CALL FOR ARTICLES: Public Medievalist Special Series—Gender, Sexism, and the Middle Ages

If 2017 has taught us anything, it’s that sexism remains rampant in our society. In a year that began with the Women’s March and ended with #metoo, grappling with the way that our society defines and treats people based upon their gender is more relevant than ever. And just as with race, many of our present perceptions of gender have been shaped by both medieval history and contemporary fantasies about the medieval past.

A New Special Series
Beginning in 2018, The Public Medievalist will launch a new special series: Gender, Sexism, and the Middle Ages. Like our ongoing Race, Racism and the Middle Ages series, our gender series will explore the complex and fascinating ways that medieval people understood and performed their genders, will disrupt myths about gender binaries in the past, and will examine how myths about medieval gender shape masculinity and femininity in the present. We’re soliciting articles on any and all aspects of medieval gender, or on gender and medievalism in the modern world. We will be accepting submissions on a rolling basis.

We’re interested both in fresh ideas and in adaptations of your existing work or work-in-progress. The only critical element is that they be geared toward a public audience, which the TPM editors are happy to help you with. Appropriate topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Debunking myths about medieval gender and gender roles (both male and female)
• Gender non-conformists
• Women in the medieval workforce
• “Chivalry”
• Queenship and kingship
• Gender in neomedieval entertainment (games, film, television, fiction)
• Gender and medieval literature
• Medieval people who were transgender, genderqueer, or nonbinary
• Intersectional identities (gender and faith, gender and race, gender and class, etc.)

We encourage submissions from scholars at any point in their career, as well as medievalists outside the traditional boundaries of the academy. And, we are particularly interested in submissions about medieval gender outside of the confines of Western Europe.

Feel free to pitch us an idea or send a full submission to editor@publicmedievalist.com, and be sure to consult our guidelines for prospective authors before submitting.

Call for Submissions: Epistolary Discourse: Letters and Letter-Writing in Early Modern Art

While cultural historians have recently published a number of studies on letters and letter-writing in Early Modern Europe, the subject has not been sufficiently explored from an art historical perspective. Though some texts on Early Modern private life offer insight on the prominence of the theme in art, a more exhaustive analysis is in order, especially since letters and letter-writing are depicted in art in other contexts besides the domestic realm. Indeed Early Modern epistolary discourse falls into both private and public categories. 

In the private sector, the Early Modern period saw a significant increase in literacy, especially among women, mainly due to the development of the printing press and the subsequent proliferation of texts. Women no longer dictated their letters to others, but wrote them themselves. As letter-writers, they could now take on intimate roles, such as that of mothers, lovers, or travelers, without the intrusion of a writing assistant. 

In the public sector, members of the papal curia exchanged letters to publicize new statutes, while spiritual leaders in general often corresponded to offer religious instruction and guidance. 

Travelers wrote letters to inform of their experiences abroad, and merchants used the rhetorical form to exchange information on financial events or to issue letters of credit and other financial instruments. Further, the renewed interest in antiquity during the Renaissance revealed the epistolary discourse of Pliny, Cicero, Seneca, and others, resulting in the revival of humanistic epistles, such as those composed by Erasmus of Rotterdam. 

For the learned, letters could be a form of rhetorical self-fashioning, as often these were made public, revealing the friendships and patronage they enjoyed from powerful individuals. 

No less significant is the fact that a new literary genre emerged at this time: the novel written in epistolary form. Examples include Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloise (1661) and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Virtue Rewarded(1740). 

Zephyrus Scholarly Publications LLC is seeking papers for an upcoming anthology on letters and letter-writing in Early Modern art. Papers dealing with any aspect of this theme will be considered. 

Please send a 300 word abstract by July 1, 2017 to Lilian H. Zirpolo at L H Zirpolo (deadline extended).

Call for Submissions: The Femme Philosophe in Early Modern Art

Women were incorporated into the history of philosophy only in 1981 when Mary Ellen Waithe published her groundbreaking A History of Women Philosophers. 

At the time she identified approximately sixteen female philosophers from the classical era, seventeen from 500 to 1600, and thirty from 1600 to 1900. Among the names revealed were Mary Wollstonecraft, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Finch, Elena Cornaro Piscopia, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, and Margaret Cavendish, all intellectual luminaries who lived during the Early Modern Era. 

That these were highly educated women meant that they were also highly cultured and, therefore, they often collected, commissioned, or even produced art. Christina of Sweden, for example, was a student of Descartes and held academies in her home where the latest intellectual debates were the norm. Her art collection, which included a significant number of works from the ancient era, became the backdrop for these events and served to recreate the glory of the ancient past and provide philosophical inspiration. 

Anna Maria van Schurman, who corresponded with scholars from the university of Leiden and who completed her Dissertatio de ingenii mulieribus ad doctrinam on the aptitude of the female mind for science and letters in 1639, was an accomplished portraitist and engraver. Yet, the subject of the femme philosophe in the history of art has not been explored sufficiently and requires inquiry that goes beyond acknowledgment of their existence and the cursory mention of the art objects produced due to their intervention in one form or another. 

Zephyrus Scholarly Publications LLC seeks to publish an anthology comprised of papers that analyze the contributions of Early Modern femmes philosophes to the history of art, with particular emphasis on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a high level of philosophical activity took place. 

Of particular interest are papers on Carthesian female philosophers, though women with other philosophical inclinations will also be considered. Please send a 300 word abstract to Lilian H. Zirpolo at L H Zirpolo by October 1, 2017 (deadline extended).

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Early Modern Literary Geographies

Early Modern Literary Geographies
Oxford University Press

Series Editors: Julie Sanders, Newcastle University and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Pennsylvania State University.

Influenced by the work of cultural and human geographers, literary scholars have started to attend to the ways in which early modern people constructed their senses of the world out of interactions among places, spaces, and embodied practices. Early Modern Literary Geographies will feature innovative research monographs and agenda-setting essay collections that partake of this “spatial turn.” The term “literary geographies” is to be understood capaciously: we invite submissions on any form of early modern writing that engages with the topics of space, place, landscape and environment. Although English literature is at its centre, Early Modern Literary Geographies will feature scholarship that abuts a range of disciplines, including geography, history, performance studies, art history, musicology, archaeology and cognitive science. Subjects of inquiry might include cartography or chorography; historical phenomenology and sensory geographies; body and environment; mobility studies; histories of travel or perambulation; regional and provincial literatures; urban studies; performance environments; sites of memory and cognition; ecocriticism; and oceanic or new blue studies.

Advisory Board:
Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick
Steve Hindle, W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, Huntington Library
Bernhard Klein, Professor of English, University of Kent
Andrew McRae, Professor of English, University of Exeter
Evelyn Tribble, Donald Collie Chair of English, University of Otago
Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge
Lesley Cormack, Dean of Arts, University of Alberta
Dan Beaver, Associate Professor of History, Penn State University
Steven Mullaney, Associate Professor of English, University of Michigan

Enquiries to: julie.sanders@ncl.ac.uk and gas11@psu.edu