Call for Papers for Panel
Deviant Images: Text/Image Relationships in Medieval Manuscripts
An In-Person Session
60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 8-10 May 2025
Due 15 September 2024
Sponsor: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
Organizers: Cortney Anne Berg, cberg@gradcenter.cuny.edu
This panel provides a space to examine the ways that images and texts work together (or against each other) in medieval manuscripts. Scholars who study manuscripts often treat the images and the texts as separate phenomena without considering how a medieval reader would have interacted with the holistic object. Many studies of manuscripts treat the images as mere illustrations of the text, and this panel invites all scholars of manuscripts to explore the ways in which images work or do not work with the accompanying text.
Very rarely do images and texts provide the same information, and very rarely are images just illustrations to the text they accompany. Therefore, how can contemporary viewers understand the relationship between medieval images and the texts they accompany?
This panel invites 20 minute papers that explore medieval manuscripts and how their images deviate from or conform to the text. We encourage inquiries that describe the important intersections between text and image, and attempt to reconstruct the relationship between the two, particularly as these relationships may or may not map to lived conditions. We also encourage inquiries that reveal interesting information about manuscript culture writ large. Although this panel seeks papers that deal directly with images not just as aids to the text or reading, any methodological approach from literature, anthropology, history, religious studies, art history, or any other discipline that can make interesting connections between text and image would be a welcome addition to this panel.
Deadline: 15 September 2024
Please submit a 300-word abstract through the conference website: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=5977