MANCASS News and Programme 2013-14

New publications from the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies:

- Nicholas J. Higham and Martin Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World, London, Yale University Press, 2013.
- Nicholas J. Higham ed., Wilfrid: Abbot, Bishop, Saint, Donington, Shaun Tyas, 2013.
- Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider, ed., Royal Authority in Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, Archaeopress, BAR British Series 584, 2013.
- Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider, ed., Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies Volume 13, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2013.

Talks and conferences 2013-14
After ordinary meetings members are welcome to join the Director and the speaker for dinner at their own expense.

Monday 30 September 2013
5pm, Samuel Alexander Building Room S. 1.7
Dr Rory Naismith, of the University of Cambridge, will speak on ‘The Forum Hoard of Anglo-Saxon Coins’

Monday 11 November 2013
5pm, room to be announced
Dr Susan Youngs, formerly of the British Museum, will speak on ‘The Prince and the Hanging-bowl: the British presence at Prittlewell’

Monday 10 Feb 2014
5pm, room to be announced
Dr David Woodman, of the University of Cambridge, will speak on ‘The writing of history in twelfth-century Worcester’

Monday 3 March 2014: The Toller Lecture
Professor John Hines, University of Cardiff, will speak on ‘A new chronology and new agenda: the problematic sixth century’ exploring the issues raised by the recent high-precision radio-carbon dating project; 6pm, in the Historic Reading Room, John Rylands Library Deansgate, followed by a free wine reception, followed by dinner at Pesto, Deansgate (about £25 per person). If you wish to attend the post-lecture dinner please book by Monday 24 Feb 2013 with Gale Owen-Crocker.

Thursday 3 April 2014: Joint meeting of MANCASS and the Manchester Medieval Society
Dr Kevin Leahy, of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, will speak on ‘The Staffordshire Hoard’; 6pm in the Historic Reading Room, John Rylands Library Deansgate. If you wish to attend the post-lecture dinner please book by Thursday 27 March 2014 with Susan Thompson.

15-17 April 2014
The MANCASS Easter Conference on ‘Womanhood in Anglo-Saxon England’ will take place at Hulme Hall, The University of Manchester. The Conference will be directed by Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker, The University of Manchester, in association with Dr Charles Insley, The University of Manchester, and Dr Christine Rauer, University of St Andrews. Offers of 20 minute papers should be submitted, with a short abstract, to Gale Owen-Crocker by 30 November 2013. Registration enquiries should be directed to Brian Schneider.

CFP: The Medieval Chronicle - Die Mittelalterliche Chronik - La Chronique au Moyen Age

Seventh International Conference

7th-10th July 2014
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, UK

The Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The University of Liverpool is delighted to announce that the Seventh International Conference on the Medieval Chronicle will take place at the University of Liverpool, 7th–10th July 2014.

Keynote speakers include: Professor Pauline Stafford (University of Liverpool), Professor Anne D. Hedeman (University of Kansas), Professor Marcus G. Bull (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Professor Christopher Young and Dr Mark Chinca (University of Cambridge).

The aim of the seventh conference is to follow the broad outline of the previous six conferences, allowing scholars who work on different aspects of the medieval chronicle (historical, literary, art-historical) to meet, announce new findings and projects, present new methodologies, and discuss the prospects for collaborative research.

The main themes of the conference are:

1. Chronicle: history or literature?
The chronicle as a historiographical and/or literary genre; genre identification; genre confusion and genre influence; typologies of chronicle; classification; conventions (historiographical, literary or otherwise) and topoi.

2. The function of the chronicle
The function of chronicles in society; contexts historical, literary and social; patronage; reception of the text(s); literacy; orality; performance.

3. The form of the chronicle
The language(s) of the chronicle; inter-relationships of chronicles in multiple languages; prose and/or verse chronicles; manuscript traditions and dissemination; the arrangement of the text.

4. The chronicle and the representation of the past
How chronicles record the past; the relationship with ‘time’; how the reality of the past is encapsulated in the literary form of the chronicle; how chronicles explain the past; motivations given to historical actors; the role of the Divine.

5. Art and Text in the chronicle
How art functions in manuscripts of chronicles; do manuscript illuminations illustrate the texts or do they provide a different discourse that amplifies, re-enforces or contradicts the verbal text; origin and production of illuminations; relationships between author(s), scribe(s) and illuminator(s).

Call for Papers

Papers in English, French or German are invited on any aspect of Medieval Chronicle. Papers will be allocated to sections to give coherence and contrast; authors should identify the main theme to which their paper relates. Papers read at the conference will be strictly limited to twenty (20) minutes in length. The deadline for abstracts is Monday 21 October 2013 (maximum length one (1) side A4 paper, including bibliography). Please email your abstract to the conference organisers. 

The conference will take place on the south campus of the University of Liverpool, near the centre of Liverpool, Merseyside, UK. Liverpool has its own airport – Liverpool John Lennon Airport – with connections to many European cities. Travel through Manchester Airport (which has direct train connections to Liverpool) is also possible. Accommodation will be in Vine Court, newly built en-suite accommodation on the South Campus, fifteenth minutes walk from the centre of Liverpool and Lime Street Station. A variety of guest houses and hotels (at a range of prices) are similarly available near the university.

Additional information about costs, accommodation, travel and registration will be provided shortly on a dedicated conference website.

For further information please contact the organisers.

Dr Godfried Croenen
School of Cultures, Languages & Area Studies
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, Merseyside,
L69 7ZR, UK

Dr Sarah Peverley
School of English
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, Merseyside,
L69 7ZR, UK

Dr Damien Kempf
Department of History
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, Merseyside,
L69 7WZ, UK

CFP: Fighting Dragons and Monsters: Heroic Mythology

The International Association for Comparative Mythology 8th Annual Conference

May 24-26, 2014
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography
National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia
Yerevan, Armenia

Conference Website

Call for Papers

We are happy to announce that the 8th Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology is to be held at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia) from May 24 to May 26, 2014. All members are warmly invited to give a paper and to participate in the discussions.

Our topic (as well as the conference title) this year will be: Fighting Dragons and Monsters: Heroic Mythology.

The main focus this time will be on the Indo–European, Ancient Near Eastern, and the Caucasus mythology; however, papers about mythology of other regions of the world that conform to the conference topic are also welcome.

A list of prospective talks will be published on our website. Please take note of the following:

Titles

Please send us the title of your paper as soon as possible. That will substantially facilitate planning.

Abstracts

By January 15, 2014, please send, if you intend to participate, a short (300 words or less) abstract of your talk to this address. The abstracts will be reviewed by a selection committee; the selected abstracts will be published on our website.

Paper Length

The expected paper length is 20 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion.

The language of the conference is English.

Conference fee for the participants from North America, Australia, the EU, and Northeast Asia is $50, which will cover the conference dinner and reception. Students from the aforementioned countries and participants from other regions can participate for a reduced fee – $10. For the payment options please see below.

Also, those of you who are not yet official members of IACM, please consider joining the association! The yearly fee is $35 (it is $10 for students and members from countries outside North America, Australia, the EU, and Northeast Asia).

CFP: Late Medieval Court Records

IMC Leeds 7-10 Jul 2014

From the twelfth century on, public courts and the institutionalized legal process obtained a prominent profile in many parts of Europe. Legal authorities and litigants increasingly strove to record and thus shape the legal process through documenting their activities. The sources they produced, grouped together under the term ‘court records’, form a true goldmine for historians. They throw light on historical events and processes that are otherwise difficult if not impossible to access, from legal procedures to daily life and language, to cosmology. Small wonder that some of the most important works on premodern history, like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, have drawn extensively on this type of source.

Yet these sources are not without difficulties for the historian using them. Not only are they often relatively hard to access, requiring extensive palaeographical and linguistic skills, but the information contained in them is seldom straightforward. Court records often purport to contain more than they do, and usually contain more than they seem to do. They are not only very rich but also very challenging sources.

That is why we think it valuable to make this historical source, the court record, the focus of a strand of sessions at the twentieth International Medieval Congress in Leeds from 7-10 July 2014. We hope to gather scholars from different regions to compare and discuss the great variety of records produced by law courts in the later medieval period, as well as the practical and methodological issues connected to their study. The idea of this IMC strand is to form a basis for further discussion and cooperation between early career researchers working with late medieval court records in the future.

We therefore invite proposals from current postgraduate, postdoctoral and other early career researchers in History and any other relevant subject area, for papers of 20 minutes on the topic of late medieval court records. Abstracts must be 200 words maximum. The proposals must include name, institution, contact information, paper title and abstract.

Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:
• Methodology of court records
• Gendering court records
• Court records and the legal process
• Court records and urban society
• The voice of the ‘common man’ in court records
• Court records and social/religious deviancy
• The comparative approach of court records
• Court records and legal/social/political conflict

Proposals are to be sent to Frans Camphuijsen by September 22nd 2013.

Panel convenors: Sarah Crawford (University of Sydney), James Page (University of St. Andrews) and Frans Camphuijsen (University of Amsterdam)

CFP: "Horror" - 35th Annual Conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA)

Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center
Albuquerque, New Mexico

February 19-22, 2014

The area chair for Horror of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association invites all interested scholars to submit papers on any aspect of horror in literature, film, television, digital and online as well as general culture. Given the strong showing of work on horror cinema in recent years, we hope to continue this tradition, but also to diversify into new and unconventional areas, especially with the addition of roundtable sessions on a variety of popular topics.

Particularly encouraged are presentations that fit this year’s conference theme, "Popular and American Culture Studies: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow."

If you are interested in being a presenter, please send a detailed abstract (300-400 words) for a paper of 15 to 20 minutes reading time. Please provide contact information, such as name, mailing address, phone number, and especially e-mail address.

If you want to propose a panel of four speakers, or three speakers and one respondent, please include the following information: panel title; name and contact information of the panel chair; an abstract for each paper; contact information for each presenter.

The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2013.

For information about the registration process, registration fees, membership, graduate student awards and course credits, and information about travel and location, please consult the SWPACA's official web site.

Please submit abstracts and panel proposals at the conference website.

CFP: The Geographic Imagination: Conceptualizing Places and Spaces in the Middle Ages

2nd Annual Indiana Medieval Graduate Student Consortium Conference

Call for Papers

Keynote Speaker: Professor Geraldine Heng
Perceval Fellow and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with a joint appointment in Middle Eastern studies and Women’s studies at the University of Texas at Austin

The students of the Indiana Medieval Graduate Student Consortium (IMGC) are pleased to announce that we are accepting submissions for the second annual IMGC conference, 'The Geographic Imagination: Conceptualizing Places and Spaces in the Middle Ages', to take place on 28 Feb-1 Mar 2014 at the University of Notre Dame.

The transnational turn in the humanities over the last two decades has put increasing pressure on our ideas of nationhood and has provided us with a liberating awareness of the constructedness of the spaces we study. New methodologies have developed in response to this pressure as scholars turn to comparative approaches, borderland studies, histoire croisée, studies of empire, and oceanic models in order to accommodate the ambiguities of nationhood and of conceptions of space. Suggested by seminal transnational studies, such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, many critics now study “the flows of people, capital, profits and information.” Recently, David Wallace’s ambitious literary history of Europe has adopted a similarly fluid approach to culture, avoiding a study of “national blocks” of literature, organizing itself instead along transnational itineraries that stretch beyond the European sphere. The Middle Ages offer a particularly broad and rich era in which to encounter fluid notions of space, as any glance at a medieval map such as the famous Hereford mappa mundi invitingly suggests. We invite presentations from all fields to explore any aspect of the medieval “geographic imagination,” of conceptions of space, place, and nation: ideas of geography, cartography, transnational identities and networks, intercultural encounters, mercantile routes, travelogues, rural and urban spaces, religious places, and concepts of locality and local identities.

The IMGC is delighted to announce that our keynote speaker this year will be Dr Geraldine Heng, well known to many of us for her exhaustive and provocative study of medieval romance, Empire of Magic, and her subsequent work on race in the Middle Ages.

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by 15 Dec, 2013 on the conference website. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter's name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests.

This conference is generously sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. The Nanovic Institute is committed to enriching the intellectual culture of Notre Dame by creating an integrated, interdisciplinary home for students and faculty to explore the evolving ideas, cultures, beliefs, and institutions that shape Europe today.

Dress and Textile Discussion Group (University of Manchester)

Programme for 2013-14

Where: TBC – please see reminders

Time: 5pm

Thursday 10th October 2013
Dr Brenda King: Stitch and Stone. The Leek Embroidery Society and its collaboration with Gothic Revival Architects

Thursday 21st November 2013
Alexandra Lester-Makin: The Kempston Embroidery Revisited

Thursday 13th February 2013
Dr John Peter Wild: Cotton - the New Wool. A Developing Tale from Roman Egypt

Thursday 20th March 2014
Dr Chris Monk: Divine Clothing: Adorning God and the Patriarchs in the Rylands Bible Historiée

Thursday 1st May 2014
Dr Elizabeth Coatsworth: Mrs Christie and English Medieval Embroidery

For more information, please contact Alexandra Lester-Makin.

Review: House of Fear, ed. by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris, 2011)

Published in 2011, House of Fear is an anthology of haunted house short stories, edited by Jonathan Oliver and featuring stories by writers such as Adam Nevill, Sarah Pinborough and Christopher Priest. I picked those three names at random, as the collection’s contents page is an impressive list of well-established UK horror writers (and a couple of American cousins), with a small number of new voices being introduced alongside.

I was asked to review this book for another site I write for, but as that review will be somewhat brief, I thought I’d write a longer post here so I can talk in a bit more detail about the collection. This book definitely deserves the additional space.

The theme (or setting or motif – depending on the way it has been interpreted) that organizes House of Fear is the haunted house. Each of the nineteen stories features a ‘house’ of some description (though ‘home’ is probably a more accurate term), and each one presents a ‘haunting’ of sorts. It wouldn’t be fair to describe House of Fear as a book of ghost stories, however, as ‘haunting’ is to be understood in its widest sense. That said, there are a fair few ghosts within the pages.

The book as a whole is excellent. The editor has done a fantastic job in putting the collection together – in terms of both selection and organization – and Oliver’s introductions to each story are complimentary without being cloying. It’s also nice to read a short story collection with a consistently high standard of writing. There are no weak links in House of Fear, no stories being held up by their more secure and accomplished neighbours. So, when I talk about the high points in the rest of the review, I’m referring to my own personal taste as a reader.

The collection opens with Lisa Tuttle’s excellent ‘Objects in Dreams may be Closer than they Appear’, which sets up expectations for the rest of the collection. Tuttle’s bittersweet tale of a divorced couple’s return to a house they almost bought at the beginning of their marriage begins with a semi-nostalgia laced with rational reflection, before drawing the reader (as the narrator herself is drawn) into an unsettling, obsessive hunt for something just out of reach. The chilling ending packs a real punch. Tuttle’s story is followed by Steven Volk’s ‘Pied-à-terre’ which is a quite different sort of story with a quite different sort of punch – I’ll admit I welled up a bit when I realized what was happening in Volk’s very moving tale. It is a mark of Volk’s talent as a writer that he was able to handle (avoiding spoilers) such emotional material without sentimentalizing or becoming mawkish.

Of the other stories in the collection, Adam Nevill’s ‘Florrie’ and Jonathan Green’s ‘The Doll’s House’ were particularly favourites, though Rebecca Levene’s ‘The Windmill’ was also fantastic. Nevill’s tale of a young man moving into a house made vacant by the death of its elderly owner was perfectly paced and a deft study in tension-building. This story resonated with me, as, like Nevill’s protagonist, my house previously belonged to an old lady who had lived in it her entire adult life. And, like Nevill’s protagonist, I found that the previous owner’s family had simply abandoned her furniture (and some personal belongings) after the house was sold. I am happy to be able to say that’s where the similarities end, as Nevill’s tale is an off-beat horror which (as good horror should) makes you smile just before it terrifies you.

Green’s story should be given to all aspiring writers trying desperately to come up with the perfect ‘idea’, the plot that is so original it will blow their readers’ minds, because ‘The Doll’s House’ is a beautiful example of why that doesn’t matter. A story of the return of a creepy doll’s house is hardly a mind-blowingly original idea, but Green brings his characters (and the house itself) to life with skill and a light touch. In Green’s hands, the familiarity of the story’s basic premise is transformed into a fresh and compelling piece of writing. And the ending is exquisite (at least, it is for those of us who like our horror shocking).

‘The Windmill’ is one of several stories in the collection that reinterpret the haunted house by widening an understanding of ‘home’, and the places in which we might temporarily reside. Levene’s protagonist is a drug dealer serving a prison sentence. With a limited view from his cell, Lee is able to watch a windmill that he knows from his time outside. Unrepentant, Lee is determined to continue dealing from within the prison, but things don’t work out quite the way he planned. Levene mixes down-to-earth realism with a growing sense of the supernatural to produce a story filled with creeping dread.

One final mention (as I don’t have the space here to go through each story in detail) is Christopher Fowler’s ‘An Injustice’. Fowler’s tale begins with a group of student ghost-hunters – as misguided, opinionated and naïve as that sounds – but evolves into something quite different, and really unexpected. Of all the stories in the book, this is the one that genuinely ‘haunted’ me. I was reading the book one story at a time in between shifts and bands at a music festival, which gave me a great opportunity to compare how long each one lingered in my imagination after I’d finished it. Fowler’s easily won – the final ‘reveal’ just doesn’t go away.

As I said, these stories were particular favourites, but the others stories in the collection are all strong. If I had to make criticisms, I found Christopher Priest’s ‘Widow’s Weeds’ a little disappointing. Priest returns to the figure of the professional magician, so a comparison with The Prestige is inevitable. I didn’t feel ‘Widow’s Weeds’ had the intrigue or narrative power of the earlier novel, and the characterization (even allowing for the restrictions of form) was underdeveloped.

Robert Shearman’s ‘The Dark Space in the House in the House in the Garden at the Centre of the World’ also left me a little underwhelmed. A clever premise – which is almost impossible to sum up without ruining the story – promised to be ‘an unusual story of a house in a garden and how people within that house find out what it is to be human’ (in Oliver’s words). The problem for me was that there was little outside of the premise, and while this was indeed unusual and clever, it wasn’t quite enough to sustain my interest.

Nevertheless, as I said, this is a matter of personal taste. I admit I can be quite traditional in my reading tastes, and usually gravitate towards strong plots and well-developed characterization. On the whole, House of Fear delivered this, as well as a few good doses of horror (of differing types).

So, overall, a resounding recommendation. This is a must-read for horror fans. I would go as far as to say – aside from the collections I have edited, of course – this is my favourite short story anthology of recent years.

For more information about House of Fear, please check out the publishers’ website.