L'Agenda des Médiévistes

In 1472 the printers Sweynheym and Pannartz wrote a petition to Pope Sixtus VI: left with over 10,000 unsold printed books, they were now forced to ask for financial help or face utter failure. The advent of print changed the dynamics of supply and demand altogether. Some printers boomed while others quickly went bust. Pioneering merchants negotiated the book trade’s position within traditional labour market structures. Early printing entrepreneurial successes depended on the ability of printers and publishers to mould an author’s creation into a sellable article consumed by a wide community of readers.

This conference invites contributions on any facet of buying and selling in the early modern book trade: failures and successes of print ventures; strategies and ideas to increase the sales; rebinding, reprinting, reediting; cooperation and competition amongst booksellers; the day-to-day life of printing firms and bookshops; fairs and permanent markets; catalogues advertising stock and individual libraries being auctioned; taste and trends in the purchase of books; influence of censorship and regulations.

Co-organised by Shanti Graheli and Jan Alessandrini, the conference will take place 18-20 June 2015.

The papers given at this conference will form the basis of a volume in the Library of the Written Word.

The call for papers is now open and will also be available online on the USTC website: http://www.ustc.ac.uk. Those interested in giving a paper should contact Dr Jan Alessandrini (jla6@st-andrews.ac.uk) at St Andrews, offering a brief description of their likely contribution.

The call for papers will close on 30 November 2014.

Informations pratiques :
Veranstalter: Universal Short Title Project; Co-organised by Shanti Graheli and Dr Jan Alessandrini
Datum, Ort: 18.06.2015–20.06.2015, St Andrews, Scotland
Deadline: 30.11.2014

Kontakt:
Dr. Jan Alessandrini
School of History, University of St Andrews, GB – KY16 9AL
jla6@st-andrews.ac.uk

Source de l’information : H-Soz-u-Kult

Yale University, New Haven, CT, February 20-21, 2015
Deadline: 15 November 2015

Keynote speaker: Spyros Papapetros (Princeton U)
Organizing Committee: Padma Maitland (UC Berkeley); Christopher P. Miller (UC Berkeley); Marta Figlerowicz (Yale U); Ksenia Sidorenko (Yale U); Emma Natalya Stein (Yale U)

“Object Emotions” continues a critical dialogue about new directions in humanities research and theory that began at UC Berkeley in 2013. This conference is inspired by the recent heightened attention to objects and emotions as new points of entry into history, literature, art, architecture, area studies, and the social sciences. We aim to foster interdisciplinary reflections about the critical uses of thing theory, affect theory, the histories of emotions, and new materialism. We also want to study how these discourses might benefit from being set in conversation with each other.

Last year, these questions inspired papers on, among many other topics, forms of animism in fourteenth-century England, the role of tiles in Taiwanese architecture, representations of churches in Willa Cather, oral accounts of labor in factories in India, and the songs of Kylie Minogue. This coming conference seeks to be similarly diverse and experimental in the kinds of approaches it brings together. By exploring emotions and objects in conjunction with each other we hope to bring out the shared stakes of these scopes of critical inquiry, as well as the divergences among the ways feelings and things are studied in particular disciplines.

Questions we want to ask include, but are not limited to, the following: How is the task of describing emotions within the context of a poem different from describing them within the context of a painting or a temple? How do the current fields of affect theory, thing theory, and the history of emotions participate in the much longer history of debates about the subjective and the objective? How do emotions and the bodies experiencing them relate to each other? Are there cultural differences in the way objects and emotions are defined and assessed? What does it mean to attribute feelings to an inanimate object, or even to describe this object as the cause or inspiration of a feeling? Do feelings have an animating force? How does the critical framing of scale—the microscopic, the individual, the human, the social, the global—change the way we pursue questions about objects and emotions?

The conference will take place at Yale on February 20th and 21st, 2015. Participants will include both graduate students and faculty members. We welcome papers that address any of the questions described above, or related ones, with reference to the bodies of theory shared across disciplines or to individual works of literature, art, or architecture. Please submit 250-word abstracts to Padma Maitland at padmamaitland@berkeley.edu by November 15, 2014.

Source de l’information : Medieval Art Research

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, March 13 – 14, 2015
Deadline-CFP: 10 déc. 2014

Keynote speaker: Professor Dr. Carola Jäggi, University of Zürich (CH)

This conference seeks to compare, contrast and juxtapose scholarly approaches to the art of Medieval and Renaissance religious women that have emerged in recent decades. Seeking to initiate a broader conversation, which is long overdue, we invite papers that examine female monastic art in terms of patronage, space, devotional practice, spiritual identity or material history, spanning all of Europe and bridging the gap between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Over the last three decades, within a broader scholarly effort to recover women’s history, art historians have explored the role of gender in the form, function and patronage of monastic art and architecture. It has become evident that the institutionalisation of late medieval and renaissance religious women developed under very different conditions from that of their male counterparts. Monastic foundations for women are repeatedly revealed as having been idiosyncratic, rarely adhering to a set of norms. There are many examples of stable and flourishing institutions performing functions of dynastic memoria for wealthy, aristocratic or royal families. Equally, female convents could be fluid and metamorphic during the course of their history: many instances demonstrate shifting ecclesiastical allegiances, mutable types of monastic life, movement between patrons, and even communities changing order. Such varied historical circumstances shaped the architecture for female religious communities, ranging from large complexes erected in the most fashionable styles of their time, to basic dwellings within converted secular buildings. Diversity can also be observed in the commissioning and use of works of art, from second-hand or adapted paintings to specially commissioned, lavish monuments and vast cycles of wall paintings. In short, artworks in the female religious context escape generalisation.

Idiosyncrasies are found not only when investigating the female monastic complex and its art, but also in the scholarship itself, which has primarily focused on chronologically and geographically specific material, often without engaging in dialogue with adjacent fields.

North of the Alps, scholars tend to gravitate towards the rich Cistercian and Dominican material, and to concentrate on the interplay between visual culture and devotional practice. The 2005 exhibition ‘Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern’, and the accompanying conference, bore witness to the vibrant wealth of artworks preserved in the German-speaking areas of Europe, and should foster scholarly exchange with other European regions.

On the Italian peninsula, the patchy archival record and damage to physical convent spaces has led to a proliferation of case studies. Renaissance and early modern scholarship has also focused on biographies of individual nuns or specific convent chronicles as means of investigating nunneries within the urban fabric of the Italian city-states from a socio-economic perspective.

Meanwhile, the abundance of surviving artistic material in Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe has recently started to receive attention. The art of women who lived in a semi-religious context, such as tertiaries, widows, anchoresses and beguines, has also been brought to the fore. This abundance of recent work now invites comparison and wider interpretation.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers exploring material across the stated time span, in all artistic media and throughout Europe, that deal with either case studies or broader methodological questions. Papers, which take a comparative approach, breaking the traditional regional or chronological boundaries, are particularly welcome. We intend to arrange the papers into panels that present contrasting approaches and/or differing time periods or places, to stimulate comparative discussion.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The topography of female religious settlements (e.g. within a city or a region)
• Female monastic architectural space (social aspects, interaction, hierarchies etc.)
• The commemorative function of art and architecture in female religious communities
• The relationship between lay patrons and female religious communities
• Artworks and liturgical/devotional practice
• Religious women as artistic practitioners
• Second-hand or relocated artworks
• The importance of written sources (chronicles, regulations, etc.) for understanding the artistic choices of religious women
• Comparisons between the art of female and male communities
• Artworks for female tertiaries and other semi-monastic groups, comparisons with the art of their second order counterparts
• Patronage networks between individual patrons and/or female religious communities
• Representing collective and individual identity
• The influence of female monastic art beyond the nunnery

Please send your abstracts of 250 – 300 words and a short biography of 100 words to Laura Llewellyn (laura.llewellyn@courtauld.ac.uk) and Michaela Zöschg (michaela.zoschg@courtauld.ac.uk) by 10 December 2014 at the latest.

Unfortunately, we cannot offer travel subsidies. Applicants from outside London are therefore encouraged to apply to other funding bodies for travel bursaries to attend the conference.

Organised by Laura Llewellyn and Michaela Zöschg (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

Source de l’information : blog de l’ApAhAu

Cinquième colloque international au château de Bellecroix (Chagny),
du 16 au 18 octobre 2015,
organisé par le centre de castellologie de Bourgogne (CeCaB),
sous la direction de Nicolas Faucherre, Delphine Gautier et Hervé Mouillebouche

L’habitat aristocratique médiéval est généralement étudié sous l’angle de la défense, et la résidence des temps modernes sous celui du confort et de la distribution. Pourtant, les demeures élitaires, rurales ou urbaines, conservent souvent des éléments de fortification (fossés, canonnières, bretèches, pont-levis…) et des capacités défensives (armement, position, droit), jusqu’aux XVIe et XVIIe, voire XVIIIe siècle.

Ce colloque propose donc d’étudier les formes et les causes de la permanence et de la disparition de la fortification privée à l’époque moderne :

• formes symboliques, décoratives, dissuasives…
• manifestation d’une idéologie, d’une domination sociale (aristocratique ou financière), ou d’un droit féodal…
• cadre institutionnel, légal, historique ; insécurité réelle ou supposée, reprise en main des fonctions régaliennes…
• archaïsme ou modernisme des formes de défense, efficacité, adaptation ou non aux progrès balistiques…

Les intervenants s’efforceront d’éviter la stricte monographie de site et privilégieront plutôt les synthèses chronologiques, typologiques, régionales, thématiques ou institutionnelles. Le colloque permettra de croiser des approches historiques, archéologiques, architecturales, iconographiques et littéraires, à l’interface de l’Europe médiévale et moderne.

Propositions de communications à envoyer accompagnées d’un court résumé et éventuellement de documents iconographiques à H-Mouillebouche@Wanadoo.fr, avant le 31 janvier 2015.