Online lecture: ‘Syriac Villages in the Tur Abdin: A Microhistory of the Medieval Middle East’, Marica Cassis (University of Calgary), 15 February 2022, 12pm (EST), 5pm (GMT)

Marica Cassis, University of Calgary, considers the significance of colonialism in the study of Tur Abdin, the importance of microhistory in understanding archaeological material, and the overall underdiscussed material present in the region.

While scholarly work on the churches of the Tur Abdin dates back to the work of Gertrude Bell, and subsequently continued off and on through the twentieth century, the focus of most research has consistently been the churches in the region. However, churches are the heart of communities, whether villages or monasteries, and need to be considered as part of the whole. What has not been considered in detail is the importance of contextualizing churches in the villages and cities in the region, both in terms of the material remains and the literary sources.

This paper is meant to start a discussion about the significance of colonialism in the study of this region, the importance of microhistory in understanding archaeological material, and the overall underdiscussed material present in the Tur Abdin.

Marica Cassis is the Head of Classics and Religion at the University of Calgary. She specializes in the Late Roman, Byzantine, and Syriac past in Anatolia. Professor Cassis is the director of the SSHRC-funded Byzantine excavations at Çadır Höyük, a multi-period site in Yozgat province Turkey. She also works on the intersection of colonialism, orientalism, and gender theory with Byzantine and Syriac archaeology, considering new ways of reconsidering the material to provide a more nuanced view of the past.

This lecture will take place live on Zoom, 15 February 2022 at 12pm EST, followed by a question and answer period. Please register to receive the Zoom link.

An East of Byzantium lecture. EAST OF BYZANTIUM is a partnership between the Arthur H. Dadian and Ara Oztemel Chair of Armenian Art at Tufts University and the Mary Jaharis Center that explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the late antique and medieval periods.

Image: Deyrulumur (Mor Gabriel monastery), Midyat, Turkey. Credit: Nevit Dilmen, Wikimedia Commons

CFP: ‘The Traces of the Colorful Souls: Visual & Material Arts in the Chromatic Middle Ages’, 2-4 March 2022, Madrid, deadline: 1 February 2022

Organised by: Medieval Colors Network. Universidad Complutense de Madrid (CAPIRE Research Group), Freie Universität Berlin, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Università di Bologna, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Helsingin Yliopisto.

In recent years, the research of the chromatic reality of the Middle Ages has received increasing attention from specialists in different academic disciplines. Fortunately, the vision of a dark and monochrome Middle Ages – propagated by nineteenth-century historiography – is gradually being banished from the collective imagination thanks to important actions for the transfer of scientific knowledge in the media, informative books, and fiction creations. A large number of medieval artworks that are preserved today in museums, cathedrals, or churches bring us to the present time important data about the technical composition or the material creation processes associated with colors. Likewise, the understanding of the different dimensions of medieval colors has important implications that go beyond the purely material and are connected with the sensory experience of medieval men, true colorful souls whose life experience connects the use of certain colors with emotional and sensory values.

The Conference ‘The Traces of the Colorful Souls: Visual & Material Arts in the Chromatic Middle Ages’ aspires to become a meeting point and a forum for reflection on medieval colors and their importance in the life of the time (Art History, Aesthetics, Technology, Sensory Studies, Philosophy, Restoration, Artistic Technology, Linguistics, Psychology, Optics, etc.) trying to promote a more complete vision of the colorful souls of the Middle Ages. For this reason, a series of thematic lines are proposed around which different conferences and free communication sessions will revolve, all having as their central concept color in the Middle Ages:

  • The artistic and documentary dimension of medieval colors, traceable through documentary sources, treatises, artist’s books, as well as evidence of chromatic uses in the diversity of the arts.
  • The material dimension of medieval colors, evoked through the study of pigments, materials, dyes, and chromatic elements that served to give color to different artifacts and works.
  • The technical dimension of medieval colors, materialized in the plurality of uses in numerous artistic media and supports, such as illuminated manuscripts, polychrome in stone, wood, panel, or canvas, as well as the study of color in the diversity of the sumptuary arts, such as stained glass, enamels, ceramics, mosaics or textiles.
  • The symbolic dimension of medieval colors, reflected in the social and extra-semantic uses and values ​​conferred on the chromaticism of spaces, clothes, and objects for daily or festive use, both in the sacred space and in every day or court environment.

CONTRIBUTIONS
The paper proposals are to be sent by participants to the Organized Committee before February 1st 2022 in English, French, Italian or Spanish, through an online form.

The Conference will take place in Madrid (Spain) and the communicators must be able to manage their own journey to the event.

CFP: ‘Fragmented Illuminations’ online symposium, The V&A, early July 2022, deadline: 6 March 2022

With over 2,000 manuscript cuttings, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds one of the largest collections of this kind in the world. Cut out of Italian, Germanic, Netherlandish, French, Spanish, and English manuscripts, they range from the 12th to the 18th century, with a wealth of 15th- and 16th-century examples. They vary in size, from small border snippets and initials to full leaves and, though they have come largely from choirbooks, other types of books are also represented.

The V&A will be organising an online symposium in early July as a follow-up to the display Fragmented Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Cuttings at the Victoria and Albert Museum (extended until 5 June 2022). It will be held over one afternoon to allow for as large an audience as possible to join and participate, from different time zones.

We welcome papers focusing on any of the following themes and aspects, preferably in relation to pieces in the V&A collection:

  • Study of groups of cuttings from the same manuscript source
  • Provenance research and history of collections
  • Questions of attribution and iconography
  • Identification of parent manuscripts when extant; reconstructions of broken manuscripts
  • Materiality and digital display of manuscript cuttings: opportunities and challenges
  • Comparison with other types of intentionally cut-out medieval and Renaissance fragments, such as textile cuttings, cuttings from printed material, etc.
  • Relationship between manuscript cuttings and copies
  • 19th-century reception of, and responses to, medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts

This list is indicative rather than exhaustive.

A preference will be given to contributions focusing on lesser-known examples in the collection and adopting innovative approaches.

Please send an abstract (max. 300 words), a paper title, and a short biography (max. 150 words) to Dr Catherine Yvard, at c.yvard@vam.ac.uk. 

Papers should be no more than 15 minutes in length, to allow time for questions and discussion.

The deadline for submissions is 6 March 2022. Selected speakers will be notified by mid-March.

Image: Border ornaments attributed to Domenico Morone, from a Franciscan choirbook, Verona,
ca. 1500. Museum nos 4918:1 to 9 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Scholarship: Belle Da Costa Greene Award, The Medieval Academy of America, deadline: 15 February 2022

The Medieval Academy of America will award the Belle Da Costa Greene Award of $2,000 annually to a medievalist of color for research and travel. The award may be used to visit archives, attend conferences, or to facilitate writing and research. 

Special consideration will be given to graduate students, emerging junior scholars, adjunct, and unaffiliated scholars. Applicants must be members in good standing of the Medieval Academy of America as of 15 January of the year in which they apply.

Belle Da Costa Greene (1883-1950) was a prominent art historian and the first manuscript librarian of the Pierpont Morgan collection. She was also the first known person of color and second woman to be elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1939).

According to the Morgan Library & Museum website, “Greene was barely twenty when Morgan hired her, yet her intelligence, passion, and self-confidence eclipsed her relative inexperience, [and] she managed to help build one of America’s greatest private libraries.” She was, just as importantly, a black woman who passed as white in order to gain entrance and acceptance into the racially fraught professional landscape of early twentieth-century New York. Her legacy highlights the professional difficulties faced by medievalists of color, the personal sacrifices they make in order to belong to the field, and their extraordinary contributions to Medieval Studies.

The deadline for applications is 15 February 2022.

The application will consist of a biographical form, CV, a one-page proposal, and a simple budget. Letters of recommendation (no more than two) are optional. So as not to burden the applicant, it is perfectly appropriate to include material and letters prepared for other grant applications. Applicants must be members in good standing of the Medieval Academy as of 15 January of the year in which they apply.

Click here to read about previous winners.

To apply, click here.

CFP: ‘Passions and the Mystical: between Affecting and Being Affected’, International Conference, Nijmegen, Titus Brandsma Institute, 1-2 December 2022, deadline: 18 March 2022

It is a pleasure to invite you to Passions and the Mystical: between Affecting and Being Affected. The
conference is jointly organized by the Mystical Theology Network (MTN) and the Titus Brandsma
Institute of the Radboud University (TBI) and will take place in Nijmegen on 1-2 December, 2022.
The aim of this conference is to bring together theologians, religious studies scholars, philosophers,
literary scholars, historians and scholars working in related fields to discuss and map out the wider
semantic field of the ‘passion(s)’ across mystical traditions. The conference aims to address questions
such as:

  • How do the mystics across different traditions view their own passions and emotions?
  • What role do the passions of others play in accounts of the mystical?
  • How is gender factored into the mystical use of passions?
  • How do mystics understand their passions in relation to key events within their tradition (e.g. the
  • Passion of Christ within the Christian tradition)?
  • How is erotic language ‘translated’ into passionate mystic literature?
  • To what extent can mystical experiences be considered passions in their own right?
  • How do mystical passions relate to emotions and what can they contribute to the history of
  • emotions?
  • Can mystical passions contribute to social engagement and political resistance (e.g. D. Sölle, M.
  • de Certeau), including issue of race and gender?
  • How does modern artistic engagement deal with this passionate mystical heritage?

Topics for proposals include, but are not limited to:

  • Relationship between passions and emotions in mystical texts.
  • Mystical passions and the history of emotions.
  • Critical close-readings of mystical texts from various traditions focusing on ‘passions’.
  • Comparative studies of passions across mystical traditions.
  • Mysticism, Gender and Passions.
  • Conceptualization of the notions of passivity/agency, consent, effort and grace and their
  • interrelations in the mystical tradition.
  • The influence of philosophical discourses on the passions on mystical authors and, vice versa, the
  • influence of mystical discourses on philosophical passion theories (Descartes, Pascal…).
  • Reception and critique of mystical discourses on the Passion and the passions in recent non-
  • mystical (theological, philosophical, literary, historical etc.) authors.
  • Passions and intimacy in the mystical reception of the Song of Songs, Kabbalah, etc.
  • Influence of mystical passions on modern artistic practices and theories.
  • Persistence of mystical passions within political and social engagements, including issues of race
  • and gender.

The deadline to submit abstracts is Friday March 18th, 2022.
Proposals are accepted in English, Dutch, French and German.
Please send your abstract to stefaan.neirynck@titusbrandsmainstituut.nl

All proposals should include:

  • Full name
  • E-mail
  • Current institution and/or academic affiliation
  • Title of the paper of Project
  • Proposal (up to 350 words)

We invite the following proposals:

Paper proposal — A proposal for presenting a short (20 minute) original paper.

Session proposal — A proposal for a session or roundtable where different papers are
presented on a common theme and emphasis is placed on shared discourse. Session proposals
should include abstract, name of presider, list of panelists or respondents.

For more information, visit the Titus Brandsma Institute (Research centre for mysticism and spirituality) website.

For any enquiries, please contact: Lieven De Maeyer lieven.demaeyer@titusbrandsmainstituut.nl or
Stefaan Neirynck (stefaan.neirynck@titusbrandsmainstituut.nl )

Image: The Church, the Bride of Christ and Mother of the Faithful in Baptism. Illustration to Scivias II.3, fol. 51r from the 20th-century facsimile of the Rupertsberg manuscript, c. 1165–1180. Source: Wikimedia Commons

New Open Access Publication: ‘Shrines in a Fluid Space: The Shaping of New Holy Sites in the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese and Crete under Venetian Rule (14th-16th Centuries)’, by Argyri Dermitzaki, Mediterranean Art Histories, volume 6. Brill, 2021.

In Shrines in a Fluid Space: The Shaping of New Holy Sites in the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese and Crete under Venetian Rule (14th-16th Centuries), Argyri Dermitzaki reconstructs the devotional experiences within the Greek realm of the Venetian Stato da Mar of Western European pilgrims sailing to Jerusalem.

The author traces the evolution of the various forms of cultic sites and the perception of them as nodes of a wider network of the pilgrims’ ‘holy topography’. She scrutinises travelogues in conjunction with archaeological, visual and historical evidence and offers a study of the cultic phenomena and sites invested with exceptional meaning at the main ports of call of the pilgrims’ galleys in the Ionian Sea, the Peloponnese and Crete.

Argyri Dermitzaki, Phd (2019), University of Fribourg, Switzerland, is an archaeologist in Athens, Greece. Her research interests focus on cultural interactions in Latin-ruled Greece, the pilgrims’ devotional experiences and their role in the shaping of the area’s ‘holy topography’.

For more information, to download the free PDF, or to order a hardback copy of the book, click here.

CFP: ‘Transitions’, Postgraduate Conference 2022, University of Bristol and online, 29-30 April 2022, deadline: 28 February 2022

After the success of the 2021 ‘Rules and Regulations’ and ‘Disruption’ Conference, the committee for the Centre for Medieval Studies Postgraduate Conference invites you to yet another highly topical conference in the longest-standing medievalist PGR conference series: the 2022 Transitions Conference.

The principle of transition management in our global pandemic has become a highly relevant approach aiming to facilitate and accelerate sustainable transitions affecting workplace, politics, social interactions, and health.

How are such principles of transitions to be observed in the manifold institutions, organisations, cultures, etc., in medieval Britain, Europe, and beyond? How are those transitions represented in the many disciplines related to medieval studies from Musicology, History, Art History, Religion and Theology, Linguistics, Literature, to Law and Medicine, and how can our society profit from those observations today?

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Language Change and Related Phenomena
  • Translations and Genre Boundaries
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Social Mobility
  • Initiation
  • Mode and Modulation
  • Christianisation and Cultural Adaptation of Religious Systems
  • From Local and Trans-National Christian Identities to National Identities
  • Migration, Travel, and Pilgrimages
  • Dynastic and Administrative Transition
  • Stylistic Changes and Adaptation

We welcome abstracts from postgraduates and early-career researchers, exploring aspects and different approaches to the spectrum of transitions in all relevant disciplines pertaining to the medieval period, broadly construed c.500-c.1500. (300 words for 20-minute papers)

Based on current government guidelines, we are planning to hold the conference as a hybrid event online and on the campus of the University of Bristol.

Deadline for submissions: 28 February 2022.

Please send abstracts and enquiries to cms-conference-enquiries@bristol.ac.uk

Job opportunity: Copy editor for Gesta, deadline 15 February 2022

The academic journal Gesta, published by the University of Chicago Press for the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), seeks to retain an independent contractor for a position as copy editor to work closely with the coeditors of the journal on the copyediting and proofreading of two issues per year (with four or five articles totaling approximately 70,000 words per issue).

The copy editor should be familiar with North American practices and standards for scholarly publishing, and must have at least two years’ experience copyediting scholarship in art history. Applicants should submit: (1) a cover letter, (2) a resumé, and (3) an example of a copyedited text (with footnotes or endnotes) in which editing is displayed with Microsoft Word’s Track Changes function. Please send the materials by email to the editors, Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly, at gesta@medievalart.org. Review of applications will begin on February 15, 2022.

The ICMA is dedicated to the support of the study, understanding, and preservation of visual and material cultures produced primarily between ca. 300 CE and ca. 1500 CE in every corner of the medieval world. The organization embraces diversity in all forms, serving a membership of scholars with a variety of racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, religious beliefs, and gender identities, among other factors. We encourage applications from candidates committed to forging and sustaining the ICMA’s multifaceted diversity and to being part of a community in which individuals of all backgrounds are warmly welcomed and encouraged to succeed. For information on the ICMA, please visit www.medievalart.org.

Compensation negotiable according to experience. This position is remote with varied hours. No fringe benefits.

Deadline for applications: February 15, 2022.
Send application materials to gesta@medievalart.org.

Online lecture: ‘Slavery and the pursuit of freedom in later medieval Mediterranean Europe’, Daniel Lord Smail, 20 January 2022, 5.30pm (GMT)

The IHR Seminar Europe 1150-1550 team is delighted to announce that Professor Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard) will speak this Thursday, 20th January at 17.30, on ‘Slavery and the pursuit of freedom in later medieval Mediterranean Europe.’

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work has explored the legal, social, and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, which was the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (1999). His most recent book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016), approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt collection from Lucca and Marseille. With Gabriel Pizzorno and Laura Morreale and contributors, he recently published the online collection “The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe(Opens in new window).”

He is currently working on a book featuring an enslaved Berber woman in early fifteenth-century Marseille who engineered her own self-manumission. Smail’s work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His most recent article in this vein asks whether there is a history of the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books, in addition to those listed above, include The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (2003); On Deep History and the Brain (2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011).

This seminar is free to attend but advance booking here is required.

Image: Map of Marseille in 1575, Braun & Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum, II-12. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Online lecture: ‘The King’s Rollodex’, by Sonja Drimmer, Bard Graduate Center’s The Global Middle Ages Seminar, 9 February 2022, 12.15pm (ET) / 5.15pm (GMT)

Sonja Drimmer will present Bard Graduate Center’s The Global Middle Ages Seminar on Wednesday, February 9, at 12.15pm (ET)/5:15pm (GMT). Her online talk is entitled “The King’s Rollodex.”

A persistent myth in the history of the book in the west is that the roll gave way to the codex. This idea is often encountered in the prepositional formula, “from roll to codex,” as ubiquitous as the phrase “from manuscript to print.” Over the last two decades, an efflorescence of scholarship devoted to the abundant variety of scrolls and rolls in medieval Europe has offered welcome pushback to this supersessionist model of book history. Yet, the roll and the codex were not the only formats available for the book arts of the Middle Ages.

Focusing on a recent acquisition made by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a manuscript genealogy of King Edward IV that is both roll and codex—this talk will examine the political significance of codicological diversity during the Wars of the Roses. Nearly one hundred genealogical rolls survive from fifteenth-century England, across which scribes and illuminators fashioned remarkably experimental approaches to the narration of genealogical history, approaches that defy our own genealogical narrative of the history of the book. Public doubts about the monarch’s legitimacy, pragmatic considerations about the physical presentation of history, and the robust scribal infrastructure required to proliferate genealogies combined to drive this experimentation, which rests largely on the different affordances of each medium produced.

This talk is part of a larger project that examines a variety of reproducible media that preceded movable type as political discourse in visual and material form in late medieval England. None of the objects considered in this project—from livery badges and coins to heraldry, genealogical rolls and, horribly, the bodies of the decapitated and the lists that bear their names—were new media. Yet in the quantity, manner, and contexts of their production, distribution, and display, they threatened the foundations of the social and economic affiliations they forged. What does it mean when the most potent media for political discourse are themselves the instruments of doubt and suspicion? And why is it important to recognize the role of pre-print reproduction in this history?

Sonja Drimmer is Associate Professor of Medieval Art in the department of the history of art and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (University of Pennsylvania, 2018), which was awarded High Commendation for Exemplary Scholarship from the Historians of British Art. Recently, she edited a special issue of Digital Philology (2020), “Manual Impressions: Visualizing Print in Manuscript, Europe c.1450-1850.” Her articles have appeared in Gesta, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Viator, Exemplaria and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a second book, Political Visuality: Reproduction, Representation, and the Wars of the Roses.

Register for Sonja Drimmer’s online lecture here. The event will be held on Zoom, and will be live with automatic captions.