CFP: M@P Session on Mediocrity, Kalamazoo 2020

M@P is looking for submissions for its ICMS 2020 panel, a follow-up to our conference last year! Please feel free to share widely.

Middle Grounds: The Politics and Aesthetics of Medieval Mediocrity 

What can we learn from unexceptional texts and artifacts in the Middle Ages? How can we critically assess the metrics by which we evaluate quality? How can medieval studies reconcile, or recover from, the history of Orientalism in its estimation of non-European medieval traditions? This panel builds on conversations during the 2019 Medievalists @ Penn Conference on Mediocrity (middling-ages.tumblr.com), which we seek to carry in more explicitly transcultural directions. By revisiting definitions of “middleness,” we hope to foster a rigorous approach to challenging the literary and artistic canons of the Western Middle Ages, to explore organic connections between politics and art within and across European and non-European traditions, and to consider how developing an aesthetics of mediocrity invites new discussions about the ethics of criticism. 

We invite 15- to 20-minute papers on this subject from any discipline, and particularly encourage comparative methodologies, as well as research that challenges regional divisions by using global/universal/planetary models of medieval studies. We believe that mediocrity is a useful framework for thinking cross-culturally as well as analyzing the limitations of global approaches, allowing us to explore different aesthetic models and to expose the processes of canon formation within academic institutions. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Unexceptional examples of common genres, such as romance
• Translation, adaptation, and/or reproduction of medieval objects
• Mediality of the Middle Ages
• Orientalism and the mediality of Middle East/East/non-European traditions
• Non-deluxe manuscripts, mundane objects, ordinary subjects
• Artists and writers outside conventional canons
• Medieval theories of artistic quality
• Quotidian devotional practices; the religious lives of the unsaintly
• Contemporary and historical reception and criticism
• Differences in quality between text and image, or text and music

Please send queries or abstracts (200-300 words), along with the Participant Information Form (available at https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions), to Rawad Wehbe (rzwehbe@sas.upenn.edu) or Aylin Malcolm (malcolma@sas.upenn.edu) by September 15th, 2019. 

Mediocrity: 11th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Conference

For more information, visit the conference website at middling-ages.tumblr.com.

Medieval Events in Spring 2019

Please see below for a selection of M@P and related events at Penn this spring. For a more complete listing of events, see the Global Medieval Studies calendar.

Jan 23: Med/Ren WIP: Anna Lyman
Jan 28: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Sonja Drimmer's The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476
Jan 30: Paleography Working Group

Feb 13: Med/Ren WIP: Kellie Robertson
Feb 14: Paleography Working Group
Feb 14: Rita Copeland (Classical Studies Colloquium), "Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the Medieval Preacher"
Feb 22: 11th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Conference, "Mediocrity in the Middle Ages: Finding the Middle Ground"
Feb 28: Paleography Working Group

Mar 13: Med/Ren WIP: Sarah Novacich
Mar 14: Paleography Working Group: Guest lecture by Catherine Innes-Parker
Mar 25: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Alexander Key's Language Between God and the Poets: Maʿnā in the Eleventh Century
Mar 28: Paleography Working Group

Apr 11: Paleography Working Group
Apr 22: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Carissa Harris's Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain

Call for Papers: Mediocrity: 11th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Conference

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for our annual spring conference, "Mediocrity in the Middle Ages: Finding the Middle Ground," to be held at Penn on February 22, 2019. Our keynote speaker will be Sonja Drimmer (Assistant Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture, UMass Amherst).

Please see below for a shareable PDF and the full text of the CFP.

What makes something “mediocre” in the Middle Ages? We often assume that if a manuscript, literary text, or work of visual or performance art has survived from the medieval period, it is exceptional in some way. Modern scholarship tends to enforce this assumption by either praising a work for its beauty and importance, or arguing for the centrality and exceptionality of something that past scholarship has ignored. But what of things that have survived that are just OK? How can clarifying the boundaries of what modern or medieval critics consider(ed) “good” and “bad” art still leave room for mediocrity? What can this middle ground teach us about form, aesthetics, language, and reception? Resisting the notion that any texts surviving from the Middle Ages are likely exceptional in some way, this conference seeks to examine unexceptional artistic productions in the Middle Ages, to consider what we can learn from medial texts and artifacts, and to critically assess the metrics by which we evaluate quality. We hope that this topic will challenge the spectrum endpoints of what has been labelled “good” or “bad” by searching for the middle ground. 

We invite 15-20 minute papers on this subject from any discipline, including History, Art History, Musicology,  Manuscript Studies, Literary Studies, Religious Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Non-deluxe manuscript codices and fragments
• Artists and writers outside conventional canons
• Medieval theories of artistic quality (or lack thereof)
• Microhistories of “ordinary” medieval people
• Average devotional practices; the religious lives of the unsaintly
• Contemporary and historical reception and criticism
• Differences in quality between text and image, or text and music
• Unexceptional examples of common genres, such as romance
• Translation, adaptation, and/or reproduction of medieval objects
• Mediality of the “Middle” Ages

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words as attachments to pennmedieval@gmail.com by December 2, 2018. Submissions should include your name, paper title, email, and institutional and departmental affiliation. Papers will be due February 12, 2019 for distribution to faculty respondents.

Online Resources for Medievalists

Please click the image below (or the link in the sidebar) for the new M@P Online Resources for Medievalists document! Links compiled by Ph.D. Candidate Daniel Davies and other M@P student and faculty members.

Vulnerability: 10th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Graduate Conference

Thanks to all of our presenters, respondents, moderators, and attendees for helping us to put on another great conference. Special mention to our keynote speaker Masha Raskolnikov; to Courtney Rydel, Penn English PhD and one of the earliest organizers of M@P, who returned to us as a respondent; and to the staff of the Kislak Center for their ongoing help and advice. We're also grateful to SIMS graduate intern Oliver Mitchell, who reviewed the conference for the Schoenberg Institute blog.

Click here to visit the conference website: medievul.tumblr.com

Photo of Panel 3 by David Wallace

Medieval Events in Spring 2018

Please see below for a selection of M@P and related events at Penn this spring. For a more complete listing of events, see the Global Medieval Studies calendar.

Jan 30: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Steven Justice’s “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?”
Feb 7: Med/Ren WIP: Julie Orlemanski
Feb 20: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Wulf and Eadwacer and Sarah Harlan-Haughey's The Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature
Feb 27: Irina Dumitrescu lecture: “The Riddle of the Old English Andreas”
Mar 17: Vulnerability: 10th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Conference
Mar 23-24: Gothic Arts Conference
Mar 29: Med/Ren WIP: Carolyn Dinshaw
Mar 30-31: Yale/Penn Workshop: Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript Roll
Apr 17: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
Apr 25: Med/Ren WIP: Sarah Novacich