We seek papers for three sessions sponsored by the Italians and Italianists at Kalamazoo at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI) from May 8 -11, 2014.
Please submit abstracts (less than 300 words) together with the Participant
Information Form (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF)
to Kristina Olson at [log in to unmask]
before September 15, 2013.
1) Reading Old Italian Aloud Workshop
Building on the great success of the inaugural Reading Old Italian Aloud workshop this year, we propose a workshop that highlights the merits both pedagogical and scholarly of reading old Italian texts (ca. 1100-1500) aloud. We invite participants to read selections of verse or prose texts that call attention to the wide range of early vernacular production, from poetry in dialect to popular sermons to legal texts, while providing tips to others on how to work with such texts. We hope that an emphasis on “minor” voices might serve to add historical context as well as provide access to the toolset required to work with these traditionally less-regarded texts.
2) The Piazza
The recent interest in Mediterranean studies has highlighted the importance of open spaces for encounter and transformation, where identities change in definition and categories are questioned. This panel proposes the piazza as a kind of micro-Mediterranean, a place where similar exchanges are negotiated on a smaller, more domestic scale, but no less importantly. What can we discover in the complex relationships between the different social groups that converge here, between buyers and sellers, between “regular society” and the criminal element? Riots, festivals, hangings, processions, assassinations, feasts, prostitution, slave auctions and urban combat are all suitable topics for this panel. Abstracts from scholars working within specific fields (literary studies, history, etc.) or across fields are welcome.
3) Ingegno and the Sabotage of Representation
From their early appearance in the Decameron to later manifestations across Italian prose and verse, beffatori prevail over beffati (the duped) through the exercise of ingegno, an intellectual and practical skill combining insight, ambition, and daring. Beffatori, who substitute one frame of reference for another in order to disable the agency of beffati, may be understood to affirm not just the instability and interchangeability of frames of reference in particular narratives, but more broadly that of meaning inherent in all systems of exchange. We welcome paper proposals focused on any aspect of trickery in the Italian novella and/or in other genres of medieval and early modern Italian fiction, particularly papers that look at this theme in relation to medieval and early modern Italian mercantile history, criminal justice ethics and cognitive psychology.
Kristina M. Olson