54th International Congress on Medieval Studies Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo—May 9-12, 2019
Sponsored by the Hagiography Society
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Marked Bodies, Divine Remnants
Organized by Stephanie Grace-Petinos
“[M]iracle is a prerequisite for sainthood, and more often than not miracle involves the marking of flesh” state Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd state in the introduction to their 2015 work Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh (5). In many vitae, the saint’s marked flesh serves as proof of God’s privilege. The divine remnants imprinted upon a saint’s body could take many forms, such as missing limbs, scars, stigmata, suffering and pain, and being healed of— or gaining the ability to heal— impairment. After death, saints continued their embodied demarcation as relics, material remnants capable of channeling the divine that were further distinguished through division, enshrinement, veneration, and circulation throughout various geographical locales. This panel explores the ways in which hagiography represents how the divine is expressed upon saints’ bodies.
Possible questions include, but are not limited to:
• What is the relationship between sainthood and physicality?
• How does a saint’s divinely marked body juxtapose the sacred and the secular?
• What is the role of disability, gender, and/or race?
• What role does performance, spectacle, and/or audience play?
• What limits, transgressions, or paradoxes does a marked body illuminate?
Please send abstracts of 250-300 words, along with a completed Participant Information form, to session organizer Stephanie Grace-Petinos ([email protected]) by Sept 15, 2018. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.
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“More Fuss about the Body: New Medievalists’ Perspectives”
Organizers: Stephanie Grace-Petinos and Leah Pope Parker
In her 1995 essay “Why All the Fuss about the Body?: A Medievalist’s
Perspective,” Caroline Walker Bynum presented a nuanced picture of embodiment
in the past in order “to suggest that we in the present would do well to focus on a
wider range of topics in our study of body or bodies.”1 The same year saw the
release of Bynum’s magisterial exploration of the body, identity, and medieval
Christian eschatology in The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity,
200–1336. Almost 25 years later, Bynum’s call for diversity with respect to
histories of the body still invites increasingly nuanced approaches to medieval
embodiment. This panel seeks to honor Bynum’s seminal essay, while using it as a
springboard for future investigations concerning the body, both medieval and
modern.
We seek papers that deal with personhood, identity, and the material body,
updating histories of the body through areas of study that have grown in popularity
since the mid-1990s, including disability studies, trans studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, posthumanism,
ecocriticism, animal studies, and the global Middle Ages, along with new developments in feminist and critical race
theory. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
• Bodily integrity and the limits of the body, healing damage to the body, or bodies and borders (i.e. the treatment
of bodies in immigration/incarceration);
• Theologies of death and resurrection and rituals of burial and remembrance;
• Bodies centered and marginalized—including discussion of recent movements such as #metoo and Black Lives
Matter;
• Gender expression and/through the body;
• Normativity (cisheteronormativity, compulsory ablebodiedness, etc);
• Flora and fauna, cyborgs and prosthesis;
• Present-day concepts of embodiment and their medieval predecessors as presented in popular culture (e.g. the
television shows Supernatural or Game of Thrones);
• Comparative and cross-cultural concepts of the body; and/or
• The body in queer/crip time.
The organizers of this panel are committed to including perspectives representative of the diversity of the field, and to
amplifying voices that are too often marginalized by systemic discrimination in academic employment, publishing,
funding, and conference programming. In the spirit of Bynum’s invitation to consider “a wider range of topics in our
study of body or bodies,” we welcome papers that offer critical reflections upon the field of medieval studies, and which
represent diverse and innovative perspectives on medieval histories of the body and contemporary medievalisms. Given
the limitations of a single conference panel, submissions will also receive early consideration for an edited volume on the
same range of topics.
Please submit abstracts of 200–300 words to [email protected] by Friday, September 14, 2018,
along with a completed Participant Information form. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself.
All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general
sessions, as per Congress regulations. The organizers are happy to answer any questions via the aforementioned email
address.