Call for Papers: Image & Meaning in Medieval Manuscripts: Sessions in Honor of Adelaide Bennett Hagens
Session I: Text-Image Dynamics in Medieval Manuscripts
Session II: Signs of Patronage in Medieval Manuscripts
International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 11-14 May 2017
Organized by Judith Golden and Jessica Savage, Index of Christian Art, Princeton University
Session I: Text-Image Dynamics in Medieval Manuscripts
This session invites papers that examine the interaction between words and images in medieval manuscripts as they shape the reader-viewer’s experience of the book. How do texts and images interact on the page? How did medieval readers respond to the varied discourses between images and texts? This session endeavors to open up new perspectives in describing, analyzing, and contextualizing manuscript illumination. Speakers may address the topic of visual rhetoric and how images communicate meaning with accompanying text, image-text composition, and the recovery of the reader’s experience through text and iconography. Also of interest is the role of images and their intrinsic or peripheral textual elements (including rubrics, captions, mottos, names, initials, labels, titles, instructions, votives, quotations, speech scrolls, pseudo-inscriptions and other types of inscriptions), as well as that of formal text or paratextual elements, in elucidating meaning and engaging the viewer. Speakers may consider case studies of particular manuscripts or present analyses addressing broad iconographic trends.
Session II: Signs of Patronage in Medieval Manuscripts
This session invites papers that examine the many varied “visual signatures” of manuscript patrons, including the dress, gestures, posture, and attributes of donor figures; heraldry and personalized inscriptions; marginal notes, colophons, dedications, and other signs of ownership and use. Building on scholarship presented in the 2013 Index conference Patronage: Power and Agency in Medieval Art, this session seeks papers that will investigate the dynamic system of patronage centered on the interaction of owners with their books (whether as creator, patron, commissioner, or reader-viewer). Speakers may also investigate the importance of gender and social roles in book production, use, and readership or the role of patron as instigator in the process of book creation, from payment to design.
Adelaide Bennett Hagens is retiring from the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University after fifty years of dedicated research and scholarship. She studied under Robert Branner at Columbia University and joined the Index during the directorship of Rosalie Green. Adelaide has studied medieval art in a variety of media, but her passion at the Index and in her personal research has always been manuscript illumination, particularly of the Gothic period. Her publications include “Some Perspectives on the Origins of Books of Hours in France in the Thirteenth Century,” in Books of Hours Reconsidered, edited by Sandra Hindman and James H. Marrow (2013); “Making Literate Lay Women Visible: Text and Image in French and Flemish Books of Hours, 1220–1320,” in Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces, edited by Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson (2012); and “The Windmill Psalter: The Historiated Letter E of Psalm One,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980). In two sessions, we celebrate Adelaide’s accomplishments and recognize her contributions to the Index of Christian Art and to the wider medieval and academic community.
Inspired by Adelaide’s continued interest in new research, we would particularly welcome submissions from emerging scholars in manuscript studies to share projects that reflect new developments and chart future possible courses for the field.
The deadline for paper proposals is: 15 September 2016
Please send the abstract of your proposed paper (300 words maximum), CV with current contact information, and completed Participant Information Form (available at https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions) to the organizers: Judith Golden (jkgolden@princeton.edu) and Jessica Savage (jlsavage@princeton.edu)
