L'Agenda des Médiévistes

NeMLA 46th Convention
Toronto, Ontario
April 30-May 3, 2015

We invite contributions to a session entitled “From Medieval to Modern: New Approaches to French Women and Authorship” to take place at the next NEMLA conference (Toronto, April 30-May 3, 2015). The session will explore new approaches to French women writers and concepts of authorship in a range of periods. It will also serve as a springboard for an edited collection of essays that considers the history and social significance of the French woman writer as a figure with a specific, if shifting, cultural valence, directly related to the values, history, and ideology of the society that constructed her. We are particularly interested in intersections between the study of women, gender difference, authorship and other current scholarly topics and approaches, eg. discourses of embodiment, race and ethnicity, religion, politics, popular culture (including media and celebrity), biography, ecocriticism, science, material culture, class / family relations, queer studies, disability studies.

As the study of gender has been integrated into other modes of French cultural studies, recent scholarship has tended to focus away from the woman writer as a category of inquiry in her own right. This session aims to recover the figure of the woman writer (broadly conceived) and her specific struggles by exploring recent methodological approaches that bring new kinds of questions to bear on the study of women writers. While we seek a broad view of female authorship and the multivalent ways that it has been interpreted, constructed and embodied over the course of French history, we also would like to bring into dialogue scholars who may be working on shared questions and intersecting methodologies but who might otherwise have little contact with each other due to the period-specificity of their work. Both the NEMLA session and the related volume seek to interrogate a mythology of progress, and bring to light the repeated conflicts faced by French women writers over time as well as the ways in which these writers reflected and refracted the broader social conflicts of the specific historical contexts in which they lived and wrote. Abstracts for 20-minute presentations must be sent via this link on the NeMLA website. Feel free to contact Rachel Mesch, mesch@yu.edu, or Leah Chang, lchang@gwu.edu, with any questions about the session and/or the related volume.

Rachel Mesch
Yeshiva University
500 West 185th st
New York, NY 10033
Email: mesch@yu.edu
Visit the website at http://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15466

Source de l’information : H-Net

Special Sessions: Nunneries in Medieval Europe: New Historiographical and Methodological Approaches Kalamazoo,Michigan

Deadline: Sep 15, 2014

50th International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 14-17, 2015), Kalamazoo, Michigan

Although in the last two decades a large amount of research has pointed out different significant issues regarding female monasticism in Europe, partly overcoming the previous lack of studies, many of them still rely on preconceptions, with a lack of both critical reading and revision and a gender perspective.

In these sessions we aim to address different issues of recent scholarship on female monasticism, questioning some oversimplified and idealised interpretations given by traditional historiography, and redifining some particular points.We will cover a wide timeframe, from the High to the Late Middle Ages (950-1500ca), and this will allow us to consider the evolution and changes in spirituality and liturgy, the gender roles, the relationships of  nunneries with their environment, and the consequences of all this in art and architecture.

The greater regulation of monasticism and Treaties and Councils of Central and Late Middle Ages involved outstanding  alterations in the roles of religious women, as they tried to undermine women authority and independence, imposing  a more strict control over the administration and religious life.  Likewise, the reform of the religious orders at the end of the Middle Ages insisted also in these restrictions. Nevertheless, we will discuss how religious women managed to overcome this gender limitations, and affirmed their authority taking control over the administration, legislation, liturgy, relationship with the environment and also the artistic  production and commission.

Papers dealing with all these issues are welcome.

Please send your title and abstract (250 words), together with a short CV, to Mercedes Pérez Vidal mercedespvidal@gmail.com and/or Laura Cayrol Bernardo laura.cayrolbernardo@ehess.fr by September 15, 2014.

http://wmich.edu/medieval/files/call-for-papers-2015.pdf

Source de l’information : Ordensgeschichte

European Society for Environmental History (ESEH)’s 8th biennial conference “Greening History: Studying the Environment across Disciplines, Past, Present and Future”

30.06.2015–03.07.2015, Versailles
Deadline : 20.09.2014

We intend to submit one or two panels on “Monasteries and Environment” for the ESEH conference in Versailles, France (30 June – 3 July 2015). Papers contributing to the mentioned subject would be very welcome. You will find more information about the planned panel in the abstract below.

We invite you to send your abstract (200 – 300 words, including the name, title, affiliation and email address of the presenter(s)) until 20 September 2014 to chantal.camenisch@hist.unibe.ch.

For further information on the ESEH 2015, see also www.eseh.org/event/upcoming-conference.

From the Early Middle Ages through the Modern Period, monasteries have played an important role in European environmental history. Depending on their religious order, the monks sought places in the wilderness near forests or floodplains. Monks cleared forests to obtain cultivated land, and they established field rotations systems. Therefore, monasteries shaped landscapes. Fish ponds were maintained in these places in order to feed the monks during lent. To maintain these fish ponds, elaborate techniques of water use were established and, for the purpose of food production and gaining medicine, the monks planted vegetables and herbs in gardens.

In addition, monasteries were places where the written tradition survived during the Migration Period and in the Early Middle Ages. The monks wrote chronicles on everything important to the monasteries where they lived, including weather anomalies and natural disasters. Later they wrote weather diaries. Written evidence of the perception of nature and the environment have also survived from the early Middle Ages.

This panel aims to trace the activities emanating from monasteries that led to changes in the environment and includes all continents and all epochs, in effort to answer the following questions: What were the reasons for the many interventions into the environment? Which methods did the monks (and nuns) apply for that purpose? How did the monks understand nature and the environment through the centuries? What sources can be used for researching these topics?

Possible topics include but are not limited to :

• Deforestation and land reclamation by monasteries
• Concepts of landscaping used by different orders
• Maintenance of gardens in monasteries
• Maintenance of fish ponds
• Techniques of water use
• Innovations and techniques in land use
• Forest exploitation by monasteries
• Natural disasters and hazards hitting monasteries
• Weather observations in monasteries
• Resource conflicts
• Perception of environment and nature in monasteries

Contact :
Camenisch Chantal
University of Bern, Section of Economic, Social and Environmental History (WSU)
Länggassstrasse 49, CH-3012 Bern
chantal.camenisch@hist.unibe.ch

Source de l’information : Ordensgeschichte

Call for Chapter Proposals:
Singing Death (edited volume)
Deadline: 30 September (submission of abstracts)

Chapter proposals are invited for an edited volume entitled ‘Singing Death’. The editors are in preliminary negotiations with Ashgate Press for a collection of essays provisionally entitled ‘Singing Death’ and we would like to invite chapter proposals for this project. ‘Singing Death’ arises out of a day-long symposium and concert combined, generously supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. This took place at the University of Melbourne, 17th August, 2013: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/media/89722/singing-death_poster_web.pdf

The programme alternated academic papers on the music, art and literature of death with performances of some of the music associated with it. The editors would like to extend the work of the symposium with a collection of essays focussing on death and music. We want to offer readers an encounter with music as a distinct discourse of death, another way of speaking death; the collection will be accompanied by a recording of the music involved with each of its chapters. We aim, most of all, to bring into focus how death figures through music for the living and the dying, how it taps into the experience of all those for whom death comes close.

Death is an unanswerable question for humanity, literally the question that always remains unanswered (although so many answers are offered). It is ‘the question of questions’ as Federico García Lorca put it, since it lies beyond human experience. The music of death represents one of the most profound ways in which, nevertheless, we struggle to accommodate death within the scope of the living by giving a voice to death and the dead. We want the book to engage with the profound disturbance that death presents to the living and how music expresses and/or responds to that disturbance.

The field of enquiry is very broad. We welcome proposals from any intellectual discipline that can engage with the nexus of music and death. Musicological expertise is not essential. Music, like poetry, operates in a different way from ordinary discourse; it acts as well as speaks and it can have profound and complex effects for listeners. We want our collection to address the difference that music, vocal and instrumental, makes to all those confronted with death. We also welcome proposals from those practically involved with the question, for instance music therapists involved in palliative care or grief counselling, or those who organise or perform music associated with death in some way.

Below are some possible topics for research. The list is far from exhaustive, nor is it intended to be exclusive. Each topic could also be subdivided many times:

• music and suicide (some songs have been blamed for causing suicide, some songs commemorate a death by suicide)
• music and murder
• music and the dying
• music and mourning
• music and spiritualism (some people believe that the dead are communicating with them through music)
• music and the afterlife
• music, death and religion
• music, death and the law
• music and the revenant (ghosts, vampires, zombies, etc.)
• death in various musical genres, for instance opera, death metal, folk music.
• music in palliative care

Proposals should include:

An abstract no longer than 500 words
3-10 keywords
short CV, no more than 10 lines which can include a link to a website

Please indicate to the editors what music you wish to accompany your contribution and whether you can provide it. Recordings can be of live music or of pre-recorded music (permissions will be required when chapter is submitted). Please send to Helen Dell and Helen Hickey. See email addresses below.

Important dates:

30th September—submission of abstracts
30th October—notification of acceptance or otherwise
30th January—deadline for submission of paper
30th May—notification of acceptance of paper
30th June—submission of revised version

Editors: Dr. Helen Dell and Dr. Helen Hickey, University of Melbourne, Australia, 3052. Y6h

Bios:

Helen Dell:
Helen Dell’s research is in the fields of music and literature, especially when joined together as song. Her PhD thesis, on desire in French medieval song was published in 2008 as Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song, by Boydell and Brewer. Since then Helen has been conducting research into recent receptions and inventions of medieval music. She has now finished a second book, for Cambria Press, entitled: Music and the Medievalism of Nostalgia: Fantasies of Medieval Music in the English-speaking World, 1945 to 2010. Recent research has centred on the music of death, from which last year’s symposium, ‘Singing Death’ and the current planned collection have sprung. More on Helen’s research can be seen at her website: http://www.helendell.com
Email: helendell@internode.on.net

Helen Hickey:
Helen Hickey completed her PhD thesis on the Everyday in early fifteenth-century English literature. She is interested in the ways history and literature intersect with medicine and materiality. Her most recent publication is an article in an edited collection, Theorising Legal Personhood in Pre-modern England (Brill) on the Inquisitions of Insanity and medieval literature. She is a member of the International Health Humanities Network.
Email: helenhickey@bigpond.com

Appel à contribution : Medieval Art Research