EVERYDAY OBJECTS: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN MATERIAL CULTURE AND ITS 
MEANINGS

Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies
Hilton Shepherd Centre for Medieval Studies

27th-30th June 2007

Confirmed speakers include: Julian Bowsher, Museum of London; Tarnya 
Cooper, National Portrait Gallery; Flora Dennis, V&A; Chris Dyer, 
University of Leicester; Geoff Egan, Museum of London; David Gaimster, 
Society of Antiquaries; Maria Hayward, AHRC Textile Conservation Centre; 
Stephen Kelly, Queen’s Belfast; Natasha Korda, Wesleyan; David Mitchell, 
Centre for Metropolitan History; Lena Orlin, UMBC; Roger Pringle, 
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; Giorgio Riello, LSE; Barbara Rosenwein, 
Loyola; John Styles, University of Hertfordshire; John Thompson, Queen’s 
Belfast; Jennifer Tiramani, Globe Theatre; Bob Tittler, Concordia; 
Evelyn Welch, Queen Mary UL.

Panels include: reconstructing spaces through objects; books; music; 
shoes; pottery; land and property; London’s Southbank culture; feasting 
objects; domestic linen; paintings; the application of modern methods to 
the study of pre-modern objects.

This conference aims to encourage heritage practitioners and academics 
from different disciplines to debate the key terms of its title. It 
encourages them to discuss the methods by which they analyse material 
culture, but also the way they present their findings: how the 
analytical languages and methods of presentation used within their 
disciplines reconstruct material culture for a wider audience. Those 
working on such issues both within and outside the periods under 
consideration are invited to come and talk about the transferability of 
methodologies - to debate the existence of a specifically pre-modern 
material culture.

Material culture has become an increasingly important aspect of the 
study of medieval and early modern societies. Always the foundation of 
museum practice and the subject of enquiry for archaeologists and social 
anthropologists, ways of presenting the objects themselves and the 
findings of research into them have been the focus of increasing 
critical attention and hence new methodologies. Material culture has 
more recently become a key feature of scholarly negotiation with a 
variety of social behaviours across a much wider range of Humanities 
disciplines. Within literature departments it has provided an invaluable 
way of negotiating the relationship between literary productions, their 
original forms and meanings, and the way they were consumed by their 
various audiences. Within history departments it has, although initially 
driven by late modern consumption work, begun to offer a focus for the 
study of production and consumption in earlier periods, a focus which 
takes account of the motivations of consumers, and therefore offers the 
possibility of bridging the historiographical gap between economic and 
social change. As a particular kind of discourse of contact with past 
societies, it has found its way into departments such as art history, 
where art objects have been treated both as objects of exchange, use and 
display and, more equivocally, as forms of historical evidence about the 
world of material things. More or less central to all these developments 
has been an interest in the access material culture study gives to lived 
experience at the level of the individual.

This conference will address the difficulties inherent in a dialogue 
between diverse disciplinary research agendas, and it is therefore 
structured in a way which foregrounds such debates. It aims to marry two 
different approaches: one exploring the meaning of key terms and 
investigating ways of writing about material culture within and across 
disciplines; the other grouping papers around specific objects and 
categories of object to which curators and scholars from different 
disciplines are invited to speak.

Participants will be encouraged to address the relationship between 
objects and, for example, gender, power, taste, ideology, space, 
morality, identity, skill, value, culture, ritual, use, narrative, 
process, choice, individual response, continental and colonial 
influence, materiality, emotion, technical innovation, regional and 
national identity, inclusion and exclusion, status, competition and 
social mobility, location and locality, political climate and legislation.

In the course of these discussions, it is hoped that several significant 
subsidiary questions arising from the categorisation of medieval and 
early modern objects will be addressed. The study of material culture 
offers the possibility of cutting across the binary oppositions of 
traditional historiographies, and contributors are therefore encouraged 
to discuss 'everyday objects' as a way of questioning the relationship 
between public and private life and the changing connections between the 
sacred and the profane. However, it is also hoped that discussion will 
involve changes in contemporary categories of object more generally, and 
the boundaries between the usual and the unusual.


For further information please contact:

Dr Catherine Richardson
Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies
University of Birmingham

[log in to unmask]

Tel: 0121 414 9511
Fax: 01789 414 992

This conference is generously supported by the Heritage, Cultural 
Production and Interpretation Collaborate Research Network, University 
of Birmingham

Provisional Programme


Wednesday 27 June
2pm-3.15pm	Registration
3.15pm-4.30pm	Plenary Lecture: John Styles
4.30pm-5pm	Tea
5pm-6.15pm	Plenary Lecture: David Gaimster
6.30-8pm	Evening drinks reception, Halls Croft

Thursday 28 June
9.15am-10.45am	Panel 1: Clothing. Speakers: Maria Hayward  Louise 
Sylvester  Tricia Allerston
10.45am-11.15am	Coffee
11.15am-12.45pm	Panel 2: Property & Human Relations. Speakers: Barbara 
Rosenwein  Lena Orlin  John Carman
12.45pm-1.30pm	Lunch
1.30pm-3pm	Panel 3: Personal Objects. Speakers:  Evelyn Welch  Richard 
Williams  Catherine Richardson
3pm-3.30pm	Tea
3.30pm-5pm	Panel 4: Ritual Objects. Speakers: Sheila Sweetinburgh  
Angela McShane Jones  David Mitchell
5pm-5.45pm	Wine and nibbles
5.45pm-7.15pm	Panel 5: Material Culture of the South Bank. Speakers: 
Geoff Egan  Natasha Korda  Jennifer Tiramani

Friday 29 June
10am-11.30am	Panel 6: Furniture & Interiors. Speakers: Laurie Lindey  
Marta Ajmar  Tara Hamling
11.30am-12pm	Coffee
12pm-1.30pm	Panel 7: Text and Object. Speakers: David Griffith  Ryan 
Perry  Robert Swanson
1.30pm-2.15pm	Lunch
2.15pm-3.45pm	Panel 8: Music. Speakers: John Thompson  Flora Dennis
3.45pm-4.15pm	Tea
4.15pm-5.45pm	Panel 9: Pottery. Speakers: Chris Dyer  Steve Wharton  
Sara Pennell

Saturday 30 June
9.00am-10.30am	 Panel 10: Shoes. Speakers: Giorgio Riello  Stephen 
Kelly  Michelle O’Malley
10.30am-11am	Coffee
11am-1pm	Panel 11: Paintings: Space & Effect. Speakers: Tarnya Cooper  
Bob Tittler  Roger Pringle  Joy Kearney
1pm-1.45pm	Lunch
1.45pm-3.15pm	Panel 12: Space and Object. Speakers: Julian Bowsher  
Dinah Eastop  Kate Giles
3.15pm-3.30pm	Tea
3.30pm-4.30pm	Round Table Discussion
4.30pm	Close

Booking form available via 
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/filearea.cgi?LMGT1=MAT-REN

Full delegate fee: £95, student delegate fee: £40.
Fee includes access to all lectures and panels, afternoon tea on 27 
June, sandwich lunch, morning coffee and afternoon tea on 28, 29 and 30 
June. Fee also includes an evening drinks reception at Halls Croft on 27 
June and wine and nibbles on 28 June.

Deadline for registration is 20 May 2007. Please pay by cheque, made 
payable to The University of Birmingham. Please return booking form with 
payment to Dr Catherine Richardson, The Shakespeare Institute, Mason 
Croft, Church Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, CV37 6HP, United Kingdom.


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INTER. CONGRESS OF MEDIEVAL STUDIES KAZOO (May 10-13, 2007)
NOTE: The Congress schedule is online at: 
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/41congress/index.html

The Italian Art Society is sponsoring four sessions on Sacred, 
Corporate, and Civic Spaces in Italian Art and Architecture

SESSION I: Sacred, Corporate, and Civic Spaces in Italian Art and 
Architecture: Civic Identity (Chair: Philip Earenfight, Dickinson College)

Scott Montgomery, University of Denver, "The Saint and the Sepulchre: 
St. Petronius and the Image of Sacred Bologna"

Lynley Anne Herbert, University of Delaware, "Duccio di Buoninsegna: 
Icon of Painters, or Painter of "Icons""

Miranda Jan Routh, National Gallery of Art, "Light in the Scuola: 
Vittore Carpaccio's Vision of Saint Augustine"

SESSION II: Sacred, Corporate, and Civic Spaces in Italian Art and 
Architecture: Monastic Communities (Chair: William Hood, Oberlin College)

Sally J. Cornelison, University of Kansas, "Sacred Space and the First 
Tomb of St. Antoninus at San Marco, Florence"

Janis Elliott, Texas Tech University, "The Eremitani Choir in 14th 
century Padua: Unique Case or Widespread Propaganda"

Kyle Killian, Columbia University, "Form and Reform at Benedictine Orbais"

SESSION III: Sacred, Corporate, and Civic Spaces in Italian Art and 
Architecture: Healing Body and Soul (Chair: Eunice Howe, University of 
Southern California)

Kathleen G. Arthur, James Madison University, "Poor Clares visual 
Culture: Arte Povera, Visions and Intellectual Life at Corpus Domini, 
Ferrara"

Diana Elizabeth Bullen, University of Michigan, "The Abandoned Child as 
Holy Innocent in a Processional Banner for the Innocenti Hospital in 
Florence"

Heather R. Nolin, Rutgers University, "Piety and Politicking: Girolamo 
dai Libri's Madonna and Child with Sts. Zeno and Lorenzo Giustiniani for 
San Giorgio in Braida, Verona"

SESSION IV: Sacred, Corporate, and Civic Spaces in Italian Art and
Architecture: Civic Spaces (Chair: Barbara Deimling, Syracuse University 
in Florence)

Alick M. McLean, Syracuse University in Florence: “The Sustainability of 
the “speculum civitatis” at Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli”

Areli Marina, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ""Movimenti di 
Piazza: Spectacle, Surveillance, and Insurrection in Parma's Civic Squares"

Samuel D. Gruber, Syracuse Univeristy, "Selective Inclusion: Integration 
and Isolation of Jews in Italian Medieval Civic Spaces"

Kathryn B. Moore, New York University, "Politicizing the Aesthetics of 
the Piazza San Marco in Venice"

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