Encountering the Material Medieval, University of St Andrews, January 19–20, 2017

The University of St Andrews School of Art History in collaboration with the St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies (SAIMS) present Encountering the Material Medieval, an interdisciplinary conference on materiality and material engagements with the medieval, taking place on 19-20 January 2017 in St Andrews, Scotland.

The academic year 2016-2017 looks like it is going to be the year of modern medievalisms, with three conferences addressing how the medieval fits into our modern world in the UK, France and the USA. While the idea of medievalism directly impacts modern scholarship and culture at large, it encourages an engagement with a theoretical abstraction of the medieval culture. This way, the materiality of the sources, and the intrinsic materiality of our embodied engagement with the medieval, is neglected.

Beyond the digital humanities, we are interested in material engagements with the medieval. This takes place in the library, where we encounter manuscripts in an intimate, skin-to-skin contact; during fieldwork, when we need to crouch in order to enter a medieval altar; in one’s own kitchen, when we try to reproduce a recipe freshly transcribed from a manuscript; or on the fairground, where we can hold in our own hand a replica of medieval pottery.

We are dedicated to encouraging multi-mediality and non-traditional presentation methods during the conference. Therefore, we invite interactive presentations, installations and posters, workshop and hands-on activities proposals (45-50 minutes), as well as papers (not longer than 20 minutes) on the following range of topics and their relationship to the study of materiality, physicality and embodiment in/with the Middle Ages:

• The concept of materiality and physicality as research and teaching methodology;
• Bringing the materiality of the medieval to the institution or the wider public;
• Semiotics and anthropology of the material Middle Ages in modern or medieval thought and practice;
• The human and non-human, material and embodied, materiality and boundaries;
• Medieval to modern (dis)continuities in genealogy of material.

Papers and workshops on other issues related to the study of materiality and physicality in the Middle Ages are also welcome.