The era of COVID-19 has been transformational for medieval digital humanities. Medievalists have come to learn the limits and possibilities of online scholarship, whether in the virtual classroom or in the transfer of knowledge among specialists. Although direct access to material sources and the easy face-to-face exchanges with colleagues are deeply missed, we have come to understand that digitally-inflected scholarship can be more economical, more global, and –in limited ways– more equitable for many medievalists. And because we have come to this inflection point, the members of the Digital Medievalist Board are launching a conference series that marks this turn and aims to build upon what we have learned. The theme, The Past, Present and Future of Medieval Digital Studies is both retrospective and prospective in scope, bringing digital medievalist practitioners into conversation with each other as we step into a new scholarly environment where digital methods take on a new importance.

The first session of this three-part conference – “Americas: Images and Imaging” – will be held on 24th May 2021, 11:30-15:30 EDT. Advance registration is required.

For medievalists working in the Americas, increased access to high-quality images of manuscripts and other medieval resources has changed the way we work, whether we consider ourselves digital humanities scholars or not. The ready availability of these resources has opened new ways of thinking about practices that are fundamental to our field, such as textual editing, image description and analysis, or manuscript collation, for example. Yet the instantaneous access we now have to facsimiles of the materials that were previously so difficult or arduous to view masks the enormous amount of expertise needed to bring these images so effortlessly to our desktops. Librarians, curators, cataloguers and information technologists bring their skills and knowledge to the task of image delivery in ways that remain invisible to most subject-area specialists, but have become critical to the way most medievalists now work.

The goal of this conference is to reflect on how access to images — whether limited or open — has shaped how medievalists in the Americas have worked in the past and the present, as well as how they may do so in the future. Topics may include the following: a discussion of how resource professionals take material objects in a collection and create properly catalogued digital objects; IIIF, scanning, metadata, 3D-imaging, and 3D-printing; the relationship between image and material object and the implications for textual scholarship or pedagogy.

This session is organised by Nathan Daniels, Lisa Fagin Davis, James Harr III, Aylin Malcolm, and Laura Morreale, and is co-sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America.

In 2021 The Open University’s interdisciplinary Spaces and Places conference will address the theme of ‘Courtly Encounters’ by exploring instances of cultural exchange that shaped the day-to-day and extraordinary sensory experiences of court life.

Since Subrahhmanyam’s seminal book Courtly Encounters, scholars have incorporated the transcultural in courtly studies, but not to the extent it deserves. At a time when scholars across the humanities are embracing a ‘global turn,’ it is an important moment to reassess court studies and consider new approaches that allow us to move beyond Eurocentricism and simple explanations of ‘shared’ tastes and also adopt novel approaches.

The early modern court was not a closed entity but was reliant on the movement of people and things, its power being dependent on its relationships with other courts and states. In the early modern period, increased exploration led to fierce competition over the control of trade routes and territories, and inevitably led to diplomatic entanglements that reached from Brazil to Portugal to India. These entanglements brought about hostile relationships, confusion and admiration, giving rise to cross-cultural transfer, exchange and friction as objects, practices and people moved through trade and diplomacy.

This conference will examine courtly encounters during the early modern period to consider the following questions:

• How were courtly spaces adapted and transformed through the movement of material and immaterial things and to what extent did those things condition sensorial experiences?
• Which particular aspects of political, social, and economic infrastructures enabled the exchange of objects, ideas, and people?
• To what extent do new methodologies and approaches need to be developed to consider courts within a global geopolitical network and how might sensorial approaches enable this?
• How might sensory experiences of the same objects differ according to courtly environments (considering, for example, transcultural exchange or experiences of objects in different architectural spaces and/or geographical locations)?

This annual conference is fundamentally interdisciplinary: literary, musical, architectural, artistic and religious spaces will be the subjects of enquiry, not as discrete or separate entities, but ones which overlapped, came into contact with one another, and at times were in conflict.

The conference will take place online on Microsoft Teams with shorter presentations and more of a workshop format to accommodate the online platform. The event is free, but requires registration before 7th June:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/medieval-early-modern-spaces-places-courtly-encounters-tickets-151171689593

DRAFT PROGRAMME:

9 June 2021 17:00-18:00

Keynote Lecture

Katherine Butler-Schofield (King’s College London) ‘Something Borrowed, Something New: Appropriation and Integration in Mughal Courtly Arts, 1580–1680’

10 June 2021

Exchanges and Images I

13:00 Jacopo Gnisci (University College London/British Museum) ‘The Veiled Emperor: On Courtly Customs in Ethiopia’

13:30 Rachel Carlisle (Florida State University) ‘Maximilian on the Move: Imperial Architecture and Courtly Spectacle in Print’

14:00 Break

Exchanges and Images II

14:15 Stefan Gasch (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) ‘What’s in a Book? Music, Miniatures, and Meaning in Wolfenbüttel Cod. Guelf. A Aug. 2°’

14:45 Rebecca Teresi (Johns Hopkins University) ‘A Gift Between Queens: Portraiture and Devotional Politics in Anglo-Spanish Relations, 1604-1606’

15:15 Break

Exchanges and Objects

15:30 Juan Chiva Beltrán (Universitat de València) ‘A Palace Between Asia and Europe: Luxury Objects in the Court of the Viceroys of New Spain’

16:00 Isabella Cecchini and Veronica Prestini (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) ‘Accepting Ottomans in Florence: Spaces and Objects at the Medici’s Court (15th-17th centuries)’

16:30 Closing Discussion

17:00 End

11 June 2021

Exchanges and Urban Culture

13:00 C. Cody Barteet (The University of Western Ontario) ‘The Maya Court at Mayapán: Gaspar Antonio Chi’s Colonial Reflections and Self-Representation’

13:30 Alessandra Bertuzzi (“Sapienza” University of Rome), ‘Urbino “Città in forma di Palazzo” Spaces and Identity between Arts and Science ‘

14:00 Break

European Exchanges

14:15 M.A. Katritzky (The Open University) ‘Italian stage costumes at German court weddings’

14:45 Jaroslaw Pietrzak (Pedagogical University in Krakow), ‘The Polish Royal Court as a Common Space of Polish-German-Italian and French encountering between 16th and 17th century’

15:15 Break

Exchanges in Tudor England

15:30 Jonathan Gibson (The Open University) ‘French Poetry and the Elizabethan Court’

16:00 Alexandra Siso (University of Colorado Boulder) ‘Building Early Modern Tabernacles: Elizabethan Composers and the Fashioning of Sacred Courts’

16:30 Michael Ohajuru (Institute of Commonwealth Studies) ‘The John Blanke Project: Imagine the black Tudor trumpeter’

17:00 Closing Discussion

17:30 Online drinks reception (bring your own bottle)

18:00 Close

From the Museum of Russian Icons:

‘In a 1947 article titled “Byzantine Art and Scholarship in America,” Kurt Weitzmann examined the history of collecting Byzantine art in the United States. “…The combination of formal beauty and material splendor, coupled with great technical perfection and an aristocratic spirit which gives to even the smallest object a rare distinction…” renders these works particularly attractive to private collectors, wrote Weitzmann. [This] conference takes this statement as a starting point and focuses on the history of collecting Christian Orthodox objects in the West from the nineteenth century to the present: a topic replete with spectacular objects, profound questions and captivating narratives.

This international conference, organized and sponsored by the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, MA (USA), considers why, how, where, and by whom these objects have been and continue to be acquired. Once obtained, how are they classified, conserved, displayed, and described? How and by whom is their value, whether symbolic or monetary, determined? What is the relationship between their original purpose and the newfound one? From Marjorie Merriweather Post and Henry Walters to modern day collectors such as Gordon Lankton, small private museums to major public institutions, there has been a sustained interest in owning architectural remnants, manuscripts, liturgical objects, enkolpia and, of course, icons. Whether to save them from destruction, perpetuate a living tradition, preserve personal or communal memory, demonstrate erudition, wealth or taste, or to tell a story, these pieces are found in nearly every important collection. ‘

The complete programme, list of speakers, and registration link can be found here.