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CFP – The Maladies, Miracles and Medicine of the Middle Ages III ‘Patients, Prayers and Pilgrims’ – org. by The Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Reading – Friday 1 April 2022

HeaIthcare in the Middle Age covered a broad range of practices, influenced by religious and scholarly theories of the body. Patients might look to a range of restorative practices from herbal remedies to more invasive procedures, not to mention charms and prayers. In their search for cure, they might also turn to various healers with practitioners ranging from high-end university-trained physicians, to local wise women, and even the ‘saintly physicians’ whose form of miraculous care emanated from the shrines. Healing could thus be sought through a variety of channels that both complemented and competed against one another.

What can we leam about those who engaged with medieval healthcare? Where do the various forms of healthcare sit in relation to each other and in relation to religious and/or academic understanding of corporeal health? In what ways were the ill and impaired able to access healing, and what form did this take?

Within the third ‘Maladies, Miracles and Medicine’ of this quadrennial series of conferences we invite post-graduate and early-career researchers to come together to consider this theme in relation to health, ill health, and healing. The conference welcomes papers on all aspects of this theme whether your interests lie in archaeology, art, literature, medicine and science, or mireacles and theology (or a little bit of everything).

However, specific themes to consider are:

  • environments and experiences of care and recovery
  • gender in relation to practices and treatments
  • practitioners and particular treatrnents within medieval healthcare
  • pilgrims as ‘patients’, saints as ‘healers’
  • the senses and sensory experiences of ill health and cure
  • birth, death (and everything in between!)
  • healing charms and magical medicine
  • representations and realities of the ill and healthy body

Proposals of 200-words (max.) for twenty-minute papers fitting broadly into one of the above themes are welcomed from all post-graduate and early-career researchers before the deadline 10 January 2022.

Proposals and further enquiries should be sent to the organisers (Dr Ruth Salter, Anne Jeavons, and Claire Collins) via: maladies.miracles.medicine@gmail.com. Full details will be released closer to the date, but we are hoping this will be able to go ahead in person rather than online.

New book – Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England by Will Rogers, ed. by Arc Humanities Press

Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England

A ground-breaking study of old age impairments in Middle English literature and their function as prosthetic additions, which draw attention both to the debility of old age and its ability to complete and drive narrative.

Description

The old speaker in Middle English literature often claims to be impaired because of age. This admission is often followed by narratives that directly contradict it, as speakers, such as the Reeve in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Amans in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, proceed to perform even as they claim debility. More than the modesty topos, this contradiction exists, the book argues, as prosthesis: old age brings with it debility, but discussing age-related impairments augments the old, impaired body, while simultaneously undercutting and emphasizing bodily impairments. This language of prosthesis becomes a metaphor for the works these speakers use to fashion narrative, which exist as incomplete yet powerful sources.

Contents

Introduction: Staves and Stanzas
 
Chapter 1: Crooked as a Staff: Narrative, History, and the Disabled Body in Parlement of Thre Ages
 
Chapter 2: A Reckoning with Age: Prosthetic Violence and the Reeve
 
Chapter 3: The Past is Prologue: Following the Trace of Master Hoccleve
 
Chapter 4: Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower’s Supplemental Role
 
Epilogue: Impotence and Textual Healing
 
 

CFP – IMCS Kalamazoo 2019 – The Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages propose 3 themes: Medieval Disability and Pedagogy – Intersections of Race and Disability in the Global Middle Ages – Disability and Public Scholarship.

The Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages Invites Proposals for the International Congress on Medieval StudiesMay 9-12 2019, Kalamazoo, MI

 

Medieval Disability and Pedagogy (a roundtable)

Contributors will discuss the ways in which disability has informed approaches to instruction, how to unite disability pedagogy and scholarship, possible texts for inclusion in the classroom, and selected assignments and activities that involve the medieval disability perspective. Participants will share practical ideas for effective activities, assignments, and readings.

 

Intersections of Race and Disability in the Global Middle Ages (a session of papers)

In this session, contributors will offer papers that explore the intersections between race and disability in the Middle Ages. We particularly seek approaches that consider non-Western, inter-disciplinary perspectives.

 

Disability and Public Scholarship (a session of papers)

In this session, participants will discuss the responsibilities of medieval disability studies to engage in public scholarship, how we can share our own public scholarship, and the ways that we as medieval disability studies scholars can be more active in public scholarship in order to support the value of our research.

Please send 250-word abstracts along with completed Participant Information Form to Tory Pearman at pearmatv@miamioh.edu by September 15.

Because medieval disability studies should pursue inclusive and intersectional scholarship, the SSDMA is committed to including perspectives representative of the diversity of the field and to amplifying voices that are too often marginalized by systemic discrimination in academic employment, publishing, funding, and conference programming

 

More infos on the organisator’s website !

CFP – ICMS Kalamazoo 2019 – “Marked Bodies, Divine Remnants”

Marked Bodies, Divine Remnants
54th International Congress on Medieval Studies – Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo—May 9-12, 2019
Sponsored by the Hagiography Society – Organized by Stephanie Grace-Petinos

“[M]iracle is a prerequisite for sainthood, and more often than not miracle involves the marking of flesh” state Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd state in the introduction to their 2015 work Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh (5). In many vitae, the saint’s marked flesh serves as proof of God’s privilege. The divine remnants imprinted upon a saint’s body could take many forms, such as missing limbs, scars, stigmata, suffering and pain, and being healed of— or gaining the ability to heal— impairment. After death, saints continued their embodied demarcation as relics, material remnants capable of channeling the divine that were further distinguished through division, enshrinement, veneration, and circulation throughout various geographical locales. This panel explores the ways in which hagiography represents how the divine is expressed upon saints’ bodies.
Possible questions include, but are not limited to:

  • What is the relationship between sainthood and physicality?
  • How does a saint’s divinely marked body juxtapose the sacred and the secular?
  • What is the role of disability, gender, and/or race?
  • What role does performance, spectacle, and/or audience play?
  • What limits, transgressions, or paradoxes does a marked body illuminate?

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words, along with a completed Participant Information form, to session organizer Stephanie Grace-Petinos (stephanie.grace.petinos@gmail.com) by Sept 15, 2018. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.

Call for Papers – ICMS Kalamazoo 2019 – “More Fuss about the Body: New Medievalists’ Perspectives”.

Call for Papers: International Congress on Medieval Studies Kalamazoo, MI — May 9-12, 2019

“More Fuss about the Body: New Medievalists’ Perspectives”

Organizers: Stephanie Grace-Petinos and Leah Pope Parker

 

In her 1995 essay “Why All the Fuss about the Body?: A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Caroline Walker Bynum presented a nuanced picture of embodiment in the past in order “to suggest that we in the present would do well to focus on a wider range of topics in our study of body or bodies.”‘ The same year saw the release of Bynum’s magisterial exploration of the body, identity, and medieval Christian eschatology in The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336. Almost 25 years later, Bynum’s call for diversity with respect to histories of the body still invites increasingly nuanced approaches to medieval embodiment. This panel seeks to honor Bynum’s seminal essay, while using it as a springboard for future investigations concerning the body, both medieval and modern.

We seek papers that deal with personhood, identity, and the material body, updating histories of the body through arms of study that have grown in popularity New York, Plerpont Morgan Library, MS NI. 736 since the mid-1990s, including disability studies, trans studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, animal studies, and the global Middle Ages, along with new developments in feminist and critical race theory. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• Bodily integrity and the limits of the body, healing damage to the body, or bodies and borders (i.e. the treatment of bodies in immigration/incarceration);

• Theologies of death and resurrection and rituals of burial and remembrance;

• Bodies centered and marginalized—including discussion of recent movements such as #metoo and Black Lives Matter;

• Gender expression and/through the body;

• Normativity (cisheteronormativity, compulsory ablebodiedness, etc);

• Flora and fauna, cyborgs and prosthesis;

• Present-day concepts of embodiment and their medieval predecessors as presented in popular culture (e.g. the television shows Supernatural or Game of Thrones);

• Comparative and cross-cultural concepts of the body; and/or

• The body in queer/crip time.

 

The organizers of this panel are committed to including perspectives representative of the diversity of the field, and to amplifying voices that are too often marginalized by systemic discrimination in academic employment, publishing, funding, and conference programming. In the spirit of Bynum’s invitation to consider “a wider range of topics in our study of body or bodies,” we welcome papers that offer critical reflections upon the field of medieval studies, and which represent diverse and innovative perspectives on medieval histories of the body and contemporary medievalisms. Given the limitations of a single conference panel, submissions will also receive early consideration for an edited volume on the same range of topics. Please submit abstracts of 200-300 words to More.Body.Fuss.Kzoo19@gmail.com by Friday, September 14, 2018, along with a completed Participant Information form. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations. The organizers are happy to answer any questions via the aforementioned email address.

‘Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 1-33, p. 8.

 

More infos on Leah Pope’s website !