Medieval Art Research

CFP: Second Fiddles in Medieval Rituals (Trondheim 20-22 September 2017)

Call for Papers Deadline 31 March 2017.

International Conference

Second Fiddles in Medieval Rituals

Department for historical studies NTNU, Trondheim 20-22 September 2017

This conference addresses the role, status and performance of secondary actors in medieval rituals, thus enabling us to diversify and deepen our understanding of rituals in pre-modern societies. Although peripheral to the engineering and execution of rituals in a formal sense, the postures and actions of these ancillary players often made their participation vital for the success of the rituals’ primary agents. What roles did secondary actors play in medieval rituals and what were the deeper meanings ascribed to them? What relation did they have to central actors? Did they operate individually on their own volition or as representatives serving broader group interests? How freely could they maneuver within and influence the rituals in which they participated?

Although relegated to a subordinate tier within the formal hierarchy of ritual service, their role and status was not immutable. With every ritual came new opportunities for secondary actors to renegotiate the divisions of service. How and to what end did secondary actors alter their role, status and performance? Can we identify disruptions that challenged the hierarchies of ritual (coups, initiatives), and what was the meaning and purpose for restructuring ritual performances?

Above all, this conference seeks to trace the changing functions and performances of secondary actors over time and in relation to their evolving political and cultural contexts. In doing so, we will also explore the sources for reading medieval rituals, including codifications and narrative portrayals, and the manner in which these works’ authors depicted the role and status auxiliary ritual agents. While these are some of the suggested avenues for exploration, contributors are invited to enrich the topic with related themes of their choosing.

We welcome proposals for relevant papers, to be presented in English and roughly 20 minutes in length. Proposal should include the author’s name, affiliations and address, a brief author biography/CV and an abstract of roughly 500 words. All proposals will be reviewed by a scientific committee.

Proposals should be submitted to david.bregaint@ntnu.no no later than 31 March 2017. Notification of acceptance will be given on 28 April 2017. It is the intention of the organizers to publish the conference proceedings.

CFP: CEMS International Graduate Conference (Budapest, 1-3 Jun 17)

Budapest, Central European University, June 1 – 03, 2017
Deadline: Jan 31, 2017

The Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) at Central European
University and its junior members are proud to announce the forthcoming
Fifth International Graduate Conference on Building, Bending, and
Breaking Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean World.

This three-day conference invites graduate students of Late Antique, Islamic, Jewish,
Byzantine, Medieval, Ottoman studies, and related disciplines, to present their research on the manifold and complex processes of constructing, negotiating, transgressing, and subverting social, political, cultural, or confessional boundaries in the eastern Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Early Modern period.

Conference Description

What is a border? What are the sites and strategies of
boundary-construction and who are its agents? Boundaries shape and
forge categories by enforcement and reinforcement of power ingrained
within a built environment, conceptual or physical. Thus, they do not
necessarily indicate territorial margins, but can also embrace
theoretical, temporal, and metaphorical borders. They can be natural or
artificial, sharp or blurry; they can be understood in positive and/or
negative terms as means of protection or as instruments of exclusion;
and they can mark conceptual territories, such as “the human,” “the
holy,” “the family,” or “the natural world.” Triggered by new waves of
immigration, the meaningfulness of state borders and the necessity of
their control have been subject to debate, alongside questions
concerning the boundaries surrounding identities, cultures or
religions. Moving beyond the border of nation-states and the “clash of
civilizations” paradigm, the main objective of this conference is to
explore the historically contingent, fluid, and dynamic nature of
borders by shedding light on the intricate mechanisms through which
boundaries were erected, maintained, crossed, and transgressed
throughout the eastern Mediterranean world.

Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

Border ontologies and epistemologies
Negotiating, contesting, and appropriating spaces – sites of cultural,
religious, social, political, economic, artistic encounters,
transformations, and exchange
The dynamics of borders and identities – the role of different sensory
mechanisms in (re)articulating communal boundaries and identities,
multiple identities and cultural mobility
Practices of representation – multisensory engagement with various
aspects of daily life, the anthropology of smells and sounds, sumptuary
restrictions on food
Bordering the body – the politicization of bodily images and the
genderization of conflicts
Geopolitics, power practices, sovereignty
Politics of translation as means of enforcement, representation, and/or
appropriation
Please submit by January 31, 2017 a short paper proposal (no more than
250 words, together with a brief biography and contact information) to
the following address: cemsconference@ceu.edu

Keynote Speakers

Verena Krebs (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

David Thomas (University of Birmingham)

Greg Woolf (Institute of Classical Studies, London)

Accommodation and Travel Grants

All participants will be offered accommodation for the full duration of
the conference (3 nights) at the CEU Residence Center. In order to
encourage the participation of individuals with limited institutional
support a small number of partial travel grants will be available to
cover travel expenses. Those who wish to be considered for the grant
should include an additional justification alongside their paper
proposals. Please note that there is no conference fee. For further
information, do not hesitate to contact the organizers at
cemsconference@ceu.edu .

CFP: The Origins of the Islamic State: Sovereignty and Power in the Middle Ages (London, Feb 2017)

CfP: The Origins of the Islamic State: Sovereignty and Power in the Middle Ages

February 16^th-17^th 2017, University College London

Deadline for abstracts: December 4^th 2016.

Organiser: Corisande Fenwick (UCL)

The medieval roots of the Islamic state have never been more relevant or misunderstood. Early Islamic history is used to bolster Daesh propaganda of establishing a new caliphate as well as to justify the imposition of strict Sharia law, the oppression and genocide of religious minorities, and the destruction of Islamic (and pre-Islamic) heritage at an unprecedented rate. In turn, Daesh and other Wahhabi and Salafi groups are often critiqued as medieval in their methods and stance. These developments pose significant challenges for scholars of the early Islamic world.

A two-day colloquium hosted by the UCL Institute of Archaeology and generously funded by the British Academy under its Rising Star Engagement Award scheme seeks to bring together historians, archaeologists and art historians to discuss and debate the emergence and development of the earliest Islamic states and the nature of Muslim sovereignty between 600-1000CE, and to open up discussions about how to challenge static and simplistic notions of Islamic statehood outside the academy. The focus is global and comparative and papers are invited from across the early Islamic world – the Middle East, Islamic West, Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and beyond – that consider these issues. The aim is to explore the problem of the early Islamic state from these different disciplinary and regional perspectives and open up a range of ways looking at power and politics in the Islamic context.

Papers of ca. 20 minutes in length are invited on the following core themes:

Theoretical and methodological approaches to Islamic states
Discourse, authority and legitimization in different media (documentary, epigraphy, architecture, art, numismatics etc.)
Muslim sovereignty and rulership
The workings of the early caliphate and Islamic states
The use and abuse of early Islamic history today

Funding is available to support the travel and accommodation costs of early career researchers from the UK and overseas (defined as being within 10 years of award of PhD or advanced postgraduates) who work on the history, archaeology or art history of the early Islamic State. Scholars funded through this scheme will also attend a workshop before the conference “Researching the Islamic State: New Challenges and New Opportunities”.

Abstracts of 200-250 words should be sent to Corisande Fenwick (c.fenwick@ucl.ac.uk) by Sunday, 4 December 2016. Presenters will be informed by Friday December 9^th, 2016.

Resource: Academic Illustrating Services

Can you imagine a faster, easier and more immediate communication than a drawing? Probably not… A drawing is more persuasive than a thousand words: even a simple reconstruction will strengthen your ideas and make them tangible. The illustrating service I offer is addressed to academics, researchers, museums, cultural institutions and publishers, mostly in archaeology and art-related subjects, but also in any other field which requires drawings. It consists in the creation of high-quality illustrations generated on professional computer software, which are generally used in books, academic papers and museum display panels:

https://sites.google.com/site/matildegrimaldi/

For some years now I have been preparing a wide range of illustrations including:

Architectural drawings
Ground floor plans
Axonometric building projections
Reconstructions of archaeological findings
3D reconstructions
Maps

… and much more!

Click here to see a selection of my work, and please do not hesitate to get in touch for any queries.

I look forward to hearing about your project!

Matilde Grimaldi

Call for Applications to Attend: An Interdisciplinary Workshop with Christiane Gruber (Copenhagen, 27th March 2017)

MEDIEVAL ASCENSION NARRATIVES IN ISLAMIC AND EUROPEAN TRADITIONS

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

An Interdisciplinary Workshop with Christiane Gruber (University of Michigan) Organized by the Centre for Medieval Literature and the David Collection

Copenhagen, David Collection, 27 March 2017

Deadline for applications: Saturday 10 December 2016

A one-day workshop on medieval ascension narratives, from al-Sarai’s Nahj al-Faradis to the Liber Scale Machometi and Dante’s Commedia, will be held at the David Collection, Kronprinsessegade 30, Copenhagen, on Monday 27 March 2017. It will be followed by a public lecture on Tuesday 28 March 2017 by Prof. Christiane Gruber (University of Michigan), who has written widely on Islamic book arts, ascension images and narratives, and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. This workshop—conducted by Prof. Gruber and an interdisciplinary team of art and literary historians from the Centre for Medieval Literature and the David Collection—will allow for a sustained analysis of the changing values conferred upon ascension texts and images in cross-cultural contexts. We will focus on their circulation in Islamic lands and Europe, since the notion of rising into the heavens was imagined in prose, verse, manuscript paintings, and wall frescoes from Ilkhanid Persia to Medieval Castile and Renaissance Italy. Ascension narratives served as a powerful tool for expressing and exploring theological, philosophical, spiritual, and soteriological concerns in literature and art, within both Christian and Muslim traditions. For these reasons, this workshop seeks to open new avenues and approaches, asking, in particular, how can we conceptualize narratives that travel and are adapted, reformed, and reimagined across various temporal and geographical domains. Additionally, how can we explore questions of world (or trans-imperial) literature through medieval ascension narratives? Is this possible through a sustained engagement with both text and image, positioning the artistic with the literary and vice versa?

Scholars from Denmark and abroad will have the unprecedented opportunity to examine some of the extraordinary manuscripts and precious objects preserved in the David Collection during a private visit led by the museum’s curators and Prof. Gruber.

The workshop is sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Literature in cooperation with the David Collection. Participation is free, and places available are limited to 15 in number. Participants will have to bear costs for travel and accommodation themselves.

Postgraduate students and early career scholars willing to become more familiar with questions of cross-cultural engagement, text and image issues, and medieval narratives are particularly encouraged to apply regardless of their disciplinary expertise. Please send motivation letters (max. 1000 words) explaining your research interests and reasons for applying, along with a brief CV, to either Shazia Jagot (jagot@sdu.dk) or Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto (rosa.rodriguezporto@york.ac.uk) by Saturday 10 December 2016. Applicants will be notified of the decision by Monday, 18 December 2016.

CFP: Concealment and Revelation in the Art of the Middle Ages (Nicosia, 22-24 september 2017)

International Conference: Concealment and Revelation in the Art of the Middle Ages

Nicosia, 22-24 September 2017

CFP Deadline: 30 April 2017

‘To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim’ – thus Oscar Wilde in his aphoristic Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In the western intellectual tradition, art has repeatedly been conceived and understood as existing at the intersection of the antithetical notions of concealment and revelation – from the old unattributed adage that ‘it is true art to conceal art’ (ars est celare artem) to Robert Rauschenberg’s lapidary statement about the ability of a work of art to reveal something beyond itself (‘A light bulb in the dark cannot show itself without showing you something else too’, scribbled in pencil on the photo collage entitled Random Order, c. 1963). Veiled or unveiled, obscured or illuminated, opaque or transparent, works of art are often invested with meaning(s) and function(s) at the liminal moment of transition from the one state to the next; after all, to resort again to Wilde’s witty prose, ‘the commonest thing is delightful, if one only hides it’.

Recent scholarship on medieval art has brought such considerations to the fore, by tackling issues of screening, veiling / unveiling, temporal and performative transformations, the permeability of barriers and the movement of objects in space, among others. The visibility of sacred relics and their reliquaries, the metal revetments and textile curtains of miracle-working icons, the folding wings of northern European altarpieces, the parting womb of the Vierges ouvrantes or Schreinmadonnen and the porosity of choir screens East and West have all received fairly extensive treatment in monographic studies and specialist articles. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of these individual phenomena within a broader framework, encompassing both the religious and secular sphere, as well as several different religious traditions, has only seldom been attempted.

The present conference aspires to explore the role of the concept and the act of concealment and revelation in the arts of the Latin West, Byzantium, Islam and Judaism in the course of the Middle Ages (defined chronologically as c. 500-c. 1500). Subjects to be broached include, but are not limited to, the use of curtains or veils in screening objects or spaces; the function of permeable screens (in a variety of materials and media) in structuring accessibility, whether physical, visual, aural or spiritual; the performative aspect of concealing and revealing in all its civic and private manifestations, and the issues of emotional manipulation thereby raised; the role of gesture and spatial motion in the performance of concealment and revelation; the hierarchy of sacred and secular space as the outcome of its compartmentalisation; and the representation of these practices in the pictorial arts.

The conference is planned as a three-day event, to take place at the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus, Nicosia, in 22-24 September 2017. Due to budgetary constraints, the speakers’ travel and accommodation expenses cannot be covered, but every effort will be made to secure conference rates at hotels near the conference venue. There is no registration fee for participation or attendance.

Prospective speakers are invited to submit electronically a title and a 300-word abstract (in either English or Greek) for consideration by 30 April 2017. Please send all materials and address all queries to the conference convenors, Michalis Olympios (olympios.michalis@ucy.ac.cy) and Maria Parani (mparani@ucy.ac.cy).

CFP: Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

COMITATUS: A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES, published annually under the auspices of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, invites the submission of articles by graduate students and recent PhDs in any field of medieval and Renaissance studies.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR VOLUME 48 (2017): 1 FEBRUARY 2017.

The Comitatus editorial board will make its final selections by early May 2017. Please send submissions as email attachments to Dr. Blair Sullivan, sullivan@humnet.ucla.edu.

UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/publications/comitatus.html

CFP: The Black Prince and Canterbury Cathedral (16-17th November 2017), deadline 30 January 2017

Proposals for papers are invited for the two day conference ‘The Black Prince and Canterbury Cathedral’ (working title) to be held at Canterbury Cathedral on the 16th and 17th November 2017. The conference is part of a wider project to preserve and research the material culture of the Black Prince held at Canterbury Cathedral and it is supported by the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury and the Heritage Lottery Fund through The Canterbury Journey project.

This conference will explore and appraise current and developing studies of the Black Prince, his life, his influence past and present, and will contextualise him within the cathedral setting. A keynote address will be complemented by a series of presentations and panel discussions and unique and unusual access to the architecture of the Cathedral.

The aim of the conference is to offer a vibrant and challenging perspective on the field, review ongoing projects and public and scholarly engagement.

Original proposals are welcome from professionals, rising and established academic scholars and graduate students. Submissions are invited on topics including, but not limited to:

Architecture associated with the Black Prince
Religion and piety in the 14th century
The Black Prince’s Achievements – their construction, provenance and conservation
The wider material culture of the Black Prince
Women’s history in the 14th century
The Black Prince and his spiritual and secular links with Canterbury
The funeral and burial of the Black Prince, his tomb, tester and his effigy and their context
Literature, music and artistic achievements of the mid to late 14th century
The Black Prince and his position in history – changing perspectives

Guidelines for proposals:

Presentations of papers will be 40 minutes in length with an additional 10 minutes for questions.
Papers in this context could be individual or joint presentations, panel discussions or interactive workshops.
Proposals should include the presenter’s name, position and institutional affiliation, the paper’s title, an abstract of up to 250 words, a biography of up to 200 words (written in the third person), and a contact e-mail address.

Proposals for joint presentations or panel discussions should include the above for each speaker, and in the case of a panel discussion a paragraph of up to 250 words describing the panel’s rationale.

Proposals for papers should be emailed to Sarah Turner and Heather Newton by 30th January 2017, using the following email addresses: sarah.turner@canterbury-cathedral.org and Heather.Newton@canterbury-cathedral.org. Informal enquiries in advance of this deadline are welcome.

All presenters will receive their travel and accommodation costs (up to a maximum of £200) and free entry to the conference.

Full registration details will be available in March 2017. Limited student bursaries may be available, more details to follow.

New Publication: The Age of Opus Anglicanum, edited by M.A.Michael

This book attempts to re-assess the importance of English medieval embroidery as a unique cultural phenomenon.

This volume, the first to appear in a series of Studies in English Medieval Embroidery, contains the papers delivered at a Symposium held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in February 2013, which was designed to re-vitalize research and public awareness of a significant medium of medieval art.

During the period which has become known as the great age of Opus Anglicanum between c.1200 and 1400, kings, popes and high ranking prelates all over Europe vied with each other in their desire to own English medieval embroidery. Such vestments were first mentioned as ‘English Work’ (Opus Anglicanum) in the papal archives because of their distinctive style rather than their technique – although most also display skilful use of gold embroidery in what is known as ‘underside couching’, a method of embroidering silver-gilt thread so that it is both pliable and displays the maximum amount of thread on the surface of the garment. The imagery achieved in this special medium is comparable with the luxurious illuminated manuscripts produced in England during the Middle Ages and forms a repository of some unique iconography.

The essays included here break new ground in the understanding of both liturgical and secular embroidery, covering topics such as interesting iconographic aspects found in Opus Anglicanum; hitherto unpublished data from the royal accounts of Edward III related to commissions and payments to embroiderers and embroideresses; and a detailed study of late medieval English palls accompanied by a Handlist of the major extant examples. Of particular importance is the inclusion of the Evelyn Thomas Collection of pre-digital images of Opus Anglicanum work, now digitized in its entirety at the Princeton Index of Christian Art.

The wealth of illustrations in this volume – over 180 images and comparative material from other forms of medieval art – are all in full colour.

Dr M.A. Michael is a professorial Fellow of the University of Glasgow and Academic Director at Christie’s Education. He has published widely on English medieval manuscripts, stained glass and panel painting.

Table of Contents: www.brepols.net

240 p., 5 b/w ills, 185 col. ills, , 225 x 300 mm, 2016, ISBN 978-1-909400-41-2

From Harvey Miller Publishers, an imprint of Brepols Publishers

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