and Late Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 12-15 May 11)

Call for papers. Two sessions sponsored by the Society for the
Study of Pilgrimage Art at the 46th International Congress on
Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI USA (May 12-15, 2011).

In, Out, Up, Down, and Through: Innovative and Participatory
Physical Architecture in the High and Late Middle Ages (1200-1600)

Architecture in the High and Late Middle Ages was often designed
to be looked at and experienced in new and participatory ways.
The comings and goings of churchgoers were accommodated by
multiple (but specific) church doors used in connection with
Candlemas, ordinales, the churching of women, public penance,
Palm Sunday, baptism, marriage, burial, and more. Adding to
the dynamic space were apertures in the ceilings and floors
where (on appropriate days and times) such items as doves,
swinging incense burners, eucharistic wafers, almonds, and
gallons of water were splashed down on congregants while images
of Christ seated on a rainbow were winched upward as devil dolls
were tossed down into a trap door below. This session seeks
papers that focus on the innovative and participatory manner in
which people of the later Middle Ages engaged with architecture
and how architectural and its decoration responded to this
interaction.

Innovative and Participatory Fictive Architecture in the High
and Late Middle Ages (1200-1600)

As artists were increasingly able to render illusionistic
space, the architectural spaces they rendered became imbued
with meaning and significance. This session welcomes papers
that investigate the meaning and intention found in fictive
architectural spaces found in late medieval site specific
painting, panel painting, theater design or any other media.
We seek papers that address imaginary and actual spaces, that
investigate the use of micro-architecture to frame visual or
iconographic ideas, or that develop theories to explain how
these fictive structures would have been read and understood
by their creators and audiences.

Send abstracts via email to: blickskenyon.edu

By mail to: Sarah Blick, Art History, Kenyon College,
Gambier, OH 43022 USA or Sarah Blick, P.O. Box 619, Gambier,
OH 43022 USA

By fax: (740) 427-5673

For further information on the Congress as a whole, see
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

and please forward this on to interested parties and check out the
latest news on Ottonian art at http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu