Cfp: "Medieval and Early Modern Authorship," SAMEMES, University of Geneva, June 30-July 2, 2010.

The Second Biennial Conference, Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. Authorship has come to the forefront of medieval and early modern English studies in recent years, as is shown by the wealth of important publications in this area. The objective of this conference is to take stock of a duly socialized form of authorship, which recognizes that while authors have agency, that agency is circumscribed by the multi-faceted social, legal, institutional, and intertextual pressures within which authorship takes place. Contributions are invited on any aspect of medieval and early modern authorship. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• The history of authorship – The pre-history: authorship in antiquity; the history of medieval authorship; the reception of Chaucer and/or other medieval authors in early modern England; the history of early modern authorship; the post-history: from early modern to modern authorship
• Authorship and critical theory – Eliot, Bloom, Barthes, Foucault and beyond: theorizing the medieval and/or early modern author
• Authorship and its social contexts – Authorship and gender; authorship and censorship; authorship and patronage; the economics of authorship; early professional authorship; authorship and copyright, authorship and the law; authorship, forgery and plagiarism; authorship and the culture of authority; authorship and anonymity
• Authorship and its literary contexts – Authorship, imitation, intertextuality; authorship and literary style; authorship in medieval and/or early modern literary theory
• Authorship and the theatre – Authorship and playwriting; authorship and theatrical collaboration; authorship and acting
• Authorship and literary genres – Authorship and genre; authorship and early ‘lives of the poets’; the ‘I’ in medieval and early modern poetry; authorship and commendatory verse; authorship and miscellanies
• Authorship and the material text – Authorship and paratext; authorship and the book trade; authorship and the scriptorium; authorship and publication; authorship and media: manuscript, and print
• Medieval and early modern literary careers – Authorship and the Virgilian cursus; Spenser, Jonson, Milton and print-constructed careers; careers of medieval and early modern female writers
• Constructing the medieval and early modern author through the centuries – The Making of ‘Chaucer’, ‘Gower’, ‘Langland’, ‘Malory’, ‘Marlowe’, ‘Sidney’, ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Donne’, ‘Milton’
• Authorship attribution – Modern methods of determining medieval and early modern authorship; Chaucer and the Chaucer apocrypha: authorship and co-authorship questions; Shakespeare and the Shakespeare apocrypha: authorship and co-authorship questions; the case of Middleton: collaboration, authorship, and The Collected Works; disputed authorship attributions: from Shakespeare and the Funeral Elegy to Milton and de doctrina Christiana; editing, authorship, and authorial intention

Proposals for full panels are very welcome. These should include three proposed speakers, including, or in addition to, a chair and/or a respondent. Individual papers will be grouped with two others. Parallel sessions will last an hour and a half, which means that papers should be no longer than 20 minutes to leave sufficient time for discussion. The final deadline for proposals is January 15, 2010, but early submissions are encouraged. Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (ca. 200 to 400 words) as well as a short bio sketch (no more than 100 words). Proposals will be reviewed in the weeks following their submission, so that prospective participants will usually be notified of the decision within a month of reception of the proposal. Proposals should be sent to authorship2010@unige.ch. A selection of papers presented at the conference will be published in a collection. Access the conference website here: http://home.adm.unige.ch/~erne/authorship2010/.

Patrico, Ryan Sayre. "Not-So-Dark Ages." NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE June 26, 2009.

Brague, Rémi. The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. The largest balloon pricked by Brague is the legend of the Dark Ages — that the medieval world was somehow unthinking, brutish, and unimportant: “The legend of the Middle Ages as a time of shadows and darkness is a legacy from the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment, and carried on by a certain variety of positivism.” In the 14th century, for example, Petrarch promoted a “new literary school that was supposed to have put an end to the obscure.” The word barbarian suddenly regained popularity, and the term was expanded to include “Germanic peoples and even monks and Turks.” According to the French humanist Rabelais, “The time was still dark and smacking of the infidelity of the Goths, who had brought all good literature to destruction.” This trope was picked up again during the Enlightenment by those radicals who were “set on stamping out superstition and crushing ‘fanaticism.’” Thus, Edward Gibbon ends his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by describing his themes as “the rise, establishment, and sects of Christianity” and “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” Brague reminds us that the legend still continues today, with the media always ready “to recall that ‘finally we are no longer in the Middle Ages!’ or to decry the resurgence, ‘well into the 21st century,’ of an utterly medieval barbarity.” Brague is humble about his ability to dispel these myths, and while he admits that “any fast-talking media star can do a thousand times more in one minute to perpetuate falsity than we library rats can do in ten lifetimes to unmask it,” he nonetheless does his “utmost to destroy” these legends — or, as he puts it, these “teeming vermin.” Brague’s weapon of choice in destroying these legends is his close examination of medieval philosophical discourse: He expertly illustrates that, contrary to popular belief, “medieval thought does not escape the phenomena typical of thought in general.” Brague’s main task, then, is to show that “people never stopped thinking, that in fact medieval people did a lot of thinking, and that many highly refined concepts were shaped during those years.” . . . Read the rest here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWE2NDI4NTMxOTIwOGVkZmIzNDlkMzZlNmQyNTBmYzU=.

Cfp: "Time, Temporality, History," 31st Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum, Plymouth State University, April 16-17, 2010.

We invite abstracts in medieval and Early Modern studies that consider questions of periodization, historicity, and temporality. Papers may consider: • how people conceived of, constructed, interacted with, measured, or produced “time” in medieval and Early Modern cultures • how we currently construct or deconstruct history • how studying temporality illuminates other subjects. Papers need not be confined to the theme, but may cover many aspects of medieval and Renaissance life, literature, languages, art, philosophy, theology, history and music. Student sessions welcome. This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Carolyn Dinshaw, Professor of English/Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Dr. Dinshaw, the author of Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern and Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, researches and publishes widely on medieval literature and culture, feminist studies, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender studies, history of sexuality, theories of history and historiography, and mysticism. Her most recent work focuses on theories and experiences of temporality.Students, faculty, and independent scholars are welcome. For more information, visit: www.plymouth.edu/medieval