CALL FOR PAPERS: The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Sight and Visual Perception

University College Dublin, 11–12 March 2016

Proposals for papers are invited for The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Sight and Visual Perception, which aims to provide an international and interdisciplinary forum for researchers with an interest in the history of the senses in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The history of the senses is a rapidly expanding field of research. Pioneered in Early Modern and Modern studies, it is now attracting attention also from Medieval and Renaissance specialists. Preoccupation with the human senses and with divine control over them is evident in a range of narrative texts, scientific treatises, creative literature, as well as the visual arts and music from the pre-modern period. This conference – the first in a series devoted to the five senses – aims to contribute to this expansion by bringing together leading researchers to exchange ideas and approaches.

The theme of the inaugural meeting is ‘Sight and Visual Perception’. Sight has been chosen as the first topic for investigation as it was considered the primary sense and was treated as an abstract philosophical and religious concept in many medieval texts. But the study of sight can also provide insights into various aspects of medieval society: ‘eye-witness’ descriptions; sight impairment and the care of the blind; deprivation of sight as punishment or revenge; the development of spectacles and other optical aids; ideas about colours and their significance; ‘second sight’ as manifested in visions and apparitions; the concept of ‘the gaze’ in visual arts. The conference aims to address these and other themes and to foster interaction between established and younger scholars working in the area.

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Elizabeth Robertson, University of Glasgow
Professor Chris Woolgar, University of Southampton

Professor Robertson’s research and publications are concerned with vernacular theology, medieval poetics, literacy in the Middle Ages, and gender and religion in Middle English literature. Her recent work has focused on vision and touch in devotional literature. With J. Jahner she edited Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective: Translations of the Sacred for theNew Middle Ages series (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). This collection contains her important paper, ‘Julian of Norwich’s Unmediated Vision’.

Professor Woolgar’s research and publications are concerned with the social and economic history of late-medieval England and in particular with the evidence contained in domestic household accounts. He is the author of The Senses in Late Medieval England (Yale, 2007) and co-author of A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, 500–1450, ed. Richard Newhauser (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

Contributions on any aspect of the conference theme of ‘Sight and Visual Perception’ are welcomed from established and early career scholars as well as postgraduates. Proposals for panels are also warmly encouraged. Titles and abstracts (maximum 300 words) together with a short biography, institutional affiliation and contact details, should be forwarded to medrenforum@gmail.comby 8 November 2015.

The conference is organised by Edward Coleman, School of History, UCD and the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland. It is generously supported by UCD Seed Funding.

Organizing Committee:
Dr Edward Coleman (University College Dublin)
Dr Ann Buckley (Queen’s University Belfast / Trinity College Dublin)
Dr Carrie Griffin (University of Bristol)
Dr Emer Purcell (University College Cork)

Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland (FMRSI)
Web: www.fmrsi.wordpress.comEmail: medrenforum@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ForumMRSI
Twitter: @FMRSI

Enlightenment senses? Eighteenth-Century Sensorium(s), Theory and Experience

June 13th-14th 2014, King’s College London

Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s

The senses mattered a great deal in the eighteenth-century. Sensibility, sympathy, and Lockean subject theory were all overwhelming concerned with the senses, and ‘The Enlightenment’ is often seen as a crucial breaking point in how we have historically understood and used our senses. Historical narratives that stress the increased value placed on the rationality of vision and the primacy of touch over the eighteenth-century - gaining prominence over the sense of smell as a method of evaluation - are much contested today. Scholars such as Foucault, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Lucien Febvre have emphasized the manifold changes in the way the senses were thought about and used during the Enlightenment. At a broader level Mark Smith has stated that

‘In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the senses informed the emergence of social classes, race and gender conventions, industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, ideas concerning selfhood and “other,” to list the most obvious developments typically associated with the “modern” era’. (Mark Smith, Sensing The Past, Berg, 2007, p.1)

This two-day conference aims to bring together those concerned with the social and cultural history of the senses in the period from 1650-1790 as well as those working on literary or intellectual histories of the senses in an attempt to encourage a more active dialogue between these areas. The conference aims to link ‘sensory histories’, concerned with embodied sensory experience and representation, with ‘histories of the senses’ in which the intellectual and medical understandings of the senses are foregrounded. Papers are invited that reflect on the wide variety of issues described above and their connections with notions of ‘Enlightenment’. We particularly welcome papers that seek to critique the utility of the ‘Enlightenment’ for the understanding of the senses in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries.

Proposals are invited from across disciplines for papers of 20 minutes in length. Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent to enlightenmentsenses@kcl.ac.uk with a brief biography attached. The deadline for proposals is 08/03/2014.

The conference is being organised by William Tullett, Alice Marples & Marlee Newman.

http://enlightenmentsenses.wordpress.com

NeMLA 2012 Conference: Dissecting the Lower Sensorium: Smell, Taste, and Touch in Early Modern England

From Spenser’s Faerie Queene to the collected poems of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, early modern thinkers were moved to define and qualify the body’s senses. Of particular interest then—and the focus of this seminar—was the lower sensorium, one’s perception of smell, taste, and touch. Essays will focus on understanding how various works of poetry, drama, altered mythologies, and medical texts gave meaning to three sensoriums so foundational to the subject’s experience. Send abstracts to CJMadson

The 43rd convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association will be held in Rochester, New York March 15 - 18, 2012. Our host institution this year is St. John Fisher College, and the convention will be held at the Hyatt Regency Rochester. The call for papers (CFP) is now available online and will appear in NeMLA’s summer newsletter by early June; abstracts are due to session chairs by 30 September 2011 unless otherwise noted in the CFP.

The Senses in Early Modern England 1485-1668

A conference hosted by the London Renaissance Seminar, Shakespeare’s Globe and Birkbeck, University of London

Prof. Erica Fudge, University of Strathclyde (Keynote Speaker)

Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare’s Globe (Keynote Speaker)

“Why, then, your other senses grow imperfect
By your eyes' anguish” (King Lear, 4.5.5-6)

What did early modern subjects understand by the term “the senses”? What relationships and hierarchies were posited amongst the senses? How reliable were they in facilitating communication, understanding or knowledge? What kinds of sense experiences were implied in the production and consumption of texts in manuscript, print and performance?

There has been increased attention in early modern studies to various aspects of sense experience. Recent work is increasingly sensitive to the ways in which the senses were conceptualised at a particular historical moment, in terms of their relative significance, the physiological processes that they entailed, and the forms of experience and knowledge that they might facilitate for a subject. Such research foregrounds the importance of cultural context to sensory experiences, necessitating close attention to the particular ways in which early modern subjects both understood and experienced their own senses. This is visible in the posited ‘hierarchy of the senses’, and in the different understandings of the workings of the body and its relationship with the world; indeed, the place and nature of sensory experience in the relationship between outside phenomena and inner knowledge was central to the many epistemological questions being explored during the period. This conference aims to examine these culturally specific configurations and their importance to texts and performances; this importance is visible in many ways – in performance and reception at the theatre, in reading habits and indeed in conceptions of ‘reading’ itself, in the various ways in which senses appear in texts for rhetorical or other purposes, even in the relationships between the exterior, the body, cognition and selfhood explored in canonical texts of the period. We aim to bring together the latest research on this significant and critically current topic.

The conference will consist of a Friday evening postgraduate forum at Shakespeare’s Globe, and a day-long Saturday postgraduate conference at Birkbeck, University of London, with keynote papers from Dr Farah Karim-Cooper and Professor Erica Fudge. We welcome submissions in the form of 20 minute papers on subjects including, but not limited to, the following:

• Theoretical and practical understandings of the experience and/or functioning of the senses,
• How the senses appear in texts of various kinds,
• How understandings of the senses shaped theatrical practice in England,
• How such understandings may have shaped audience experience of drama,
• The various sensory experiences of reading ,
• Differing relations with the senses in different fields of artistic production,
• The relationship between the senses, cognition and selfhood,
• More recent theories of sensory experience/aesthetics and their relevance to early modern texts and contexts.

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words to Jackie Watson, Birkbeck College, at jwatso05@mail.bbk.ac.uk by Friday 24^th June 2011, including your name, institution, position (e.g. PhD Student) and email address. We would also welcome joint submissions of 2-3 abstracts that could form a panel of 20 minute papers. 

Shakespeare and the Banquet of the Senses at The Globe

A season of events consisting of academic conferences, lectures and staged readings around the theme of the senses in early modern culture and performance. Please follow the link to see the brochure and book tickets or to register for the postgraduate forum and/or the international conference at Shakespeare’s Globe: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/education/events

Speakers throughout the season (lectures and conferences) include: 

Dr Tarnya Cooper (National Portrait Gallery), 

Professor Evelyn Welch (QMUL), 

Dr Francois Quiviger (Warburg), 

Professor Stanley Wells and Rev. Dr Paul Edmondson (The Shakespeare Centre, Stratford), 

Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford), 

Professor Richard Wilson (Cardiff), 

Dr Margaret Healy (Sussex), 

Professor Jonathan Hope (Strathclyde), 

Dr Lucy Munro (Keele), 

Dr Joan Fitzpatrick (Loughborough), 

Dr P.A. Skantze (Roehampton), 

Professor Laura Farina (West Virginia), 

Professor Ayanna Thompson (ASU), 

Professor David Lindley (Leeds), 

Professor William West (Northwestern), 

Professor Erica Fudge (Strathclyde).

Readings:

George Chapman, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595): Sunday 9 October
Tomas Tomkis, Lingua (1607): Sunday 23 October

We will also feature a reading of The History of Cardenio by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, recreated by Professor Gary Taylor: Sunday 20 November

For further enquiries, please contact Dr Farah Karim-Cooper farah.k@shakespearesglobe.com