Utz to Organize Medievalism Sessions at IMC (CFP)

Studies in Medievalism is sponsoring three sections for next year's International Medieval Congress. If you are interested, please contact Richard Utz (richard.utz@wmich.edu).

1) "What, in the World, is Medievalism? Global Reinventions of the Middle Ages."
For next year's congress, Studies in Medievalism is sponsoring a roundtable discussion which, as the punctuation in the session title attempts to indicate, would like to extend existing discussions of Medievalisms in the postmedieval west to non-western, westernized, or only marginally western regions, nations, and cultures. Specifically, we intend to include five to eight scholars from the areas of political science, anthropology, economics, cultural history, literary and language study, music, and the fine arts to discuss notions of the "medieval" in Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria, China, Japan, Korea, South America, India, and Australia/New Zealand (to name but a few) to present a panoramic view of global receptions. The main goal of the round table is to provide a forum for congress participants to encounter the rich, but often less well-known notions of the "medieval" in countries and cultures which negotiate prevalent western ideas of the past with their traditional cultural paradigmata.

2) "Expatriate Medievalisms." This paper session wants to investigate the experience of western voyagers, expatriates, and emigrés who, displaced from their countries and cultures of origin, brought with them and often transmuted ideas of the "medieval" to their new "homes." The "extraterritorial" experience, as George Steiner called it, provides for often original insights into definitions of the Middle Ages, as new architectures, landscapes, climates, literary genres, languages, and theories lead to a veritable "Babel" of identities among political exiles, sentimental travelers on the grand tour or "going west," from soldiers on foreign shores to scholars and artists on their year(s) "abroad." Contributions to this topic might include personal biographical accounts of current medievalist expatriates.

3) "Religious Medievalisms." This paper session intends to provide a forum for the discussion of how various religious traditions have viewed the Middle Ages or how images and stereotypes of, for example, the Catholic or Christian Middle Ages have dominated the popular and scholarly reception since the Renaissance. Specifically, the session is meant to seek answers as to diverse reconfigurations of the "medieval" by the Reformation, Counterreformation, Enlightenment, Modernism, and Postmodernism, Vatican II; by writers, artists, musicians, etc. with missionary intentions; and by scholars who recognized the central role of Medieval religion for their cultural theories. Finally, the organizers would welcome scholarship on how specific religious organizations and communities have redefined their own medieval roots through the centuries.