The latest research, news, and reviews from the world of Medieval Art History
The London Society for Medieval Studies is hosting a lecture on Tuesday
evening, January 12th, at 7.00pm in the Wolfson Room (NB01), IHR Basement,
Senate House (located on Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) by:
Paul Gazzoli (Cambridge) who will be speaking on ‘Royal Relations between the Danes and the Baltic Slavs in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’.
All those who are interested in Medieval Studies are very welcome to
attend the lecture.
The World Comes to Sinai:
St Catherine’s Monastery and its Library
as a Cultural Magnet
A Workshop-Conference of the Saint Catherine Foundation
Saturday, 6 February 2015, 10.00 to 13.00
Bridgewater House
14 Cleveland Row, SW1A 1DP, London
Programme
10.00 Welcoming Remarks
Jenny Richardson, Treasurer, Saint Catherine Foundation
10.10 How Did Syriac Manuscripts Get to Sinai?
Sebastian Brock, Department of Oriental Studies, Oxford
University
10.35 Visitors from Christian Orient and the Palimpsested Manuscripts
Claudia Rapp, Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek
Studies, Vienna University
11.00 Break
11.30 Sinai and the Market for Printed Books
Nicholas Pickwoad, Ligatus Centre, University of the Arts,
London
11.55 A View to the Future: The New Library Wing
Petros Koufopoulos, Department of Architecture,
University of Patras, Greece
12.20 Discussion, followed by Coffee and Conversation
RSVP:
secretary@saintcatherinefoundation.org
+44 (0) 20 7396 5420
Admission free
In the spirit of the tradition forged by the late Andrew Ladis and his colleagues at the University of Georgia, an international congress of Trecento specialists will congregate at Tulane University to share their research formally and informally in New Orleans, LA.
This call for papers invites scholars of all ages and stages to submit proposals for 20-minute discussions of specific art historical problems, issues, and ideas that focus on the arts of Italy during “the long fourteenth century” (late Dugento through early Quattrocento). MA students must provide a letter of support from a professor with whom they have taken a graduate level course.
Please submit paper proposal (500-word limit), and a CV by February 20, 2016 to: LadisTrecentoConference@gmail.com
The keynote speaker at the Tulane conference will be Marvin Trachtenberg, Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Thanks to the generous support of the Kress Foundation and other benefactors, we will not be charging any registration fees for this conference. Participants will be responsible for securing their own transportation and lodgings.
More information, including options for lodgings, will be posted soon on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/LadisTrecentoConference/) as well as on a Tulane website.
Conference registration will be on Eventbrite beginning May 1
This will be the inaugural Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference and we are very excited! The plan is for the conference to be held every other year, with a new venue and host institution each time. The 2nd conference will be hosted by the University of Houston in Houston, TX, in fall 2018.
The Graduate Union of Students of Art at the University of Toronto is still accepting abstractions for the third annual Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium, “Seeing and Believing.” The conference will take place at the University of Toronto on March 18, 2016, and will feature a keynote address by Jacqueline Jung of Yale University.
All graduate students in Art History or related fields are encouraged to apply. Submit abstracts of 300 words to gustasymposium@gmail.com by January 10, 2016. Please consult the attached CFP or our website, gustasymposium.wordpress.com for more information.
Extended deadline for abstract submission: abstracts are now due on Thursday, January 14
Web Site: http://sites.duke.edu/representationsoftheordinary/
The 16th Annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies invites graduate students to submit proposals for twenty-minute paper presentations that investigate representations of everyday life––mimetic, descriptive, or prescriptive––from late antiquity through early modernity. How are the particularities of ordinary experience shown, shaped, distorted, or elided in poetry, prose, visual art, architecture, music, drama, and other forms of creative endeavor? For that matter, what constitutes the concept of the ordinary, and how does the history of this concept interweave with the development of realism, alongside other modes of representation?
In short, we shall explore what is at stake in representing the ordinary. For whether the representation works toward a form of distinction or a claim to community, it cannot be neutral.
We encourage participants to explore an array of topics within this region of inquiry. (See list below. Note that it does not purport to be comprehensive. All pertinent concerns are welcome.) The North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies is a cooperative venture between UNC-Chapel Hill’s and Duke University’s programs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. We seek contributions from a broad range of humanistic and social-scientific disciplines––including, but not limited to History, Philosophy, Theology, Literary Studies, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Political Theory, Sociology, Anthropology, Art History, Musicology, Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Food Studies.
Interested graduate students should submit 250-word abstracts to representingtheordinary@gmail.com no later than Thursday, January 14, 2016. The body of the email should include the presenter’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information, but the abstract itself should be attached as a PDF or MS Word Document. Decisions will be announced by Monday, January 18, 2016.
Possible Subjects:
temporalities of the everyday, the diurnal
the ordinary in its tragic/comic aspects
mystery plays, guilds
liturgical practice, parochial variety
agency, habit, praxis
commerce, the quotidian, homo economicus
play, the aleatory, homo ludens
jokes and insults
song and dance
visions of language––ordinary and ideal, private and universal
materialities of communication––the body, gesture, physiognomy
pedagogy and learning
rise of the vernacular, semantic shift, lexicography
reading practices, history of reading, marginalia
gender, sexuality, and desire
manuals and guides for agrarian, domestic, or courtly life
households, lords and servants
the oikos and the polis
the ordinary and modernity; everyday life, pre/postmodern
the place of death and grief in life
representations of reality in writing
realism in painting and sculpture
realism and nominalism; the generic and the particular
common spaces, urban and rural
the built environment, orientation
imposed structures, functional objects
mechanization and machinery
print, mass production and dissemination
We are delighted to announce the next UCL IMARS Seminar of 2015-16. The seminar will be held on Monday, 18th January 2016 with Professor Jean-Claude Schmitt – Doyen of the modern Annales School – speaking. He will be presenting his latest book:
‘Les rythmes au Moyen Âge (Rhythms in the Middle Ages)’
As usual the seminar begins at 6:15pm, but in a break from tradition, it will be in the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL in the Common Ground, South Wing, Wilkins Building, UCL. It will, of course, be followed by a wine reception.
The programme for the first two terms of this year is online at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mars/seminars-lectures/imars
We hope to see many of you at this year’s seminars.
Best Regards,
The IMARS team
For more information on this seminar please contact: alejandra.concha.09@ucl.ac.uk
For information on the IMARS seminars generally please contact: benedict.wiedemann.09@ucl.ac.uk
Zuleika Murat, ‘I have not seen more precious tombs and burials with greater pomp’: Guariento and the Tomb of Doge Giovanni Dolfin in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice
The splendid tomb of Doge Giovanni Dolfin in the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice once consisted of a hanging canopy and tomb by Andrea da San Felice and decorations by the famous painter Guariento. Dr. Murat proposes a new hypothesis and a visual reconstruction of this important monument in one of Venice’s most significant locations.
All seminars this term are held at 5pm in the Keynes Library at Birkbeck’s School of Arts (Room 114, 43, Gordon Sq., London, WC1H OPD). A break at 5.50pm is followed by discussion and refreshments.
The Coll & Cortés Medieval Spain Seminar in the Research Forum South Room in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. By Dr Encarna Montero, University of Valencia
6-7pm, Monday 18th January, followed by a drinks reception. Free attendance, open to all
A significant number of sources for the study of architectural practise survive from medieval Spanish kingdoms when compared to other European territories. Apprenticeship contracts, drawings, sketches and masons’ inventories shed light on the means by which architectural knowledge was transmitted in the Iberian peninsula between 1370 and 1450. This body of evidence – much of it newly discovered – also challenges many long-held assumptions, even if several key problems remain unresolved: the training requirements for masons’ apprentices, the specific skills that defined a master, or the role of drawing in the building process.
This is the second in the Coll & Cortés Medieval Spain Seminars, which take the theme of ‘Gothic Architecture, New Approaches’ from 2015-17. The first lecture in the series was delivered by Eduardo Carrero in October 2015.
Some thirteenth century wall paintings of exceptional quality were discovered at Poitiers Cathedral earlier this year. Measuring 900 square metres, these murals were covered by whitewash in the eighteenth century.
You can read more here at France Bleu and watch a video here at la Nouvelle Republique
Best wishes for your winter holidays from all at Medieval Art Research!
Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2016
The University of St Andrews School of Art History in collaboration with the St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies (SAIMS) present
Re/generate: Materiality and the Afterlives of Things in the Middle Ages, 500-1500
an interdisciplinary conference on reuse and recycling in medieval Europe taking place on 6-7th May 2016.
In recent years, the discipline of Art History has been grappling with the concept of materiality, the very thingness of art. The material of medieval art, be it parchment, precious metal, gem, bone or stone, has emerged as a spearheading topic. Unsurprisingly, this “material turn” has prompted intriguing questions. To what extent does an ivory figure of the Virgin and Child embody the divine, rather than merely represent it? What exactly did pilgrims do with the holy dust or liquid which they carried away from saints’ shrines in little ampullae? It is within this context that we wish to explore how recycling was part of the medieval (re)creative process.
This conference will investigate the different ways in which medieval people used and reused goods, materials, and other elements from existing forms to create (or recreate) new art and architecture. Why did medieval people preserve, conserve, and recycle art and materials from a different era? Did such appropriation go beyond mere economic practicality? Could the very materiality of an object have been the reason for its retention or reinvention? The two-day conference is aimed at postgraduates and early career academics from a range of disciplines including, but not limited to history, art history, museum studies, archaeology, book studies and literature.
We invite twenty-minute papers on the following range of topics and their relationship to the study of materiality, recycling and reuse in middle ages:
Papers on other issues related to the study of materiality and reuse of materials in the Middle Ages or of medieval materials in post medieval practice are also welcome.
Please direct your submissions (250 word abstract) along with a short biography (100 word) to regenerate2016@st-andrews.ac.uk no later than 1st of February 2016.
Conference website regenerate2016.wordpress.com
Medieval Art Research