Session Title: "Materiality and . . . ?”
An object’s physicality is one of its defining characteristics—something that helps to separate material culture from other cultural products. Of late, scholarship has increasingly focused on the materiality of medieval objects as a way of understanding their ritual, symbolic, and economic significances. This session builds on this burgeoning area of study to specifically consider how materiality intersects with other aspects of medieval culture and/or theoretical frameworks. Potential submissions might comprise investigations of the relationship between an object’s materiality and its facture, including considerations of the artists or craftsmen involved in its production; the intertwined relationship between materiality and form; or how the lens of materiality works with or against historicizing approaches to material culture. Authors are encouraged to read the session title in its broadest possible sense as this session aims for interdisciplinarity in keeping with the history and intellectual goals of the Medieval Association of the Pacific. Organizers seek papers on all types of material, and particularly welcome studies on non-elite materials that have received less scholarly attention. This session is open to papers from Latin, Byzantine, and Islamicate contexts.
The Medieval Association of the Pacific is an organization of university faculty, students, and independent scholars from around the Pacific Rim, including North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The Association was founded in 1966 and has a distinguished history of supporting interdisciplinary medieval studies. This active international scholarly community dedicated to the study of the global medieval world is run by five officers and twelve councilors.
Please send abstracts of 250-300 words to Miranda Wilcox (miranda_wilcox@byu.edu) by September 15, 2018.