The View From Kalamazoo

Call For Papers – 2009 Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies Annual Graduate Student Conference
“Education: Forming and Deforming the Pre-Modern Mind” — Friday, January 23, 2009

250 WORD ABSTRACT & CV ARE DUE OCTOBER 15, 2008, and may be sent to renaissance@newberry.org

http://www.newberry.org/renaissance/conf-inst/gradstudents09.html

How did premodern people learn? How did they teach? In a rapidly expanding world, how were education and information disseminated to both traditional, school-based students and a more general public? This year’s Graduate Student Conference invites papers that broadly interpret education in premodern societies through the focal point of history, literature, art, philosophy, music, gender, disability, cultural studies, or other fields. In particular we seek studies that expand how we think about learning and teaching in medieval and early modern contexts. Some possible topics include gender and education, cloistered learning, the master/disciple relationship, missionary work and colonial learning, confessionalization, the effects of the printing press, propaganda, literacy, the education of the prince, and illustrated treatises and educational primers (possibly based on the Newberry’s extensive collection).

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Call for Papers: Authority and the Book in Medieval Culture
April 4, 2009
Yale University

Abstracts from graduate students are now being accepted for the 26th Annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference, the theme of which will be “Authority and the Book in Medieval Culture.”

The organizers hope that this broad heading will elicit proposals for papers from all disciplines of Medieval Studies. Of especial interest are papers dealing with palaeography and manuscript studies;
hagiography; literary studies; art history; history and historiography; gender studies; religious studies; musicology and medieval liturgical studies; as well as biblical exegesis and the relationship between Latin and various medieval vernaculars. Further, we look forward to receiving proposals that take more theoretical approaches to ideas of authority in the medieval period. We also hope to have one panel devoted to papers that explore different aspects of the history of modern Medieval Studies.

Papers are to be no more than twenty minutes in length and read in English. Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent by e-mail to Andrew.Kraebel@Yale.edu or SamanthaLily.Katz@Yale.edu; a hardcopy may be mailed to:

Andrew Kraebel
Department of English
Yale University
P.O. Box 208302
New Haven, CT 06520-8302

The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2008.

Graduate students whose abstracts are selected for the conference will have the opportunity to submit their paper in its entirety for consideration for the Alison Goddard Elliott Award. The conference will also feature an exhibition of manuscripts in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, and a plenary speaker, to be announced at a later date.

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REMINDER:

The seventh annual Conference for Medieval Studies, a graduate student conference sponsored by Comitatus (the Purdue Medieval Studies student organization) will be held at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana on February 20-21, 2009. The theme for this year’s conference will be “Saints and Sinners of the Middle Ages.”

Ann W. Astell, Professor of Theology at Notre Dame University and author of The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (1990), Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth (1994), Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (1996), and Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (2006) will be the keynote speaker for this year’s conference.

Our theme looks at the various roles of saints and sinners throughout the Middle Ages. The literary and historical texts surrounding these medieval figures are multilingual, fantastic, and spiritually rich-fitting well into the interdisciplinary approach of our conference. Because saintliness and sinfulness could be idiosyncratic, they were often expressed in different and interesting ways in the
texts of the Middle Ages. What is more, saintliness and sinfulness extend beyond words on a page to other areas such as scribal practices, manuscript creation, art, architecture, and many other facets of medieval life.

We are inviting both 250-word abstracts for papers and panel proposals from graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Individual papers should be kept to 15-20 minutes in length. Possible topics might include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

- The lives of saints in vernaculars and their dependence upon the Latin tradition.
- The occurrence of marginalia in manuscripts depicting both the sacred and the sordid.
- The role of saintliness or sinfulness in everyday medieval life.
- The commodification of relics in the Middle Ages.
- Saintliness and sinfulness in detailed illuminations, wall paintings, architectural reliefs, etc.
- The experiences of holy women and holy men.

Due Date for Abstracts: October 31st, 2008

Please send all abstracts to:
Jack R. Baker
jackrbaker@purdue.edu (preferred method)
Purdue University
Department of English
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038