Here are sessions proposed for May 2013; the Congress will be held on 9-13 May.
1. Last Things
Papers in this session will consider the ways in which fifteenth-century Europeans addressed the death of the individual and its perils and promises; mass deaths or killings associated with plague, famine, or war; or fears, hopes or predictions about the end times, often imagined as soon to come. Participants might also consider the longer history of these attitudes and practices, and the ways that in telling the story of the fifteenth century they have been deployed within a narrative of waning or decay leading to the end of the middle ages.
2. Biblical Mediation and Remediation
Papers in this session will consider the proliferation of new media and genres and languages that mediated the bible to ever increasing audiences in the fifteenth century, in a wide range of redactions and embellishments and paraphrases and liturgical and performative deployments as well as (what might be claimed to be) its authentic and unadorned words. However, these new mediations also involve remediation. We use that term not only in its media studies sense, where it refers to the ways that any new form of communication does not supersede but interacts with and integrates and repurposes older ones, so that in many ways it is not as new as it seems. We also use it to describe how biblical mediations make bold ameliorative claims: they aim (they say) to repair or reform persons and communities by providing them with a truth they have lacked. But everything new is old, in ways that can produce all sorts of violence—the same might be said about the ways scholars have laid claim to what is new in the fifteenth century.
To submit a proposal, or for any further questions, please get in touch with Fiona Somerset at addax3[at]gmail[dot]com.