[1] The Stones Cry Out: Modes of Citation in Medieval Architecture

Lindsay Cook (lsc2140columbia.edu)

International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 11-14, 2017

Organized by Lindsay Cook (Columbia University) and Zachary Stewart (Fordham University)

Citation, understood in its earliest legal sense, refers not to the act of reiterating or to the act of repeating but rather to a formal process of assembling parties separated by space and time. It is therefore best understood as a complex procedure for forging new relationships between people, places, and things that, though highly structured, are by no means inherently stable.

Over the past several decades, a growing number of scholars - including, most notably, Wolfgang Schenkluhn, Hans-Joachim Kunst, Dieter Kimpel, Robert Suckale, Dany Sandron, and Arnaud Timbert - have examined, in explicit terms, the role of citation in architectural production during the Middle Ages. On the one hand, their work has been of great benefit to the field, demonstrating that citation is a productive paradigm for understanding the ways in which isomorphic relationships enable spatial environments to create, support, or subvert social orders. On the other hand, their work has also raised troubling questions about the capacity of buildings to convey meaning, assuming as it does that architecture, like language, functions as a coherent semiotic system. Vitruvius laid the groundwork for the application of this logocentric analogy to classical architecture, but does it necessarily obtain within all modes of architectural production, particularly those considered un- or anti-classical? What are the advantages or disadvantages of choosing citation - versus imitation, replication, appropriation, influence, or habit - as a discursive frame for studying the recurrence of formal elements within architectural ensembles? How does such a visually oriented method address issues of production, perception, technology, function, and value? How might it alter current accounts of the design, construction, and meaning of buildings modeled after famous precedents such as St. Peter's in Rome, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the Great Mosque of Damascus, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, or the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris?

This session invites papers that pursue these kinds of questions as they pertain to the diverse building cultures of the Middle Ages, West and East, between c.300 to c.1500. Highly encouraged are contributions that investigate the stimuli for citation, the media that make it possible, and the agents that make it productive. Especially welcome are papers involving case studies that consider the potential volatility of architectural citation across cultures, regions, institutions, audiences, materials, architectural types, art-historical styles, or chronological periods.

Contact Lindsay Cook (lsc2140columbia.edu) and Zachary Stewart (zdstewartgmail.com) to propose a 20-minute paper. Submissions must include a title, a one-page abstract, a short CV, and a completed Participant Information Form (available here: wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions). Proposals will be accepted through September 15, 2016.

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[2] Obscured by the Alps: Medieval Italian Architecture and the European Canon

CFP for a Session at the International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 11-14 May 2017

Organizer: Erik Gustafson (edg218nyu.edu)

The traditional canon of European architecture has been well established through both formal-stylistic aesthetics and periodized criteria, rooted ultimately in Hegelian notions of the underlying spirit of an age and Modern nationalist identities. Viewed from northern Europe, the canon’s trajectory moves fluidly from the halcyon days of Greece and Rome to the stunted but ambitious Early Christian and Byzantine era, developing into the solidly reliable Romanesque until the revolution of the transcendent Gothic is decapitated by the Renaissance counter-revolution and its florescent Baroque iteration, to be overshadowed by the enlightened and reasoned Neoclassical age, leading to the search for identity of the 19th century Historicist styles and the return to the classically pure clarity of Modernism. The contributions of the Italian peninsula are periodic, and are generally defined within the canon by returns to classicism. In recent decades, architectural historians have begun to challenge the Italian canon, expanding its geographic scope from the old Rome-Florence-Venice vector while also undermining chronological waypoints such as the Medieval-Renaissance divide. The canon, however, remains infrangible, still underwritten by the formalist priorities established at its inception.

This session seeks to examine the utility of the European canon in assessing the historical significance of Italian medieval architecture. Is there more to Italian architectural history than recurrent bouts of classicism? How can Italian architecture be understood positively within the European context, rather than in opposition or subjection to the canonical narratives? Possible avenues of inquiry might include exploring the historiographical lacunae of the canon, considering alternative criteria for structuring new canonical narratives, examining socio-cultural phenomena otherwise elided by the canon, or investigating other historically contingent trends which reflect different scholarly treatments of Italy and the north. Medieval architectural history has been “rethought” several times in the past decade, bringing "new approaches" to old questions. Shifting the discussion, this session seeks papers that ask broad new questions about medieval architecture’s place in the history of European culture, grounding such investigations in local Italian contexts. While Italy has long been obscured by the Alps, this session seeks to begin new conversations about medieval architecture driven by Italian challenges to canonical understandings.

Please submit a paper proposal to the organizer, Erik Gustafson (edg218nyu.edu)
Deadline: September 15, 2016
Please include the following materials in your application:
1) A one-page abstract
2) Completed Participant Information Form available at the website of the Medieval Congress:
http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions
3) A one-page CV

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[3] The Matter of Ornament

Ashley Jones (ajonesarts.ufl.edu)
Session at the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
May 11-14, 2017

The Matter of Ornament

Organizer: Ashley Jones, University of Florida

Ornament has long occupied a troubled position in the history of western art. Subject to rising and falling fashions, it has been beset from all sides. Derided as feminine and dismissed as superficial, ornament has been defined against both classical and modern austerities. Medieval ornament, like so much of medieval art, has acted as foil in the grand narratives of the rise and fall of figuration and abstraction. But broader trends in the history of art and material culture have, in recent years, highlighted the role medieval objects, with their simultaneously heightened physicality and spirituality, can play in illuminating profound questions of the nature of matter and representation. This panel seeks to add ornament - arguably a fundamental mode of premodern abstraction - to that equation. It invites papers drawn from both material and textual traditions that investigate the intersections of materiality, representationality, and ornamentality in medieval material culture. Possible topics include but are not limited to questions of the way in which matter gives rise to ornament; the way in which matter, such as sacred relics, is made legible through ornamentation; and the ways in which medieval ornament evokes both the matter of nature and the matter of the cosmos.

DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: 15 September 2016

Paper proposals should consist of the following:
- Abstract of proposed paper (no more than 350 words)
- Completed Participant Information Form – available on the conference
website here:
https://wmich.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/u434/2016/medieval-pif-2017.pdf

- CV with contact information.

ALL PROPOSALS AND INQUIRIES SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO:
Ashley Jones (ajonesarts.ufl.edu)

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[4] The Schematization of time

Arthur Henaff (arthur.henaffetu.ephe.fr)

CfP: The Schematization of Time

52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 11-14, 2017, Kalamazoo, MI

This session proposes to investigate visual strategies used in time-reckoning and calendar constructions. Medieval illustrations of scientific works, computus treatises (including Bede's De temporum ratione), historical chronicles, almanacs and moral and theological tracts, display a vast spectrum of images dealing with the natural and divine causes of time phenomena, their manifestations, their various effects on the world and their universal significations. These images testify to a wide range of subjects and interests, from cosmological and astronomical explanations, to practical considerations regarding liturgy, astrology, medicine, divination, prognostication, to history and geography, to practical and speculative mathematics, and to symbolic devices working as visual exegesis of the creation. Given the rich corpus of source material, how might the visualization of thime through schematization and volvelles help us understand the role of time in medieval life and culture? How did schemata and diagrams represent specific strategies of knowledge transmission through geometrical relationships, color systems, and numerical and spatial representations? Although modern medieval studies witness an increasing interest in schemata and diagrams, the omnipresence and diversity of visual reflexions on time in the Middle Ages contrasts with the small number of case studies dedicated to the subject.

This session welcomes papers focused on, but not limited to: the visualization of relationships between time, space and matter; the schmatization of time in medical theory and practice; the depiction of liturgical time; the correlation between time-reckoning and celestial phenomena, either astronomical or astrological; the calculation of past and future dates through images concerning chronology and eschatology.

The panel features 15-20 minutes papers. Please send an abstract (150 to 350 words), a short CV and completed Participant Information Form to Arthur Hénaff (arthur.henaffetu.ephe.fr) and Sarah Griffin (sarah.griffinkellogg.ox.ac.uk) by September 15, 2016

Contact Info:

Arthur Hénaff, École Pratique des Hautes Études (arthur.henaffetu.ephe.fr)
Sarah Griffin, University of Oxford (sarah.griffinkellogg.ox.ac.uk)

URL:
http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions

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[5] Light and Darkness in Medieval Art, 1200-1450. ICMA sponsored session

Tom Nickson and Stefania Gerevini (tom.nicksoncourtauld.ac.uk)

Call for Papers: Light and Darkness in Medieval Art, 1200–1450

International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 11-14 May 2017 (two sessions)

Sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art

Light has occupied an increasingly prominent role in medieval studies in recent years. Its perceptual and epistemic significance in the period 1200-1450 has been scrutinized in several specialised research projects, and the changing ways in which light and light-effects are rendered and produced in the arts of the Middle Ages, particularly in Byzantium and Islam, are routinely evoked in literature. However, scholarship on these topics remains fragmented, especially for the Gothic period, and comparative approaches are seldom attempted. New technologies of virtual reconstruction and changing fashions of museum display make it an opportune moment to consider these issues in a more systematic manner.

These two sessions will investigate how perceptions of light and darkness informed the ways in which art across Europe and the Mediterranean was produced, viewed and understood in the period 1200-1450. In the late 12th century a key set of optical writings was translated from Arabic into Latin, providing new theoretical paradigms for addressing questions of physical sight and illumination across Europe. At this time theologies of light also gained renewed popularity in the eastern Mediterranean - particularly as a result of the Hesychast controversy in Byzantium, and in connection with Sufi notions of divine illumination in Islam. What correlations can be traced between theories of optics, theologies of light, practices of illumination, and modes of viewing in the Middle Ages? Are there similarities in the ways different religious or cultural communities conceptualised light and used it in everyday life or ritual settings?

These sessions invite specialists of Christian, Islamic and Jewish art and culture to explore the status of light in broader discourses around visuality, visibility and materiality; the interconnections between conceptualizations of light and coeval attitudes towards objectivity and naturalism; and the ways in which light can articulate political, social or divine authority and hierarchies. The session will also welcome papers that address such broad methodological questions as: can the investigation of light in art prompt reconsideration of well established periodizations and interpretative paradigms of art history? How was the dramatic interplay between light and obscurity exploited in the secular and religious architecture of Europe and the medieval Mediterranean in order to organise space, direct viewers and convey meaning? How carefully were light effects taken into account in the display of images and portable objects, and how does consideration of luminosity, shadow and darkness hone our understanding of the agency of medieval objects? Finally, to what extent is light’s ephemeral and fleeting nature disguised by changing fashions of display and technologies of reproduction, and - crucially - how do these affect our ability to apprehend and explain medieval approaches to light?

Proposals for 20 min papers should include an abstract (max.250 words) and brief CV. Proposals should be submitted by 19 September 2016 to the session organizers: Stefania Gerevini (stefania.gereviniunibocconi.it) and Tom Nickson (tom.nicksoncourtauld.ac.uk). Thanks to a generous grant from the Kress Foundation, funds may be available to defray travel costs of speakers in ICMA-sponsored sessions up to a maximum of $600 ($1200 for transatlantic travel). If available, the Kress funds are allocated for travel and hotel only. Speakers in ICMA sponsored sessions will be refunded only after the conference, against travel receipts.