Date(s) of Conference:
May 10–13, 2012
Location:
Kalamazoo, Michigan
Description:
The Congress is an annual gathering of over 3,000 scholars interested in Medieval Studies. It features over 550 sessions of papers, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops, and performances. There are also some 90 business meetings and receptions sponsored by learned societies, associations, and institutions. The exhibits hall boasts nearly 70 exhibitors, including publishers, used book dealers, and purveyors of medieval sundries.
Call for Papers:
Law was an important part of medieval culture, just as in modern culture. High and low people alike regularly attended some court or other — serfs attended their lord’s court while barons attended the royal court — and rates of litigation (for instance in medieval England) were surprisingly high (by modern standards). Feudalism, an important medieval institution, was largely (though not exclusively) a set of legal rules, and disputes over the overlapping jurisdictions of secular and ecclesiastical courts played a large role in the evolution of church-state relations. The legal system shaped medieval society just as it was shaped by it. The historian of medieval law must study social, economic, and cultural history, but the historian of medieval society, economy, and culture must also study the law.
Papers are being sought for a panel on Law as Culture: Legal Development and Social Change. This session is part of a series of panels under the general title of “Law as Culture in the Middle Ages” that ran first from 1994 to 2003, and was revived in 2010. This panel, therefore, will explore the intersection among law, economics, and culture in the context of the evolution of medieval European law.
For this panel, any papers on medieval legal history are welcome, including: English legal history, Continental legal history, canon law, or any other tradition practiced in the medieval West, e.g. Jewish or Islamic law.
The concept of “medieval” at Kalamazoo tends to be fairly broad, so you often find papers dealing with late Antiquity on one end, and the Renaissance on the other. Especially, as the title “Law as Culture” hints, papers are encouraged that draw connections between law and other fields, especially in the humanities or economics (though doctrinal legal papers are also fine).
Those who are interested should send an abstract by September 15, 2011 to volokh@post.harvard.edu.
The general call for papers is available at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/sessions.html.
Contact Information:
Sasha Volokh
volokh@post.harvard.edu
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/
published by the Universidade de São Paulo, the Universidade do Porto and the Editora Mandruvá of Brazil, requests submissions of previously unpublished articles that treat any aspect of the interrelationship between law and culture in Medieval/early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. Studies with a strong comparative and or interdisciplinary focus are encouraged.
uclawlib
