We are pleased to announce that the theme of this years annual N/EMICS
conference held at the University of York will be 'Recovering the Past'.

Recovering the past can be an arduous and treacherous task and modern
scholars frequently find themselves indebted to those who have gone before
them. This multi-disciplinary two-day conference sets out to celebrate and
analyse the impact the work of previous generations has had on our
understanding of the Medieval past. For example, from the mid-nineteenth
century onwards there appears to have been an increased interest in
cataloguing and preserving the sculpture of the early Medieval period by
figures such as John Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson, whose seminal work
The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, published in 1903, is still the
most complete record of the sculpture of early Medieval Scotland and was an
influencing factor behind the creation of the British Academy Corpus of
Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (which published its twelfth volume in 2016),
the key text for any scholar working on Anglo-Saxon monumental sculpture
and ecclesiastical / secular patronage of the arts in the early Middle
Ages. This recording and cataloguing of the past can also been seen during
the Medieval period itself with the collation of earlier oral poetry being
preserved in manuscripts, such as the ninth-century poem Genesis B
preserved within the c. 1000 Bodleian Junius 11 manuscript-version of the
near contemporary poem Genesis.

Wider examples of recovering the past include, but are not limited to:
recovering the past given the issues surrounding the accuracy/authenticity
of primary sources; excavation and/or scientific analysis, the insights
these provide and the issues surrounding the findings; the recovery of lost
or stolen artefacts during the Medieval period and beyond; highlighting the
skewing of the past through the editing of texts since the later sixteenth
century, the production of fakes, the re-carving of sculpture; highlighting
the use and manipulation of the past to support nationalistic/religious
arguments; the varying interests of antiquarians and early historians; as
well as museology and the questions surrounding how we engage with and
display the Medieval past.

This conference will bring together emerging scholars, early career
researchers and established academics from a variety of disciplines to
provide a platform to discuss how this important idea was manifested in the
textual, visual and material evidence of the Medieval world and beyond. It
aims to examine the implications and the significance of ‘recovering the
past’ in its widest possible contexts.

Possible subjects include but are not limited to:
- Antiquarianism and/or the recording and cataloguing of the Medieval past
- Historiographies
- Archaeological investigations
- Stolen and/or recovered artefacts
- The creation of fakes: including the re-carving of sculpture and the
‘editing’ of texts
- Reconstructing fragmentary texts, narratives or objects
- The recording of the oral tradition during the Medieval period and beyond
- Issues surrounding the accuracy/authenticity of primary source material
- Museology and the displaying of the Medieval past

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words (with a short biography) to
ea502york.ac.uk by 17 Feburary 2017.

For Further information on the Northern/Early Medieval Interdisciplinary
Conference Series please see our website: northernemics.wordpress.com.