Congress hosted by Western Michigan University; sessions sponsored by the Ibero-Medieval Association of North America; roundtables co-sponored with the North American Catalan Society.
Kalamazoo, Michigan
11-14 May 2017
Submit Participant Information Form, abstract and CV directly to session organizers by 15 September 2016 (see information below).
Posted on 24 July 2016
Here is a list of the IMANA sessions and their organizers for 2017:
1. Alfonso al-HakÄ«m: Significance and Impact of Alfonso X of Castile’s Exchanges with the Islamic World(Michelle Hamilton, University of Minnesota)
The connections of Alfonso X of Castile to the Islamic world exceed his evident interest in Arabic texts, his patronage of Muslim scholars and translators, and his conflictive relationships with Muslim enemies, allies, and subjects.This session invites papers from historical, cultural or literary perspectives and will accept topics like:
– Islamic influences over the Alfonsine works.
– commonalities between Islamic authors and the cultural production of the Alfonsine court.
– political, religious, and social interactions between Alfonso X and Muslims inside and outside his works.
– impact of the Alfonsine translations for Iberia and the rest of the Mediterranean world.
For consideration in the panel, interested participants should send a 500-word abstract and a 2-page cv to[email protected].
2. A Text by Any Other Name: Rewritings, Reworkings, and Manipulations of Medieval Iberian Texts:(David Arbesu;, University of South Florida)
While we tend to think of contemporary works of literature as finished, unalterable products, this was seldom the case in the Middle Ages, when even the mere act of copying a text most likely produced a different version of it. However, scribal error is but one of the many different explanations for the transformation of medieval works. Texts would often be altered purposefully as a means of manipulating the readers’ interpretation of historical events so as to produce political propaganda, and popular myths, legends, and/or folklore could be rewritten to suit particular interests. Our job as modern critics of this literature is to analyze such textual witnesses in an attempt to comprehend the original writer’s intentions as opposed to the altered documents that may reveal foul play. This panel will examine the rewriting, reworking, and manipulations of such texts and attempt to establish possible motives that could have provoked the alterations found in their existing witnesses. This will allow us to reevaluate how these changes have affected our understanding and vision of the works in question and will allow us to appreciate the differences between original versions versus their reworked counterparts.
Please send a 300-word abstract and 2-page cv to[email protected]
3. Literary, Artistic, and Cultural Approaches to Friendship in Late Medieval Iberia(Sol Miguel-Prendes, Wake Forest University
Scholarship on friendship tends to ignore the Iberian peninsula with the notable exceptions of Carlos Heush’s dissertation (1992) on the philosophy of love and friendship in 15th-c Spain; Cortijo Ocana’s studies on Boncompagno da Signa (2002, 2005) and the echoes in Rodriguez del Padron’s Siervo libre de amor (2006); and more recently Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo’s Friendship in Medieval Iberia: Historical, Legal and Literary Perspectives (2014) focusing on the 13th century and the works of Alfonso X. This panel asks for papers that explore friendship in the later middle ages from literary, artistic, and/or cultural perspectives.
Please send a 300-word abstract and 2-page cv to[email protected]
For information on the roundtable discussion, please refer to the Congress’s Call for papers athttp://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/events/sessions