Events & Conferences

Mediaevalia at the Lilly Library

Lectures and Workshops given by Falk Eisermann, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

Monday, April 26, 2010 at 9:30 A.M. & 2:30 P.M.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 5:00 P.M.
The Lilly Library (1200 East 7th Street)

The speaker for this year's Mediaevalia at the Lilly (April 26–27) will be Dr. Falk Eisermann, director of the Union Catalogue of Incunabula (Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke) at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.
On Monday, April 26th, Dr. Eisermann will conduct two mini-workshops on how to describe incunables in the Internet Age and on how to work with scholarly research facilities for 15th-century printing available on the internet. The workshops also will present opportunities to work with both original source materials as well as electronic resources. The workshops will be in held in English from 9:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M., and in German from 2:30 P.M. to 5:30 P.M. The number of participants is limited. Enroll by sending an e-mail to the organizers: Cherry Williams and Hildegard E. Keller.
On Tuesday, April 27th at 5:00 P.M., Dr. Eisermann will give a public lecture, to be held at the Lilly Library. His topic will be: "Secrets of Success: Printers, Patrons, and Audiences in 15th Century Leipzig." A reception will follow the lecture.
The series Mediaevalia at the Lilly Library (directed by Cherry Williams, curator of manuscripts at the Lilly, and Professor Hildegard E. Keller, Department for Germanic Studies) aims to both better exploit and publicize the collection by bringing in established scholars and experts for a lecture and a workshop with hands-on-approach for students and faculty. The series is sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute and the Lilly Library. In seeking to combine lectures with workshops, our goal is to make abstract ideas, as presented in the classroom, concrete by confronting students with the intractable nature of sources and giving them some sense of just how much can be gleaned from handwriting, type, parchment, paper, watermarks, title pages, musical notation, format, decoration, in short, all material aspects of the book over the course of the period stretching from Late Antiquity to the Reformation, i.e., comprehending at the outset the transition from roll to codex and, at the end, the shift from manuscript to print.
Flyer for the Event

Directions to the Lilly Library

Urban Allegories: Walter Benjamin and Medieval Temporalities

A lecture by Ethan Knapp, Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University

Friday, January 29, 2010 at 4:30 P.M.
State Room East, Indiana Memorial Union (900 East 7th Street)

This talk revisits the often disembodied history of medieval allegory by returning to Walter Benjamin's famous analysis of the particular modernity of Baudelaire's urban lyricism. Rather than privileging Benjamin's late essay, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," which presents a stark sense of the alterity of the modern, we might instead consider his earlier, and richer, treatment in the Arcades project, a treatment that draws on a persistent parallel between Baudelaire and Dante in order to construct a modernity that cannot be read as a simple chron- ological proposition. The talk will then turn to specific examples of late medieval English allegory in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower.
Flyer for the Event

Directions to the Indiana Memorial Union

The Man with the Pale Face, the Relic, and Du Fay's Missa Se la face ay pale

A lecture by Anne Walters Robertson, Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago

Monday, October 19, 2009 at 4:15 P.M.
Ford-Crawford Hall (Simon Building, 200 S. Jordan Ave.)

Professor Anne Walters Robertson writes on subjects ranging from the plainchant of the early church to the Latin and vernacular polyphony of the late middle ages. In her work, liturgical and secular music, and often the interactions of the two, mirror theological and courtly ideas and shape the development of medieval spirituality and personal devotion, architecture, institutional identity, and politics. Her research on fourteenth-century polyphony points to the fundamental roles of local musical dialect in understanding Philippe de Vitry's life and music, and of mystical theology in illuminating the compositions of Guillaume de Machaut. More recently, she has studied the symbolic and folkloric aspects of the seminal masses and motets of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Flyer for the Event
Directions to Ford-Crawford Hall

Little Nothings: "The Squire's Tale" and the Ambition of Gadgets

A lecture by Prof. Patricia Clare Ingham, Indiana University

Monday, September 21, 2009 at 4:00 P.M.
Indiana Memorial Union, State Room West

Despite advancements in architecture, optics, philosophy, literature, music, and mechanics, the Middle Ages remains more often associated with conservation than it is with innovation. This paper, part of a larger book-length study of the meaning and reach of medieval accounts of novelty, analyzes one telling example of the altogether ambivalent discourse of the medieval "newfangled." Geoffrey Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," I argue, cross-cuts a fascination with novel technological gadgetry with the fascinations of impossible love, raising for us the promise and problem prompted by wonder in the new and unusual.
Flyer for the Event
Directions to the Indiana Memorial Union

The 25th International Conference on Medievalism: July 8-10, 2010 Leiden University

Conferences

The 25th International Conference on Medievalism: July 8-10, 2010
Leiden University
(Netherlands, 2010)

XXVe Conférence Internationale sur le Médiévalisme, organisée en partenariat avec Modernités médiévales
Dialogues transatlantiques : Parler du Moyen Age

Appel à communications Studies in Medievalism, en collaboration avec Modernités médiévales, invite à envoyer des propositions d’ateliers et de communications en vue de son colloque pluridisciplinaire annuel, qui aura lieu du 8 au 10 juillet 2010 à l’université de Groningen (Pays-Bas). Les communications porteront sur le médiévalisme, dans ses versants recherche et enseignement ; et plus précisément sur le double thème de cette année : « Dialogues transatlantiques / Parler du Moyen Age ». Ce thème est inspire par le cadre européen du colloque, et l’héritage de Paul Zumthor, élu à Groningen en 1948, pour son premier poste universitaire. D’une part, son livre, Parler du Moyen Age (1980) est l’un des ouvrages de référence du médiévalisme. D’autre part, Zumthor est le symbole même du dialogue transatlantique qui fonde les études médiévalistes : d’origine suisse, il a exercé en Europe avant de partir en Amérique du Nord. Alors que le « Moyen Age » sert à designer une période de l’histoire européenne, ce sont en effet des chercheurs et des artistes d’Amérique du Nord, en particulier, qui ont élaboré de nouvelles manières d’envisager cette période, en littérature, en peinture, dans la musique, le cinéma et d’autres médias. Enfin, l’œuvre de Zumthor témoigne de l’importance que revêt la réflexion théorique sur les concepts du Moyen Age et du médiéval.

Conférences plénières par Joep Leerssen (université d’Amsterdam), Richard Utz (Western Michigan University) and Michèle Gally (université Aix-Marseille).

Les communications (en anglais ou en français) pourront envisager les questions et sujets suivants (sans en exclure d’autres, en relation avec la question du médiévalisme)


• De quel « Moyen Age » parle-t-on, lorsque l’on parle du Moyen Age ? Comment est défini ce qui est « médiéval » ?
• Que peut apporter la « théorie européenne » aux chercheurs en médiévalisme d’Amérique du Nord ?
• Comment le Moyen Age européen est-il repensé dans d’autres traditions  ?
(par ex. : dans le western, les dessins animés japonais)?
• Variations sur le Gothique américain (architecture, peinture, musique)
• Echos médiévalistes du colonialisme : quelle théorie pour les médiévalismes (post)coloniaux ?
• Médiévalismes d’Amérique du Sud, d’Amadis à Borges : miroirs et contrepoints de l’Europe ?
• Appropriations du médiévalisme par les féministes américaines
• Médiévalisme et traductions (en particulier, français / anglais)
• Rôle des médiateurs culturels entre l’Europe et l’Amérique
• Médiévalisme et voyages / tourisme transatlantiques

Publication :
Une sélection de communications paraîtra dans The Year’s Work in Medievalism et/ou Studies in Medievalism ainsi que dans un volume en français.
Date butoir : 15 novembre
Merci d’envoyer une proposition d’environ 300 mots (20 à 30 lignes) à Alicia C. Montoya et Vincent Ferré:
A.C.Montoya@rug.nl / ferre@fabula.org

The annual International Conference on Medievalism (ICOM; known as the General Conference on Medievalism until 1993) began with two meetings at the University of Notre Dame in 1986 and 1987. Subsequent conferences were organized through the Newberry Library and Northeastern Illinois University (Chicago, Illinois: 1988), the United States Military Academy (1989), Burg Kaprun (jointly with the 5th Symposium on Mittelalter-Rezeption, Austria: 1990), the University of Delaware (1991), the University of South Florida (1992), the University of Leeds (UK: 1993), Montana State University (1994), the Higgins Armory Museum (Worcester, Massachusetts: 1995), Kalamazoo College (1996), Christ Church College (Canterbury, UK: 1997), University of Rochester (1998), Montana State University (1999), Hope College (Michigan: 2000), Buffalo State College (2001), the University of Northern Iowa (2002), St. Louis University (2003), University of New Brunswick (Canada: 2004), Towson University (Baltimore, Maryland: 2005), Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio: 2006), University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada: 2007), Wesleyan College (Macon, Georgia, 2008), and Siena College (Loudonville, New York, 2009).

The conference organizers and the editorial boards of YWIM and SIM thank everyone who participated in making these conferences successful.

Additionally, Studies in Medievalism usually sponsors sessions at the International Congresses on Medieval Studies (Western Michigan University; Kalamazoo, Michigan) and the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds (UK). Conference proceedings, including papers from the annual ICOM and the Kalamazoo and Leeds sessions, have been published in The Year's Work in Medievalism.