classical studies

The literature of ancient Greece and Rome has survived for thousands of years. As a result, Classical literary and philosophical works have served as a profound influence on the writings of subsequent time periods. Indeed, in many subsequent time periods, the ability to quote from Classical sources became a marker of status and intelligence. However, many works of ancient Greece and Rome are not wholly original, but in fact flaunt their use of source materials, citing earlier versions of myths and epics. Often, Classical and post-Classical authors would modify their source materials, and we are able to see them not only as writers, but as readers in their own right.

Those scholars committed to an inter-disciplinary perspective on human experiences confront centuries-old divisions between and among the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities, competing investigative methods, descriptive foci, and explanatory emphases. Bolstered by specialization, administrative demarcations, professionalization, and expertise, the discontinuities generate trajectories of intellectual enrichment and progress.  On the other hand, have scholars within these intellectual spheres, disciplines, and area studies become passing ships in the night?  What would constitute evidence of this condition, if this is, indeed, the case? Have scholars not been displaced from public discourse and social media?

Shakespeare gave and withheld knowledge to craft his plot and engage his audience. We are taken on a guided ride from which we glimpse what the playwright chooses thus forming our layers of knowledge through which we are manipulated. What we know can be what we knew before attending the play, based on dialogue from the characters, or from reported speech of events off stage and even in times before the play.

How does medieval war resonate beyond the battlefield? This roundtable session invites papers that consider the relationship between medieval literature and wartime. War punctuates our understanding of the Middle Ages, providing us with frameworks for comprehending and interpreting the events of history, and the corpus of literature created in response to these conditions is equally broad. In its most literal sense, wartime literature is the narration or memorialization of events on the battlefield, from the Battle of Maldon to the work of Jordan Fantosme and the poetry attributed to Laurence Minot. Wartime, however, is less a temporal or veridical marker than a loaded conceptual term. What counts as wartime? When does it begin and end?

The literature produced by the communities of early Northern Europe, where the elements of craft and material culture informed the descriptive matter of both poetry and prose, has left a legacy which demands critical analysis of the ways in which the trappings of the real and the imaginary were represented.  What were the relationships between figurative language, mimetic representation, the production of craft, and perceptions shaped by the visual arts?  Did the allegories, symbols, emblems, fancies, and verisimilitude of literature in Old and Middle English, Old Norse/Icelandic, Early Welsh, or Early Irish provide opportunities to discuss the interface of descriptive writing with other modes of representation?  Potential papers are asked to cons

From compendia of “illustrious women” modelled on Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, to Machiavelli’s Lucrezia in the Mandragola, to Giambattista Gelli’s (male-driven) philosophical dialogue La Circe, women from the classical tradition are resurrected in many forms and to many ends over the course of the Italian Renaissance. This panel seeks to investigate how authors and intellectuals rewrote, revised, and (in some cases) reclaimed classical women in Renaissance Italian discourse and literature. 

Topics, authors, and questions that papers might address include, but are not limited to:

Free Will, defined by Dante's Virgilio as the noble power to guide and constrain the soul's natural inclination and desires (Purg 18.73),  holds a place of central concern in the Commedia. Elaborating on Marco Lombardo's discourse, the roman poet asserts that it is Free Will that accounts for the justice in feeling joy for doing good and misery for doing ill. While offering a general outline of the fundamental importance of Free Will in the ethical and moral rationale for the fate of departed souls, the pilgrim's first guide promises that Beatrice will provide clarity on this and other topics of particular complexity beyond the purview of his Classical pagan understanding.

Ic þa wiht geseah

heo wæs wrætlice

Wundor wearð on wege

on weg feran

wundrū gegierwed

wæter wearð to bane

I saw the wight

It was splendidly,

The wonder was on the wave;

going on its way.

wonderfully arrayed

water became bone.

— Exeter Book, Riddle #7 (Baum)

14. Meeting on Spanish Humanists

«Distinctive Traits of Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish and Portuguese America (16th and 17th Centuries)»

Santiago de Compostela. School of Philology

27th – 28th (thursday / friday) September 2018

Women Warriors and Popular Culture: Representations across Time and Space

Panel Proposed for the Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

2018 Conference of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)

Worcester State University, Worcester, Massachusetts

19-20 October 2018

Proposals due 1 June 2018

CSL Postgraduate Conference- 2018

Post-truth-An Interdisciplinary Exploration

Further to our earlier posting, we would like to announce the final schedule for our one-day conference relating to the topic of "post-truth". 

Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is a refereed, peer-reviewed, and born-digital journal devoted to the culture, literature, history, and society of the medieval past. Published semi-annually, the journal collects exceptional examples of work by graduate students on a number of themes, disciplines, subjects, and periods of medieval studies. We also welcome book reviews of monographs published or re-released in the past five years that are of interest to medievalists. For the spring issue we are highly interested in reviews of books which fall under any topic related to medieval studies.

The thirteenth annual meeting of the Georgia Philological Association (GPA) will convene at the Middle Georgia State University Conference Center at 100 University Parkway, Macon, Georgia on Friday, May 18, 2018. We invite proposals for session topics, panel discussions, and scholarly papers in English on any subjects relating to American, British, French, Hispanic, Russian, German, or Slavic literature or language, as well as composition, philosophy, history, translation, the general humanities, interdisciplinary studies, and pedagogy. Reading times for individual paper presentations are limited to 15 minutes.

The 2nd International Conference on Arts and Humanities is an event organized by the International Centre for Studies of Arts and Humanities (ICSAH) and the Dante Alighieri Society Nicosia that aims to explore the image of the victim throughout the human history. The conference is to be held in 5-8 June 2018 in Nicosia, Cyprus.

We warmly welcome all papers broadly relevant to the subject without predefining chronological and territorial limitations, as the major goal of the conference is to address questions that involve more than one research field and promote multidisciplinary dialogue and cooperation. The papers will be published online and in a dedicated volume of Conference Proceedings.