Medieval Conferences lists major events – check out the dates for CfP and see what is happening around the Medieval World

2021

Schwerter und Schwertortbänder von der Völkerwanderungszeit bis ins 14. Jahrhundert
16.09.2021
Hörsaal des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle
Richard-Wagner-Str. 9, 06114 Halle (Saale)

Swords and ferrules are notoriously difficult to date. Colloqium aims to provide a detailed chronology.

Thomas Becket: Life, Death, and Legacy
Canterbury Cathedral
28.04.2021 – 30.04.2021

The international conference “Thomas Becket: Life, Death, and Legacy”  will take place from 11–14 November 2020 in Canterbury Cathedral, coinciding with the 850th anniversary of his martyrdom and the 800th anniversary of the translation of his relics into the Trinity Chapel. The conference is co-organised by scholars at the Cathedral, Christ Church University, and the University of Kent, and we are very grateful to the British Academy for supporting us. The Becket 2020 conference will be one of many cultural celebrations that commemorate and re-examine the legacy of Becket next year, so stay tuned for more news about exciting exhibitions, publications, research projects, and various public engagement events. Please consider submitting an abstract to CanterburyBecket2020@gmail.com before the deadline on 21 October 2019. We hope that your papers offer new, interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Becket (both locally at Canterbury and within a wider European context) and we want to offer an inclusive chronology of scholarship on Becket that stretches across medieval, early modern, and modern history

2020

OCTOBER

Medieval Cultural Heritage Around the Globe: Monuments, Literature, and the Arts, Then and Now
The Cemers Conference
Binghamton University
23.10.2020 – 24.10.2020
CfP Deadline: 01.05.2020

The field of cultural heritage has experienced a great increase in scholarly and media attention in recent years. Events such as the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials have made evident how controversial cultural heritage can be, and the central role it plays in defining communal identities at all levels, from small villages to multi-state entities, such as colonial empires or, more recently, the United States and the European Union. This interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University will explore cultural heritage, broadly conceived, as it relates to the global Middle Ages (c.500 – c.1500). Topics will range from medieval approaches to the cultural heritage inherited or claimed by medieval societies, to the transformation of medieval heritage through the centuries, to the yearning for medieval times that has inspired, in the modern era, the architecture of university campuses, the rebuilding of Japanese castles to assert communal identity, and the revival of traditional crafts, among others.

JULY

Medievalism and the North
Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus, Denmark
27.07.2010 – 28.07.2020

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, translations of Old Norse texts into modern languages ignited a new interest among poets and artists in early-medieval Northern European culture. Today, the early-medieval North once again captures our imagination – for better or for worse. The international success of Michael Hirst’s TV series Vikings (2013-2018), Viking-music groups such as Amon Amath and Wardruna, A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok. The End of the Gods (2011), or Marvel’s Thor (2011-) suggest that imaginings about Vikings, shield maidens and Norse gods reverberate beyond the borders of Scandinavia. The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to explore constructions of the medieval North across genres and media from the Nordic renaissance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present. The conference will focus on adaptations of Old Norse and medieval texts; on the refashioning of the medieval North in literature, art, music, film, etc.; and on the uses of the North, for instance in nineteenth-century nation-building or in contemporary political discourse. The conference asks participants to consider the ideological, cultural, aesthetical, generic and other implications of these refashionings of the medieval North; diachronic perspectives in the changing imagery; or the theoretical foundations for such usages.  The conference is scheduled to allow delegates to experience the annual Moesgaard Viking Moot, 25-26 July 2020, one of the world’s oldest and largest Viking reenactments. A pre-conference tour of the Viking Moot will be organized on the 26th.

16th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law
Saint Louis University
19.07.2020 – 25.07.2020
Deadline for CfP: 15.08.2019

The 16th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, co-sponsored by ICMAC (Iuris Canonici Medii Aevi Consociatio/International Society of Medieval Canon Law) and Saint Louis University, will take place on the university’s campus in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, from Sunday, July 19, through Saturday, July 25, 2020. These quadrennial Congresses, alternating sides of the Atlantic, constitute the premier academic conference in the field of medieval canon law. Traditionally they have drawn scholars from many countries, including not only medievalists and canonists, but also those who study related fields, such as Western jurisprudence and legal norms, Roman law, ecclesiastical and papal history, theology and biblical exegesis, manuscript studies, and the history of culture, society, and ideas. More information about the Congress, its sessions, special instructions for the poster session, accommodations, travel, and Saint Louis University will eventually be found on the Congress website. Questions may be directed to icmcl2020@gmail.com

IMC 2020. Special thematic strand: Borders
Leeds University
06.07.2020 – 09.07.2020
Deadline for CfP: 31.08.2019. Session proposal deadline: 30.09.2019.

The IMC provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of all aspects of Medieval Studies. Proposals on any topic related to the Middle Ages are welcome, while every year the IMC also chooses a special thematic focus. In 2020 this is ‘Borders’.

Medieval borders have preoccupied scholars for several decades in various guises. The term ‘border’ designates a wide variety of phenomena: physical geographical limits, that can be signalled by border markers or natural features, points where toll has to be paid, political boundaries, that vary from points in space to linear and fortified military fronts, ways of controlling space, frontier zones, borderlands, porous zones of encounters and contact, ways of limiting community and identity, ideological and metaphorical delimitation including discourse and representation, bordering practices, the process of creating and performing borders, and borderscapes to capture fluidity and change over time.

JUNE

International Conference on Food Economies in Pre-Modern Europe
University of Lleida
11.06.2020 – 12.06.2020

We cordially invite you to participate in the International Conference on Food Economies in Pre-Modern Europe, Food markets development and integration (XIth-XVIIIth centuries), which will be held at the University of Lleida, 11th-12th June 2020.
The conference is targeted at scholars who study the economic history of Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Times. For further information please visit the website: http://foodeconomies-udl.com

Power, Resistance, and Leadership RBMS 2020
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
23.06.2019 – 26.06.2019
Deadline for application: 06.03.2020

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) offers scholarships to subsidize conference attendance by professional librarians, paraprofessionals, and students. RBMS is currently accepting scholarship applications for RBMS 2020: Power, Resistance, and Leadership to be held at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN from June 23-26, 2020. The deadline to apply for scholarships is January 10, 2020 and applicants will be notified on or before March 6, 2020. Please note that eligibility requirements have changed, and awards are available for first-time attendees and returning attendees.

MAY

The 55th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University
07.05.2020 – 10.05.2020

The congress features more than 550 sessions of papers, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops, demonstrations, performances, and poster sessions. There are also some 100 business meetings and receptions sponsored by learned societies, associations and institutions. The exhibits hall boasts nearly 70 exhibitors, including publishers, used book dealers and purveyors of medieval sundries. The congress lasts three and a half days, extending from Thursday morning, with sessions beginning at 10 a.m., until Sunday at noon.

APRIL

Closing conference of the exhibition in Ghent on Van Eyck
Ghent Museum
27.04.2020 – 28.04.2010

Researchers from the Pirenne Institute are scientific curators for the 2020 Van Eyck exhibition at the Ghent Museum for Fine Arts (MSK). Curated by Pirenne researchers Jan Dumolyn, Maximiliaan Martens and the director of the Musea Brugge Till-Holger Borchert it also features as the venue for the closing conference. The scientific committee is in the process of organising this closing conference of the exhibition, featuring leading researchers in art sciences and medieval studies.

International Romanesque Conference
Organised by British Archaeological Association
14-04.2020 – 16.04.2020
Deadline for CfP: 15.05.2019

The British Archaeological Association will hold the sixth in its series of biennial International Romanesque conferences in association with the Dommuseum in Hildesheim on 14-16 April, 2020. The theme is Romanesque and the Year 1000, and the aim is to examine transformation in art and architecture in the years to either side of the millennium.

Despite the complex political situation in late-10th-century Europe, a period marked by chaos in some areas and effective authority in others, the last quarter of the century saw an apparent upsurge in artistic production in the Empire, southern Britain, Lombardy and the Mediterranean. The decades after the millennium have left a larger residue of work, notably in France, but were the 1020s artistically more dynamic than the 980s? How might we describe the cultural climate of the Latin West between c.970 and c.1030? Proposals for papers concerned with the above are welcome, as are those that review individual patrons, particularly in establishing workshops and developing expertise. The Conference will take place at the Dommuseum in Hildesheim from 14-16 April 2010. There will also be an opportunity to stay on for two days of visits to buildings in the surrounding area on the 17 and 18 April. Proposals for papers of up to 30 minutes in length should be sent to the convenors, John McNeill and Gerhard Lutz, on romanesque2020@thebaa.org by 15 May, 2019. Papers should be in English.

MARCH

95th Annual Meeting of Medieval Academy of America
University of California, Berkeley
Hosted by Program in Medieval Studies of UC Berkeley Concurrently with Medieval Association of the Pacific Meeting

• 68 Concurrent Sessions with a Range of Threads are of offer:
• Translation and Literary/Textual Transmission across
• Religio-Cultural Spheres
• Gender and Power in Late Medieval Iberia
• Law and Sovereignty
• New Scholarship on Medieval Scandinavia
• Music as/and Language
• Old Archives, New Approaches
• Multilingualism, Multiculturalism, and Multiconfessionalism in the Medieval Mediterranean
• Medieval Health and Medicine

JANUARY

Interdisciplinary Workshop Medieval Landscape and Settlement Research: the Legacy of Adriaan Verhulst
Organised by the Historical Archaeology Research Group
15.01.2020

Wednesday 15 January 2020, the Historical Archaeology Research Group and the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies at Ghent University are organising a workshop on the latest research into medieval landscapes and settlements. It is the explicit aim of the workshop to have the latest research from different disciplines engage with the groundbreaking work of Adriaan Verhulst.

2019

NOVEMBER

Historical Inertia: Continuity in the Face of Change 500-1500 CE
University of Edinburgh
22.11.2019 – 23.11.2019
Deadline for CfP: 03.06.2019

OCTOBER

Provisioning Medieval European Towns.
Castelo de Vide
10.10.2019 – 12.10.2019
Deadline for CfP: 31.05.2019

This year, from October 10th to the 12th, the Institute for Medieval Studies (IEM | NOVA-FCSH) and the Portuguese municipality of Castelo de Vide are organizing the IV International Conference on the Middle Ages, under the theme: Provisioning Medieval European Towns. Medieval towns were large human gatherings, the provision of which was diverse and complex, implying great challenges to their ruling powers. In fact, towns were simultaneously production centres, consumers and distributors, and its range depended on the town’s size, which left clear imprints in its space, both inside the walls and its surrounding areas. The importance of this theme justified its selection for the International Conference on the Middle Ages that will take place in Castelo de Vide in 2019. Taking Christian and Muslim medieval Europe as the stage for reflexion, we wish to analyse the different issues generated by urban provisioning, drawing on diverse information sources and looking for ways to bring together perspectives from History, Archaeology, Art History, Literature, Law, among others. The conference languages are Portuguese, Spanish, French and English.

Call for sessions, papers and posters deadline: May 31st. Session, paper and posters acceptance: June 15th For more information, please  visit Idade Média

JULY

The “Long” Black Death: New perspectives
Society for Medieval Archaeology 2019 Annual Conference
King’s Manor, University of York (UK)
05.07.2019 – 06.07.2019
Deadline for CfP: 30.01.2019 to clewis@lincoln.ac.uk

A recent upsurge in scholarly interest in the Black Death – its origins, spread and impact on medieval society – has been driven by methodological advances across a range of disciplines. New techniques have allowed the causal agent of the 14th-century pandemic – Yersinia Pestis – to be confirmed, and identified in ways which are throwing new light on the origins and spread of the Black Death. Meanwhile, expanding datasets from disciplines as diverse as climatology, genetics and history are enabling the complexities of the relationship between pandemic, society and environment to be explored in new detail. As the profundity of the impact of the Black Death, in the short, medium and long term, becomes increasingly evident, interest is growing in the role of plague across the world in other periods. This is given added urgency by the knowledge that microbial resistance to antibiotics now used to treat plague is growing, thus the interest in plague pandemics may not for much longer be confined to the past. Offers of papers are now invited from researchers in any fields exploring aspects of the Black Death.

MAY

Medieval Studies and the Far Right
Humanities Division, University of Oxford, Radcliffe Humanities,
Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK
11.05.2019Deadline for CfP: 12.02.2019

This interdisciplinary conference due to be held on 11 May 2019 invites speakers to explore the relationship, past and present, between the medieval and far-right ideologies. Key areas for focus are: examining racisms in the medieval, unpicking the history of medieval studies, and confronting contemporary far right medievalism. The conference will look at the construction and operation of racial categories in medieval culture and its products. It will challenge the historiography of Medieval Studies, focussing on links to 19th-century cultural nationalism and 20th-century fascism. Lastly, it will consider whether Medievalists have a responsibility towards the representation and cultural construction of the Middle Ages in public discourse, and how medievalists can develop effective responses to the present-day instrumentalisation of aspects of the medieval by racist and far-right groups. Please send abstracts to organisers Charlie Powell and Alyssa Steiner at msfcon.ox@gmail.com by 12 February 2019.

The 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University
09.05.2019 – 12.05.2019

The congress features more than 550 sessions of papers, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops, demonstrations, performances, and poster sessions. There are also some 100 business meetings and receptions sponsored by learned societies, associations and institutions. The exhibits hall boasts nearly 70 exhibitors, including publishers, used book dealers and purveyors of medieval sundries. The congress lasts three and a half days, extending from Thursday morning, with sessions beginning at 10 a.m., until Sunday at noon.

Byzantine Materiality
St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary
575 Scarsdale Road, Yonkers, NY 10707
08.05.2019 -11.05.2019

Popular descriptions of Byzantium often emphasize the mystical and immaterial while overlooking the mediating role of matter implied by the Christian belief in the incarnation. In the field of art history and across the humanities, a new interest in matter and materials constitutes what is now being referred to as the “material turn” or “new materialisms.”

This conference explores matter, materials, and materiality in Byzantine art and culture. It aims to examine material strategies of objects, makers, and users; the agency and affective properties of materials and objects; Byzantine depictions and descriptions of matter in images and texts; and the senses and embodied experiences in Byzantium.

Byzantine Materiality has been made possible through the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation. Byzantine Materiality is a Conference of the Sacred Arts Initiative at St. Vladimir’s Seminary

APRIL

People and Places: Networks, Communities, and Early Theatre
Medieval English Theatre Conference 2019
Université de Fribourg
12.04.2019 – 13.04.2019
CfP: 01.12.2018 to elisabeth.dutton@unifr.ch
Details for CfP

Theatre is inevitably collaborative, as actors, with the help of designers and creators of costumes, props, sets, present script-writers’ words to a generally willing and cooperative audience. In order to understand Early Theatre, it is often necessary to consider very particular types of collaboration, seeing plays as the distinctive products of specific communities, considering the importance of specific performance sites to a play’s interpretation, exploring the significance of certain social groups or networks — religious, professional, academic — as creators and audiences of individual productions….

Listening and Learning in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
40th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum:
Keene State College, Keene, NH, USA
12.04.2019 – 13.04.209
CfP: Deadline 15.01.2019. Please submit abstracts, audio/visual needs, and full contact information to Dr. Robert G. Sullivan, Assistant Forum Director at sullivan@german.umass.edu.

We are delighted to announce that the 40th Medieval and Renaissance Forum: Listening and Learning in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will take place on Friday, April 12 and Saturday, April 13, 2019, at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire.

We welcome abstracts (one page or less) or panel proposals that discuss music and other aural experiences in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Papers and sessions, however, need not be confined to this theme but may cover other aspects of medieval and Renaissance life, literature, languages, art, philosophy, theology, history, and music. This year’s keynote speaker is Margot Fassler, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Fassler is a music historian who gives the liturgy and its performance primary emphasis in her scholarly publications and her teaching. Her scholarship profoundly elucidates the connections between texts and music. Her 2014 book, Music in the Medieval West and its accompanying anthology (Norton) are now standard introductions to medieval music.

MARCH

Transnationalism at Court. The third Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures project workshop
Université de Liège (Salle des professeurs)
21.03.2019–22.03.2019

The MALMECC project seeks to question some of the methods of medieval historiography, particularly with regard to the role played by music in politics, religion, and the arts in courtly spaces. One model which the project seeks to engage with is that of the nation-state, a framework which can encourage historians to consider as peripheral those areas which at one time had a significant cultural role, but which have since disappeared with the formation of modern geopolitical entities. These areas, like the former principality of Liège, today “divided” between Belgium and the Netherlands, or the regions governed by the Luxembourg dynasty in the years 1250-1450, (including parts of France, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg) will be the focus of this study day, which will examine pre-national and transnational exchanges in the area surrounding the Netherlands in comparison with the wider European context.

The Global Turn in Medieval Studies
94th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
07.03.2019 – 10.03.2019

The 94th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place in Philadelphia on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The meeting is jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America, Bryn Mawr College, Delaware Valley Medieval Association, Haverford College, St. Joseph’s University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University. This year’s meeting spotlights the “global turn” in medieval studies, treating the Middle Ages as a broad historical and cultural phenomenon that encompasses the full extent of Europe as well as the Middle East, southern and eastern Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

JANUARY

Gender and Aliens
Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2019
Durham University
07.01.2019 – 10.01.2019

The Gender & Medieval Studies (GMS) Group is a UK-based organization devoted to furthering gender-focused medieval scholarship. Since the late 1980s, it has run an annual conference to showcase and support the work of postgraduate students, early-career researchers and established scholars. This year’s Conference is ‘Gender and Aliens’.

Contact gmsconference2019@gmail.com. for more information about this event.