Dear Colleagues,
On behalf of the Italian Art Society, I invite you to submit proposals for IAS-sponsored sessions at ICMS 2024 which are due 1 September.
Speakers submitting proposals must upload all their information for either of these sessions via the ICMS Confex portal:
https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/events/sessions.
Click on Call for Papers, select Sponsored Sessions, then scroll down to find the correct session title.
The IAS offers a number of travel grants; international speakers, BIPOC scholars, and those with financial need may be eligible for IAS Sospeso Memberships. Speakers must be current members of the IAS: join/renew my IAS membership.
Please share these CFPs (below) with all who might be interested. Help us to create great sessions, submit a proposal!
Janis Elliott, Chair of Program Committee
International Congress of Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 9-11 May 2024, in person or online
Session #1
IAS-sponsored Session title: Italian Art for a Persecuting Society
Organizer: Theresa Flanigan (Texas Tech University)
Abstract: R.I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society (2007) argued that late medieval Europe experienced the systematic, targeted persecution of diverse minority groups (i.e., heretics, Jews, lepers, and sexual deviants), which society proclaimed “dangerous,” thereby legitimizing violence against them. Notable about this period was the creation of a “rhetoric and apparatus of persecution capable of being turned at will from one category of victim to another, including, if necessary, those invented for this purpose,” establishing “patterns of persecution that endure in our own times” (pp. 145-51).
Art’s role in the construction and reinforcement of systems of marginalization, exclusion, and persecution has been explored by art historians focused primarily on Northern Europe, including Mellinkoff’s Outcasts (1993), Strickland’s Saracens, Demons and Jews (2003), and Camille’s Image on the Edge (2004); and exhibitions, including Outcasts: Prejudice and Persecution in the Medieval World (Getty, 2018), and Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders (Morgan, 2018). This session explores the role of Italian art in the construction and reinforcement of persecuting systems and seeks to test Moore’s theory about the relationship between medieval institutional systems of persecution and those of the modern day.
Please submit your full name, current affiliation, email address, paper title, abstract (300 word maximum), PhD completion date (past or expected), keywords, and a 1-page CV to the ICMS Confex portal, https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/events/sessions, as explained above. Please also send notification to the organizer, Theresa Flanigan (Theresa.Flanigan@ttu.edu), to be sure she receives your abstract.
Proposal Submission Deadline:
1 September 2023
Notification Date:
10 September 2023
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Session #2
IAS-sponsored Session title: Spatial Confinement and Virtual Peregrinations of Women in Late Medieval Italy
Organizer: Shane Harless (Rice University)
Abstract: Women’s movement during the Middle Ages was often controlled within domestic life, the church, and the convent. Variations of enclosure were practiced within the home to safeguard maidens’ chastity; laywomen were periodically confined to the chiesa delle donne during Mass; and investiture symbolized a nun’s death to the world. This isolation permeates the secular and sacred lives of women throughout the Middle Ages. As a solution to this regulated mobility, visual reproductions of Jerusalem provided females an avenue for virtual pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
This session welcomes papers exploring women’s spatial confinement within domestic and cloistered environments, and their visual responses to representations of sacred topography. We seek papers exploring examples of how devotional art within manuscript illuminations, wall paintings, altarpieces, and private tabernacles functioned as a conduit for virtual pilgrimage within the restricted lives of laywomen and female religious in late medieval Italy.
Please submit your full name, current affiliation, email address, paper title, abstract (300 word maximum), PhD completion date (past or expected), keywords, and a 1-page CV to the ICMS Confex portal, https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/events/sessions, as explained above. Please also send notification to the session organizer, Shane Harless (msh14@rice.edu), to be sure he receives your abstract.
Proposal Submission Deadline:
1 September 2023