Theorizing the Early Middle Ages - Schedule

SESSION 1: Esoteric and Magical Bodies – Taylor Auditorium (Marsh Hall 217)

• Lynda L. Coon (University of Arkansas), 'The Mandalas of Hraban Maur'
• Elizabeth Markham (University of Arkansas), 'Boddhisattvas Laugh in Paradise'
• Martha Rampton (Pacific University), 'Ritualized Bodies Claimed by Magic'

Continental Breakfast - Old College Hall

SESSION 2: Producing Their Own Space: Dark-Age Women

• Valerie L. Garver (Northern Illinois University), 'Dress and Gender in the Carolingian World'
• Jane Tibbets Schulenburg (University of Wisconsin), 'Holy Women and Stitching the Sacred: Hems, Borders, and Sacred Space'
• Albrecht Diem (Syracuse University), 'Was the First Medieval Monk a Woman'?
  

SESSION 3: Identity and Ritual Practice in Late Ancient Christianity

• John Arnold (SUNY-Fredonia), 'Revering Michael the Archangel: Ritual and Spatial Intersection in the Formation of Christian Praxis'
• Aneilya Barnes (Coastal Carolina University), 'Power & Patronage in Old St. Peter's'
• Kim Sexton (University of Arkansas), 'Theorizing the Circus Basilica'
  

SESSION 4: Strategies in Political and Cultural Legitimation

• Daniel DeSelm (University of Michigan), 'Translation of the Body Politic: Relics as Symbols of Political Legitimacy in 9th and 10th-century Neustria'
• Eric Ramirez-Weaver (NYU), 'Saving Science at the Carolingian Court'
• Sarah Whitten (UCLA), 'Performance in Early Italian Judicial Courts'
  

SESSION 5: Paradigm Breakers

• Alan Kramer (NYC), 'Theorizing a Pluralist Paradigm for the Early Middle Ages
• Andrey Grunin (University of Avignon), 'The Application of Complexity Theory to the Study of the Early Middle Ages: The Case of the Carolingian Empire'
• Hagith Sivan (Kansas University), 'The Body as Border: Where does Late Antiquity End and the Early Middle Ages Begin'?
  

5:00 - 6:00pm

Plenary: Dr. Frantzen's Address

Continental Breakfast - Old College Hall

SESSION 6: Masculinity and its Habits

• Eric Goldberg (Williams College), 'Hounds of the Lords: Nobility, Masculinity, and Hunting Animals in the Early Middle Ages'
• Paul Kershaw (University of Virginia), 'What were your habits when you were a lad? Youth and Rulership in the Earlier Middle Ages'
• Andrew J. Romig (Harvard University): 'The Warrior/Monk Hybridity of St. Gerald in Odo of Cluny's De vita Geraldi Auriliacensis'
  

SESSION 7: The Medieval Imaginary

• Margaret Cotter-Lynch (Southeastern Oklahoma State University), 'How to Read a Story, How to Read a Dream: Oneiric Hermeneutics in the Vita Rusticula'
• Courtney M. Booker (University of British Columbia), 'Telling the Truth about the Field of Lies: The Carolingian Drama of Paschasius Radbertus'
• Christopher Craun (University of Central Arkansas), 'Re-Reading the Historical Martyrology'
  

SESSION 8: Sensory Experience in the Middle Ages

• Sarah Gordon (Utah State University), 'Thrown Out with the Dishwater: Representations of the Pious Body in the Old French Vie de St. Alexis'
• Christine Tate Reilly (Monmouth University), 'The Gastronomy of Medieval Iberia from 700-1300'
• Mary Thurlkill (University of Mississippi), 'Smells & Sanctity in Early Islam'
  

SESSION 9: Transgressive Bodies

• Anthony J. Adams (University of Tennessee), 'Bataille's Bison and the Medieval Macabre'
• Phillip A. Bernhardt-House (Columbia College), 'Bridging the Gap: The Paucity of Sources on Early Medieval Insular Celtic Homoeroticism'
• Dominic Janes (University of London): 'Exquisite Corpse: Decadence and the End of Antiquity from Gibbon to Wilde and Peter Brown'
  

5:00 - 6:00pm

Plenary: Dr. Nelson's Address

Continental Breakfast - Old College Hall