Vagantes Medieval Graduate Student Conference
Florida State University
March 5-7, 2009
VAGANTES is one of the largest conferences in North America for graduate students studying the Middle Ages. Its goal is to provide an open dialogue among young scholars from all fields of medieval studies. See the website for this year's conference at: www.vagantesconference.org.
Abstracts for twenty-minute papers are welcome; in keeping with our mission to advance interdisciplinary studies, we invite submissions in areas including, but not limited to, history, literature, art history, philosophy, religious studies, and musicology.
Please send a brief vitae and abstract of no more than 300 words by October 1, 2008 to:
Carey Fee
carfee@yahoo.com
Department of Art History
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida
Forum II: Early Modern Women and Material Culture
Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal/ (/EMWJ/) invites submissions to an interdisciplinary Forum Early Modern Women and Material Culture, slated for publication in Volume IV (2009). Contributors to the forum will explore the nature of the material culture of early modern women and girls from different socioeconomic levels and from regions across the globe. Which objects - garments, manuscripts, jewelry, toys, housewares, tools, furniture, and musical instruments - - did they own or use? How did such objects construct identity, strengthen social ties, teach social or economic roles, or perform other cultural functions? What objects were commonly associated with women and girls? What unusual objects did they own or use? Were specific objects associated with certain times in a woman's life, certain places, or particular rituals? What values, ideas, and assumptions were linked to the material culture of women and girls?
Submissions should be 1300 words in length (plus footnotes). Building on such recent exhibitions as the Victoria and Albert Museum's /At Home in Renaissance Italy /(2006) and on such recent books as Jacqueline Musacchio's /Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy /(1999) and/ /Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass's /Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory/ (2001)/, /contributions may focus on a single object or group of objects that still exist, or on references to objects in images, literary texts, or archival documents. Submissions that explore a range of socioeconomic groups and regions across the globe are especially welcome.
The deadline for forum submissions is *October 31, 2008.* Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies
Taliaferro Hall 0139 University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742-7727 USA,
emwjournal@umd.edu
The Early Modern Parish Church
Worcester College, Oxford, April 6-8, 2009.
Across Europe, the parish church has stood for centuries at the centre of local communities; it was the focal point of its religious life, the rituals performed there marked the stages of life from the cradle to the grave. Nonetheless the church itself artistically and architecturally stood apart from the parish community. It was often the largest and only stone-built building in a village; it was legally distinct being subject to canon law, as well as being consecrated for the celebration of religious rites. The buildings associated with the 'cure of souls' were sacred sites or holy places, where humanity interacted with the divine. The accretions of the centuries make the parish church a palimpsest which provides a record of continuing and changing attitudes towards religion and sacred space.
Linked to the AHRC funded 'The Early Modern Parish Church and the Religious Landscape' research project, this conference will provide a forum to assess the role and significance of the parish church in the early modern period. This is intended to be an interdisciplinary conference and papers from a range of disciplines are welcome, including art historians, architectural historians, legal historians, archaeologists, as well as historians and ecclesiastical historians. Rather than providing a series of case studies of particular churches, it is hoped that this conference will facilitate a better understanding of the evolution and importance of this religious building within communities across Europe during the confessional, economic, political and social changes of the early modern period.
Andrew Spicer
Oxford Brookes University
CALL FOR PAPERS
If you are interested in offering a 20 minute paper for this conference, please send a title, an abstract of no more than 250 words and, if you wish, a short CV (no more than one side of A4) to kjohnson@brookes.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 30 November 2008. Further details about the conference will appear in due course on the project website.
PROJECT WEBSITE
Further details about the AHRC 'The Early Modern Parish Church and the
Religious Landscape' project can be found at:
http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/research/project/parishchurch_and_religiouslandscape/
