-Making
For further details on the project, including how to submit a proposal, please see the below pdf.
Member Esther Theiler has recently published a monograph with Brepols entitled Painters and Sitters in Early Seventeenth-century Rome: Portraits of the Soul.
Significant innovations in portraiture occurred during the transitional period from the end of the sixteenth-century to the early seventeenth-century in Rome. Portraits by Annibale Carracci, Valentin de Boulogne, Anthony van Dyck, Simon Vouet and Gianlorenzo Bernini display a loosening of formality and a trend towards movement. These artists produced a portrait type that was more inclusive of the viewer, more communicative, more revealing of a private face. The portraits in this study were less likely to celebrate achievements, family or social standing, titles, rank or station. Instead they portray individuals who exist apart from their professional personae. They reveal unique and characteristic traits of their subjects captured at a particular moment in time. They used subtle affetti, painting technique and colour to express mood and atmosphere and evoke the presence of the sitter. The sitters include poets, courtiers, buffoons and the artists themselves, and each composition is attentive to the thoughts, emotions and imaginative life of the individuals.
Painters and Sitters in Early Seventeenth-century Rome is available for purchase through Brepols.
Issue 40.2 of Parergon went to print in December and will soon be making its way to members’ mailboxes. This is special issue guest edited by Kate Allan and Nupur Patel on the subject of women’s agency in Early Modern Europe. Kate and Nupur have written a post for the Parergon blog about the issue, how it came together, and its aims and contents. Enough to keep you going until the journal arrives!
Susan Broomhall and Carolyn James have recently published a volume with the Cambridge Elements series: Elite Women and the Italian Wars, 1494–1559.
The volume analyses the critical importance of elite women to the conflict conventionally known as the Italian Wars that engulfed much of Europe and the Mediterranean between 1494 and 1559. Through its considered attention to the interventions of women connected to imperial, royal and princely dynasties, the authors show the breadth and depth of the opportunities, roles, impact, and influence that certain women had to shape the course of the conflict in both wartime activities and in peace-making. The work thus expands the ways in which the authors can think about women’s participation in war and politics. It makes use of a wide range of sources such as literature, art and material culture, as well as more conventional text forms. Women’s voices and actions are prioritized in making sense of evidence and claims about their activities.
Elite Women and the Italian Wars is available for free downloadfor the next two weeks.
The 99th annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America takes place this year on March 14–16, 2024, at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.
Please visit medieval.nd.edu/maa2024, where you will see a link for registration. Here you will also find direct links to conference hotels offering discounted rates and a general overview of conference activities. The discounted hotel rates for attendees remain in effect only through February 13, 2024, and online registration closes February 16, 2024, so I urge you to register soon. Full details concerning the program as well as transportation and related matters may also be found on the site. The conference will be entirely in person, though the plenary lectures and some other events will also be live-streamed.
The themes for this year’s meeting are “Mapping the Middle Ages,” “Bodies in Motion,” and “Communities of Knowledge.” Plenary addresses will be delivered by Robin Fleming (Boston College) and Samantha Leggett (University of Edinburgh), “Conscious Uncoupling: Migration without ‘The Migration Period’. Chronology, mobility, diet, and health in a small corner of early medieval Hampshire”; Bissera Pentcheva (Stanford), “AudioVision in the Arts of the Liturgy at Conques”; and Jack Tannous (Princeton), “From Tatian to Hunayn: Communities (and Continuities) of Knowledge between Late Antiquity and Islam.”
Sixty concurrent sessions will represent a range of threads, including “Digitally Mapping the Middle Ages,” “Sacred Interiors,” “Islamic Epistemology,” “Mapping Real and Imaginary Travel,” “Mobile Bodies,” and “Border Crossings,” and cover topics addressing material culture, literary studies, cosmology, architecture, liturgy, and pandemics, to name a few. Roundtables and workshops will highlight union organizing in higher education, writing for a public audience, and publishing on the Middle Ages.
Beyond the conference and its sessions, other attractions are available to you before and during the meeting. On Wednesday, March 13, workshops on digital medieval studies and fragmentology will be offered. Notre Dame Library’s Rare Books & Special Collections will showcase an exhibit entitled “Mapping the Middle Ages: Marking Time, Space, and Knowledge,” while the campus Digital Visualization Theater will host a 360-degree visual and aural presentation on the cosmology of Hildegard of Bingen. Visit the newly-opened Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and while there enjoy a special exhibit of early woodcuts and engravings, including Albrecht Dürer’s famous Apocalypse series. The Morris Inn will host an Irish Céilí dance on Saturday evening.
All course run during the period 5-9 February. Applications and payment must be finalised by 5 January. Some bursaries are available and these are also open for applications.
For general information, see the School’s website. For specific information on each course and to apply to attend, please use the links above.
Registrations fees are quoted in $NZD. An early bird registration offer is available until 22 December, after which standard registration charges will apply.
A seminar for postgraduates and early career researchers will take place at the University of Canterbury on Sunday 11 February. Further details to follow shortly.
Abstracts are sought for an edited collection on women’s expression in early medieval English society. Abstracts of up to 300 words are due 20 December 2023. See the CFP below.
Imaginary Communities: Reading, Writing and Translating Early Modern Women’s Fiction
University of Huelva, Spain 17-18 October, 2024
Traditional approaches to the ‘origins of the novel’ question in the English context have often overlooked the role played by women’s contribution to the development of the genre. Minor works, anonymous texts, fiction signed by women, as well as those works bearing a female pseudonym, were usually considered second-rate and were rarely included—with only a few exceptions—in canonical histories of the novel. A female history of the novel genre cannot be written in isolation from other women novelists across Europe, who no doubt exerted an enormous influence on the English novel market, and on women novelists in particular. This seminar proposes a discussion of women’s printed fiction during the seventeenth century from a pan-European perspective to help us situate the early days of the novel in their true transnational context. The fictional works translated into English from different European tongues, the growing popularity of women’s fiction among readers, as well as the cross-influences between English and non-English novels allegedly authored by women, or their different markets—accounting for the influence that women printers and booksellers played in the publication and dissemination of fiction—will also be of our concern. It is our contention that it is possible to read the complex network of readers, writers and other agents of the novel market as belonging to an active, though imaginary, community contributing to the development of the novel form. We would like to assess the relevance that this growing female contribution had in the evolution of the genre.
We invite 20-minute papers which discuss crosscurrents or influences among texts authored by European women, as well as about biographical and/or cultural relationships at work between women writers and intellectuals in the period of study. We aim to discuss whether we can trace a continuum in European women’s fiction which explains transitions of genre/gender and literary culture, from the perspective of transculturality, drawing on all literary sources as fields of cross-media influences. We will consider papers about English women’s native fiction, like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, as well as about translations and adaptations of continental women’s works printed in England, as the examples of Marie de Lafayette, Mlle de la Roche Guilhem, Madeleine de Scudéry, or María de Zayas, among others, make clear.
Some of the suggested topics are the following:
Women’s contribution to the rise and development of fiction in English
French nouvelles and English novels: mutual allegiances and liaisons
Spanish novelas, the picaresque and the world of roguery
Letter exchanges: the early novel and epistolarity
Assessing gallantry across borders: from French to English
Towards a transnational theory of the novel
Political diatribes and religious debates in early prose fiction by women
Intersections of gender and genre across national borders
Translation, revision and adaptation in the seventeenth-century novel: translations of women’s texts, female translators of works by men.
Female histories of the book: printing, publishing and bookselling across national borders
Popularity, canonicity, and the new female readership for the novel: reality or wishful thinking?
Romancing the novel and novelizing the romance
Framed-nouvelles and female narrators
Women’s worlds in historical fictions
The worlds of domesticity: wives, daughters, she-workers, servants
Keynote speakers:
Dr Erin Keating, University of Manitoba Dr Mary Helen McMurran, Western University Dr Leah Orr, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
