CALL FOR PAPERS
ICMA Sponsored Sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies 2024
The Sense of an Ending: Finispieces in Medieval Codices
due 15 September 2023
International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo 2024
International Center of Medieval Art Sponsored Session
Organizer:
Julie A. Harris, marfiles@comcast.net
Format: in person
While much has been written about the opening folios of medieval illuminated codices - especially about the entity known as the carpet page - the final pages of these books have been little studied. Papers in this session are asked to address the following questons: what sort of materials does one expect to find at the end of a precious codex? Can the visual designs of these final folios be seen as expressing notions of protection, closure, continuity, or identity? How do the designs we find at the end of a book reconcile ideation about its contents with the material requirements of the codex and the needs of its patrons/users? Is the decorative Finispiece a viable, meaningful, and expected entity in medieval book culture?
Proposals for this in-person panel must be submitted through the Confex proposal portal.
Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Alps: Medieval Artistic Production in the Historic County of Tyrol
due 15 September 2023
International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo 2024
International Center of Medieval Art Sponsored Session
Organizers:
Emma Leidy (ecl2177@columbia.edu)
Sarah Cohen (sf2112@columbia.edu)
Format: in person
In field-defining studies published between 1950-2000, the historic County of Tyrol is recognized as a flourishing area of artistic production, particularly in wall painting around the year 1200. Furthermore, this resilient center located at the crossroads of north and south repeatedly evades stylistic classification. Described as neither Romanesque nor proto-Gothic, the renowned wall paintings of Malles and Naturno have been cast as an unusual mixture of post-Ottonian, Carolingian, and Veneto-Byzantine styles, ambiguously attributed to either local or itinerant artists. Similar speculation regarding questions of style and artistry surrounds the area’s sculpture from the later medieval period. Works related to the so-called “Beautiful Style” originating at the imperial court in Prague have received particular attention concerning their place of production and whether they were imported, sculpted by foreign artists, or created in Tyrol itself. Influential contributions to scholarship include the work of Enrico Castelnuovo, (1929-2014), including the co-authored and edited volumes Centre and Periphery (1979), La frontiera nella storia dell’arte (1987), and Il gotico nelle Alpi 1350-1450 (2002). Yet, in the past twenty years, few studies have attempted to readdress artistic production in this region. Even fewer have moved beyond matters of style to engage with its socio-political complexity, as the Brenner Pass connected the empires north of the harsh mountain range to those of the south, which, in turn, brought merchants, artists, and pilgrims to and from the eastern Mediterranean.
This session seeks papers that address any of the following questions: How, in fact, do we move beyond style to discuss artistic production in Tyrol? Can we speak of workshops or define them as such? What can be gained from studying the movement of people and objects between Tyrol and its neighbors to the north and south? Similarly, how can politics and trade networks inform our understanding of this area?
Possible themes and subjects include but are not limited to:
Wall painting, monumental art, sculpture, manuscript production, and religious architecture
Program themes and iconography
Imperial and royal patronage
Monastic communities
Trade networks
Historiography and nationalism
Proposals for this in-person panel must be submitted through the Confex proposal portal.
Sites of Tension I: Islands and Isolation
Sites of Tension II: Islands and Interconnectivity
due 15 September 2023
International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo 2024
International Center of Medieval Art Sponsored Session
Organizers:
Gabriela Chitwood gchitwood@uoregon.edu
Brittany Forniotis bnf11@duke.edu
Nina Gonzalbez nmg03e@fsu.edu
Shannah Rose smr690@nyu.edu
Format: in person
In the premodern world, the Isolario (“Book of Islands”) was a popular genre for providing geographical, historical, and cultural descriptions of the islands of the oikumene. In Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario (Venice: Nicolò Zappino, 1528), for example, the Paduan cartographer famously describes all islands of the known world, detailing their folklore, myths, cultures, climates, and histories. Intended as an illustrated and practical guide for sailors, Bordone’s Isolario is replete with woodcut maps and explanatory texts that visualize and describe the major known islands and ports throughout the Mediterranean, the Americas, and the Indian Ocean. Several of the woodcut illustrations are among the earliest printed maps of the depicted sites—including the first separate printed map of Cuba—all of which are represented as isolated islands devoid of contact with other geographies, cultures, and histories. This two-part session questions the tenets laid out in such island books: how did medieval peoples navigate the tension between isolation and interconnectivity in island communities and geographies?
Sites of Tension I: Islands and Isolation (Session ID 5329), the first of this two-part session, explores the practical and cognitive effects of building and experiencing lives on islands in the medieval world. It considers the multifaceted ways in which such geographies affected the built environment and visual culture in the Middle Ages. Bearing in mind issues such as isolation and untranslatability, this session seeks papers that address how art and architecture on islands— conceived physically and literally—operated according to their unique, localized geographies and contributed to the formation of island identities.
Sites of Tension II: Islands and Interconnectivity (Session ID 5340), the second of this two-part session, looks beyond issues of physical, geographic isolation. This session examines the imagined or metaphorical island as a locus of inquiry in the medieval world. Bearing in mind the complex political, economic, and cultural significance of overseas exchange and maritime exploration in the formation of islands, this session seeks papers that explore the vital roles played by cross-cultural exchange and colonization in the formation of islands—conceived conceptually.
The ICMA Student Committee seeks papers that challenge the traditional geographic, temporal, and theoretical “edges” of our discipline. We especially welcome papers that reach beyond Europe, thus reflecting the mission of the ICMA to study and understand visual and material culture in every corner of the medieval world.
Potential thematic topics for individual contributions may include, but are not limited to:
- Separation—conceived in intellectual, cartographic, and geographic terms
- Miscommunication and mistranslation
- Diasporic communities and the relationship between colonizer and colony
- Memory, identity, and the (mis)appropriation of cultural heritage, civic, and religious ceremonies
Proposals for both in-person panels must be submitted through the Confex proposal portal.