medieval

What was medieval style? 

PCDP 2019: Fairies and the Fantastic
February 22-23, 2019

This session at the 2019 International Congress on Medieval Studies examines the many valences of wounds in late medieval Christianity, focusing on themes surrounding wounds and wounding both visible (corporeal and/or material) and invisible (rhetorical and allegorical). The image of the wounded body held a central place in late medieval Christian practice and material culture; the wounds of the crucified Christ were tangible reminders of his Passion and served as foci of veneration, while stigmatic saints and maimed martyrs were marked as holy by means of bodily trauma.

In a letter to his friend Axel Kaun, Samuel Beckett once described the “terrible materiality of the word surface” that faces every writer as they set pen to page. Their goal, Beckett claims, is to puncture this surface, boring holes into the word so that a different materiality “lurking behind” it might seep through. When the word is filled with holes, when what is said is ineffable and indescribable, it is no longer subordinated to its representative function. Rather, the word reveals its own sense and sensuousness, its materiality entirely distinct from that of its referent. The “sounding of impossible bodies” of the voices of the dead in M.

Vernacular Devotional Cultures Group

ICMS 2019

The Vernacular Devotional Cultures Group is organizing the following three special sessions at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 2019. The VDCG sponsors sessions on medieval mystics and mysticism and showcases recent scholarship on vernacular spiritual traditions in medieval Western Europe.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a completed Participant Information Form to Dr Catherine Annette Grisé (grisec@mcmaster.ca) by 15 September 2018. Electronic submissions are preferred.

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