Op 27 april 2021 vindt aan de University of Reading een online workshop plaats met als onderwerp: Medieval Government Finance: Innovation and Experimentation. De workshop is gericht op beginnende onderzoekers binnen dit vakgebied. De workshop mikt op een divers publiek van deelnemers uit verschillende landen met bijdragen over verschillende niveaus (lokaal, stad, staat, supranationaal). Mogelijke onderwerpen zijn onder andere: belastingen en overige inkomsten, schuldenbeheer, uitgavenbeheer en investeringen.

Dr. Richard Cassidy zal aan het begin van de workshop een Keynote-presentatie geven.

Bijdragen moeten in het Engels zijn met een duurtijd van 20 minuten. De deadline is vrijdag 19 februari 2021. Voor deelname moet een abstract van maximaal 300 woorden verstuurd worden naar Andy Ford: jw898873@student.reading.ac.uk.

De Call for Papers is hieronder in pdf-formaat bijgevoegd.

Het Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference uit Leiden heeft een Call for Papers gelanceerd in verband met grenzen in crisistijd. Abstracts van 500 woorden kunnen ingediend worden tot 15 januari 2021. Meer informatie is op de website van de Universiteit Leiden zelf te vinden: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2020/11/ljgc-09-reinventing-boundaries-in-times-of-crisis

Het tijdschrift Queeste zoekt bijdragen voor een speciaal nummer dat zal verschijnen in 2021. Het nummer zal zich richten op Franstalige middeleeuwse literatuur in de Lage Landen. Abstracts moeten verstuurd worden voor 30 april 2020. Meer details kan u in het bericht hieronder vinden en in het pdf-bestand in bijlage.

In 2015, we concluded the introduction of our special issue on Literature and Multilingualism in the Low Countries with a renewal of Queeste’s ‘commitment to the varied and multilingual culture of the Low Countries’. And indeed, in the five years since then, Queeste has continued to publish scholarly articles on the production and circulation of literature in Dutch, French, and Latin, on translation, and on multilingual text collections and reading culture in the Low Countries.

While the editors applaud this continuous attention to multilingualism and language contact, we also feel that Queeste often approaches these issues from a distinctly Dutch-language perspective. This poses the risk of downplaying the actual impact of the literature in French (and Latin) that was written, copied and disseminated in the Low Countries. Following up on the earlier issue on multilingualism, we therefore aim to publish a new special issue of Queeste devoted solely to current scholarship on medieval Francophone literature in the Low Countries, to appear in 2021.

Since Queeste actively seeks to deliver the diversity that is implied in the journal’s subtitle, this special issue should be seen as another step towards a more balanced and accurate representation of the region’s multilingual literary culture. We therefore hope that this collection of essays will mark the beginning of a steady supply of articles on the medieval francophone literature produced and received in the Low Countries.

We invite reflections on any aspect of the authoring, copying, and reception of French literary texts in the area covering modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Northern France. As we aim for a wide and diverse panorama, we welcome general overviews as well as case studies, written from a varied range of theoretical and methodological perspectives (literary theory, codicology, stylometry, etc.), with a diachronic, comparative or contextualizing approach, and discussing texts from a broad spectrum of genres (lyric, epic, theatre, but also religious, moral-didactic, scientific, and practical writing).

Contributors should by no means feel confined to the textual production in the principally francophone regions and social circles of the Low Countries, but are encouraged to (also) discuss examples of French literature in reception contexts and parts of the area that have not been typically associated with francophone culture.

Abstracts (300 words or less) should be sent to the editorial board of Queeste before 30 April 2020 (b.j.m.caers@hum.leidenuniv.nl), after which authors will be notified by 15 May. Contributions of ca. 8000 words (including notes and bibliography) should be delivered before 31 October 2020 and will be, as always, subject to double blind peer review. Contributors are requested to follow the journal’s stylesheet (https://queeste.verloren.nl/guidelines).
For any further questions, please contact the editors of this special issue directly:

* Alisa van de Haar (a.d.m.van.de.haar@hum.leidenuniv.nl) or
* Dirk Schoenaers (d.j.c.schoenaers@hum.leidenuniv.nl).

Queeste is a multilingual journal and accepts articles written in Dutch, English, French, and German. Find out more at: https://queeste.verloren.nl/

Objects of Devotion. Religion and its Instruments in Early Modern Europe

How were religious ideas and practice realized through interaction with objects? How did the presence of sculptures, paintings, books, and church furniture—their visibility, tactility, and materiality—help form attitudes toward devotion, sacred history, and salvation? In other words, how did people think with things—both clerics and lay devotees? What was the complex role of sacrament houses, altarpieces, pulpits, jubés, and baptismal fonts in molding ideas about the central tenets of Christianity? How did statues of Christ and the saints make both present and problematic these issues—particularly when they involved performances: carried about the town, taken down from the cross and laid in the sepulcher, or lanced to emit spurts of blood? How did tombs help form ideas about the body, its mortality, and the hope of resurrection? How was the material of these objects comprehended—and what were the consequences of choosing sculpture over painting or selecting one stone over another? How were statues of Christ transformed when real hair was attached to their heads? How did lay, unoffical devotional practice differ from institutionalized forms of piety and how did they both influence each other? How did objects sustain both the status concerns and the often very precise religious beliefs of their patrons? Rather than verify these readings through early modern texts, we recognize both texts and objects as opaque cultural references that must be interpreted according to complex conventions and triangulated to offer compelling readings.

Historians of the late medieval and early modern period have created an antithesis between spiritual (inward) and physical (outward) devotion, branding the latter as superficial, ritualistic and mechanistic. More generally, from the first Protestant historians to Max Weber and his followers, the Reformation has come to be represented as the classic watershed between material, magical devotion and spiritual, rational belief. In a similar vein, art historians have opposed the notion of the medieval cult image, material and functional, to the early modern work of art, subject to aesthesis (Carolyn Walker Bynum, Hans Belting). Yet, does it make sense to distinguish between late medieval and early modern religious culture, given the fact that the definitions and boundaries of these periods are notoriously problematic and considerably overlap? To what degree have these differing traditions dictated separate approaches to these objects and their role in forming beliefs and practices?

We look for papers that draw from material culture studies, social history, art history, religious studies, and anthropology. And we envision a relatively small conference of about 18 speakers from a variety of disciplines. Talks will be limited to 20 minutes with equal time for discussion.

We are happy to cover hotel costs for 3 nights. Unfortunately we cannot reimburse travel expenses. If you are interested in this conference, please send us the following:

• Name
• Institutional Affiliation
• Paper title (not more than 15 words)
• Abstract (not more than 150 words)
• Curriculum vitae of 2-3 pages
• Brief explanation of the relevance of your paper to the theme of the conference

Please send your information and any questions to matt.kavaler@utoronto.ca and Annelaure.VanBruaene@UGent.be