Replacement speaker: English and Scottish Art Patronage in Late Medieval France

A replacement speaker is sought for the following panel at Leeds
International Medieval Congress this July:

“English and Scottish Art Patronage in Late Medieval France: Book
Illumination in Times of War” (July 8, 9am-10.30am)

Late Medieval book production was characterised by a high degree of
cultural and artistic exchange between England, Scotland, and the
Continent, due to numerous military conflicts as well as economic,
ecclesiastical, dynastic, and diplomatic links. Patrons and artists
travelled a great deal across the Channel, contributing to the transfer
of ideas, style, and content, as well as devotional and liturgical
practice. Illuminated books served diverse purposes, from diplomatic
gifts and the representation of political ideas, to means of private
devotion and liturgy.

Papers for this session can focus on the production and use of these
books as well as their makers and patrons. Attention can be given to
the reciprocal transfer of stylistic, iconographic, and liturgical
orientation and influences, in the political context.

Abstracts for suggested twenty-minute papers should be submitted before
the 18 April to Julia Crispin (juliacrispin1982@gmail.com) and Alex
Collins (alexanderjarviscollins@gmail.com).

Exhibition: Les Enluminures (New York & Paris)

Vernacular-1This exhibition will seek to reveal a “new” history of medieval French literature by presenting a group of 15 very rare, previously unpublished, mostly illuminated manuscripts written in French between c. 1300 and c. 1550. The manuscripts encompass a wide variety of subjects ranging from literature and science, philosophy and theology, to history and government.

Of special interest will be a section within the exhibition devoted to the often overlooked but critically important role played by French medieval women in advancing the “mother tongue”.  As authors, subjects, patrons, and collectors, French women like the 16th- century patron and poet Catherine d’Amboise were important champions of the vernacular. Their advocacy helped ensure that French would overtake Latin in less than two centuries to become the national language of literature.

The exhibition will be on view at Les Enluminures New York, from April 2- 26, and Les Enluminures Paris, from May 13 – May 20. The INHA Paris Colloquium will take place on May 17.

For more information, please visit. http://www.lesenluminures.com/expodetail.php?cat=coming&expoid=47&

Call for papers: Mediterranean Visions/ Mediterranean Frame

MediterraneanOn 13-15 June 2014, the Sant’Anna Institute in Sorrento will host two events: a conference “Mediterranean Visions: Journeys, Itineraries and Cultural Migrations/ Visioni Mediterranee: Viaggi, Itinerari e Migrazioni Culturali” and a symposium, “History, Literature and Culture in a Mediterranean Frame.”

Paper proposals are being accepted for “Mediterranean Visions” (13 & 14 June), organized by Giovanni Spani (College of Holy Cross) and Marco Marino (Sant’Anna Institute). This conference will focus on the perceptions of the journey to/from/around the Mediterranean Sea, moving from Italian, European and extra-European perspectives (and with specific reference to the Americas), and concentrating on the theme of immigration/emigration to/from the Mediterranean Basin), the intercultural exchanges occurring between its shores, as well as new challenges (social and economic) facing the region from the globalized society and from the increasingly urgent democratic imperatives of the populations inhabiting it.

Selected conference papers will published in a volume of proceedings.

In conjunction with the conference, the symposium, “History, Literature and Culture in a Mediterranean Frame,” co-organized by Wake Forest University and the Mediterranean Seminar with the sponsorship of Centro di Cultura e Storia Amalfitana, will be held on 15 June, and is open to all.
Confirmed speakers include:
Brian A. Catlos (University of Colorado Boulder/University of California Santa Cruz)
John Dagenais (University of California at Los Angeles)
Sharon Kinoshita (University of California Santa Cruz)
Roberta Morosini (Wake Forest University)
Pasquale Sabbatino (Universita’ degli studi “Federico II’ di  Napoli)
Carlo Saccone (Universita’ di Bologna)
Roberto Tottoli   (Universita’ degli studi di Napoli  “L’Orientale”)
and
Prof. Giuseppe Gargano (Honorary President, Centro di Cultura e Storia Amalfitana)

For information regarding the symposium, please contact: mailbox@mediterraneanseminar.org

Conference Proposals
Please send your proposal (2 paragraph maximum) in Italian, English, Spanish, or French, along with a brief CV, to the conference Organizing Committee at mediterraneanvisions@gmail.com by April 10, 2014.

Please visit http://santannainstitute.com/en/conference-at-sant-anna-institute.php for more details and the list of topics.

Material Witness continues: Studying the Literary Archive and Stone Sculpture in-situ

C15 King at Westminster Hall ready for inspection
Medieval king at Westminster Hall ready for inspection

As well as the blog, the study days for Material Witness, a CHASE consortium-led initiative to engage emerging researchers with the physical artefact continue.

On the 8th of April, Shane Weller will be leading an investigation into the literary archive at the University of Kent, using the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett as a case study.

On the 9th May Kim Woods will head the Studying Stone Sculpture in-situ workshop at the Mercer’s Hall and St Helen’s, London.

There may be a few places left on these workshops so please contact J.A.Wackett@kent.ac.uk if you have any questions about the programme.

Publications

  • Spike Bucklow, The Riddle of the Image: the Secret Science of Medieval Art. Reaktion Books, 2014. ISBN: 978-1780232942riddle-image-255x330
  • Crusafont, M., Balaguer, A.M., Grierson, P., Medieval European Coinage: Volume 6, The Iberian Peninsula. Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN: 978-0521260145
  • Piana, M., and Carlsson, C., Archaeology and Architecture of the Military Orders: New Studies. Ashgate, 2014. ISBN: 9781472420534
  • Barbara Schedl, Der Plan von St. Gallen: Ein Modell europäischer Klosterkultur. Böhlau, 2014. ISBN: 978-3205795025
  • Cédric Giraud, Notre-Dame de Paris, 1163-2013. Brepols, 2013. ISBN: 978-2-503-54937-8

Upcoming Conference: ‘The Abbot’s Table’, Glastonbury Abbey, 13th June 2014

Conference on eating and monastic life in medieval England.

Chaired by Prof. Roberta Gilchrist (University of Reading).

Speakers include Prof. James Clark (University of Exeter), Prof. Chris Woolgar (University of Southampton) and Marc Meltonville (Hampton Court Palace).

For more info, email info@glastonburyabbey.com.

Call for Session Proposals: ‘Conquest: 1016, 1066’

An Interdisciplinary Anniversary Conference
St Anne’s College, Oxford, and TORCH, 20-23 July 2016

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Sessions will run in parallel for 90 minutes each. Session proposals of any suitable form are invited (3x20min papers, 2x30min papers, round tables, debates); session organisers are welcome to have speakers already in mind, but need not do so: a call for papers will follow. Session organisers are asked to nominate one or more of the thematic strands in which their session would fit:

1. The Church; monasticism, clerical reform, theology, religious experience
2. Literature, authors, and patronage
3. Language and multilingualism, language contact
4. Institutions and governance; lordship; kingship
5. Warfare, battles, conduct in war, fighting men
6. Art and material culture; music; court life
7. Society and peoples
8. Trade and commerce
9. Space, movement, contact, networks; England and Europe, England and Scandinavia
10. Historiography

Email session proposals to laura.ashe@ell.ox.ac.uk

Call for Papers: Knowing Nature in Medieval & Early Modern Worlds (College Park, 24-25 Oct 14)

University of Maryland, College Park, March 25, 2014
Deadline: 01.05.2014

The Graduate Field Committee in Medieval & Early Modern Studies at University of Maryland, College Park — an interdisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students — is excited to announce its call for this year’s conference:

Knowing Nature in the Medieval & Early Modern Worlds, Oct. 24-25, 2014

Nature, according to the critic Raymond Williams, is quite possibly “the most difficult word in the English language.” The genealogy of nature’s complexities—semantic, philological, epistemological, ontological—are the subject of this two-day conference that seeks to bring into dialogue historians of science, philosophy, art, and literature. How did early writers and artists and other thinkers know and encounter nature? What practices made nature legible? What ethics were thought to arise out of the environment? This event considers a wide variety of cultural productions in the medieval and early modern periods. By what metaphors and strategies did pre-modern people represent the sensible world of matter? This event considers a wide variety of cultural productions in the medieval and early modern periods, seeking to rethink the relation between fields of knowledge and to bridge the widening gap between the humanities and the sciences in our own universities.

Topics may include:
the analogies through which nature is known
the long history of environmentalism

materiality and its discontents
encyclopedism
natural occurrences, wonders, or cataclysms
landscapes and visual culture
natural and medical histories
histories of the body, human and otherwise
the relationship between the nature and the supernatural

Confirmed speakers include Jeffrey Cohen (GWU), Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins), Alan Mikhail (Yale), David Norbrook (Merton College, Oxford), Stephen Campbell (Johns Hopkins), Joanna Picciotto (UC Berkeley), David Simon (Chicago), Michael Witmore (Folger Shakespeare Library), Jessica Wolfe (UNC Chapel Hill), and Michael Sappol (National Library of Medicine).

Please submit paper proposals of 250 words to knowingnature@umd.edu by May 1.
Best, Chris Maffuccio

*
Christine Maffuccio
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Maryland
Graduate Assistant, UMD’s Graduate Field Committee in Medieval & Early Modern Studies
http://www.arhu.umd.edu/memum
http://www.facebook.com/memsum

Workshop: The Mosaics of Thessaloniki Revisited (London, 30 May 2014)

A One-Day Workshop at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London

Sponsored by the AG Leventis Foundation

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The mosaics of Thessaloniki provide the most comprehensive ensemble of Byzantine mosaics in the world, with examples from late antiquity right through to the fourteenth century. They present remarkable testimony to the skills of artists throughout the Byzantine millennium, and give insights into many aspects of Byzantine society and belief. They also document the changing concerns of the city and its relationship with the earthly and divine worlds. The publication of The Mosaics of Thessaloniki, 4th-14th century (Athens: Kapon editions, 2012), edited by C. Bakirtzis, E. Kourkoutidou-Nikolaidou and Ch. Mavropoulou-Tsiumi, has provided an exemplary documentation of the mosaics in the city, with photographs of exceptional quality. In the light of this book as well as the growing quantity of recent work on the mosaics this workshop will look once more at the issues and controversies surrounding the mosaics, especially their dating, contexts and meanings, but also to look at new ways forward in the study of this extraordinary group of monuments. The day includes papers which examine all the major mosaic monuments in the city, but there will be extensive time for discussion so that the controversies and relationships between them can all be discussed.

Programme
09.30-10.00: Registration

Session 1: Setting the Scene
10.00-10.10: Antony Eastmond, Introduction and Welcome
10.10-10.50: Beat Brenk, The mosaics of Thessaloniki: the state of research
10.50-11.20: Coffee

Session 2: Chaired by Jaś Elsner – Dates and Contexts: pre-Iconoclasm
11.20-12.00: Hjalmar Torp, Considerations on the Chronology of the Rotunda Mosaics
12.00-12.40: Charalambos Bakirtzis, The mosaics of Saint Demetrios basilica: Iconographical issues
12.40-13.15: chaired by Jaś Elsner – Discussion: dates, contexts and interpretations
13.15-14.10: Lunch

Session 3: Chaired by Judith Herrin – Dates and Contexts: post-Iconoclasm
14.10-14.50: Robin Cormack, After Iconoclasm – forwards or backwards?
14.50-15.30: Liz James, The mosaics of the church of the Holy Apostles: Byzantine mosaics in the fourteenth century
15.30-16.00: Tea

Session 4: Chaired by Liz James – Contexts and Colour in Thessaloniki
16.00-16.40: Laura Nasrallah, Representing the first-century Thessalonians: Early Christian Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles
16.40-17.20: Bente Kiilerich, Colour, Light and Luminosity in the Rotunda Mosaics
17.20-18.00: Myrto Hatzaki, Peacocks, Rainbows and Handsome Men: Perceiving Physical Beauty in the Early Byzantine Mosaics of Thessaloniki
18.00-18.10: Antony Eastmond, Conclusions
18.15: Reception

Booking for the conference is up on the website (under forthcoming conferences, soon to be moved into main section once the summer term programme is up). There are links to the programme and abstracts, and the online booking has also been opened (£12, £7 concessions).

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/calendar.shtml