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.

CFP: ‘Philosophical Perspectives on Medieval Theories of Science’, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, 27-28 September 2022, deadline: 14 February 2022

‘Medieval science’ is a fascinating object of study, both when viewed as a historical precondition of the rise of ‘modern science’, and when studied because its instances provide important examples of significantly different, yet highly sophisticated ways of thinking. However, those who wish to study particular instances of ‘medieval science’ in light of general philosophical reflections on science from the Middle Ages will not find much help in the recent literature: no general history of developments and shifts in medieval ‘theories of science’ is available, a state of affairs lamented already more than 50 years ago by Laurens Laudan, and again recently by Ana María Mora-Márquez.

Detailed and systematic studies on medieval ‘theories of science’ are, thus, scarce. This is regrettable as a robust evaluation of ‘medieval science’ will, at least in its details, depend on the precise shape which ‘theories of science’ took in the Middle Ages. We adopt here a very broad and inclusive working definition of a theory of science as a combination of both ‘scientific methods’ and of the ways in which these ‘methods’ relate to philosophical background assumptions (stemming, for instance, from metaphysics or natural philosophy). Moreover, we understand scientific methods as ‘the different ways in which it was possible for [medieval scholars] to produce knowledge that is rational, objective, and based on evidence’, following a working definition proposed by Mora-Márquez. Such scientific methods clearly include logical tools and mathematical techniques, but also those procedural rules and practical guidelines that were upheld as rational.

We want to bring together scholars with an interest in these kinds of theories of science in the Middle Ages. Our perspective is philosophical: we focus on the (epistemological and ontological) reasons behind, the arguments for, and the rational concepts within particular methodological views. While our focus is narrow in this sense, we do not want to impose restrictions on the material studied. In particular, our ‘Middle Ages’ include the Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin traditions of medieval philosophy. Moreover, case studies need not be limited to the canon of the history of philosophy and logic, and we also welcome and encourage contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including theology, intellectual history, the history of science, and the history of art.

Contributing papers will consider medieval theories of science and its philosophical implications, and might consist in particular case studies, or reflect more broadly on theoretical issues. Questions addressed by the papers might include but are not restricted to:

  • Where can explicit discussions of theories of science be found? Are these limited to logical writings? Which issues were particularly scrutinized in the medieval philosophical debate?
  • What is the place of methodologies that were constructed analogically, i.e., practices (e.g., artistic practices) structured in analogy to philosophical or scientific methods?
  • Can the interpretation of philosophical, (proto-)scientific, religious, or artistic practices in the Middle Ages benefit from a better understanding of medieval theories of science? Do such practices, in turn, illuminate the ideals behind the methods themselves?
  • Are medieval theories of science abstract catchalls, or is there room for domain-specificity? Is the notion of ‘domain’ itself part of discussions in the Middle Ages? If so, can the concept of ‘domain’ be fruitfully applied to other branches of medieval culture such as art?
  • Are medieval theories of science valuable interlocutors for more recent philosophy of science? To what extent can they provide transformative contrasts to contemporary philosophical assumptions?
  • To what extent do answers to all these questions depend on the methodologies employed by us (as philosophers, theologians, intellectual historians, historians of science, or historians of art)? Can our answers benefit from a critique of these (historiographical or exegetical) methodologies?

Over the course of two days, we aim to hold several panels with two to three twenty-minute papers each, as well as keynote lectures of forty minutes each.

Submission:
We are inviting proposals for papers of twenty-minute length. Please send abstracts of up to 500 words with CVs (as well as any inquiries) to medieval.theories.of.science@gmail.com by 14 February 2022.

Organisers:
Yael Barash (Cohn Institute for the History of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv)
Dominic Dold (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)
Gerd Micheluzzi (Department of Art History, University of Hamburg)

Updates and confirmed speakers: 
For updates and a list of confirmed speakers, please consult the event website: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/philosophical-perspectives-medieval-theories-science

CFP: ‘Geographical Mobility and Cultural Itineraries During the Late Middle Ages’, International Congress, Universitat de Girona, 20-22 April 2022, deadline: 23 January 2022

Western medieval civilization was a highly intertwined society. Following the 12th century, which saw the flourishing and the peak of a powerful civic and mercantile bourgeoisie, and the progressive increase of the laity’s training needs, various phenomena extended and increased the communications networks and routes that linked different territories of Western Europe. This included the proliferation of religious movements, the birth and development of the universities, and the appearance and consolidation of the mendicant orders. At the same time, power relations were reframed, economic, political, and military expansion projects promoted, and contacts with non-Christian communities and with other religious and cultural spaces intensified.

This congress seeks to take an interdisciplinary approach to a specific aspect of mobility: the relationship between the geographical routes and itineraries taken by texts, books, artworks, and, in their wake, cultural ideas and tendencies. It will give special consideration to the Occitan-Catalan area as the starting, middle, and final points of these journeys. To investigate this topic, the focus will be on figures who are often left on the margins of study: the intermediaries and agents responsible for the transfer culture. Oral accounts, music, written texts, and artworks were all physically and intellectually transported by agents who were often under the cover of anonymity; this includes scribes, translators, minstrels, cantors, artists, and patrons or promoters, but also other figures such as pilgrims, students, clerks, diplomats, and merchants. These all played a fundamental role in developing, disseminating, and circulating ideas, and encouraged cultural and intellectual mobility in Europe.

The congress aims to explore questions including, but not limited to, the following:

  • Which were the roads and routes followed by intermediaries? How did they travel and with whom?
  • Which were the cultural places (courts, monasteries and convents, schools, notarial offices, artistic and scribal workshops, etc.) through which these intermediaries passed? And how did these places evolve?
  • Can we define tendencies in the relation between the circulation of a certain kind of cultural product and existing routes?
  • What impact did the mobility and activities of different cultural agents have on these products?
  • Which contacts were established with cultural agents of different religions?

To explore and discuss these questions invited lectures, a round table with specialists from different disciplines, and paper sessions are planned.

You are invited to submit a 20-minute-long paper in any Romance language or in English. Proposals must be emailed to the address congres.mobgic2022@gmail.com by the 23rd of January 2022, and must include:

  • Author’s full name and institution
  • Email address
  • Paper title
  • Abstract (maximum 2000 characters and 5 keywords)

The proposals will be evaluated by the scientific committee. The outcome will be notified by the organizing committee by the 30th of January 2022.

The congress will be held on-site taking into account the health situation. If some of the participants are not able to assist due to restrictions on mobility to prevent the spread of the pandemic, they will be able to deliver their paper on-line.

Job opportunity: Head of World Collections, Cambridge University Libraries, deadline: 31 January 2022

A unique position has arisen to develop strategy, curate and lead the service offering for research collections at Cambridge University Libraries (CUL).

CUL is now recruiting to the new role of Head of World Collections to lead the curation and strategic development of a key area of its collections and activities. Reporting within the Research Collections Directorate, and leading a dedicated team, the Head of World Collections will drive the development of collecting strategy in their area, and ensure the provision of excellent and highly-focussed services to our users. They will work closely with library, archive and academic staff to create a coherent approach that reflects education and research needs, with the aim of diversifying our collections and curatorial practices. The Head of World Collections will also oversee the expert curatorial input into funding bids for collaborative research projects arising from the collections. There is an expectation that this will include research and documentation into collection provenance and the opportunity to increase engagement with representative communities, locally, nationally and globally. The post-holder will be expected to review the current resource for world collections, identify gaps in provision, challenge obsolete practices and approaches, redirect activity and introduce new functions as required. 

The Head of World Collections will be an experienced and dynamic collection, change, and people manager, with responsibility for forming and developing a new departmental structure and culture. They will be expected to have a curatorial and linguistic specialism in one of the collection areas covered by the World Collections function.

Cambridge University Libraries is one of the world’s foremost university and research libraries. With approximately 8 million volumes, 120,000 e-journal titles, and over 50 linear km of Special Collections, it is a major scholarly resource, both for the University of Cambridge, and for researchers nationally and internationally. 

A network of over 30 libraries, with the historic University Library at its heart, CUL serves resident members of the University, a local, national and international public, and a global scholarly audience. A UK legal deposit library for over 300 years, and a National Research Library, the University Library is also an Accredited Archive. Its Special Collections have been Designated by Arts Council England, as ‘one of the world’s great collections of global documentary cultural heritage’. CUL’s holdings cover every conceivable area of human endeavour, written across three thousand years, and in over two thousand languages, and they include manuscripts, maps, music, rare printed material, thousands of personal and institutional archives, as well as very substantial digital holdings.

Apply for this position here. The deadline for completed applications is 23.59 GMT, 31 January 2022.

Online lecture: ‘The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres 450 Years On’ by Professor Penny Roberts, The Twelfth Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture in French History, 17 January 2022, 6pm (GMT)

The Society for the Study of French History (SSFH) and The Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF) presents the twelfth annual Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture in French History. Professor Penny Roberts (University of Warwick) will give a paper entitled ‘The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres 450 years on’.

Professor Roberts is Vice-Provost and Chair of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick and the President of the Society for the Study of French History. Her talk will be held online, due to the current situation around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Roberts has provided the following summary of her talk:

“Michelet famously stated that the Massacre of St Bartholomew was ‘not a day, it was a season’. The historiographical debate about the massacre has proved intense, particularly around where responsibility lay for its instigation, with the crown or with the Guise or even an international Catholic conspiracy. Yet a consensus has also been reached: that the royal intention was to eliminate the Huguenot leadership, who were believed to be conspiring against the crown, not to prompt a general massacre. Nevertheless, in the confusion, local officials and militias made up their own minds how to proceed in Paris and beyond. More recently, through the work of Jérémie Foa, attention has turned to the victims and the perpetrators. In addition, the repercussions of the massacres, the impact in different countries and towns, is to be the focus of a forthcoming volume in French History. My own contribution will return me to the town of Troyes, on which I did my doctorate, to explore its massacre more closely in light of this recent shift in historical interest.”

The talk will take place on 17 January 2022, starting at 6pm (GMT). Registration is essential, though attendance is free. Please reserve your place in advance by signing up through Eventbrite here.

CFP: ‘Scientific Recreation / Recreational Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, 15-16 July 2022, University College London, deadline 31 March 2022

This two-day conference, funded by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at UCL, exploits the ambiguous meaning of the term “recreation” to bring together two important but disparate themes in the current scholarship of medieval and early modern recipe literature: the experimental turn centred the reproduction of scientific, craft, and household recipes, and studies highlighting how the playfulness of scientific activities contributed to contemporary scientific developments. Science is often associated with professionalism and seriousness. It is frequently forgotten that many scholars and non-scholars alike carry out playful science experiments as a form of recreation or entertainment. This was especially true for the late medieval and early modern period, when people from different backgrounds engaged in playful experiments, for example to produce astonishing magic tricks, invisible inks, or unusual hair dyes.

This conference will provide a unique opportunity to bring together scholars and practitioners from different disciplines such as history, chemistry, and physics to discuss the significance of fun and enjoyment in science. Furthermore, a hands-on section, hosted by the Institute of Making at UCL, will provide participants with the opportunity to work with historical recipes and conjoin theory with practice. This practical session will offer a better understanding of the opportunities and difficulties that arise in the recreation of historical scientific practices which frequently rely on the tacit knowledge of contemporary compilers and audiences. For example, in recreating seemingly impractical recipes which aim to make a ring jump around the house using mercury, we can unveil how late medieval and early modern people understood and exploited chemicals and their properties.

This conference will take a broad approach to the term “scientific recreation”. Papers might address the following topics:

  • Methodologies, Potentials, and Limitations of Scientific Recreation
  • Scientific Recreation for Education and Entertainment
  • Performing Scientific Spectacle and the Role of Wonder
  • Experimentation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
  • Sites of Scientific Recreation / Recreational Science
  • Transmission, Modification, Enhancement and Corruption of Recipes and Instructions

The conference will be held, circumstances permitting, at University College London. It will be accompanied by keynote lectures by Prof Simon Werrett (University College London) as well as Dr Tillmann Taape (The Warburg Institute).

We strongly encourage graduate students and other early career scholars as well as conservation scientists and artists to apply to present papers. We invite applicants to submit abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers accompanied by a short biography to Vanessa Da Silva Baptista and Dr Eveline Szarka (recreation.conference2022@gmail.com) by 31 March 2022.

We invite anyone interested in demonstrating recreations of late medieval or early modern recipes to submit an abstract with a maximum of 500 words including a description of the recreation process and a list of materials and equipment together with a short biography to Vanessa Da Silva Baptista and Dr Eveline Szarka (recreation.conference2022@gmail.com) by 31 March 2022.