Hagiography Society Newsletter
Volume XIX, no. 2; June 2009
Call for papers: Symposium in Croatia, late May 2010
We are delighted to announce the plans for "Saintly bishops and bishops' saints", a symposium co-organized by the Croatian Hagiography Association, Hagiotheca, and the Hagiography Society, to be held 27-30 May 2010 in Poreč, Croatia (ancient Parentium)-- a very appropriate venue because it's the site of the magnificent Euphrasian Basilica, built by a 6th-century bishop, and a historic episcopal complex. (For some enticing views of the site, see http://www.istra.hr/porec/en ).
This symposium is intended to focus on both bishops as the objects of cults and/or hagiography and bishops as the agents in the making of cults and/or hagiography. The final aim is to shed light on the relations between the two.
The first proposed direction of research is therefore to examine the development of the cult and hagiography of holy bishops, and the second, to examine the role of bishops in the promotion, suppression, interpretation, etc., of the cult of the saints in general. The topic fits into the broader stream of research on the diverse and changing roles of bishops in Mediterranean and European societies (including the Orthodox East) in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern period. The chronological framework is meant to cover the period ca. 300-1600 AD– that is, from the emergence of the cult of the first Christian bishop-martyrs to the promotion of Post-Tridentine saintly bishops.
How did particular contexts as well as the development of the role of the bishop affect the cults and hagiography?
The ambiguity of the title is meant to trigger diverse associations and invite different topical and methodological approaches. Thus possible topics include, but are not limited to
• models and constructs of episcopal sainthood,
• holy bishops and civic identity/memory,
• bishops in local hagiography and liturgy,
• the figure of a non-saintly bishop in hagiography,
• iconography of holy bishops,
• holy bishops' tombs– translations, miracles, architecture,
• bishops and female sanctity,
• bishops and lay sanctity,
• saintly friar-bishops between their two communities
The deadline for paper proposals is 30 October 2009. Proposals should include an abstract (300 words maximum) and your current position and contact address, and be sent to hagiotheca@yahoo.com ; the contact person is Trpimir Vedriš.
Future of the Hagiography Society
[In case you missed it the first time, here is a copy of the letter Sherry sent in late May to our email distribution list. By now (some four weeks later) she has heard from more than half a dozen members who are volunteering to help in various ways to keep the Society going; so the future is looking brighter already. But please think about this situation and contact her this summer if you can contribute some of your own time and expertise to the Society, or can offer advice on handling the transition, or have strong opinions about any of the options.]
Dear Hagiography Society members,
As some of you know already, this spring was my final semester of teaching. As a retiree I hope to spend more time doing research in the library and traveling, and in a few months I will lose the campus office in which my various student assistants and I have compiled the newsletters and directories over the years. Although I can keep things going for another year, the time has come to think about turning over the Hagiography Society to new management.
I have procrastinated about making this announcement because I have enjoyed my work for the Society and because I am no good whatever at planning transitions. But May 2010 at Kalamazoo will be the 20th anniversary of our initial, exploratory meeting (over box lunches in a tiny room in Valley III), and by then I think we need to have a good idea of whether the Society will be continuing, and in whose hands. Several possible futures have occurred to me so far.
(1) Since much of our information-sharing function can now be fulfilled by internet searches, we might decide simply to dissolve the Society next year and either use the remainder of the bank account to throw a party, return it to the members who prepaid their dues for 2011 and 2012, or donate it to some good cause.
(2) An individual member or group of members with some spare time and good institutional support might volunteer to carry on the work of the Society in its current, rather ad hoc and casual form. (The current work has these components: distributing calls for papers and other messages by email, putting out an actual newsletter a few times a year, keeping records of dues payments and information from members, compiling an annual directory and bibliography, and maintaining a rather basic website. The work of the program chair, who organizes our Kalamazoo sessions, is done separately.)
(3) A group of members might volunteer to get the Society formally organized, as most other professional societies are-- with by-laws, probably an advisory board of some kind, and several officers besides the program chair performing well-defined functions for predictable terms. (It has been suggested to me that the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society might provide a good example to follow.) With some such organizational structure, the Hagiography Society would be well placed not only to survive for the long run, but also to take on more ambitious projects in the future-- for example, playing a more active role in international conferences and collaborative research projects, regularly sponsoring symposia of its own, perhaps publishing an on-line or printed journal.
The purpose of this message is not just to give you notice that a change of some sort is coming, but to ask those of you with appropriate abilities and experience to please consider volunteering to help find a new home for the Society or to assist with the process of transition, or both. Although it's the time of year when most of you are probably either launching your summer research projects or trying to wrap up the work of the academic year, I hope you will think about this and let me know well before the end of the summer if you can help in some way.
Thanks!
Sherry – slreames@wisc.edu
New program chair
Thanks to the many members who voted in our election this spring for a new program chair to replace Fiona Griffiths, who just completed her three-year term– and thanks once again to Fiona for her excellent work. Scott Bruce won the most votes this time, and his term began with last month's business meeting at Kalamazoo.
Call for papers at Kalamazoo, 13-16 May 2010
Here's the list of topics chosen for next year's Hagiography Society sessions at Kalamazoo by those who attended our business meeting last month. They've now been approved by the Medieval Institute and should be included in their big CFP for 2010.
• Unanchored and UnKempt: Independent Religious Women in Medieval Europe (if you're wondering, that does mean we're seeking papers on women who weren't either anchoresses or Margery Kempe)
• The Enterprise of the Bollandists in the Twenty-First Century
• Professional Hagiographers in the Middle Ages
• Geography and Hagiography: Place in the Telling of Saints' Lives
The deadline for session organizers to receive abstracts is 15 September 2009– and of course earlier submissions and expressions of interest are welcome. Please send them to Scott G. Bruce,
Dept of History, Univ of Colorado at Boulder, 262 Hellems Bldg, 234 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0234; phone (303) 317-3071, fax (303) 492-1868, email bruces@colorado.edu .
Reminder: Info needed for 2009 directory
Have you recently moved? taken a new job? changed your email address? published something? started or finished a research project? If so, please take a few minutes this week to update your information for our next directory. We have far too many members whose contact and research information is incomplete or long out of date. If you received the 2008 directory (as all paid-up members should have done), you can see what needs changing by taking a close look at your entries in both the directory and the bibliography. If you're not sure what your entry said last year (or whether you had one at all), please feel free to contact us and ask.
For your convenience, we're sending 2009 questionnaire forms with this newsletter. If you need another copy, please go to http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~hagio/questionnaire_form.html and either print out a form or (better yet) just fill it out on your computer and email it to us, either as an attachment or cut and pasted into an ordinary message.
Other calls for papers
Columbus, 6–7 November 2009. "Texts and Contexts, a Manuscript Conference" at Ohio State University. The conference seeks to investigate textual traditions of various texts and genres, including texts in classical Latin, mediaeval Latin, and the vernaculars. Preference will be given to abstracts which deal with newly discovered texts and their manuscript settings, or which present new perspectives on established textual traditions. We encourage graduate students and newly established scholars to submit their work. The deadline for submission is 15 August 2009. E-mail abstracts (epig@osu.edu) or send to Frank T. Coulson, Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies, 190 Pressey Hall, 1070 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210.
New Haven, 9–10 April 2010. "Dante's Volume from Alpha to Omega: A Graduate Symposium on the Poet's Universe." The symposium will explore how the encyclopedism of today can enrich, inform, or obscure our understanding of Dante's universe and its poetic representation. In the interests of interdisciplinarity, paper topics may include such matters as: Receptions of Dante: commentary, exegesis, and philology; Representations of Dante: visual, acoustic, and cinematic arts; Dante and the sciences; Poetry as knowledge and self-knowledge; Justice earthly and divine; Theology, history, and the politics of exile; Ethics and psychology; Theological and philosophical debates in the thirteenth century. Presentations may be in Italian or English. Please submit an anonymous abstract (250 words maximum) and a separate cover sheet with the title of your paper, your name, affiliation, and contact information (including telephone and e-mail address). Kindly send this information as Microsoft Word file attachment to yaledantesymposium@gmail.com by 15 Nov. 2009. Further details will appear at http://www.yale.edu/italian/news/index.html
Leeds, 12-15 July 2010. "Travel and Exploration" will be the special thematic focus of the Seventeenth International Medieval Congress. The deadline for paper proposals is 31 August 2009. For the full Call for Papers and submission guidelines, see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/imc2010_call.html .
Other upcoming conferences
Leeds, 13–16 July 2009. 2009 International Medieval Congress at Leeds, with special theme "Heresy and Orthodoxy." For details, see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/imc2009.html
Durham, 22-25 July 2009. "Saints and Sanctity," summer conference of the Ecclesiastical History Society. For further information, see the EHS website: http://ehs.bangor.ac.uk .
Tampere, 20-22 August 2009. "Religion, Society and Participation." Fourth conference in the series Passages from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. For further information, go to www.uta.fi/trivium .
New York, 11 September 2009. “Authorship and Authority: Barking Abbey and Its Texts.” For conference information, see http://www.fordham.edu/mvst/barkingabbey/index.html . For questions about registration, email medievals@fordham.edu .
Boston, 6–8 November 2009. 28th International Conference of the Charles Homer Haskins Society at Boston College. Contact: Robin Fleming (robin.fleming@bc.edu ; http://www.haskins.cornell.edu )
Special issue of Peregrinations
The editors of Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art & Architecture are delighted to announce the publication of a special double issue featuring articles on "Placing the Middle Ages: Towards a Geography of Material Culture" and "The Bayeux Tapestry Revisited," Canterbury Pilgrim Badges, the Digital Mappa Mundi, book reviews, discoveries, and more. This issue also features an enlarged photobank of beautiful (free) images to download for teaching and research, calls for papers, exhibitions, publication opportunities, etc.
Peregrinations is free and can be accessed by clicking on this link: http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu .