Abstracts are sought for an edited collection on women’s expression in early medieval English society. Abstracts of up to 300 words are due 20 December 2023. See the CFP below.

International Seminar

Imaginary Communities:
Reading, Writing and Translating Early Modern Women’s Fiction

University of Huelva, Spain
17-18 October, 2024

Traditional approaches to the ‘origins of the novel’ question in the English context have often overlooked the role played by women’s contribution to the development of the genre. Minor works, anonymous texts, fiction signed by women, as well as those works bearing a female pseudonym, were usually considered second-rate and were rarely included—with only a few exceptions—in canonical histories of the novel. A female history of the novel genre cannot be written in isolation from other women novelists across Europe, who no doubt exerted an enormous influence on the English novel market, and on women novelists in particular. This seminar proposes a discussion of women’s printed fiction during the seventeenth century from a pan-European perspective to help us situate the early days of the novel in their true transnational context. The fictional works translated into English from different European tongues, the growing popularity of women’s fiction among readers, as well as the cross-influences between English and non-English novels allegedly authored by women, or their different markets—accounting for the influence that women printers and booksellers played in the publication and dissemination of fiction—will also be of our concern. It is our contention that it is possible to read the complex network of readers, writers and other agents of the novel market as belonging to an active, though imaginary, community contributing to the development of the novel form. We would like to assess the relevance that this growing female contribution had in the evolution of the genre.

We invite 20-minute papers which discuss crosscurrents or influences among texts authored by European women, as well as about biographical and/or cultural relationships at work between women writers and intellectuals in the period of study. We aim to discuss whether we can trace a continuum in European women’s fiction which explains transitions of genre/gender and literary culture, from the perspective of transculturality, drawing on all literary sources as fields of cross-media influences. We will consider papers about English women’s native fiction, like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, as well as about translations and adaptations of continental women’s works printed in England, as the examples of Marie de Lafayette, Mlle de la Roche Guilhem, Madeleine de Scudéry, or María de Zayas, among others, make clear.

Some of the suggested topics are the following:

Keynote speakers:

Dr Erin Keating, University of Manitoba
Dr Mary Helen McMurran, Western University
Dr Leah Orr, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Please, send your titles and 150-word abstracts to women16211699@gmail.com
(cc/villegas@uhu.es) by 1 March, 2024.

The journal Perspective : actualité en histoire de l’art will explore, in its 2025 – 1 issue, the relations between labor and art history, understood both as a scholarly discipline and the material under study.

That which we collectively term “labor” is today the subject of rapid changes and fierce debates which, in an often caricatural way, pitches those for whom labor is a value in and of itself (work or else laze about) against those who question the value of labor: Which type of work is useful to society? Are the conditions acceptable where labor is active? Is labor a form of domination ()? Posing these questions from an art-historical point of view allows us to start from scratch. This volume suggests that we study the relationships between labor and art history along four axes:

1. The debate over art as labor: How has art history participated; effected changes in its vocabulary; and interacted with those artists, art critics, or philosophers who played a role in this debate?
2. Art as a process of production: Which strands of art history have turned their attention more to the production of art than to its reception and through what type of theoretical, methodological, and ideological apparatus?
3. The iconography of labor: What contributions does art history furnish, through the analysis of images, to our knowledge of the realities or representations of labor? What does it borrow from or contribute to other humanistic disciplines that study labor?
4. Art history as labor: What are the material conditions in which art history is produced? How do these conditions vary in relation to individual, local, and/or historical situations?

Taking care to ground reflections in a historiographic, methodological, or epistemological perspective, please send your proposals (an abstract of 2,000 to 3,000 characters/350 to 500 words, a working title, a short bibliography on the subject, and a biography limited to a few lines) to the editorial email address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) no later than December 11, 2023. Perspective handles translations; projects will be considered by the committee regardless of language. Authors whose proposals are accepted will be informed of the decision by the editorial committee in January 2024, while articles will be due on May 15, 2024. Submitted texts (between 25,000 and 45,000 characters/ 4,500 or 7,500 words, depending on the intended project) will be formally accepted following an anonymous peer review process.

The Eleventh Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (June 10-12, 2024) is a convenient summer venue in North America for scholars to present papers, organize sessions, participate in roundtables, and engage in interdisciplinary discussion. The goal of the Symposium is to promote serious scholarly investigation into all topics and in all disciplines of medieval and Renaissance studies.

The plenary speakers for this year will be Cynthia J. Hahn, of Hunter College and the City University of New York, and John Witte, Jr., of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.

The Symposium is held annually on the beautiful midtown St. Louis campus of Saint Louis University. On campus housing options include affordable, air-conditioned apartments as well as a more luxurious hotel. Inexpensive meal plans are also available, and there is a wealth of restaurants, bars, and cultural venues within easy walking distance of campus.

While attending the Symposium, participants are free to use the Vatican Film Library, the Rare Books Division, and the general collection at Saint Louis University’s Pius XII Memorial Library. These collections offer access to tens of thousands of medieval and early modern manuscripts on microfilm as well as strong holdings in medieval and Renaissance history, literature, languages, manuscript studies, theology, philosophy, and canon law. The Jesuit Archives & Research Center is adjacent to the university and also accessible to Symposium attendees.

We invite proposals for papers, complete sessions, and roundtables. Any topics regarding the scholarly investigation of the medieval and early modern world are welcome. Papers are normally twenty minutes each and sessions are scheduled for ninety minutes. Scholarly organizations are especially encouraged to sponsor proposals for complete sessions, and organizing at least two sessions in coordination with each other is highly recommended. All sessions are in-person.

Mini-conferences hosted by societies or organized around a theme occur in the context of the SMRS. Paper submitters are welcome to submit their paper for general consideration at the Symposium or for one of the mini-conferences. This year’s mini-conferences are:

• 49th Annual St. Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies
  • All areas of manuscript studies, including but not limited to paleography, textual criticism, codicology, preservation and curation, and art history, are welcome
  • Lowry Daly, SJ Plenary Speaker: Daniel Hobbins (University of Notre Dame)
• Boethius 2024: The 1500-Year Memorial Conference
• The 2024 Conference on John Milton

The submission portal will open on November 1. The portal has buttons for submission to the main SMRS and for each of the mini-conferences. The deadline for all submissions is December 31, 2023. Decisions will be made by the end of January and the final program will be published in March.
For more information or to submit your proposal online go to: https://www.smrs-slu.org/.

12th-14th September 2024
Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies

CFP Deadline: 1 December 2023

Children in the early modern world were dependent upon caretakers in many ways: physically, socially, and emotionally. Children could also be subjected to and negotiated social and economic dependencies, including conditions of serfdom, indentured labour, servitude, slavery, and family ties. Highly mobile, children were traded and trafficked between households, across cultural boundaries, and over land and oceans. These experiences could be exacerbated through considerations of gender and (premediated) sexuality. Wedged between these intersections of power, space, and (in)visibility, children have frequently been neglected in history writing, with their limited traces in archives contributing to this marginalisation. Following recent calls for praxeological approaches, global history, and the history of material culture, their silences are beginning to break.

We wish to foreground children’s representations, articulations, and their experiences in archival and visual narratives as modes of overcoming their assumed absences in the historical record. Children shaped dependent relationships, not least in their capacity as future adults. A child’s entry into strong asymmetrical dependencies may have been involuntary but they needed to adapt. Processes of adaptation, negotiation, and rejection, in turn, stabilised and destabilised dependencies. Under strong and enduring forms of asymmetrical dependency (i.e. chattel plantation slavery), enslaved children were paradoxically first treated as incomplete units of labour, but upon reaching physical maturity encountered a state of permanent infantilisation through calculated deprivation by enslavers. Accounting for both the violence of strong asymmetrical dependency and its archives, while recovering children’s agency, is a challenge for historians.

It is the aim of this conference to conceive of children not as isolated, ‘minor’ subjects in history but as seminal agents. We welcome papers that:

• Explore the experiences of dependent children in the early modern world through novel approaches, particularly that of the history of emotions and/or microhistory;
• Consider the gendered dimensions and gendered disparities of childhood experiences;
• Interrogate institutional frameworks of slavery, dependency, serfdom, capitalism, and the family from the ground up;
• Investigate archival and visual sources that recover child-authored narratives and early modern discourses about children, childhood and infantilisation; and
• Interpret how these narratives may have reinforced or challenged dependent relationships, communities, and spaces.

The conference probes the possibility of an integrative global approach to the history of children in the early modern world. We welcome examples of research on all world regions, including indigenous studies and the history of borderlands. We also encourage interdisciplinary contributions and creative theoretical engagements.

We welcome submissions from advanced doctoral students, early career researchers, and senior scholars. Please submit your abstracts of ca. 300 words along with a short biographical note to earlymodern@dependency.uni-bonn.de by 1st December 2023. The conference will take place in person in Bonn and limited travel funding may be available for speakers. Please indicate in your submission if you require funding. Successful applicants will be notified by 30th December 2023.

This conference is organised by the German-Australian DAAD-Universities Australia collaborative project Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World: Gender, Trauma, and Trafficking in Transcultural Perspective (1500-1800) of early career researchers from the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences of the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, and the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn: Joseph Biggerstaff, Susan Broomhall, Kristie Flannery, Claudia Jarzebowski, Jessica O’Leary, and Lisa Phongsavath.

Thursday 23 November 2023
Full day event
Online, hosted by Flinders University (Adelaide)

CFP closes 25 September 2023

Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Daniel Anlezark (University of Sydney)
Dr Courtnay Konshuh (University of Calgary)

The complex series of interrelated Old English annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (ASC) constitutes one of the richest surviving examples of historical writing from early medieval England. Compiled in several extant manuscripts at different centres of monastic, episcopal, and royal activity, these annals shed crucial light on changing dynamics of power, on important cultural developments, on linguistic evolution, and on the crystallisation of communal identities in England between the late ninth and mid-twelfth centuries. In recent decades, increased linguistic, palaeographical, historical, and literary scrutiny of the annals has laid secure foundations for fine-grained work on the ASC as cultural artefacts that were reworked, redeployed, and reinterpreted in many different contexts throughout the middle ages (and beyond).

This online symposium, hosted by researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, seeks to build on this scholarship by foregrounding new approaches to the ASC. In particular, we invite scholars from various disciplines and different career stages to submit proposals for 20-minute papers (to be presented in English) relating in some way to themes of conflict, connection, and/or community in the ASC and their wider context. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Representations of war and/or violence in the ASC
• Discrepancies within and/or between separate versions of the ASC
• Cross-cultural encounters and interactions in the ASC
• Relationships between manuscripts of the ASC and related texts
• Representations of particular communities and/or their relationships in the ASC
• The creation and use of copies of the ASC within specific communities in early medieval England
• The dissemination of the ASC and related texts

Please send paper proposals, including a title, 150–200-word abstract, and short biography, to Dr James Kane (james.kane@flinders.edu.au), A/Prof. Erin Sebo (erin.sebo@flinders.edu.au), and Julian Calcagno (julian.calcagno@flinders.edu.au) by 25 September 2023.

Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group 2023 Annual Conference
FATE AND FORTUNE
UWA, Saturday 21 October 2023

Renaissance thinkers were interested in moral philosophy, and they found inspiration in both ancient and medieval sources. How should one conduct themselves to be happy and useful within society? What will the future bring for us in a time of deep transformation?

An image of a new world to be discovered; changed perspectives in astronomy and medicine; Renaissance humanity wondered whether they were able to influence their path in life, whether their decisions were dependent on a free will—as Pico della Mirandola stated in his Oration on the Dignity of Man—or were but the choice of an omnipotent God, as Catholics, and even more strongly Protestants, each emphasised. The role of Providence would become prevalent across European culture, from visual art to Shakespeare’s plays, gradually replacing the capricious Wheel of Fate which was equally central to medieval thought.

This conference will broadly discuss themes concerning human destiny and the possibility of executing our own will, placed within the attempt to acquiesce to, to acquire, or to enforce a vision of peace and harmony within the constant social and political metamorphosis of the Renaissance, and of the world today.

Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group Incorporated welcomes abstracts which address the theme of ‘Fate and Fortune’ in the medieval and Renaissance periods including:

● Representations of Providence, of destiny, or of doom in literature and literary works.
● Paintings and sculpture relating to fate, divine or otherwise.
● Philosophical works or analyses of Fate and Fortune, or those relating to ethics and utopias.
● Astrology, which enjoyed a blooming during the Renaissance much as it has today, with people turning to psychics, magic, and the stars to search for answers to important questions.
● Political writings depicting the perfect ruler, a utopian vision, or condemning contemporary tyranny.
● Social ideals that valorised the reception of an ancient wisdom, from the Stoics, Plato, Aristotle, or others.
● Educational ideas inspired by Renaissance or classical philosophy, such as liberal and postcritical education.

We welcome abstracts for twenty-minute papers. This is an interdisciplinary conference, and we encourage abstracts from beyond the humanities. We particularly welcome submissions from undergraduate, honours, and postgraduate students, even if beyond the scope of the conference theme.

The conference will take place in hybrid form. Please specify in your submission whether you would attend in-person or online.

Please send abstracts of 150–200 words with your affiliation and a short (up to 50 words) biography to the conference subcommittee at pmrg.committee@gmail.com by 21 August 2023.

For further details, please see https://www.pmrg.org.au/conference2023.