57th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, 2022)
May 9-14, 2022 (Virtual)
IMANA Sessions
Lisbon: End of the Earth, Center of Culture
This panel seeks to expand our understanding of Lisbon as a cultural crossroads in the late-Middle Ages. Often left out of traditional scholarship and marginalized at the outskirts of Europe’s understanding of the world, Lisbon was anything but removed from the cultural dynamics of the Iberian Peninsula and of Europe more broadly. Additionally, Lisbon’s place as a launching point to India, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa made it rich with racial and ethnic diversity. This panel encourages discussion surrounding the exchanges in and around Lisbon at a time when the city held an important place in the medieval cultural sphere.
Send abstracts to [email protected]by Monday, September 13th.
Contact: Ross Karlan ([email protected])
Submissions due by September 15th:https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/call
Appetites for Destruction: Ugly Feelings in Iberia
Narrators, characters, inscribed (and actual) audiences who grapple with destructive appetites and actions abound in Medieval Iberian Culture. Enacted, vanquished, or ‘prayed away’, the affective states that enjoin sinful behaviors or are themselves sinful enjoy ample artistic and literary space. These same internal states can drive actions defined as virtuous or even saintly. What accounts for such ambiguity? How are ‘sinful’ psychic states shown to transcend or defy internal and external regulation, and when do they seemingly act in concert with it. This panel seeks papers interrogating representations of negative emotions or sin in any area of Iberian cultural production.
Contact: Robin Bower ([email protected])
Submissions due by September 15th:https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/call
Agony Aunts: Genders and Genres of Consolation in the Iberomedieval World
Consolation has long been recognized as a foundational category and driver of medieval aesthetic experience and expression. The diversity of modes of consolation, the complexity of the affective conditions it addresses and/or prescribes, and the widely divergent authorial or narratorial relationships towards inherited rhetorics of consolation introduce rich areas of complexity to this traditional area of study. This panel seeks papers that question consolatory gestures and technologies of care within the cultural production of medieval Iberia, both those identified as belonging within theconsolatiotradition and those which new theoretical lenses can draw into consolation’s realm.
Contact: Robin Bower ([email protected])
Submissions due by September 15th:https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/call