The latest research, news, and reviews from the world of Medieval Art History
Publication News: New Issue of Al Masaq. Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean
The latest issue of Al Masaq is now available online, including articles by Ermioni Karachaliou on the Island of Aegina, Florin Curta on markets in Tenth-Century al-Andalus, Ulisse Cecini on Mark of Toledo’s Latin Quran translation, and Ana Echevarria on Islamic confraternities and funerary practices.
Also reviewed in the journal are: Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of John Pryor, The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Byzantine Religious Culture: Studies in Honor of Alice-Mary Talbot, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt, and The Public Figure: Political Iconography in Medieval Mesopotamia.
See the journal online at Taylor and Francis Online: here.
Call For Papers: Art’s Productive Economies
University of Toronto, March 20, 2014
Deadline: Jan 1, 2014
2014 Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium, a one-day graduate symposium hosted by the Graduate Union of Students of Art, University of Toronto.
Given the multivalent definitions “work” denotes (including, but not limited to: the product of labour; action involving effort directed toward a definite end; and the operation of a force in producing physical change), it is possible to understand the work of art – and noless, the art of work – through a wide range of critical perspectives. Whether in the process of making art, the products of art, and / or the overarching labour networks in which art exists, how can one think of work and art together in ways that do not unduly privilege one term over the other? How should one situate art as work within both creative and economic labour markets? And how – if at all – can one conceive work as art in light of the conditions those markets entail?
That is, how does work negotiate the material dimensions of labour, production, and capital vis-à-vis the aesthetic dimensions of practice, process, and products? Indeed, such questions only begin to scratch the surface of this relation that lays at the heart of aesthetic production. To these questions, we invite proposals for scholarly papers spanning all relevant fields and time periods that touch upon the relation between art and work within the aesthetic, social,
political, and cultural economies that encompass these terms.
Sample topics include, but are not limited to:
– Representations of work and/or workers throughout visual culture.
– The physical labour of artmaking processes and practices
– Distributions of labour within artist studios (e.g. those of
Rembrandt, Warhol, etc.)
– Disjunctions and correlations between conceptual and material labour
in artmaking and/or art institutions
– The practice of art history / curating / etc. as forms of “the work
of art”
– The aesthetic consequences of immaterial labour / post-Fordism /
economic globalization / etc.
– The unseen labour practices that support art institutions (e.g.
museum employees, art handlers, interns, etc.)
– The figure of the artist as worker
– The functional “work” of art objects.
Current graduate students may submit an abstract of 200-300 words (outlining 15-20 minute presentations) and a brief CV to gustasymposium@gmail.com by January 1, 2014.
Please see gustasymposium.wordpress.com for more information.
Call For Papers: Medworlds 6 “Symbols and Models of the Mediterranean”
University of Calabria, Department of Humanities, September 9-11, 2014
Deadline: 1 March 2014
The Mediterranean Sea is a milieu in which it is possible to observe, through an interdisciplinary lens, the undertaking of elements defining an idea which conflicts with its immediate sensitive aspect; an idea that arises from life situations and the imaginary world of every man. Nevertheless, it remains a context in which is possible to observe the presence and the constant use of historical symbols, patterns and models of those people inhabiting its shores, as embedded in both the artistic and material production, as well as in the literary one.
The Mediterranean Sea could be investigated as a real geographical and historical referee, that has generated, and continues to generate symbols; but it can be also interpreted as the metaphor and allegory of the “encounters and clashes” between near and distant people. There are symbols and models by which is possible to perceive and understand convergences and contacts, and disclose common identities, even when considering specific differences of the people.
The theme of this interdisciplinary conference will focus on these issues:
– The symbols (signs, gestures, objects, animals, persons) capable of bringing to mind meanings deeply interconnected with the development of each of Mediterranean society.
– The importance of tangible and intangible models serving as examples to reproduce and imitate the evidence that have marked and conditioned the life of the Mediterranean people from a political, religious, economic, and social viewpoints.
We welcome the submission of 250-word abstracts for twenty-minute papers that broadly address the above themes, and that may address, but not be limited by, the following topics:
– Symbols and models disclosing common identities.
– Symbolical landmarks
– Symbols of the State and Political Power as institutional models
– Religious symbols
– Settlements patterns and historical-economic models
– Natural elements (living beings typical of the Mediterranean area bearing a symbolic value)
– Literary production as often recording the centrality of the Mediterranean as a complex and contradictory allegory.
– Redefining Mediterranean boundaries as precarious and mobile limits, but also as bridges between lands and shores
– The metaphor of the Mediterranean and the dialectic between the hegemonic power of the centers and the potential destabilizing peripheries.
Abstract Submissions:
Abstracts should be no more than 250 words and should include at least 3 descriptive keywords, the presenter’s name, email address, organization, and mailing address. The languages of the conference will be English and Italian.
Please send your abstract submissions to: m.salerno@unical.it; luca.zavagno@gmail.com
Notification of acceptance will be communicated by 1 April 2014
Call For Papers: Medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean, Modena
Modena, 26-29 June 2014
Deadline: 23 December
The Mediterranean Seminar/UCMRP seeks proposals for papers for a panel on Medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean to be proposed for the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, that will take place 26-29 June 2014 at the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy.
Papers in any of the conference languages and from any relevant disciplines are welcome; graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply. Proposals should either situate Iberian historical phenomena in a Mediterranean or extra-peninsular frame, address the influence or movement of people, institutions, cultural trends, or engage in a inter-regional comparative analysis.
Please send a title, 250-word abstract and a 2-page CV, to brian.catlos@mediterraneanseminar.org with the subject heading “ASPHS proposal” no later than 23 December 2013. Please indicate if you will require audio-visual support. University of California faculty and graduate students may apply for travel assistance through the Mediterranean Seminar.
Call For Papers: Magic | Religion | Science
Indiana University, Bloomington. March 7-8, 2014
Deadline: 10 January 2014
26th Annual Indiana University Medieval Studies Symposium
In his famous work, The Golden Bough, James Frazer proposed that human societies evolved from cultures dependent on magic to ones subject to religion and finally to ones guided by science. Scholarship since Frazer has worked to destabilize and expand upon this tidy theory, pointing out that the distinctions between these three categories of belief are not always clear and that, in fact, all three tend to exist simultaneously within the same societies, schools, and even individuals. Nonetheless, Frazer’s division of belief into magical, religious, and scientific modes of thought provides a useful lens for examining the ways that truth can be legitimated, and offers us a clear heuristic paradigm for exploration into human thought and behavior throughout history. Asking questions about magic, religion, and science offers us avenues into different epistemes and windows into the habitus of a group or society.
It is particularly useful for exploring the Middle Ages, which presents a wealth of examples in which the boundaries between magic, religion, and science are blurred, re-drawn, or entirely confounded. Indeed, the designation “medieval” across cultures often signifies a perceived interim period, between classical and modern thinking, in which multiple paradigms–magic and superstition, the hegemony of religion, and scientific exploration–coexist and compete for dominance. Investigating magic, religion, and science further within the context of the Middle Ages helps us not only to understand medieval thinking and culture more accurately and to see how the boundaries of magic, religion, and science were policed at the time, but to disturb modern assumptions about the operation of knowledge in these time periods.
Questions may include (but are not limited to):
– What role did “magical” items/practices (such as amulets, oaths, and curses) play in medieval life, and on what principles were they thought to operate? How, if at all, were they distinguished from religious or scientific practices?
– How does the examination of epistemology help undermine or reinforce distinctions between elite and popular culture?
– How (and how effectively) did medieval religious authorities police the boundaries of religious thought?
– What pursuits were seen as “science” and what distinguished them from other forms of inquiry?
– How did knowledge, obtained through magic, religion, science, or any combination of the three, affect life in the Middle Ages?
– How is scientia used and defined in the Middle Ages, considering that the modern word “science” in modern parlance often denotes an exit from the medieval world and into the Renaissance?
– How do epistemologies vary between genres? For example, how do the views of a culture’s technical texts vary from its literary texts?
Please submit 300-word abstracts to Diane Fruchtman (dsfrucht@indiana.edu) by 10 January, 2013.
Call For Papers: Seminar Series, Art on the Move in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean (2014-15)
Deadline: Jan 10, 2014
A Harvard University Research Seminar organized as part of the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, led by Alina Payne (Harvard University).
This research seminar zeroes in on rivers as the cultural infrastructure of the Mediterranean world in the early modern period, as carriers of people, things, and ideas tying geographies and cultures together. The king of such rivers was undoubtedly the Danube, running a parallel
course to the Mediterranean and cutting across Europe from West to East. Flowing into the Black Sea, it entered the system of communicating vessels of the Mediterranean—the old Roman mare nostrum itself, the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea, and, the last ripple that separates and unites three continents, the Sea of Azov.
But the Danube was not alone in swelling the Mediterranean world with the cultures along its shores. The Sava, the Adige, the Neretva, the Pruth, the Dniester and Dnieper, and the Don (which flows into the Sea of Azov) etc. connect the “traditional” Mediterranean cultures—the
Italian, the Ottoman, the Greek/Byzantine, the French and Spanish—with the world of the Balkans and beyond. Starting from this perspective, this seminar seeks to develop a framework for understanding how the Balkans and its northern neighbors mediated between East and West, as well as the region’s contribution to the larger Mediterranean cultural melting pot in the early modern period.
The premises underlying this seminar are twofold: 1) that the contours of the Mediterranean Renaissance need to be re-drawn to include a larger territory that reflects this connectedness; and 2) that the eastern frontier of Europe extending from the Mediterranean deep into the
interior played a pivotal role in negotiating the dialogue between western Europe, Central Asia and Ottoman Turkey. On the cusp between cultures and religions, Balkan principalities, kingdoms, and fiefdoms came to embody hybridity, to act as a form of buffer or cultural “switching” system that assimilated, translated, and linked the cultures of near and Central Asia with those of Western Europe. Taking a trans-regional approach, this project aims to reconstruct the fluid ties that linked territories in a period in which hegemonies were short-lived and unstable, and in which contact nebulas generated artistic nebulas that challenge traditional historical categories of regional identities, East/West and center/periphery.
The seminar will run from spring of 2014 to summer of 2015 and will be guided by a distinguished group of scholars. Participants are invited to propose their own projects related to these themes on which they will work during this period. We seek contributions on building types (eg. carvanserais/ hans), infrastructure (bridges, fortifications and roads), domestic architecture (villas/palaces), religious and domed structures, etc., building practices, materials and artisans, on Kleinarchitektur and portable architectural objects. Proposals are also invited from participants working on spolia, on “minor” arts—cloth/silks, goldsmithry, sculpture, leather, gems and books—as well as on collecting and treasuries, that is, on artworks and luxury items that allowed ornamental forms and formal ideas to circulate and created a taste for a hybrid aesthetic, as well as on historiography.
The countries under consideration here are: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.
The seminar involves three stages: 1) a two-week “mobile” workshop traveling along the Dalmatian coast and using this region as case study of the issues, historiography and methodologies that this project seeks to foreground (May/June 2014); 2) a two and a half week stay at Harvard University (2 day workshop focusing on interim presentation of participants’ findings and 2 week library access in January/February 2015); and 3) a final conference (presentation of developed individual projects) and short trip to key sites on the Black Sea. On-going participation in the seminar will be based on the quality of scholarly contribution and on the level of engagement with the group.
Applicants should be post-doctoral scholars working in the Eastern European countries on which the project focuses (maximum 10 years from a doctoral degree; doctoral degree must be in hand at time of application). Travel expenses are covered. The seminar language is English: participants will need to demonstrate a strong command of the language to enable wide-ranging discussion with the other members of the seminar. Facility with languages of the region is an asset.
Applications must include: CV, personal statement, description of proposed project (500 words + one page bibliography), one published writing sample and three letters of reference are due no later than January 10, 2014. Finalists will be interviewed; participants will be notified by early
February.
Please send applications to the attention of Elizabeth Kassler-Taub, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University: ekassler@fas.harvard.edu
Proposals are being accepted for the one-day symposium “Minorities in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean” to be held in conjunction with the Mediterranean Seminar/UCMRP Winter Workshop on “Minorities” to be held at San Francisco State University on 7-8 March, 2014.
On 7 March, three round-table sessions, “Opportunity,” “Assimilation and Exchange,” and “Vulnerability” will be held, each for discussing the status and circumstances of minorities. Minorities may include religious minorities, for example, Jews and Christians living in Muslim lands, Muslims and Jews in Christian lands, but also relations of heterodox groups within these three broad religious categories (e.g. Isma’ilis or Nusayris with Sunni Muslims, Karaites and Rabbinic Jews, Eastern or Byzantine and Latin Christians, etc.). The theme may also include ethnic minorities, such as Berbers in predominantly Arab locales or Slavs in predominantly Greek environments. “Opportunity,” will look at situations in which minorities exceeded formal bounds to which they were subject and potentially transgressed existing social norms; “Assimilation and Exchange,” will look at situations of social, cultural, intellectual, religious, and economic interchange and integration; and “Vulnerability” will look at scenarios in which minority relations broke down, whether in terms of official or popular violence or repression.
To apply to one of the round tables, please submit a CV and a 300-word abstract relating to a theoretical or methodological position on one of the above themes (indicating clearly which panel you are applying to). Case studies may also be referred to. Round-table participants will submit a short (5-page) position paper prior to the meeting, and will make a brief (7-minute) presentation as an opener to discussion.
The deadline for submission is January 1, 2014
Please reply to mailbox@mediterraneanseminar.org with the subject line “Winter Symposium Proposal.” Presenters who also attend the Workshop will be eligible to apply for limited travel support.
Presenters are also being sought for the Workshop on “Minorities” on 8 March:
The Workshop will consist of discussion of three pre-circulated papers and a keynote presentation by our featured scholar, Stephen Humphreys (History, University of California-Santa Barbara), “Adapting to the Infidel: the Christian Communities of Syria in the Early Islamic Period.”
The Mediterranean Studies MRP invites proposals for workshop papers (articles or chapters in-progress, approx. 35 double-spaced pages) on the topic “Minorities,” which may include works on Mediterranean methodologies or perspectives, or studies strongly informed by such. We seek papers in any relevant discipline, especially comparative or interdisciplinary work that uses the Mediterranean as a frame of analysis. Priority is given to faculty and graduate students from the UC system and collaborating institutions, but any North American-based scholars working on relevant material are encouraged to apply. (Scholars from further abroad are welcome to apply, but we cannot guarantee full travel support.) The Mediterranean Seminar/UCMRP will cover travel and lodging expenses for presenters.
The deadline for workshop proposals is 15 January 2014.
Please submit an abstract (250-500 words) and two-page CV by this date to mailbox@mediterraneanseminar.org (subject line: Winter 2014 Workshop Abstract). Please clearly indicate that the event you are applying to is the “Winter 2014 Workshop.” Successful applicants are expected to submit a 35-page (maximum) double-spaced paper-in-progress for pre-circulation by 15 February.
A separate call for symposium and workshop registration will be sent out on January 21.
Writing Britain is a biennial event which aims to draw on a range of approaches and perspectives to exchange ideas about manuscript studies, material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the medieval period. The 2014 iteration of the Writing Britain Conference will take place in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge under the auspices of the Centre for Material Texts. Some of the topics which we are keen to explore are literary and non-literary agencies and their significance and/or relevance in the medieval period across British medieval written culture in English, French, Latin, Norse and the Celtic languages. More broadly, we are interested in other questions such as: How did local writers, compilers and readers use writing to inscribe regional identity within broader conventions or, on the other hand, impress ‘universal’ practices and constructs on local populations? What were the different markets for books? Can we characterize their developments and differences? What new or existing methodologies can be employed to localise texts and books across Britain? What is the role of the Digital Humanities in the study of medieval book culture?
Plenary speakers: Jonathan Wilcox (University of Iowa), Richard Beadle (University of Cambridge) and Simon Horobin (University of Oxford)
We welcome proposals from scholars working on any aspects of British medieval written culture up to 1500. Please visit our conference web site in order to submit an abstract (300 words or fewer) for a twenty-minute paper. Please send your abstract by 20 February 2014. Abstracts from postgraduate students are welcome and graduate rates will be provided. For further information please visit the website where contact details of the organisers will also be available.
Conference website here.
Publication News: New Issue of Speculum
The latest issue of Speculum is now available online, including articles by Christian C. Sahner on translation and history in Orosius and Augustine, Lisa Perfetti on the eroticizing poetics of medieval French crusaders, Andrew G. Miller on equestrian mutilation and masculinity in medieval England, Filip Van Tricht on Robert of Courtenay’s rule as emperor of Constantinople, and Michael Penman on the personal piety and devotions to Scottish saints and relics of Robert Bruce.
Also reviewed in the journal are:
– Janet Burton and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011)
– Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
– Kavita Mudan Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440–1627 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
– Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)
– Sherry C. M. Lindquist, ed., The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012)
– Henry Maguire, Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
– Nina Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
– Christine Sciacca, ed., Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012)
See the journal at Cambridge Journals Online here.
Medieval Art Research