the body of literature describing the lives and veneration of the Christian saints. The literature of hagiography embraces acts of the martyrs (i.e., accounts of their trials and deaths); biographies of saintly monks, bishops, princes, or virgins; and accounts of miracles connected with saints’ tombs, relics, icons, or statues.
Hagiographies have been written from the 2nd century ad to instruct and edify readers and glorify the saints. In the Middle Ages it was customary to read aloud at divine office and in the monastic refectory (dining hall) biographies of the principal saints on their feast days. Besides biographies of single saints, other works of hagiography told the stories of a class of saints, such as Eusebius of Caesarea’s account of the martyrs of Palestine (4th century ad) and Pope Gregory I the Great’s Dialogues, a collection of stories about Saint Benedict and other 6th-century Latin monks. Perhaps the most important hagiographic collection is the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) of Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th century. Modern critical hagiography began in 17th-century Flanders with the Jesuit ecclesiastic Jean Bolland and his successors, who became known as Bollandists.
The importance of hagiography derives from the vital role that the veneration of the saints played throughout medieval civilization in both eastern and western Christendom. Second, this literature preserves much valuable information not only about religious beliefs and customs but also about daily life, institutions, and events in historical periods for which other evidence is either imprecise or nonexistent.
The hagiographer has a threefold task: to collect all the material relevant to each particular saint, to edit the documents according to the best methods of textual criticism, and to interpret the evidence by using literary, historical, and any other pertinent criteria.
"Sacred Space, Sacred Memory: Bishop-Saints and their Cities" (Le Studium, Centre de Recherche sur les Mondes Antiques, l'Histoire de la Ville et de l'Alimentation, Universite Francois Rabelais, Tours). Conference organizers are soliciting abstracts for individual papers and proposals for complete sessions for its 2010 Conference, and are inviting scholars from a wide variety of disciplines to offer their perspectives on issues coinciding with the Conference's theme. Ideally, papers will deal with different parts of Europe and address periods ranging from the Middle Ages to the present. Abstracts in French or English of 300 words or less for a 20-minute paper should be emailed to Christine Bousquet (Christine.bousquet@univ-tours.fr) or to Yossi Maurey (ymaurey@mscc.huji.ac.il) no later than 30 January 2010. Authors of accepted papers will be responsible for their own travel costs and conference registration fee (reduced for students and post-docs).
18-21 March 2010 -- "Medieval Academy of America 2010 Annual Meeting, Yale University, New Haven, CT" (Medieval Academy of America). Call for papers for the Session "Courtiers and Bishops - 1010" (C. Stephen Jaeger, session organizer). Paper abstracts on subjects ranging the Carolingian period to the twelfth century are welcome. Abstracts should be sent to Anders Winroth, Department of History, Yale University, preferably by email to anders.winroth@yale.edu, or, on paper in two copies, to Anders Winroth, Department of History, P.O. Box 208324, New Haven CT 06520-8324.
13-16 May 2010 -- "Forty-fifth International Congress on Medieval Studies" (The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo). EPISCOPUS will sponsor three sessions, two with the Exzellenzcluster 'Religion und Politik' of the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Muenster: I. Bishops and their Men; II. Bishops and their Women; III. Bishops and the Papacy, 900-1100. Send abstracts to John S. Ott, Department of History, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751, USA, or to ott@pdx.edu.
27-30 May 2010 -- "Saintly Bishops and Bishops' Saints" (Hagiotheca (Croatian Hagiography Association)). The deadline for paper proposals is 30 October 2009. Proposals should include an abstract (300 words maximum) and your current position and contact address, and be sent to hagiotheca@yahoo.com ; the contact person is Trpimir Vedriš.
12-15 July 2010 -- "International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2010 or 2011". Call for abstracts: "The Diocese of Lincoln and its Bishops." David Kennett (Stratford-upon-Avon College) is interested in organizing a panel to propose for the 2010 (or 2011) Leeds Congress. Please contact him directly at davidkennett@stratford.ac.uk if interested.
source "Episcopus" http://www.episcopus.org/
GENDER AND CLASS IN BYZANTINE SOCIETY: XVITH BIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF THE AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATION FOR BYZANTINE STUDIES
Call for Papers and Registration
The Australian Association for Byzantine Studies calls for papers for its XVIth Biennial Conference. The conference is being held in honour of Professor John Melville-Jones and the theme will be 'Gender and Class in Byzantine Society'. Contributors are invited to interpret this theme broadly and we welcome submissions from all fields. Both scholars with academic affiliation and working independently, as well as postgraduate students, are encouraged to apply.
Plenary speakers:
Dr Tom Brown, Reader, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, The University of Edinburgh Professor John Melville-Jones, Classics and Ancient History, University of Western Australia Dr Shaun Tougher, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, Cardiff University (to be confirmed)
Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words for 30-minute papers (including 10 minutes of questions) by 1 April to: Associate Professor Lynda Garland School of Humanities University of New England Armidale New South Wales 2351 tel +61 2 6773 3236 fax +61 2 6773 3520
Sessions of Hagiography Society at Kalamazoo next May
Sessions for the 2010 conference at Kalamazoo. Here are the particulars:
Unanchored and Unkempt: Independent Religious Women in Medieval Europe. Papers: "Independence, Incest and Identity in the Old English Life of St. Euphrosyne" (Erin Mann, University of Iowa); "An Exasperating House: Juliana of Mont Cornillon and the Thirteenth-Century Leprosarium" (Jay Stemmle, University of California at Santa Barbara); "Agency and Authority in Medieval Society: The Case of Gertrude of Ortenberg" (Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands).
Hagiography and Geography: Place in the Telling of Saints' Lives. Papers: "Pilgrimage (or Lack thereof) in the Vitae of Edward the Confessor " (Jennifer N. Brown, Marymount Manhattan College); "Seeking the Life of St. Kentigern in the Streets and Lanes of Glasgow: An English Monk, a British Saint, and a Scottish City in the Twelfth Century" (Mairi Cowan, University of Toronto); "Place as Proof in the Cult of St. Anne at Chartres" (Colleen A. Farrell, Yale University).
Unfortunately, Scott had to cancel the other two sessions we had proposed for next year (those on Professional Hagiographers and on The Work of the Bollandists in the 21st Century) because of an inadequate harvest of abstracts on those topics.
St. Louis, 17–20 February 2010. "Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict," Second International Symposium on Crusade Studies at Saint Louis University. The focus will be on the "worlds" of the Mediterranean and the impact of the crusades on them. All topics relating to the crusading movement are welcome. Abstracts for 20-minute papers should be submitted by mail, fax, or e-mail by 1 Dec. 2009. Contact: Second International Symposium on Crusade Studies, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Saint Louis Univ., 3800 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63108 (314-977-7180; fax: 314-977-1603; cmrs@slu.edu ; http://crusades.slu.edu/symposium/ ).
Conception Abbey, 27 February 2010. "Monastic and Religious Life in the Middle Ages," 34th annual meeting of the Mid-American Medieval Association, at Conception Abbey, near Maryville, Missouri. Papers on any medieval topic will be considered. Please send one-page abstracts to Brother Thomas Sullivan (fax 660-944-2800; thomassull@gmail.com ) by 15 Dec. 2009. For more information, see http://www.midamericamedievalassociation.org or http://www.conceptionabbey.org/
Plymouth, NH., 16-17 April 2010. "Time, Temporality, History," 31st Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum, Plymouth State University. Papers may consider questions of periodization, historicity, and temporality in medieval or early modern culture, or may cover other aspects of medieval and Renaissance life. Students, faculty, and independent scholars are welcome. Please submit abstracts and full contact information (email and postal addresses) by 15 Jan. 2010 to Dr. Karolyn Kinane, PSUForum@gmail.com . For more information see www.plymouth.edu/medieval .
Helsinki, 20-23 September 2010. "Seeing, Hearing, Reading and Believing: Authorities in the Middle Ages." The Latin word auctoritas means not only authority and influence, but more generally opinion, encouragement, decree or example. The concept thus resonates deeply in the study of social structures, such as communication or religious culture. Who had auctoritas, and how? How was influence built and maintained, how was it lost? How was authority contested? What about model and precedent? The organisers of this multidisciplinary conference are Glossa, the Society for Medieval Studies in Finland, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS) and the Written Culture in Medieval Finland Project at the University of Helsinki. They welcome working papers from established researchers, doctoral students, and those working on a Master's thesis.
Suggested paper topics include (but are not limited to) authority/-ies in different spheres of life, medieval meditations on the nature of authority, the authority of texts and traditions, religious conformism, adaptation and dissidence. The conference will be held in English. Selected papers will be published as a refereed theme issue in Mirator, an electronic open-access journal on medieval studies. Please send proposals for individual papers of twenty minutes or for whole sessions of three papers with contact details and a 200-word abstract to Tuija Ainonen tuija.ainonen@helsinki.fiby 15 December 2009.
Bochum, 12-13 November 2010. "Sanctity and Literature," symposium at the Ruhr-University Bochum. We welcome interdisciplinary proposals from both scholars and graduate students for papers which explore the dynamic relationship between sanctity and literature from late Antiquity through Medieval and Renaissance periods. Papers might address such topics as the languages of hagiography, questions of gender, genre and reception, transmission history, theological issues, stylistics and literary art. Please send proposals (not over 300 words) by 31 December 2009 to Eva von Contzen, Department of English, Universitätsstraße 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany, Eva.Contzen@rub.de .
Other upcoming conferences
Rome, 22–25 March 2010. "Old St Peter's Rome," a conference at the British School at Rome. The basilica that was built by Constantine at the Vatican in the early fourth century to mark the burial place of the Apostle Peter became the central place for Christian worship in the West for more than a millennium until its protracted demolition over the course of the sixteenth century. The essential chronology of the construction of Old St Peter's, and the major modifications made to its fabric over subsequent centuries, are well established. But a great many questions remain to be answered about details of the building and its monuments, and on the ways in which the basilica and its environs functioned as a 'theatre' of worship, burial and power throughout the middle ages from the fourth to sixteenth centuries. Confirmed contributors include: Prof. Dr. Lex Bosman and Prof. Dr. Bram Kempers (Univ. of Amsterdam); Prof. Herbert Kessler (Johns Hopkins Univ.); Prof. Paolo Liverani (Università degli studi di Firenze); Prof. Rosamond McKitterick (Univ. of Cambridge); Dr. Richard Gem (UK); Dr. Pietro Zander (Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro). Contacts: John Osborne, Carleton Univ, Canada john_osborne@carleton.ca ; Carol Richardson, Open Univ., UK, c.m.richardson@open.ac.uk ; or Joanna Story, Univ. of Leicester, UK, js73@le.ac.uk .
Sewanee, 9-10 April 2010. "Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages," 37th Sewanee Medieval Colloquium. Plenary speakers: David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson, University of Rhode Island; and Antonio Momplet Míguez, Universidad Complutense, Madrid. For further information see http://www.sewanee.edu/Medieval/main.html
New Haven, 9-10 April 2010. "Dante's Volume from Alpha to Omega: A Graduate Symposium on the Poet's Universe." Further details will appear at http://www.yale.edu/italian/news/index.html
Toronto, 21–24 May 2010. "Chester 2010: Drama and Religion 1555–1575," a symposium about the Chester Cycle in Context, at the University of Toronto. Chester 2010 will stage a Catholic version of the complete Chester Cycle of 23 processional pageant-wagon plays from the city of Chester, England, over three days on the campus of the University of Toronto. This version of the Chester Cycle enacts the Christian Story from Creation to Judgment, as we believe it was either witnessed or read in 1572 by Christopher Goodman, a protestant divine who objected to its catholic content. The symposium will take place around afternoon performances. Contacts: David Klausner, David.Klausner@utoronto.ca ; Helen Ostovich, ostovich@mcmaster.ca ; or Jennifer Roberts-Smith, j33rober@uwaterloo.ca .
Belfast, 10–13 June 2010. "Mapping Late Medieval Lives of Christ," the culmination of the AHRC-funded "Geographies of Orthodoxy" project, at Queen's University, in Belfast, N. Ireland. For updates, see http://www.qub.ac.uk/geographies-of-orthodoxy .
Southampton, 10 July 2010. "Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: A Symposium." A celebratory colloquium for Bella Millett, with papers by Vincent Gillespie, Beth Robertson, Susannah Chewning, Josephine Koster, Alexandra Barratt, Johnny Jakobsen, Anna Gottschall, Mishtooni Bose. For full details see http://www.humanities.soton.ac.uk/conferences, or email Prof. John McGavin, j.j.mcgavin@soton.ac.uk .
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