Cfp IMC Leeds 2019: Materiality and Medieval Travels between Europe and Asia (original) (raw)
Related papers
IMC Leeds 2019: MATERIALITY AND MEDIEVAL TRAVELS BETWEEN EUROPE AND ASIA: updated programme
The session is part of a tripartite panel focused on material aspects of contacts and travels between Europe and Asia in the Middle Ages. The first session of the panel aims to explore these interactions as reflected in European art objects, early Renaissance Italian paintings, Venetian glassware and Islamic glass produced in the Mamluk sultanate. The session provides ground for discussing how representations of "Exotic East" materialised in different artistic, political and intellectual contexts of medieval Europe.
Introduction: Medieval Materiality
English Language Notes, 2015
But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings o f a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized. High instincts before which our mortal Nature Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised."-William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations o f Im mortality from Recollections o f Early Childhood"
Fifty Early Medieval Things: Materials of Culture in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
This volume introduces readers to the material culture of postclassical Europe and western Asia. Ranging from Armenia to Wales, and from Sweden to the Sahara, it illustrates the variety of people’s engagement with material objects and structures in the age of transformation launched by the weakening of Roman imperial government. The book is organized into fifty short chapters, each describing and analyzing a different piece of material culture, from entire buildings to tiny seeds, and furnished with suggestions for further reading. Lavishly illustrated to reproduce the visual and tactile qualities of the things that are its main focus, Fifty Early Medieval Things demonstrates how to ‘read’ objects historically. It connects actual things to the political, economic, cultural and social forces that shaped the first millennium AD. (Cornell UP 2019, co-authored with Paolo Squatriti and Deborah Deliyannis.)
Anglia, 2017
, 2009) explores the interrelations between clothing and the texture of romance. With its deliberately "eclectic" approach (18), Medieval Romance and Material Culture, edited by Nicholas Perkins, explores the range of engagement with material practices in medieval insular romance between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Collectively, the fourteen essays of this volume, which are based on papers presented at the thirteenth biannual conference "Romance in Medieval Britain" at St Hugh's College, Oxford, provide a compelling overview of how material culture scholarship can productively enhance our understanding of medieval romance. As Perkins puts it in his introduction, they explore how "medieval romances respond to material culture, but also how romance itself helps to constitute and transmit that culture" (1). With their renewed focus on materiality, they convincingly show that relics, cloaks, rings, swords, chess pieces, harps and other objects are "complex things in romance": they are "symbols of identity formation which wrap themselves around the selfhood of their leading protagonists" and "actants that overlap with those protagonists and have their own narrative trajectories" (7). The contributors draw our attention to the potential of specific objects to travel and cross boundaries
CROSSROADS. Travelling through the Middle Ages. EXPO 27/09/2019 - 29/03/2020
2019
Dear visitor, People migrating over long distances, new political structures, climate changes, religious conflicts, shifting markets, ... The turbulent times of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (c. 300-1000) show more similarities with our modern world than we might think. In Western Europe, this period is often referred to as the ‘Dark Ages’. However, numerous historical sources and artefacts prove that there were many exchanges and contacts during this period through travel, trade, diplomacy and armed conflict. Not only objects were passed on, but also technical know-how, ideas, customs, and religious ideas. All of them reflect an astonishing diversity during this unique period in motion. We wish you a pleasant journey through the Middle Ages!
Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto
Exemplaria, 2010
Medieval views of matter have traditionally been left out of discussions of materialism, in part because philosophers and historians of science have considered them to be too "metaphysical" in orientation. Materialism has therefore been defined univocally in terms of the definitions of matter in vogue during the Enlightenment (primarily physicalism and Cartesian dualism). The effects of this omission are still felt in the materialist paradigms that continue to underwrite much work in literary criticism, history, and other humanist disciplines. This article argues that our modern understanding of materialism would be usefully widened by admitting that medieval definitions of matter, both hylomorphic and humoral, constitute their own versions of "materialism," versions that can help us to historicize later understandings of the term. Finally, medieval poetics would play a significant role in such a recuperative project, since late medieval natural philosophy and literary practice shared similar representational challenges in their respective attempts to textualize the material world and understand the immaterial forces that shaped it.