This interuniversity workshop hosted by Ghent University is the first in an alternating series of three on ‘freedom of speech’ in late medieval and early modern Europe. By drawing together research on several European countries in the period 1300-1700, the series will reveal various perspectives on premodern free speech. Freedom of speech, i.e. ‘the right to express beliefs and ideas without unwarranted government restriction’, was by no means a fundamental right in the late medieval and early modern period. Yet research has shown that there were several opportunities for the expression of critical opinion towards power holders and that this practice was often widespread. These could be uttered verbally, through the spoken or written word, but also through other sign systems and media, ranging from the sound of musical instruments to heraldic languages. The objective of this workshop is to connect the different segments of research and thereby create a better overall understanding of pre-modern free speech.

We are accepting proposals from a variety of disciplinary angles for 30-minute papers on
• Pre-modern ideas about ‘freedom of speech’
• Juridical practices on free speech and subversive verbal utterances
• Political narratives and lyric
• Non-verbal media of ‘free-speech’ (visual, multimedia, sound…)
• …
Applicants are strongly encouraged to present papers in English. French papers will be accepted as well, if the powerpoint presentation is in English. Please send an abstract of 200 words to
minne.deboodt@kuleuven.be or linde.nuyts@ugent.be by the 10th of january 2019. Applicants will be notified by the 10th of february.

See the website http://www.freedomofspeech.ugent.be/

Vooraankondiging 24^ste Mediëvistendag, 2018 (English version below)

Vrijdag 30 november 2018: 11.00-18.00 uur Universiteit Leiden

De 24^ste Mediëvistendag zal op vrijdag 30 november gehouden worden in Leiden. Het plenaire gedeelte vindt plaats in de Lorentzzaal van het Kamerlingh Onnes gebouw (Faculteit Rechten), voor de projectpresentaties na de lunchpauze zijn verschillende lokalen van het pas gerenoveerde P.J. Vethgebouw (gelegen aan de Hortus Botanicus) beschikbaar. Beide locaties bevinden zich in het hartje van academisch Leiden en liggen op loopafstand van elkaar en van het NS station.

Tijdens het plenaire gedeelte voor de lunch zijn er twee key note voordrachten rond het thema ‘De globaliserende middeleeuwen/middeleeuwen en globalisering’. Een zal gegeven worden door Hilde de Weerdt, hoogleraar Chinese geschiedenis te Leiden, de andere door de hoogleraar middeleeuwse geschiedenis, Peter Hoppenbrouwers.

Gelegenheid tot het geven van korte projectpresentaties (van 20 minuten) wordt in de eerste plaats geboden aan in Nederland en Vlaanderen werkzame promovendi (betaalde onderzoekers en buitenpromovendi) die in de beginfase van hun onderzoek zijn. Daarnaast is er ruimte voor de presentatie van postdoc-onderzoek of van grote koepelprojecten, hetzij in de vorm van ‘posters’, hetzij in de vorm van papers. Research Master studenten die deelnemen en een korte paper schrijven, krijgen daarvoor 1 ECTS.

Omdat binnen de Onderzoekschool bezwaren zijn gerezen tegen een exclusief Engelstalige programmering van de Mediëvistendag (immers in eerste instantie een ontmoetingsdag voor in Nederland en Vlaanderen werkzame mediëvisten), heeft het schoolbestuur besloten dat in het vervolg naast Engels ook Nederlands voertaal zal zijn. Om die reden zal één van de key notes in het Engels worden uitgesproken, de andere in het Nederlands. Bij de korte presentaties in het middagprogramma wordt de keuze van de taal overgelaten aan de presentatoren. In het definitieve programma zal duidelijk worden vermeld, in welke taal presentaties zullen worden gegeven. Presentaties graag vóór 15 oktober aanmelden via het secretariaat van de Onderzoekschool: ozsmed@rug.nl.

Inschrijven voor de Mediëvistendag kan via een e-mail aan het secretariaat van de Onderzoekschool, graag vóór 15 november: ozsmed@rug.nl, o.v.v. ‘Mediëvistendag 2018’. De kosten van deelname bedragen 10 euro (voor koffie/thee, lunch en afsluitende borrel),  vóór 15 november over te maken op bankrekeningnummer NL89 ABNA 04 8871 1827, t.a.v. P.C.M. Hoppenbrouwers [inzake Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis], Doelensteeg 16, 2311 VL Leiden.

Het definitieve programma zal kort na 15 oktober via de website van de Onderzoekschool bekend worden gemaakt. Nadere informatie is te verkrijgen bij het secretariaat van de Onderzoekschool (ozsmed@rug.nl) of bij de organisator van de dag (p.c.m.hoppenbrouwers@hum.leidenuniv.nl).

English version:

Early notice 24^th Medieval Studies Day, 2018

Friday 30 November 2018, 11.00-18.00 hours Leiden University

The 24^th Medieval Studies Day will take place on Friday, November 30, 2018, at Leiden University. The plenary session will be organized in the morning, in the Lorentzhall of the Kamerlingh Onnes building (Law Faculty); after lunch project presentations will be held in various class rooms of the recently renovated P.J. Veth building (near the Hortus Botanicus). Both locations are in the heart of academic Leiden, and at a walking distance from each other and the railway station.

During the plenary session two key note lectures will be given around the theme of ‘The Global Middle Ages/Globalising the Middle Ages’. One will be delivered by Hilde de Weerdt, Professor of Chinese History at Leiden University, the other by Peter Hoppenbrouwers, Professor of Medieval History at Leiden University.

In the afternoon there will be ample opportunity for short project presentations (of 20 minutes), primarily by PhD students working the Netherlands and Flanders (both paid PhD students and external doctoral students), but post-docs or leaders of large research projects  are expressly invited to present their projects, either as ‘posters’ or as papers. Research Master students who attend and write a short paper will be awarded with 1 ECTS.

Because objections have been lodged against the exclusively English programme of the Medieval Studies Day – which, after all, was once set-up as a meeting of professional medievalists working in Flanders and the Netherlands – the board of directors of the Research School for Medieval  Studies decided that henceforth, in addition to English, Dutch will be the language of communication. For this reason, one of the key note lectures will be held in English, and one in Dutch. The choice of language of the presentations during the afternoon session will be left to the speakers. In the definitive programme, it will be clearly announced what the language of all papers will be.  Proposals for presentations have to be sent before October 15 to the administration of the Research School: ozsmed@rug.nl.

Please, register for the day by sending an e-mail to ozsmed@rug.nl, preferably before November 15. There is an attendance fee of 10 euros, which will cover expenses for coffee/tea, lunch and drinks. You are requested to pay the fee before November 15 to the account NL89 ABNA 04 8871 1827, with the reference ‘P.C.M. Hoppenbrouwers [inzake Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis], Doelensteeg 16, 2311 VL Leiden.

The definitive programme will be announced  shortly after October 15 on the website of the Research School.  Further information may be obtained from the administration of the Research School (ozsmed@rug.nl) or from the Day’s organizer (p.c.m.hoppenbrouwers@hum.leidenuniv.nl).

Belonging in late medieval cities

Date: Friday June 28 to Sunday June 30, 2019.

Location: Huntingdon Room, King’s Manor, Exhibition Square, York YO1 7EP.

One of the ways belonging is conceptualised within sociological literature is that it is a socially constructed category which revolves around an individual’s inclusion and exclusion from formal and informal groups. It is thought that individuals can concurrently be included within one group yet excluded from others, and that belonging is negotiated by various actors such as local communities, governments and individuals themselves.

Late medieval and early modern cities were environments with many formal and informal groups to which people could belong, such as street communities, parishes, guilds and the citizenry, to name a few. The conference aims to explore how notions of belonging might be utilised within the study of late medieval urban centres. We invite speakers to consider whether belonging as a idea can be used to contribute to established ideas of identity, especially considering the (hierarchical) structures of urban society and examining how community boundaries were drawn and redrawn, how spaces were imagined as well as the significance of membership and exclusion. These were always in a state of flux, owing to the influence of the variety of agents who structured belonging, including rulers, local communities and individuals, with inclusion and exclusion operating along the axes of gender and social status. Papers will explore these intersections between the individual and their communities, and how inclusion and exclusion manifested themselves in historical urban areas.

Please send an abstract of 300 words to Joshua Ravenhill jtr518@york.ac.uk or Luke Giraudet lwg502@york.ac.uk by the 8^th October 2018.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his predecessors:  

Culture and Visual art and in the late 15^th and 16^th centuries

Masterclass with Reindert Falkenburg and Michel Weemans, organised by the Vlaamse werkgroep mediëvistiek (VWM) and the Réseau des médiévistes  belges de langue française (RMBLF)

2019 marks the 450^th anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/30-1569), one of the most renowned Flemish artists of the 16^th century. In Belgium, several exhibitions (at the KBR, the MRBAB-KMSKB, the Mayer van den Bergh Museum, the Castle of Gaasbeek…) and other scientific activities are planned to highlight the artistic production of the master. This “Bruegel year” constitutes a great opportunity for the VWM and the RMBLF to explore this fascinating personality and the artistic, cultural and intellectual context in which he emerged through a vivid dialogue between young and senior scholars. Indeed, we aim at taking part to this celebration by organizing a masterclass with two specialists of Pieter Bruegel’s work, Reindert Falkenburg (NYU Abu Dhabi) and Michel Weemans (ENSA Bourges and EHESS), whose forthcoming book explores the religious and exegetical character of Bruegel’s landscapes and their relationship with landscape painters of the first half of the 16th century such as Hieronymus Bosch, Joachim Patinir or Herri met de Blès.[1] This masterclass will gather up to eight young researchers (PhD students, postdocs, young lecturers) coming from various disciplines (art history, literature, history…) who will have the opportunity to present and discuss their work on the visual art and culture at the time of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his predecessors with both respondents and the audience.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is a complex artistic figure. Often considered as “both a proponent and an exponent of popular culture”[2], the Flemish painter was also appreciated and admired by the high nobility whose members praised the exceptional quality of his oeuvre and owned paintings by his hand. His work also enjoyed a great deal of success among a wider audience thanks to the diffusion of his engravings. From an artistic point of view, Bruegel was deeply influenced by the Flemish pictorial tradition of the late 15^th and early 16^th century, and especially by Hieronymus Bosch. He also played a crucial role in the emergence of genre and landscape painting, a topic which is at the core of the new publication of Michel Weemans and Reindert Falkenburg. Bruegel also had close links with humanists and scholars such as Abraham Ortelius, and with the Antwerp chambers of rhetoric (rederijkerskamers) like the Violieren (the Gillyflower). In other words, he belonged to the Antwerp intellectual circles of his time. His artistic production is deeply influenced by this intellectual and cultural context, just as it nurtured it in return.

Recent scholarship on Bruegel[3] has highlighted the multi-layered complexity of his (painted, printed and drawn) pictures, which are rooted in the rich artistic, cultural and literary context that we will investigate during this masterclass. More precisely, we would like Pieter Bruegel the Elder to act as a prism through which young scholars will explore, among others, the visual interactions between artists and between pictorial practices, the relationships between literary groups such as the rederijkers and the visual culture of their time, the social and intellectual networks of Pieter Bruegel and other Flemish artists of the late 15^th century and 16^th century, the impact of the complex religious context on the artistic production of the time, the links between humanists and artists, the influence of Flemish artists of the previous generations on Bruegel and his contemporaries, etc.

Early career researchers are invited to submit proposals for a 15-minutes paper. The languages of the masterclass will be Dutch, French, and English. A description of the proposed paper (max. one page) and a short CV should be submitted to Micol Long (micol.long@ugent.be) and Ingrid Falque (ingrid.falque@uclouvain.be), no later than October 15. Selected researchers will be notified in the first week of November.

This masterclass is jointly organised by the Vlaamse Werkgroep Mediëvistiek (Flemish Medievalist Association) and the Réseau des Médiévistes belges de Langue Française (Network of French-speaking Belgian Medievalists), with financial support of the F.R.S.-FNRS and the Fondation pour la protection du patrimoine culturel, historique et artisanal (Lausanne). The event will take place In Brussels (precise location to be announced later) on 25 January. On 24 January, Michel Weemans and Reindert Falkenburg will give a public lecture on their forthcoming book. Further practical details will be announced at a later stage.

[1] Reindert L. Falkenburg and Michel Weemans, Bruegel (Paris, Hazan: 2018).

[2] Mark Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Zwolle, Waanders Publishers: 2002), 14.

[3] See among others: Walter S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (Berkeley, University of California press<: 2006); Todd M. Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands (Farnham, Ashgate: 2011); Bertram Kaschek, Weltzeit und Endzeit. Die »Monatsbilder« Piter Bruegels d.Ä. (München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag: 2012); Christina Currie and Dominique Allart, The Brueg(H)el Phenomenon. Paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger with a Special Focus on Technique and Copying Practice (Brussels, Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage: 2012); Claudia Goldstein, Pieter Bruegel and the Culture of Early Modern Dinner Party (Farnham, Ashgate: 2013); Stephen Graham Hitchins, Art as History, history as Art. Jheronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder Assembling Knowledge not Setting Puzzles (Turnhout, Brepols: 2014); Jospeh Leo Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel. From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton, Princeton University Press: 2016).

De zevende editie van interuniversitaire Masterclass Cultuur en Religie gaat dit jaar door aan de Universiteit van Antwerpen op 17 en 18 September 2018 en heeft als thema ‘Religie en culturele transfer’.

De laatste decennia is binnen cultural studies een verhoogde aandacht ontstaan voor het fenomeen van circulatie van culturele producten (teksten, beelden, ideeën) en in het bijzonder voor de wijze waarop deze culturele goederen temporele, geografische, nationale en ideologische grenzen overschrijden: welke transformaties ondergaan teksten, beelden en ideeën bij hun transfer naar nieuwe contexten?; hoe interageren ze met andere culturele producten uit de nieuwe contexten?; welke bemiddelaars en communicatiecentra zijn bij de transfer betrokken?

In deze tweedaagse masterclass worden de doctorandi en postdoctorandi vertrouwd gemaakt met de belangrijkste concepten en methoden uit cultural transfer-studies, om ze vervolgens te leren toepassen op het domein van het onderzoek naar religie en cultuur in het algemeen en op (een aspect van) hun eigen onderzoeksproject in het bijzonder. Keynote lezingen worden gegeven door Geert Janssen (Universiteit Amsterdam) en Sabrina Corbellini (Universiteit Groningen). Het volledige programma volgt later.

Doctorandi die een casus uit hun onderzoek willen presenteren in het kader van deze interuniversitaire masterclass, kunnen dat melden bij een lid van het wetenschappelijke comité uit de instelling waar ze werkzaam zijn (zie lijst hieronder) of rechtstreeks bij Nina Lamal (nina.lamal@uantwerpen.be).

Organiserend comité: Veerle Fraeters, Nina Lamal, Guido Marnef, Patricia Stoop

Ad Brudgias Portum. Bruges’ medieval port system as a maritime cultural landscape

In October 2018, Ghent University and Raakvlak organise an international conference that centres around medieval harbour hubs as gateways for goods, people and thoughts. Bruges’ maritime cultural landscape will be the guideline for these three days of medieval maritime connectivity

Scope of the conference

Submissions of abstracts for the international conference “The Medieval Literary Canon in the Digital Age,” to be held at Ghent University from 17-18 September 2018.

An often repeated promise of the digital humanities, in the wake of the “computational turn,” is that the wide availability and accessibility of historical texts would enable scholars to breach the restrictions of a literary canon. The present international conference wishes to explore how exactly the digital humanities can provide such insights for medieval studies, in which such a promise raises critical questions.

(1) In spite of the computational turn, much of the digital scholarship for the Middle Ages still seems to hinge on well-conserved and therefore well-known theological and literary authorities, whose texts have been reproduced continuously in subsequent editions and translations. To what extent does today’s computational research manage to escape the straitjacket of the traditional canon?

(2) Considering that in the past decades, medieval scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the materiality of textual transmission in the Middle Ages, the virtual, normative and reductive character of a digital environment are not always compatible to their research interests.

As the emancipation of the digital humanities from their merely supportive role is proclaimed increasingly, and as the tools for digital medieval studies proliferate (e.g. digital scholarly editing, computational stylistics, digital palaeography, digital stemmatology, …), this conference welcomes papers —based on either case studies or broader research questions— that both problematize the specialized character of medieval literary production and demonstrate the potential for computational criticism to “breach” or “widen” the medieval canon through digital tools.

Full details on the topic and discussion of the conference are available on the conference website: http://www.mcda.ugent.be​.

The conference, to which we will accept 8 scholars in addition to the confirmed speakers (cfr. infra) will consist exclusively of plenary sessions, with ample time for discussion. The conference committee encourages proposal submissions by both established and junior researchers. Please send abstracts (ca. 300 words) and a five line biography via email to Jeroen De Gussem (jedgusse.degussem@UGent.be) by the ​10th of May. Participants will receive a notification concerning the acceptance of their application by the end of May.

We expect from our applicants that they have the ability of covering their own travel costs. Accepted speakers are offered lunches and an invitation to our conference dinner. Accepted speakers from abroad (any country other than Belgium) will also be offered up to 3 hotel nights in Ghent.

The following invited speakers have confirmed their participation: Godfried Croenen (University of Liverpool) / Maciej Eder (Pedagogical University of Kraków) / Julie Orlemanski (University of Chicago) / Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan) / Karina van Dalen-Oskam (University of Amsterdam) / David J. Wrisley (New York University Abu Dhabi