Monstruosity – History of Disease, Disability & Medicine in Medieval Europe

16/08/202116/08/2021

CFP – Emotions on the Fringes: Marginalised, Monstrous, and Supernatural Emotions – Leeds 2022

While the study of emotion in literature has received major scholarly interest throughout recent years, the study of the emotional landscape of supernatural concepts and monsters, however, represents uncharted territory. This session aims to explore the emotions of marginalised communities as well as monstrous and supernatural concepts, the vocabulary of their emotions, their literary functions as well as reactions toward such entities. What emotions are marginalised communities, monsters, and supernatural concepts depicted with? Is there a certain inventory of emotions that such concepts can be said to have ‘traditionally’ been described with? How similar or divergent are these emotions to those of human figures?

In keeping with the IMC 2022 thematic strand ‘Borders’, this session will explore representations of emotions of supernatural and monstrous concepts as well as other marginalised communities. As this session is intended to be interdisciplinary in nature, papers from various fields and topics relating to/combining the study of emotions, among others comparative study of literature, linguistics, and history, are welcomed.

Topics may include but are not limited to

• Emotions and feelings of the supernatural, monstrous, and marginalised communities
• Emotional reactions towards supernatural, monstrous, and marginalised communities
• Literary emotional communities on the peripheries
• Semantic dimensions of emotion lexemes
• Comparative study of emotions, feelings, and senses
• Depiction of emotions in textual media and medieval art

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words for a 20-minute paper to Dr Felix Lummer (fel2@hi.is) by September 1st, 2021.

28/11/202028/11/2020

New book – Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture: Concepts of Monstrosity Before the Advent of the Normal, ed. by Maja Bondestam, pub. by Amsterdam University Press

Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture, Concepts of Monstrosity Before the Advent of the Normal

Maja Bondestam (ed.), published by Amsterdam University Press, new series Monsters and Marvels. Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources, including medicine, satires, play scripts, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders, this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, moral and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena and hybrids are examined in a period before all varieties and differences became normalized to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it expands our understanding of early modern culture and deepens our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

Introduction – Maja Bondestam

1. The Moresca Dance in Counter-Reformation Rome: Court Medicine and the Moderation of Exceptional Bodies – Maria Kavvadia

2. Monsters and the Matemal Imagination: The ‘First Vision’ from Johann Remmelin’s 1619 Catoptrum microcosmicum Triptych – Rosemary Moore

3. The Optics of Bodily Deviance: Juan Ruiz de Alarcon’s Path to Public Office – Pablo Garcia Pillar

4. ‘The Most Deformed Woman in France’: Marguerite de Valois’s Monstrous Sexuality in the Divorce satyrique – Cecile Resfels

5. Curious, Useful and Important: Bayle’s ‘Hermaphrodites’ as Figures of Theological Inquiry – Parker Cotton

6. An Education: Johannes Schefferus and the Prodigious Son of a Fisherman – Maja Bondestam

7. Ambiguous and Transitional Bodies: Stillbirth in Stockholm, 1691-1724 – Tove Paulsson Holmberg

Afterword – Kathleen Long

More information on the editor website

05/01/2020

“Monsters and problematic identities” – graduate student conference – The Medieval and Renaissance Student Association (MaRSA) of California State University, Long Beach

MONSTERS AND PROBLEMATIC IDENTITIES

The Medieval and Renaissance Student Association (MaRSA) of California State University, Long Beach is seeking individual papers as well as panel submissions for their graduate student conference.

The conference will be held at the Karl Anatol Center on the campus of CSULB on March I2th, 2020. Medieval and Renaissance monstrosity and identities. As an interdisciplinary conference, we welcome submissions from a wide array of disciplines focusing on the art, literature, and history of the period. Paper and panel topics might address issues (but are not limited to) the following:
Monsters es the other (theories of otherness)

Eco-critIcism and Monsters

Nationalism and Monsters

Identity formation

Gender
Race
Sexuality
Religious identity

Psychoanalysis (historical actors)

Post/Modern

Medievalism Fantasy Monsters

Zombies
Ghosts
Dragons
Fairies
Demons
Giants
Ogres
Werewolves (shapeshifters)
Dwarves

Cultural/Social Isolation (outlaw)/ Marginalization

Travel Literature, and Monsters

Colonialism/ Imperialism Trans-AtiaMic

Disabilities (dwarves)

Medieval Imaginary

Monstrous Bodies

Witchcraft (magic)

Ideological Appropriation

PRESENTATIONS SHOULD RUN FOR APPROXIMATELY 15 MINUTES. PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS OF NO MORE THAN 300 WORDS ALONG WITH A CURRENT 1 PAGE CV BY EMAIL TO MEDREN.CSULB@GMAIL.COM BY FEBRUARY 6TH, 2020.

01/08/201801/08/2018

CFP – “Re-defining the Monster” – ICMS Kalamazoo 2019

CFP for ICMS Kalamazoo 2019: Re-defining the Monster

The proposed session will discuss and debate on the various definitions of the concept of the “monster.” Defining the monster is a challenge. Monsters and monstrosity-related aspects have been topics of academic research either connected to identity or cross-cultural encounters, explored as ‘others’ in the context of voyages (real-imagined), as heritage from Antiquity, as races reflected in travellers’ reports inserted into Western art, philosophy, and theology.

What is a monster? What is monstrosity? How is the monster conceptualized by a given community? Can one define it or does the monster define itself? Does it offer any self-description? Did the medieval man write about monsters and how does this define the monster from a cultural perspective? Where and what is the “border” between human, “other,” and monster? This session seeks original research which investigates medieval scholarly debates in philosophical, theological, political, literary, visual contexts and/or sources in order to (re)define the concept of the monster/monstrosity. Reinterpretations of previous definitions are welcome in a debate on re-visualizing medieval monsters.

This sessions also aims to bring the intellectual outcome of these sessions into the attention of the general public by publishing the proceedings of the debates in the series “picturing the Middle Ages and Ealry Modernity” at Trivent Publishing, Budapest, Hungary.

Please submitt a 250-word proposal for a 15-20 minutes paper presentation by september 15th, 2018.

Contact information :

Andrea-Bianka Znorovszky, Ca’Foscari university, Venice, Italy (andrea.znorovszky@unive.it)

Theodora C. Artimon, Trivent Publishing, Budapest, Hungary

23/07/201823/07/2018

CFP – ‘Deformis Formositas ac Formosa Deformitas. The Ugliness of Beauty and the Beauty of Ugliness: Materializing Ugliness and Deformity in the Middle Ages’ – International Medieval Congress 2019 – July 1 – 4, 2019, University of Leeds.

‘Deformis Formositas ac Formosa Deformitas. The Ugliness of Beauty and the Beauty of Ugliness: Materializing Ugliness and Deformity in the Middle Ages’

Call for Papers for Session Proposal at the International Medieval Congress (IMC 2019)

July 1 – 4, 2019, University of Leeds.

The proposed session will discuss and debate on the various definitions and functions of the concept of “ugliness.” What is ugliness and how is it conceptualized? This session seeks original research which investigates debates on the concept of “ugliness” in various contexts: