CFP: Amassing Perspectives: Current Trends in Syriac Iconography, Princeton University (17–18 September 2021), deadline 15 March 2021

The Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University invites paper proposals on late antique and medieval Syriac iconography and visual culture for a virtual conference to be held on September 17–18, 2021.

Monastery wall paintings in Syria and Egypt, the illuminations of the Rabbula Gospels, and the architecture and decorations of churches in regions as diverse as Turkey and India are just some of the rich visual culture extant from the late antique and medieval Syriac tradition. Though there is a long tradition of studying Syriac visual culture, this is a subject that has not typically been prominent in the broader field of Syriac studies, and there have been few monographs dedicated to the topic in recent decades. The aim of this conference is to gather diverse scholars from across the globe whose research touches on all aspects of Syriac iconography and visual culture in any geographic region from late antiquity throughout the Middle Ages, to roughly 1400 C.E. The conference will sum up the status quaestionis of research into Syriac art and architecture and spell out major desiderata for the field going forward.

We seek representation across academic disciplines—from art historians, archaeologists, historians, philologists, and more—and welcome the latest research being conducted on Syriac visual culture in any form. Papers might analyze the presence of varying artistic traditions in a particular monastic site or manuscript; evaluate unifying, transtemporal thematic imagery within any of the Syriac church traditions; propose a theoretical framework for the study of Syriac art; examine how medieval Syriac authors and theologians engaged with iconoclasm; study the migration and employment of artisans through architectural continuities between multiple sites; or consider the role of portable objects in artistic exchanges. This call is open to and aimed at scholars in all stages of their career, from graduate students to senior scholars. All are invited to submit abstracts related to any topic on Syriac iconography and visual culture from the late antique and medieval periods. Abstracts should be between 300–500 words and should be submitted to acady@princeton.edu by March 15, 2021. Women; Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) scholars; and people traditionally underrepresented in Syriac studies are especially encouraged to apply. Authors will be informed in early April of the results, and accepted papers will be due September 1, 2021.

The conference will be held virtually over Zoom due to the uncertain nature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Complete papers will be pre-circulated to registered conference participants in September 2021, and the conference itself will consist of roundtable workshops discussing and developing the material. Given the academic significance of such a conference, it is hoped that the conference proceedings will develop into an edited volume, reflecting state-of-the-art research on Syriac visual culture.

The conference is hosted by the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University with support from the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity (CSLA) and the Center for Collaborative History (CCH). Interested persons may contact Alyssa Cady (acady@princeton.edu) or Emily Chesley (echesley@princeton.edu) with any questions.

More information can be found here.

Online Lecture: ‘Ritual and Politics in Early Rus’ with Dr. Alexandra Vukovich, 4 March 2021, 3-4pm (EST)

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at Hellenic College Holy Cross in Brookline, MA, is pleased to announce its next lecture: “Ritual and Politics in Early Rus.” Dr. Alexandra Vukovich, University of Oxford, will discuss the ceremonies and rituals of Rus in the pre-Mongol period.

March 4, 2021 | Zoom | 3:00–4:00 pm (Eastern time)

This lecture will take place live on Zoom, followed by a question and answer period. Please register to receive the Zoom link. An email with the relevant Zoom information will be sent 1–2 hours ahead of the lecture. Registration closes at 10:00 AM on March 4, 2021.

Register here: https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/ritual-and-politics-in-early-rus

Mary Jaharis Center lectures are co-sponsored by Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, with any questions.

Find out more here.

CFP: Justice and Mercy at the Time of Dante: Reflections, Expressions, Representations & Practices (Lyon, 18-19 October 2021), deadline 25 March 2021

This international conference, primarily funded by the National Committee for the Celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s Death and co-funded by the Université Savoie Mont Blanc (laboratoire LLSETI), the Université de Lyon (ENS, Lyon 3, laboratoire IrPhil et LabEx COMOD), and the Italian Cultural Institute of Lyon, will take place in Lyon on Monday 18th October at Lyon 3 and on Tuesday 19th October at ENS. It consists of four non-parallel sessions: each session will be followed by discussions. 30-minute papers may be presented in French, English or Italian.

The conference will end with a concert held at the Italian Cultural Institute in the evening of Tuesday 19th October: the pianist Alessia Cecchetti will play pieces by Franz Liszt (including Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi sonata and the piano transcription of the first movement of Eine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina Commedia). The proceedings of the conference will be published in spring 2022.

In the Bible, justice and mercy characterize God (especially in the Old Testament) and are described by Christ as beatitudes (in the Sermon on the Mount). These two human virtues (already mentioned by Cicero), as well as divine attributes, are major elements of Christian theology, which are also well attested in the ius commune. Interestingly, they play a key role in the structure of an eschatological poem like the Comedy. This work was indeed the result, at least partly, of Dante’s struggle for justice: we know that in the song Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute and in some lost letters mentioned by Leonardo Bruni, the Florentine poet and politician had asked in vain his fellow citizens for mercy. In the Comedy, Dante (as author and more or less merciful and compassionate judge) creates in fact and follows (as the main character) a path becoming a paradigm of conversion, testifying to divine justice and mercy.

In the wide interdisciplinary field of studies on Dante and his time, literature, philosophy, theology, history and history of art, and more recently law and legal studies have provided a twofold extremely valuable contribution: on the one hand, they have offered an in-depth knowledge of Dante’s education and of his rich and varied culture, and on the other hand they have allowed for a better understanding of his work, including its contextualization, sources and its extraordinary “intertextual” and “interdiscursive” depth. We would like to explore the notions of justice and mercy within this highly interdisciplinary critical framework: although focused on Dante, our conference aims to open up to studies analyzing these two notions not only in Dante, but also in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century European poets, prose writers, artists, jurists, preachers, philosophers and theologians.

In her introduction to the miscellany Justice et miséricorde : discours et pratiques dans l’Occident médiéval Catherine Vincent invited scholars to “poursuivre sur une voie qui est loin d’avoir été totalement défrichée” . The four areas emphasized by the subtitle of our conference aim to increase the number of scientific fields involved in this research and to explore the topics of justice and mercy from a broader perspective than that of Vincent’s volume. ‘Reflections’ may involve the following disciplines: philosophy, theology, law (civil and canon) and rhetoric, ‘expressions’ the linguistic and stylistic aspects, ‘representations’ the literary and iconographical ones and ‘practices’ the historical, social, ecclesiastical, liturgical and jurisprudential domains etc.

Abstracts (in French or in English or in Italian; min. 250 words, max. 350 words) must be sent to the conference organizers (cecile.le-lay@univ-lyon3.fr and massimo.lucarelli@univ-savoie.fr) by 25th March 2021. Proposals must include a brief biography and bibliographical note (max. 200 words), including the applicant’s current affiliation and academic activity. Proposals will be examined by the scientific committee and successful applicants will be informed by 15th April 2021.

More information can be found here.
Cécile Le Lay (Lyon 3) – Massimo Lucarelli (USMB)

Scientific Committee
President : Paolo Grossi (President Emeritus of the Italian Constitutional Court; Emeritus Professor of History of Medieval and Modern Law, Università di Firenze)

Isabelle Abramé-Battesti (Italian Literature, Université de Poitiers, CERLIM)
Guido Castelnuovo (Medieval History, Université des Pays du Vaucluse, CIHAM)
Michele Corradi (Ancient Philosophy and Philology, Università di Pisa)
Sergio Cristaldi (Italian Literature, Università di Catania)
Manuele Gragnolati (Italian Literature, Université Paris-Sorbonne, ELCI)
Cécile Le Lay (Italian Literature, Université Lyon 3, IRPhil)
Massimo Lucarelli (Italian Literature, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, LLSETI)
Bruno Pinchard (Philosophy, Université Lyon 3, IRPhil ; President of Société Dantesque de France)
Pasquale Porro (Medieval Philosophy, Università di Torino)
Diego Quaglioni (History of Medieval and Modern Law, Università di Trento)
Raffaele Ruggiero (Italian Literature, Université d’Aix-Marseille, CAER)

Online Lecture Series: Medieval Manuscripts Seminar Spring 2021 (Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London)

The seminar covers current research into the intellectual history of book production in the Middle Ages, into the history of medieval texts and script and into manuscript culture more generally. The great value of the seminar, which was founded in the 1970s, is that it draws on a wide pool of expertise from the academic world, the British Library, and the commercial world of books. It is linked with the London Palaeography Teachers’ Group and so acts as the meeting place for many of those involved with the teaching of the London International Palaeography Summer School.

Please register for seminars here. Once you have registered you will receive the Zoom meeting link.

Find out more about the Medieval Manuscripts Seminars here.

Meeting on Zoom, 5.30 p.m. London time.

Organisers:

23 February 2021, 5:30pm (GMT): Dr Stewart J Brookes, Lyell Fellow in Latin Palaeography, Bodleian Library, & Dilts Fellow in Palaeography, Lincoln College

Computer-Assisted Palaeography: What? Why? Whither?

With many of us locked away at home and unable to spend time with our beloved manuscripts, the large-scale digitisation projects of recent years have taken on an unanticipated importance. Arguably, the current situation has sharpened our awareness of the limitations and strengths of encountering medieval manuscripts in the digital arena. With that in mind, this paper will explore a number of questions: what would we like to do beyond browsing with the “Turning the Pages”-style and IIIF viewers provided by repositories? How might letter-forms or iconographic motifs be catalogued, curated and compared to support evidence-based scholarship? How fine-grained should our descriptions be? And do Digital Humanities projects and Machine Learning change the scope or even the nature of our research questions?

2 March 2021, 5:30pm (GMT): Dr Ainoa Castro Correa (University of Salamanca)

The Secret Life of Writing: A Holistic Palaeography Project

Dr Castro has been recently awarded an ERC-funded project entitled ‘The Secret Life of Writing: People, Script and Ideas in the Iberian Peninsula (c. 900-1200)’. In this seminar she will tell us about how this project came up to being, discussing the new and somehow strikingly holistic method upon which it builds, its aims and first results.

30 March 2021, 5:30pm (GMT): Early Career Researcher double bill

Stephanie Azzarello (History of Art, University of Cambridge)

Divine Riddles & Monastic Puzzles: Palaeography and the Dismembered Manuscript

During my PhD, I focused on reconstructing a now-dismembered series of illuminated choir books, produced in Venice in the early fifteenth-century. This series of manuscripts—made for the Camaldolese monastery of San Mattia di Murano—was lavishly illuminated and contained script and music notation. In this talk, I will present some of the intellectual tools that I used to ‘recreate’ the original liturgical order in which the excised images once existed. I will discuss how palaeography played an important role in this process.

Dr Alison Ray, Carnegie Project Archivist (Medieval Manuscripts), Trinity College Dublin Library

The pecia system of the Paris university book trade and its users, 1250-1330

Paris was the leading centre of the university book trade in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the study of wide-ranging written and visual evidence available in surviving pecia manuscripts demonstrates the major influence of Paris intellectual life on English scholars, preachers and illuminators. The textual content, decoration and user-added marginalia of university-produced manuscripts provides a unique insight into the workings of the English cultural community at Paris during this period.

Online Course: Manuscripts in Arabic Script: Introduction to Codicology with Aga Khan University, 23-24 April 2021, 11:00 -15:00 (GMT)

This online course (2 days) aims to introduce Arabic manuscripts from a codicological and textual point of view. The first day will provide an overview of the field of codicology and it role in the manuscript field in general and in identifying the key features of the manuscript in particular. The second session will be dedicated to writing supports, the structure of quires, ruling and page layout, bookbinding, ornamentation, tools and materials used in bookmaking, and the palaeography of book hands. . Some practical examples will be given based on the lecturers’ long experiences. The second day will focus on the importance of manuscripts in research. While the first session will cover the Para-textual features in the Arabic manuscripts, the second session will demonstrate the different approaches in editing manuscripts.

This introductory course is intended for students, researchers and librarians who are working in the field of manuscript studies. In the two-day course, the lecturers will cover a wide range of aspects for those who are acquiring basic knowledge in this field.

Learning outcomes:

  • Basic understanding of the field of manuscript studies in general.
  • Identify the role of manuscripts in knowledge production in different areas studies in Muslim cultures.

Length of course: 2 days (4 lectures)

Course Convenors:

Dr Walid Ghali is the Head of the Aga Khan Library, London, Assistant Professor at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations and a Chartered Librarian of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). Also, he is a member of the Islamic Manuscript Association, University of Cambridge. Dr Ghali received his PhD from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 2012. His current research projects focus on the Islamic manuscript traditions, particularly in Arabic script, and the history of books. Dr Ghali teaches Sufism, Arabic literature and manuscript traditions. Before moving to London, Dr Ghali worked in various librarian roles at the American University in Cairo. He has also held several consultancy roles in and outside Egypt, such as the Ministry of Endowment, Qatar University and the Supreme Council for Culture in Kuwait.

Dr Anne Regourd is researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France. She has published extensively in the fields of History and Philology dealing with Codicology, Paper Studies, and Papyrology. She is the editor of book, The Trade in Papers Marked with Non-Latin Characters, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 2018, and heads the free access online journal, Nouvelles Chroniques du Manuscrit au Yémen.

Tickets: £80 for professionals | £50 for students, AKU alumni and staff. Register as soon as possible: https://bit.ly/375xxSY

Time: 23-24 April 2021, 11:00 -15:00 (London Time).

*The course will be delivered via Zoom. Readings and further details will be provided later upon registration.

Find out more here.

Online Lecture: ‘All the Stage’s a World: Vernacular Cartography and the Castle of Perseverance’ with Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee, 10 March 2021 at 5:00pm (EST)

The Medieval Studies program at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) invites you to an online lecture by Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee on 10 March 2021 at 5:00pm EST. Dr. Greenlee is a medieval cartographic historian. His research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. His lecture “All the Stage’s a World” will discuss issues of cartography in relation to the 15th-century morality play The Castle of Perseverance.

This lecture is sponsored by the Medieval Studies program at CUNY. The Graduate Center at CUNY is a leader in public graduate education and committed to doctoral and master’s education for the public good. Innovative research, rigorous scholarship, and collaborative and interdisciplinary learning define graduate education at CUNY, where students are prepared with creative, problem-solving expertise to thrive in and beyond the academy.

To register for this online lecture, please visit CUNY’s Medieval Studies website.

Online Lecture: ‘Christ, Fire, Gospels: Images of Theophany in the Chapel of Galla Placidia in Ravenna’ with Dr Maria Lidova, Cambridge Medieval Art Seminars, 1 March 2021, 17:00 (GMT)

Join the upcoming Cambridge Medieval Art Seminar with Dr Maria Lidova (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence), who will be presenting on: ‘Christ, Fire, Gospels: Images of Theophany in the Chapel of Galla Placidia in Ravenna’. The talk takes place online at 17:00 pm (GMT).

Register and find out more here.

Scholarships: British Archaeological Association Travel Grants, deadlines 15 March 2021 and 15 May 2021

Applications for travel grants are invited from students registered on post-graduate degree courses (at M.A., M.Litt., M.St., M.Phil., and Ph.D. level). Grants of up to £500 are available to cover travel for a defined purpose (such as essential site visits, attendance at an exhibition/conference, short research trip, etc). The awards will be made twice yearly, with deadlines for applications on 15 March 2021 and 15 May 2021.

Applicants are required to provide one reference, together with a timetable and travel budget, while the objective of the travel must fall within the Association’s fields of interest (as defined below). Applicants should either be registered at a UK University, or be undertaking work on material from, in, or related to, the art, architecture or archaeology of the British Isles. Applicants are also responsible for asking their nominated referee to forward a reference directly to the Hon. Secretary within one week of the closing date for applications.

An application form follows on a second page. Once complete this should be sent as an email attachment to the Hon. Secretary on secretary@thebaa.org Funds are limited, so the awards are competitive. Given current Covid-related travel restrictions, it is possible that successful applicants will be unable to undertake the travel for which an award was made. In that event, we would ask that the grant instead be used for high-quality dissertation or thesis illustrations or be used within a year for future travel with an art-historical or archaeological objective. If successful, the Association would like candidates to write a short account (150-350 words) of the travel facilitated by the award that could be posted on the BAA website.

The British Archaeological Association Travel Grant application form can be found here.Download

BAA STATEMENT OF INTEREST

The Association’s interests are defined as the study of archaeology, art and architecture from the Roman period to the present day, principally within Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The core interests of the BAA are Roman to 16th century. We only entertain applications that cover the 17th to 21st centuries if they are of an historiographical, conservationist or antiquarian nature and link back to the BAA’s core interests.

Call for Submissions: ‘Towards a Visual History of the Working Class’, Different Visions Journal, deadline 30 March 2021

The discipline of art history is closely tied to the art market and to wealthy donors and collectors, and for this reason has long identified with the upper class. Many art historians betray a tendency to identify with the elite. For example, Ruth Mellinkoff, in her fine book Outcasts, expresses a typical attitude when she asserts, “While we who live in the era of the common man publicly extol his virtues, privately we admire and covet the attributes of the upper class.” There are innumerable publications on medieval queens, wealthy art donors, and the luxury objects that they commissioned, but few studies concern the laboring class. In part this is because medieval sources are less interested in workers than in the elite. It is more difficult to write an art history from below because there are fewer textual and visual sources, but it can be done, as earlier scholars have shown. Outstanding examples include J. J. G Alexander’s study of peasants, Deidre Jackson’s essay on labor, and Ruth Mellinkoff’s book Outcasts, among others.

A future issue of Different Visions will be devoted to exploring those who labored. We welcome proposals for articles that explore any aspect that builds towards a visual history of the working class in the Middle Ages (400-1530). Essays may examine images of the laboring class or the objects that were part of their lives, or any other relevant topic. Michael Uebel and Kellie Robertson have shown that in every European language the medieval word for “labour” had an “unambivalent connotation of pain, suffering, and fatigue.” Do visual images confirm this? How is labor depicted? What role does the intersection of gender, race, and class play in medieval images of laborers? How does medieval art show animals or other nonhumans who labor? Have medieval images been used to support modern ways of seeing labor and capital, production and consumption? Does the Aristotelian contempt for labor affect medieval images? Which objects were associated with working class? Which material and immaterial qualities were associated with workers?

Please submit an abstract of about 150 words by March 30 2021 to Diane Wolfthal at dianewolfthal@yahoo.com. Those whose abstracts are selected for publication will be asked to submit their article by July 30. Contributors will then share their research through a zoom conference to be held Aug. 15. Final, revised drafts will be submitted Dec. 31 2021.

More information can be found here.

Online Lecture: ‘Cities and Surveillance in Spain and Beyond, 1200-1500’ with Dr Tom Nickson (Courtauld Institute), 24 February 2021, 18-19pm (GMT)

Organiser: Zurbarán Centre with ARTES Iberian & Visual Culture Group, Durham University

Climbing tall towers is an unmissable element of modern city breaks, rewarding breathless visitors with opportunities to survey the city below and capture it in photos. In this lecture I consider the long history of surveillance and image making. Focusing especially on the famous Giralda in Seville, and I will show how climbing towers was always implicated in the ‘imperial gaze’, and suggest that the growing popularity of tower climbing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be connected to the emergence of painted cityscapes and technologies of surveillance and map-making.

Dr Tom Nickson is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art & Architecture at the Courtauld Institute in London and Vice-Chair of ARTES. He is currently working on a book that surveys architecture in the Iberian Peninsula between 1150 and 1450.

The talk is free and open to all. It will last ca. 40 minutes and will be followed by Q&A. Booking is essential. Please email the Zurbarán Centre (Zurbaran.centre@durham.ac.uk) to register and to receive a zoom link. Please note registration closes 24 hours before the seminar.

Contact zurbaran.centre@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.