The deadline for paper proposals for University of Reading, Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies (GCMS) 2-day conference, ‘Hybrids and Hybridity’ has now been extended to the 17th of February.
Aimed at providing a platform for post-grad and early career researchers examining the idea of hybrids and hybridity in the medieval and early modern periods, the conference offers a chance to present your work within an informal environment – be that a fully-formed paper or a more exploratory questioning of these concepts through themes including, but not limited to:
- Imagery
- Identity
- Gender
- Transition
- Liminality
For any questions or to submit an abstract, please feel free to contact the organizers at gcms.reading@gmail.com.
The book aims at challenging the current limits within the field of research related to English alabasters, in order to establish a new model of study. Over the last century many studies on English alabasters have been published, including exhibition catalogues, list of documents and archival sources, catalogues raisonnés of the most important collections. All these studies have marked key points in the scholarly approach to English alabaster carvings, but they have also imposed a stubbornly curt historiographical perspective. Indeed, these publications have mainly been focused on specific collections -e.g. Frances Cheetham’s Medieval English alabaster carvings in the Castle Museum of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1973)-, and have thus provided only a partial view on that artistic phenomenon. They ended up isolating English alabasters from their historical and cultural context. In addition, as Susan Ward has pointed out in her review to Frances Cheetham’s Alabaster Images of Medieval England (Speculum, 2006), these publications’ main focus was often traditional: their bulks describe the standard subject matters found in the alabasters (e.g. the Passion of Christ, the Life of the Virgin and the saints) and explain the literary sources of that subject matter in a sometime too basic way. The authors tend to isolate the pieces from their wider historical framework, lacking to consider the character of piety in late-medieval England, and failing to consider the sculptures from a comprehensive historiographical point of view.
Medieval Art Research 