Call for Papers: ‘The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History and the Multiple Geographies of the Holy House of Loreto’, The Courtauld Institute, 30th June-1st July 2022, Deadline: 15th March 2022

The Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, is a relic in constant motion. Legend holds that at the end of the thirteenth century, a company of angels flew Mary’s small brick house—the site of the Annunciation and Jesus’s childhood home—out of Nazareth before eventually depositing it in Loreto, a remote hill town in the Marches region of Central Italy. Over the ensuing centuries, the House prompted the movement of people to the sanctuary that grew up around it: migrant communities that had been excluded from other Italian cities came to settle in Loreto just as a growing number Christians set out on pilgrimage in order to visit the miraculous incorporation of the Holy Land into Europe. As the site grew in prominence, it attracted artists from multiple centres who produced opulent votive adornments in painting and sculpture. At the same time, the sanctuary became a point of transmission for devotional memorabilia, including prints, statuettes, ceramics, and tattoos. As a result of this proliferation of media, architectural reproductions of the Holy House emerged throughout Europe and as far afield as the Amazon Basin and modern-day Canada. Through contact with the original relic or one of its surrogates located across the globe, Loreto has continued to inspire devotional and artistic responses into the present day.

Building upon scholarly interest in the cult of the Holy House, this conference endeavours to serve as an important milestone for international academic discourse on Loreto. Responding to the humanities’ recent global turn, it will investigate how a small town in the Italian hinterland became a central node in an expansive geographic network.

Topics covered might include:
– The cult of Loreto, from its medieval foundations through the twenty-first century
– The Holy House of Nazareth and its various permutations (i.e., Walsingham, Sossau)
– Broader themes of mobility, migration and cultural contact
– The Santa Casa as an instrument of symbolic domination, religious conversion and colonisation
– Lay and religious patronage pertaining to the Loretan cult
– Iconographic and spatial reproduction of the sanctuary of Loreto, or the Santa Casa itself
– The sacred and political economies of pilgrimage

This conference welcomes proposals from early and mid-career scholars working in a variety of disciplines and employing diverse methodological approaches. Proposals of maximum 250 words and a brief CV must be sent by 15 March 2022 to ecgiffin@icloud.com and matteo.chirumbolo@courtauld.ac.uk. The main language of the workshop will be English. Speakers will be notified by 1 April 2022. Some expenses (i.e., travel costs and accommodation in London) will be covered.

Organised by Matteo Chirumbolo, Erin Giffin, and Antongiulio Sorgini.

Clive’s conference is kindly supported by Dr Nicholas Murray and Mr William Sharp in loving memory of Mr Clive Davies.

Recorded Lecture: ‘A Material World – Revealing the Coventry Tapestry through Conservation’, Alison Lister, The Warburg Institute

The process of conserving a historic artefact provides opportunities to gather data on its composition and condition that can inform its future interpretation, presentation, and preservation. In this seminar, Alison Lister (Textile Conservation Limited) will describe and illustrate the initial results of a detailed examination and assessment of the late 15th/early 16th century tapestry from St Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry. This 9m long by 3m high tapestry, woven in wool and silk, was made specifically for the building and is believed to depict King Henry VI and his wife Margaret of Anjou. As part of a major refurbishment of the Guildhall, the tapestry is undergoing conservation to prepare it for redisplay, providing a rare opportunity to record key features of its materials, structure, design, and alterations that can then be made available to the public.

Presented by Alison Lister (Textile Conservation Limited)

This event is part of the A Material World, which brings together academics and heritage professionals from a wide range of disciplines to discuss issues concerning historical objects, their materials, forms, and functions, as well as their conservation, presentation, display, and reconstruction. https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/whats-on/material-world.

This event took place on 3 December 2021.

Online Lecture: ‘Sumatran Camphor in Medieval Afro-Eurasia,’ Alex West, Silk Roads Programme at King’s College, University of Cambridge, Zoom, 25th February 2022, 14:00 (GMT)

Alex West is a lecturer at the Institute for Area Studies, University of Leiden. Specialising in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago in the fifteenth century before the arrival of the Portuguese and the Islamisation of Sunda, his translations and research have revealed the presence of commodities sourced from places as far apart as the Levant and New Guinea.

Join to hear more about how Sumatran camphor in medieval Afro-Eurasia, and what this reveals about global medieval trade networks.

To join the Zoom meeting, please click here.

Everyone is very welcome to join and participate in the events hosted by the King’s College Silk Roads Programme, please add your details here to join our mailing list or get in touch. We do not record the seminars or mini-conferences as you will be hearing about brand- new, often unpublished research and we hope to facilitate questions and discussion between the audience and speakers.

Post-Doctoral Fellowship: Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Art History Leadership, Deadline: 21st March 2022

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) recognize that the growth of visionary and effective museum and academic leaders does not stop at graduation. Indeed, critical skills such as project management, effective administration, goal-setting, and professional accountability are often not integrated into graduate experiences. The Mellon Foundation is generously supporting a Postdoctoral Fellowship. Through this position, the Joint Program between the CMA and CWRU will help to create a more holistic continuum of education that better prepares future academic and museum administrative leaders early in their careers. By working closely with leadership, staff, and faculty at the CMA and CWRU, the postdoctoral fellow will learn the academic and administrative intricacies of both museum and academic environments.

The fellow will play a key role as a member of the joint CMA/CWRU team planning the biennial Keithley symposium, named in honor of Nancy and Joe Keithley; assist faculty, curators, and students to develop CMA collections-based projects related to their Mellon coursework at CWRU; and coordinate the new short-term Mellon Visiting Fellowship for artists, scholars, or other thought leaders at CMA, among other activities. Work will include engagement with communities of color and other groups who may feel less connected to art museums from a public humanities viewpoint, according to which the agency and authority of the community is acknowledged.

The fellowship is designed to help the fellow to craft plans for personal and professional development and growth, including through executive leadership coaching from the CWRU Weatherhead School of Management. Through these experiences, the postdoctoral fellow will play a significant role in shaping the future of the CMA/CWRU partnership and obtain grounding for a successful career in museums and/or academic institutions. The fellow will report to both the Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, who serves on the Joint Program Committee and the Keithley Symposium Planning Committee, and to the Chair, Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University. They may also work with curators, educators, and faculty in other areas of specialization, pending mutual interest.

Applicants should be recent PhD graduates who received their PhD no earlier than five years prior to the application deadline in art history or a related field, with demonstrated interests in the intersections of museums and academic institutions. Applications should include a cover letter explaining the applicant’s interest and qualifications for this fellowship, together with a CV, a writing sample, and contact information for three academic or professional references. The one-year fellowship will provide a salary of $45,000 per year, plus benefits. The fellowship has the potential to be extended by a second year.  Candidates must be eligible to legally work in the USA. Applications received by March 21, 2022 will receive full consideration, but applications received later may also be considered. The fellowship will begin in either summer or autumn 2022.

In employment, as in education, Case Western Reserve University along with The Cleveland Museum of Art are committed to Equal Opportunity and Diversity. Women, veterans, members of underrepresented minority groups, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply. Case Western Reserve University and The Cleveland Museum of Art provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application and hiring process should contact the Office for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity at 216.368.8877 to request a reasonable accommodation. Determinations as to granting reasonable accommodations for any applicant will be made on a case-by-case basis.

Call for Papers: ‘Steppe Medicine: Data, History, Applications, Concepts and Terms’, Al-Farabi Kaznu, Kazakhstan, 4th-5th October 2022, Deadline: 25th May 2022

AL-FARABI KAZNU

FACULTY OF ORIENTAL STUDIES

RESEARCH CENTER

“WRITTEN MONUMENTS AND SPIRITUAL HERITAGE”

October 4-5, 2022

Within the framework of the research project, the Research Center “Written Monuments and Spiritual Heritage” of the Turksoy Department of the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Al-Farabi KazNU invites scientists, researchers, teachers and doctoral students to take part in the international scientific and practical conference.

“STEPPE MEDICINE: DATA, HISTORY, APPLICATIONS, CONCEPTS AND TERMS “.

In medieval written sources, the great steppe of Central Asia, also known as Desht-i-Kipchak, was a land where various beliefs were intertwined, where several sedentary, nomadic peoples exchanged culture and art. Ethnomedicine of nomadic peoples was also formed at the junction of the interweaving of cultures and art. The main aspects of the formation of ethnomedicine, such as: methods of treatment and means used in the everyday life of the population, concepts of the cause and consequences of the disease, methods of making medicines, etc., were first spread orally, and later began to be fixed in writing and reflected in the form handwritten medical treatises of the era. Medical treatises written on the territory of Central Asia were first written in Arabic, which, in turn, correspond to the period of development of the scientific potential of the Arabic language due to the numerous scientific discoveries of scientists from the Muslim world. Since the XII century, together with the Arabic language, they began to write in Persian. The above theories raise the question, from what period exactly did medical works begin to be written in the Turkic language (Chagatai dialect or in the old Kipchak script)?

To answer this question, first of all, we need to pay attention to the medical written sources of the era, examine samples of oral literature, while not losing sight of new research and ideas. In order to study and familiarize with new scientific discoveries and ideas in the medical field, within the framework of the research project AR09259326 “Dastur al-‘iladzh” – as a source of steppe medicine”, an international scientific and practical conference “Steppe medicine: data, history, application, concepts and terms”.

The conference assumes, first of all, a broad consideration of the origins of medicine of nomadic peoples, focusing on medical concepts and scientific ideas and experience in Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, shamanic traditions, which in certain periods had a strong influence on the “steppe” medicine. In this regard, articles in the Kazakh, Russian, English, Turkish languages ​​about various studies, written relics, translations and studies related to the topic, which were considered in the context of the Turkic, Persian, Arabic, Mongolian, Chinese, Slavic peoples, are accepted into the collection of conference materials. practitioners of folk medicine, medical products, tools, knowledge and beliefs, traditions, transcultural, philosophical and religious knowledge.

The purpose of the conference: a broad analysis of the historical and cultural significance of medieval medicine, the study of the process of formation, development, distribution of folk healing culture, consideration of the level of knowledge, problems, drawing attention to the study of written exhibits of modern medical topics. 

Topics and directions of the conference :

–        terminological meaning, features, historical origins of ethnomedicine;

–        the manifestation of traditional medicine in the socio-economic, ritual, religious and cult and other aspects of ethnic culture;

–        medieval written artifacts, research, personnel in the field of medicine;

–        healing culture of the Turkic peoples;

–        intersection of cultures and sciences in the field of traditional medicine.

Important dates:

–        May 25, 2022: Abstracts of the article (at least 700 words) are accepted in Kazakh, Russian, English, Turkish;

–        May 26, 2022: notification of authors, accepted abstracts, as well as sending the full text of the article;

–        September 25, 2022: Deadline for submission of full-text articles by contributors;

–        October 4-5, 2022: conference will be held on the ZOOM platform online and offline as well.

Place, time:

The conference will be held in the building of the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Al-Farabi KazNU (Karasay Batyr Street, 95, Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan) October 4-5, 2022 from 14:00 to 17:30 (Nur-Sultan time). 25 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.

A collection of papers submitted to the conference will be published. The organizer reserves the right to select materials in accordance with the topics of the conference and research project. Article publication is FREE.

Prepared articles (in Word or PDF format) should be sent to the e-mail of the organizers: desturalilaj@gmail.com .

Requirements for the preparation of materials:

Format – A4, editor – WORD, font size – 12 (abstract, keywords, literature – 11, table text – 9-11), Times New Roman, alignment – full page width text, line spacing – 1.15, free margin – 1 cm, edges: top and bottom – 2 cm, left and right – 2 cm.

Pictures, tables, graphs, diagrams, etc. numbered and given a name (for example, figure 1 – the name of the figure). The number of figures, tables, graphs and diagrams should not exceed 50% of the total volume of the article.

Article structure:

The title of the article (Title). The title should be short and contain no more than 12 words. The title of the article is given in bold, lowercase letters, in the middle of the alignment.

Author(s) of the article Name, surname, place of work (affiliated place), city, country, e-mail. Information about the authors is given in the usual font in lowercase letters with alignment in the middle.

Abstract (200-500 words in English along with the language of the article).

Keywords (5-7 words).

The text of the article begins on a new page and should consist of an introduction, main body and conclusion. No more than 7000 words.

Links are provided at the end of the article. Reference, bibliography or reference list in APA style (https://apastyle.apa.org/)10 should not be less than 10 titles.

The authors of the article bear full responsibility for the accuracy and reliability of the information, references, citations and bibliography.

Responsible: Kairanbayeva N.N., Abdrakhanov D.M.

Contact phone: +7 777 300 69 92, +7 708 190 38 23.

Lecture Series: ‘Representing and Naming Greece from the 14th to the 16th Century’, Université de Lille, November 22nd 2021- June 13th 2022

The ERC AGRELITA team is delighted to present the program of its seminar, dedicated, throughout 2021-2022, to: “Representing and naming Greece and the Greek space, from the 14th to the 16th Century”, organised by Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas (University of Lille, France).

Check out the Academic Blog of the project: https://agrelita.hypotheses.org/471

For Zoom link, please register at the following address: caroline.crepiat@univ-lille.fr

22 novembre 2021 (14-16 h, Université de Lille, Campus Pont de Bois : salle A2.703) 
Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas (Université de Lille) : « L’espace grec dans la Bouquechardière de Jean de Courcy (1416-1422) : centralité et expansion »

14 décembre 2021 (14-17 h, Université de Lille, Campus Pont de Bois : salle A2.705) : 
Ilaria Molteni (Université de Lille) : « Représenter les grecs et l’espace grec entre France et Italie : le laboratoire de l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César »
Cléo Rager (Université de Lille) : « Des lieux communs aux lieux de mémoire : les représentations de l’espace grec au prisme de l’Antiquité dans les récits de voyage et de pèlerinage en langue française de la fin du Moyen Âge »

31 janvier 2022 (14-17 h, Université de Lille, Campus Pont de Bois : salle A2.703) : 
Clarisse Évrard-Guilbert (Université de Lille) : « L’espace grec dans l’Histoire de Jason et le Recueil des histoires de Troie de Raoul Lefèvre : choix textuels et traductions visuelles »
Valeria Russo (Université de Lille) : « La Grèce mythologique et la Grèce historique dans la Fleur des Histoires de Jean Mansel : encyclopédisme et fiction des représentations géographiques »

25 avril 2022 (14h-17h30, MESHS, 2 Rue des Canonniers, Lille : salle 2) : 
Gilles Grivaud (Université de Rouen) : « La Chorografia d’Etienne de Lusignan : sources et propositions »
Alice Colantuoni (Université de Florence) : « Imaginaires, toponymies : l’espace grec dans l’historiographie française de la quatrième croisade »

2 mai 2022 (14h-17h30, Sciences Po Lille, 9 Rue Auguste Angellier, Lille : salle 244) : 
Marie Jacob-Yapi (Université Rennes 2) : « “Ces Grecs, en 1500 ans voire plus, n’ont jamais changé leur manière de s’habiller” : le regard des Occidentaux sur le vêtement des Grecs anciens et modernes au XVe siècle »
Michele Campopiano (Université d’York) : « Un intermédiaire peu connu du monde antique : l’espace grec dans le Liber Guidonis et quelques observations sur sa fortune »
Clarisse Évrard-Guilbert (Université de Lille) : « Représenter la Grèce et les Grecs par le prisme flamand : le cas des enluminures des manuscrits français de la cour de Bourgogne »

9 mai 2022 (14h-17h30, MESHS, 2 Rue des Canonniers, Lille : salle 2) : 
Daisy Delogu (Université de Chicago) : « Paysages palimpsestes : les espaces imaginaires grecs dans l’églogue du XIVe siècle »
Constantin Bobas (Université de Lille) : « En voyageant à Rhodes aux XVe et XVIe siècles. Imagination occidentale et réalité orientale d’un espace grec »
Valeria Russo (Université de Lille) : « Retrouver la Grèce dans le temps et dans l’espace : la Mer des histoires face à la création d’un passé antique »

13 juin 2022 (14h-17h30, MESHS, 2 Rue des Canonniers, Lille : salle 2) : 
Corinne Jouanno (Université de Caen Normandie) : « Quelle place pour la Grèce dans la littérature romanesque byzantine (XIIe-XVe s.) ? » 
Ilaria Molteni (Université de Lille) : « L’espace grec à la cour de France (1364-1422): genres littéraires, projets d’édition, programmes d’illustration »
Cléo Rager (Université de Lille) : « L’espace grec dans les récits des voyageurs du XVIe siècle »

Funding Opportunity: Heckman Stipends, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Minnesota (Deadline: 15th March 2022)

For scholars who have not yet established themselves professionally and whose research cannot progress satisfactorily without consulting materials to be found in HMML’s collections. The program welcomes international applicants, but does not sponsor J visas.

  • Funder – Established in 1991, Heckman Stipends are made possible by the A.A. Heckman Endowed Fund
  • Awarded – Semi-annually
  • Number – Up to 10 stipends annually
  • Amount – Up to $2,000

Use of funds

  • Funds may be applied toward travel to and from Collegeville, housing and meals at Saint John’s University, and costs related to duplication of HMML’s microfilm or digital resources (up to $250)
  • The Stipend may be supplemented by other sources of funding but may not be held simultaneously with another HMML Stipend or Fellowship
  • Stipend holders must wait at least two years before re-applying

Application deadline

  • March 15 for residencies between July and December of the same year
  • October 15 for residencies between January and June of the following year

Application submission

  • Letter of application with current applicant contact information, the title of the project, length of the proposed residency at HMML and its projected dates, and the amount requested (up to $2,000)
  • Description of the project to be pursued, with an explanation of how HMML’s resources are essential to the successful completion of the project; applicants are advised to be as specific as possible about which resources will be needed (maximum length: 1,000 words). Use the online Reading Room and contact the curator in charge of your subject area to shape your project proposal. Though priority will be given to applicants who demonstrate the necessity for accessing microfilm and uncataloged digital materials that are exclusively available on site, all applications are welcome
  • Updated curriculum vitae
  • Confidential letter of recommendation by an adviser, thesis director, mentor, or, in the case of post-doctoral candidates, a colleague who is a good judge of the applicant’s work

Applicants

  • Send all materials as email attachments to fellowships@hmml.org
  • Add “Heckman Stipend” in the subject line

Letter of recommendation authors

  • Send letter directly as email attachment to fellowships@hmml.org
  • Add “Heckman Stipend + applicant’s name” in the subject line

Questions

Send any questions to fellowships@hmml.org

Note on health insurance

Applicants planning to stay on the Saint John’s University campus or at the College of Saint Benedict must purchase health insurance in advance of the visit, and will be asked to show proof of coverage. Insurance plans for travelers to the United States are available from numerous online providers at reasonable cost.

New Publication: ‘The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books’ by Elina Gertsman

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association

Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures.

Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death.

Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

Elina Gertsman is Professor of Art History and Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan Professor in Catholic Studies II at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of the award-winning Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, also published by Penn State University Press.

Contents

Introduction Nothing Is the Matter

Chapter 1 Imaginary Realms

Chapter 2 Phantoms of Emptiness

Chapter 3 Traces of Touch

Chapter 4 Penetrating the Parchment

Coda Absences

“Gertsman makes a convincing argument, and at times shows a wonderful novelistic sensibility in describing the micro-dramas on display.”Times Literary Supplement

“This is an intellectually ambitious, rigorously argued, and erudite book that explores visual strategies and their theoretical underpinnings of ‘empty spaces’ in medieval manuscripts. A must-read for scholars of medieval and northern Renaissance art and intellectual history.”—Nino Zchomelidse, author of Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy

“This is one of the most original books I have read—original in its conception and subject, in the materials studied and illustrated, in the numerous questions posed, and in its compelling conclusions. It is a potentially paradigm-shifting work that will affect how we perceive illustrated manuscripts and that should finally put to rest for art historians the ‘intentional fallacy’ long rejected by literary historians.”—Richard K. Emmerson, author of Apocalypse Illuminated: The Visual Exegesis of Revelation in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts

“Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image is a rarefied treat for connoisseurs – a kind of apophatic art history. She explores a phenomenon that is seldom studied: the voids, gaps and empty frames that manuscript artists used to represent the unrepresentable.”—Barbara Newman, London Review of Book

New Publication, ‘Visualising Household Health: Medieval Women, Art and Knowledge in the Régime du corps’ by Jennifer Borland

In 1256, the countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, enlisted her personal physician to create a health handbook to share with her daughters. Written in French and known as the Régime du corps, this health guide would become popular and influential, with nearly seventy surviving copies made over the next two hundred years and translations in at least four other languages. In Visualizing Household Health, art historian Jennifer Borland uses the Régime to show how gender and health care converged within the medieval household.

Visualizing Household Health explores the nature of the households portrayed in the Régime and how their members interacted with professionalized medicine. Borland focuses on several illustrated versions of the manuscript that contain historiated initials depicting simple scenes related to health care, such as patients’ consultations with physicians, procedures like bloodletting, and foods and beverages recommended for good health. Borland argues that these images provide important details about the nature of women’s agency in the home—and offer highly compelling evidence that women enacted multiple types of health care. Additionally, she contends, the Régimeopens a window onto the history of medieval women as owners, patrons, and readers of books. 

Interdisciplinary in scope, this book broadens notions of the medieval medical community and the role of women in medieval health care. It will be welcomed by scholars and students of women’s history, art history, book history, and the history of medicine.

Jennifer Borland is Professor of Art History and Director of the Humanities Initiative at Oklahoma State University. She is a founding member of the Material Collective and managing editor of the journal Different Visions.

Contents:
Introduction
1. The Visual Language of the Régime du corps
2. The Illustrated Manuscripts and Their Audiences
3. The Medical Context for the Régime du corps
4. Household Management, Status, and the Care of the Body

“Borland masterfully weaves together the methodologies of a variety of disciplines: the history of women as patrons and consumers, the history of medicine, anthropology, geography, and of course material and visual studies and art history, all under the larger umbrellas of social history and medieval studies. . . . By immersing the illuminated Régime manuscripts in this multivalent exploration, the full nature of their rich content is finally revealed.”—Tracy Chapman Hamilton, author of Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie of Brabant (1260–1321)

“Visualizing Household Health interrogates the function and value of illumination paired with a secular text with both practical and theoretical knowledge. . . . Borland demonstrates the newest area of modern scholarly attention to the wayfinding devices that integrated the textual and visual communication of medieval knowledge.”—Jean A. Givens, author of Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art

Find this new publication here.

CFP: ‘Meta, Matrix, Mater – Renaissance Metaphors of the Matrix’, Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne (Deadline: 20th March 2022)

The female sex has become the core of an increasing number of Early Modern studies since the rise of a gender-sensitive feminist viewpoint in art history. Many have dealt with images of a hairless and polished vulva, sometimes ostensibly eroticized. Pending this approach, the 2022 CHAR Workshop wishes to re-explore the imaginary of the female sex from within and focus on the metaphors of the matrix in images and material culture from the middle of the 14th century to the first decades of the 17th century.

Since the Early Modern Period relied on the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, the womb is confused with the matrix. Both are considered to be the very essence of femininity engaged at all levels from procreation to maternity, as a feminine principle and receptacle. Although it was also considered to be the nasty source of the diseases that specifically affect women, since they were more prone to phlegm than men. The etymology preserves the memory of these two functions, one praiseworthy and the other despicable. The Latin matrix derives from mater (mother) creating a positive affiliation that lives on in French, Italian and even more so in German (gebärmutter/mutter) whereas the pejorative names like hysteria and hustera (uterus) are linked to the ancient Greek hústeros (the lower, the inferior).

Despite being referred to on a daily basis, the matrix defies any attempt of representation. This internal organ is hidden from the eyes of doctors, artists, and spectators because of the opacity of the flesh. Its form thus varies according to the imagination: hollow and moist, blood-red with a blooming rose scent, or plunged in fetid and putrid darkness where the most ignoble diseases arise. Therefore it is still worth wondering how the various metaphors are constructed and used to represent the matrix, whether to exalt its procreative capacity or to blame its horrific and almost demonic aspects; and even more worth questioning how these are related to science and cultural practices.

Fruits, flowers, and animals provide a considerable number of natural metaphors in images and medical treatises such as Johannes de Cuba’s Hortus sanitatis published in 1491: pomegranates, roses but also vanilla in the New World; amphibians, in particular toads and the dragon-salamander that accompanies Saint Margaret; cetaceans, especially the whale that swallows up and then spits out Jonah, thus becoming the place of his rebirth, or dolphins based on the etymological link between delphis (dolphin) and delphus (matrix).

Since the Latin matera derives from mater, material itself is to be considered matrix-like. Caves like those inside the Boboli gardens in Florence, architecture, and textiles are some of the many metaphors involving materials, figurative or real, that symbolize the internal genital organ as the place of procreation or Incarnation in the case of the Virgin. Their characteristics and haptic effects, the sense of their softness, sponginess and malleability similar to that of the uterine membranes or cavity, should be considered as a full part of the metaphor precisely because they help characterizing the matrix in opposition to the virility of manhood.

This obvious proximity between matrix, mater and materia finally calls for the consideration of ex-voto and other items, activated during devotional and folk practices, used to assure pregnancy and easy childbirth. This is particularly true of items in blood-red color, tinted with this colour of the ‘irruption of the interior’, this non-mimetic figurability of the matrix and its menses (Didi-Huberman), whether they are made of red-tinted wax, coral or precious and semi-precious stones such as ruby, carnelian, red jasper, magnetite, hematite.

Research proposals for papers may address, but are not limited to, the following enumerated themes:

Natural metaphors using plants or animals,
Symbolic places, landscapes or buildings,
Material metaphors of birth,
Poetics of generation and regeneration,
Anatomical diagrams and more generally schematizations linked to the matrix,
Textual metaphors balancing between narrative and rhetoric,
Reception of these metaphors.
Proposals should be sent via email to this address before March 20th, 2022 in the form of a 300-word abstract accompanied by a title and a brief bio-bibliographical presentation of the author.

Organisers:

Fiammetta Campagnoli (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CHAR)

Florence Larcher (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CHAR)

Please click here for further information.