Op 8-10 November 2017 vindt de 14e editie van de International Meetings of the Middle Ages in Najera (Spanje) plaats. Het thema van deze interdisciplinaire bijeenkomst is dit jaar “Exclusion and social discipline in the Medieval City in Europe”. De organisatoren doen een oproep voor papers, die kunnen handelen over tal van onderwerpen, zoals instrumenten van exclusie, armoede en sociale marginalisatie,religie en exclusie, gender en exclusie etc. Deadline voor voorstellen, die maximum 500 woorden mogen tellen, is 15 september 2017.

Meer informatie kan je vinden in dit document.

Voor het International Medieval Congress in Leeds in juli 2018 gaat een Call for Papers uit over “Women’s Strategies of Memory: Representations in Literature and Art”. Meer informatie vinden jullie hieronder.

Philomela reflects on her metamorphosis. Eleanor of Castile constructs her future image with her tomb effigy. Chaucer’s Custance pretends to forget her origins. From the Iliad’s Hecuba to the Brut’s Tonwenne, women re-narrate their children’s infancy on the political stage. In wills, letters and literary commissions, women represent themselves in relation to the past. How straightforward are these acts of memory?

Memory, in the Middle Ages as now, was widely accessible to women as means of personal and political influence. Scholarship on medieval memory has principally explored men’s practices. But women, too, used and created strategic representations of the past to serve their own present or future purposes. We invite papers from any discipline, region and medieval period, which consider any aspect of the representation of women’s memory, including but not limited to the topics above.

Proposals might consider:

• women who perform remembering, forgetting, or recounting past events as a means of achieving power
• women who (re)construct histories and identities
• women who present denials or disruptions of known narratives
• women who manipulate the memories of other characters.
• women who use memory and forgetting to compartmentalise traumatic emotions
• women who are accused of errors of memory, such as omissions, ignorance or misrepresentation of the record.

Please contact Dr Lucy Allen (lucyallen505@gmail.com) and Dr Emma Bérat (eoloughl@uni-bonn.de) with an abstract of approximately 100 words and a brief biography by 31 July 2017.

CfP Session SS04. Gambling and the City: From Rome’s Chariot Races to the Baccarat Tables of Macau (1st – 21st centuries), 14th International Conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH)

Rome, 29 August – 1 September 2018

Several cities in the world are immediately associated with leisure, entertainment, games and gambling: Las Vegas, for instance. But this ‘Sin City’ is currently surpassed in terms of turnover by another city: Macau. As an autonomous territory within China, Macau’s legal system has fostered the strong rise of an urban economy strongly dependent on gambling and tourism. In the past, other cities have given rise to similar gambling cultures that privilege leisure and entertainment. Indeed, cities, as argued by urban historian Peter Clark among others, were crucial in the development of new types of leisurely activities.

Our session will focus on gambling as a form of entertainment. The appeal of certain cities to draw in tourists and citizens alike rests on the promises of its gaming tables and wagering opportunities. One can wager on the outcome of any event – whether mundane such as the role of the dice, lotteries or football matches to high politics, such as papal elections or battles. These gambling cultures have their own evolution and histories.

City authorities displayed an ambivalent and ever-changing attitude towards gambling within their walls: while it did bring in travelers and revenue through taxation, gambling could be illegal in certain legal systems and often carried a negative moral connotation. Conflicts, violence, drunkenness, criminality and prostitution often went hand in hand with gambling, which has prompted city governments to forbid the practice outright (and by doing so pushing gambling underground), they could construct a legal framework and infrastructure which allowed for monitoring and transparency for the players, or gambling could be limited in time and space.

Papers on the urban history of gambling should focus on one or more of the following elements:

• Sociability of gambling: who played and gambled, what was their gender, their social identity? Were particular types of gambling restricted to particular social groups? How did different players and organizers socially interact with each other? Did different gambling institutions compete with one another?
• Dynamics of tolerance and repression: why and when did urban authorities either allow and even encourage the development of the gambling industry or repress it? What role did transparency and publicity play? Which events or ideas triggered reversals in previous urban regulation of gambling? How does the relation between city and state affect the policing of gambling?
• Locations of gambling within cities and towns: betting could be done in taverns, in underground venues and in specialized buildings such as gambling offices and casino’s. In which neighborhoods were gambling venues located? What does this tell us about the profile of the industry? The type of venue matters as well. Was gambling advertised and if so, how?

We welcome papers from all periods and regions and are particularly interested in comparative work or long-term case studies.

Keywords: gambling; sociability; leisure

Session Coordinators:  Jean-Dominique Delle Luche (jddelleluche@gmail.com ), John Hunt (john.hunt@uvu.edu ), Jeroen Puttevils (jeroen.puttevils@uantwerpen.be)

Session webpage: https://eauh2018.ccmgs.it/users/index.php?pagename=cms&name=sessiontracks&trackname=gambling-and-the-city–from-rome-s-chariot-races-to-the-baccarat-tables-of-macau

Please submit your paper proposals of up to 450 words online to the EAUH2018 website https://eauh2018.ccmgs.it/users/ (prior registration is required)

Deadline for paper proposals submission: October 5, 2017

Notification of paper acceptance: December 1, 2017

Further information about the conference: https://eauh2018.ccmgs.it/

Op 29 september 2017 vindt in Wervik de twaalfde Landschapscontactdag plaats. Het thema voor deze editie luidt “Grenzen in het Landschap”. De organisatie is op zoek naar bijdragen die ingaan op het ontstaan en de transformatie van grenzen in het landschap en over de betekenis ervan vroeger en nu. Abstract zijn welkom voor 1 juni 2017.

Meer informatie kan je in dit document vinden.

Recent historiography on charity, poor relief and mutual assistance has strongly focused on its community-delineating potential. All assistance and relief is in one way or another reserved for a specific group considered ‘deserving’, be that co-religionists, fellow townsmen, members of a particular guild, confraternity or quarter, etc. When allocating aid or relief to one specific group, the in-group is formed while its boundaries are being sharpened to outsiders. The putting up of boundaries thus stands at the forefront of research on charity, assistance and relief.

This is enhanced by Eurocentric modernity narratives, in which notions of territory have played a major part. Historiography for example has strongly focused on a perceived shift, especially from the sixteenth century onwards, from private initiatives to the responsibility of public institutions and governments, initially at city level; later the regional or ‘national’ level took over. Writing from the vantage point of national welfare states, historians have perceived poor relief all too easily as linked to a certain territory and / or citizenship. Poor relief and aid embedded in networks stretching across territories often escaped the attention. This is all the more problematic since medieval and even early modern political actors conceived their political communities in a non-territorial way, as corporations, or clusters of corporations, based on membership rather then residence. This territorial analytic framework furthermore enhances the idea that the Christian, Jewish and Muslim charity and assistance system were of a different ‘world’, leading to a lack of reflection about its differences and similarities.

Recent studies have already criticised this modernity narrative and the use of ‘nations’ as frame of analysis. In a range of research fields ‘entangled history’ or ‘histoire croisée’ approaches have yielded new insights, while in the broader social sciences new conceptual approaches have chosen networks as their basic concept. However, a truly network-based and transnational perspective on charity, assistance and relief is still missing. In this workshop we want to broaden the view by focussing on networks of charity, assistance and relief, transcending local, regional and / or national boundaries and by paying attention to organisations and institutions of different religions; thus exploring the area of tension between territory, network and transnationalism. Family, religious, commercial and other ties indeed all challenged or transcended territorial boundaries. We welcome papers dealing with forms of charity, relief and assistance in Christian, Jewish and Muslim pre-industrial societies that have a translocal, transregional and/or transnational component, be it focussing on international tradesmen, religious communities, colonial forms of relief, … If there is interest, a publication might follow.

A keynote lecture will be given by prof. Gervase Rosser.

This workshop will be organised in Bruges from 26 to 27 October 2017. Please send your abstracts of ca. 300 words to Hadewijch.Masure@uantwerp.be before 15 April.

Prof. dr. Bert De Munck – dr. Eline Van Onacker – Hadewijch Masure (University of Antwerp – Centre for Urban History)

Prof. dr. Paul Trio – Hannelore Franck (KU Leuven Campus Kulak Kortrijk)

Op 14-15-16 september 2017 wordt aan de Universiteit Gent het congres “Telling Tales Out of School. Latin education and European Literary Production” georganiseerd. De focus ligt op de dynamische interactie tussen Europese literaire productie en scholing in het Latijn.  De organisatoren zijn op zoek naar papers die diverse aspecten van de relatie tussen onderwijs en literatuur behandelen. Voorstellen moeten ingediend worden voor 1 februari 2017. Meer informatie over de thematiek van dit congres kan je in dit document vinden.

Aan de University of Oxford wordt op 23 juni 2017 een conferentie georganiseerd met als thema “Mobility and Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe”. Centraal staat de manier waarop alledaagse mobiliteit bijdroeg tot de vorming van laatmiddeleeuwse en vroegmoderne ruimtes en hoe het ruimtelijke framework de beweging van mensen beïnvloedde. De organisatoren zijn op zoek naar papers van ongeveer 20 minuten. Deadline voor het indienen van een voorstel is 1 februari 2017. 

Meer informatie over het onderwerp en de vereisten voor de paper, kan je hier vinden.

Van 10 tot 12 juli 2017 gaat aan de Universiteit Gent voor de vijfde maal het tweejaarlijkse congres door van de Society for the Medieval Mediterranean. Het thema is deze keer “Communities, Imaginations and Emotions in the Medieval Mediterranean”. De call for papers is nu gelanceerd, en abstracts tot 300 woorden kunnen nog tot 31 oktober 2016 bezorgd worden aan smm2017@ugent.be.

Alle verdere informatie is te vinden op de congreswebsite.

Van 14 tot 16 september 2017 zal in Gent het internationale congres ‘Telling Tales Out of School. Latin education and European Literary Production’ doorgaan. Bevestigde keynote speakers zijn Anders Cullhed (Stockholm), Rita Copeland (Pennsylvania) en Erik Gunderson (Toronto). De organisatoren lanceren nu een oproep voor verdere bijdragen over de verhouding tussen Latijns onderwijs en de Europese literatuur.

Abstracts van ca. 300 woorden dienen tegen 1 februari 2017 ingezonden te worden naar relics@ugent.be, vergezeld van een korte biografie (5 regels). Meer details over thematiek en vraagstellingen zijn te vinden in het call-document.