Session Co-Chairs Maurizio Rebaudengo, PhD (University of Connecticut)
Carla Rossi, Titular Professor (University of Zurich, Research Centre for European Philological Tradition, Lugano)

As part of the 3-year project “Intersexuality in pictures: gender fluidity in Medieval illuminated manuscripts”, coordinated by Prof. Carla Rossi, and funded by the Stiftung für wissenschaftliche Forschung an der Universität Zürich, our Centre is organising a conference in online mode on 14 October 2022, and launching a call for proposals.
Despite what one might think, Middle Ages or, more generally, the premodern period, were quite familiar with the idea of ‘gender fluidity’ and with hermaphrodite and androgynous figures, as well as with a range of physiological aspects of sexualities that cannot easily and clearly be categorized in a bipolar system of male and female.

TOPICS:
- God with Our Lady's attributes
- The femininity of Christ (we do not accept interventions either on the Vagina Christi, or on Christ giving birth to the Church, topics that have been investigated at length at our research centre)
- Transgender Saints
- Transgender Monks
- The hermaphrodite Adam „… fecit ipsum masculofeminam“
- The iconography of queer characters in ancient French, Italian, German, English or Spanish literary texts of the Middle Ages
- The iconography of ambiguous bodies in Medieval medical texts
- The iconography of ambiguous bodies in Canon and Roman law Mss
- Alchemical gender fluidity (such the Mercurial hermaphrodite)
- Hebrew manuscripts
Anyone wishing to participate with a lecture in Italian, English or French is invited to send by 30 June an email to inforeceptio.eu, specifying their university/institute, their biography, the title of their paper and a maximum of ten lines of their speech abstract.