[1]
From: Mickey Abel <mickey.abelunt.edu>
Date: Jul 11, 2016
Subject: CFP: Urban Planning

Urban Planning:
Buildings, Planning, and Networks of Medieval Cities
AVISTA sponsored sessions

Broadly defined, urban planning is today a process one might describe as half design and half social engineering. One engaged in this process considers not only the aesthetic and visual product, but also the economic, political, and social implications, not to mention the underlying or over-arching environmental impact of any given plan.
While it appears that this sort of broad, multifaceted planning did not take place in the middle ages because we do not have left to us the tangible evidence—the maps, the drawings, the reports, recent scholarship employing the methodological lens of Cultural Geography seems to suggest otherwise. Monastic historians, archaeologists, and art historians have long demonstrated, based on the famous plan of St. Gall, that monasteries, particularly those of the Cistercian order, were very much concerned with planning in the rural sense. From the intricacies of the water infrastructure, to the ordered logic of the space, to the esoteric qualities of metaphysical light, to the seasonal inter-dependence of pigs and pollarded oak trees, there is ample evidence to support a claim that the various components of an “urban plan” were understood within the monastic realm during the Middle Ages.

But what of the integration of these various parts? This session seeks to explore and expand our comprehension of how those in roles of authority—both within the monastic confines and the more secular enivorns--saw the big picture. Was there a plan or a planning process? What can we say by way of an analysis of architectural complexes beyond the monastic enclosure about this planning process? Are there hints in literary sources that indicate sensitivity to the correlation between climate, architectural orientation and positive social interaction, or indications in religious documents to illustrate a planned confluence between visual or aural stimulation, water features and physical well-being? In the broader context of the secular built environment, where historians frequently demonstrate the economic and political interaction between monastic leadership and the local or regional authorities, can we detect a specific replication or modeling of the integrated concern with materials and aesthetics seen in the monastic complex? Similarly, where philosophic and religious scholars highlight the mirrored nature of heaven and earth in medieval texts, can we find evidence of this theoretical “ordering” being planned or integrated into the secular world in the same way we can see it in the monastic enclosure? What can we learn by bringing together the views of the architect, the archaeologist of infrastructure, and the environmental biologist with those scholars of literature, sculptural ornamentation and liturgy? With these questions in mind, we seek papers from the broadest interdisciplinary point of view, where we can identify glimpses of a plan or, in the modern sense of the term, a planner.

In the Middle Ages European and eastern Mediterranean/western Asian cities developed from myriad situations, their cityscapes exhibiting a variety of types, as Wolfgang Braunfels outlined in Abendländische Stadtbaukunst: Herrschaftsform und Baugestalt (1976; English version, Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture, 900-1900, 1988). While much scholarship still focuses on archaeology and individual sites, since Braunfels's publication research with a greater breadth of perspectives is being tackled. This examines not only the role of ecclesiastical architecture within civic society, but also on secular building, the functions of which always interacted with religious values of medieval culture. The proposed session invites papers showing innovative research and discussing specific examples or topics understood within a broad framework, on such issues as the forms that medieval cities and buildings took and why, what infrastructure was necessary to facilitate cultural growth, what pre-existing buildings and spolia conveyed to the social network of urban development, and why, as well as how, people moved about and operated within urban contexts (including the ex-urban and rural Hinterland). Within an urban setting--whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or some combination thereof--structures that might be investigated include city halls and courts, market halls, shops, merchants' hostelries (fondaci), entertainment venues, hospitals, prisons, etc., as well as infrastructure such as bridges, roads, and hydraulic elements, and natural features such as topography, geological phenomena, and environmental impacts, which might question how the rural was integrated and/or maintained as attributes of the urban.

Papers that view specific constructions as part of the whole social fabric are welcome, as are those that consider how political, geographical, economic, and social issues affected the built environment, or conversely were affected by it, during this period when a public sphere was emerging for the first time since the Roman Empire. Send abstracts of 300 words to:
Mickey Abel
Mickey.Abelunt.edu

Deadline: September 15, 2017

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[2]
From: Martin Schwarz <schwarzmuchicago.edu>
Date: Jul 11, 2016
Subject: CFP: The Material, Visual, and Cultural Life of Scholasticism

The Material, Visual, and Cultural Life of Scholasticism

Organizer: Martin Schwarz, University of Chicago
Chair and Respondent: Alex Novikoff, Fordham University

This panel explores the cultural dimensions of Scholasticism, a topic of study that has been largely confined to the realm of intellectual history and the history of ideas. The term principally denotes the profound revolution of knowledge and learning that swept across Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, most notably through the reception of Greco-Arabic learning, the development of new intellectual methods and pedagogical practices, and the institutional formation of higher education in universities. Broadly speaking, standard narratives have traditionally cast Scholasticism as a purely intellectual and therefore immaterial discourse dissociated from its immediate material and cultural surroundings. More recently, however, scholars have begun to question the disciplinary isolation of the study of Scholasticism, challenging its reach from a variety of angles. In investigating, for instance, Scholasticism’s dimension of sound and its relationship to polyphonic music, the performative character of scholastic disputations, its physical and aesthetic presence and expression in urban space and architecture, or its dependence on literary forms and visual representation, this new approach has in many respects sharpened our perception of the co-dependence between intellectual and material worlds—and has, consequently, demonstrated the need for an expanded, integrative account that reckons both with the Scholasticism’s cultural life and its centrality to the scholastic production of knowledge. Accordingly, this panel invites contributions that address the material, visual, spatial, and sonic dimensions and qualities of Scholasticism from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. We aim to bring together scholars from different backgrounds such as Art History, Material and Visual Culture, Theatre Studies, Sound Studies, Urban Studies, Musicology, and Literature to open new lines of inquiry and reflect upon the disciplinary and methodological complexities of their research.

This panel will feature 15–20min papers. Please submit a 150-word abstract with your paper title and a short CV by Sept 9, 2016 to Martin Schwarz (schwarzmuchicago.edu) and Alex Novikoff (anovikofffordham.edu).

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[3]
From: Laura Whatley <lwhatle1aum.edu>
Date: Jul 11, 2016
Subject: CFP: Layered Meanings, Layered Functions

Layered Meanings, Layered Functions: Metalwork and Gems in the Middle Ages

This session seeks to offer a broad analysis of medieval metalwork, including but not necessarily limited to objects such as jewels, engraved gems, seals, coins, badges, reliquaries and medals. In particular, it welcomes papers that examine portable or wearable metalwork—objects with a very personal, somatic connection to the owner or viewer. In terms of iconography, materiality, function and context, these objects of status, legitimacy and even devotion have much in common and should be explored alongside one another. This session has the potential to help advance and refine our methodologies for analyzing these important facets of medieval visual culture across time, place and discipline. Some general topics of interest include: personal seal matrices (signets, finger rings); re-use or revival of antique gems, cameos and coins; workshop practices and production of metal objects; heraldry and arms; magical properties of gems and metalwork; metalwork and medieval gift exchanges; metalwork, gems and pilgrimage; materiality and portability; signification, identity and self-fashioning; “afterlife” of medieval metal objects and gems.

Proposals on aspects of metalwork and gems not suggested in this CFP will also be considered. Please email one-page abstract and completed Participant Information Form to Laura Whatley at lwhatle1aum.edu on or before September 10th.