UBC Medieval Workshop 2010

NEXT WORKSHOP

2011-07-14T14:03:00.000-07:00

40th Annual UBC Medieval Workshop 2012:
"Specular Reflections: The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture"
16-17 March 2012
Deadline for paper and panel submissions: 1 August 2011

Quest and Conquest: Spiritual Symbols and Myths in the Indo-Mediterranean and European Worlds

2010-09-16T18:47:00.000-07:00

39th Annual Medieval Studies Workshop
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada
14 - 16 October 2010

UPDATE: Registration has now closed.
(Deadline: THURSDAY 7 OCTOBER.)

UPDATE #2: Please note the change of time and venue for the plenary lecture: it is now at 1.00 p.m., still on Friday 15 October; and will be at Green College

The Committee for Medieval Studies at the University of British Columbia welcomes you to the 39th Annual UBC Medieval Workshop, to be held from Thursday the 14th through Saturday the 16th of October 2010.

The workshop's papers deal with a range of aspects of ‘quest and conquest’ and engage with the continuities and differences in the way in which myths and symbols of the spiritual quest and/or conquest ‘travel’, in all forms of expression and exchange, throughout the Medieval Indo-Mediterranean and European worlds.

The conference will be held at Green College, one of the UBC graduate residences, nestled on a forested cliff overlooking ocean and mountains at the edge of our campus in Vancouver, Canada.

For further information, such as the Programme, please consult the menu at the top of the page.

We would particularly like to thank our sponsors for their generous support:

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (UBC)

UBC

Green College, UBC

Faculty of Arts, Office of the Dean

Office of the Provost and Vice President Academic

Office of the Vice-President, Research and International (VPRO)

DEPARTMENTS IN THE UBC FACULTY OF ARTS:

Art History, Visual Art and Theory

Asian Studies

Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies

English

French, Hispanic and Italian Studies

History

AT SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY (SFU):

SFU Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures

SFU World Literature

IN VANCOUVER:

Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Vancouver

Consulat général de France à Vancouver

Organizing Committee

2010-09-16T17:22:00.000-07:00

Principal Organizer:
Daniela Boccassini (FHIS, UBC)

Organizing Committee:

Sharon Doucet (UBC)
Dorothy-June Fraser (UBC)
Janet Magee (UBC)
Kirsten Rusko (UBC)
Alexis Statz (UBC)

Web Mistress:
Juliet O’Brien (FHIS, UBC)

Advisors:

Derryl MacLean (History, SFU)
Robert Rouse (English, UBC)
Raúl Alvarez-Moreno (FHIS, UBC)

Contact us:

Email ubcmedievalworkshop@gmail.com

See also:
✥ UBC MEDIEVAL STUDIES

Vancouver accommodation

2010-09-14T01:35:00.000-07:00

Suggestions only... the following are near UBC and accessible by public transport.

MAIN INFORMATION

UBC Conference Accommodation: Rooms and Suites

BUDGET

Jericho Beach Youth Hostel (close to UBC campus)
Other HI Youth Hostels downtown (about 45 minutes' commute)

MID-RANGE

Holiday Inn Vancouver-Centre-Broadway (about 30 minutes' commute)
see also: Expedia, HotelClub, Hotwire, Travelocity, Tripadvisor, etc.

UPPER RANGE

Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre (about 30 minutes' commute)
see also (further away, less direct routes to UBC): the Four Seasons, the Loden, Opus, the Sylvia, etc.

Workshop locations

2010-09-01T19:53:00.000-07:00

Istituto Italiano di Cultura
Green College Coach House
More detailed map (NB we are in the *Coach House*):

The UBC bus loop is about 15 minutes' walk from the Coach House, and the nearest car park is the Rose Garden Parkade:

(Clicking on the maps above will open up a larger image; screenshots taken from Google Maps.)

Image credits

2010-08-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

HEADER: The ceiling of the Sheikh Lotf Allah mosque.
Isfahan, Iran (1615-18 CE).
Photograph: Phillip Maiwald. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

FOOTER: Detail from the Book of Kells, f° 34r (a.k.a. the Chi-Rho Carpet Page).

Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS A. I. (58). (Ca. 800 CE).
Image source: the Yorck Project c/o Wikimedia Commons.

ALSO:
The ceiling of the Cappella Palatina.
Palermo, Sicily (1140-43 CE)

The Fra Mauro World Map
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice (1459)

Daniela Boccassini

2010-08-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

Michael Barry: ABSTRACT: "King Arthur's Round Table and the Thousand and One Nights"

2010-08-16T21:34:00.001-07:00

The famous Round Table of knightly lore was first attributed to King Arthur in 12th- and early 13th-century Norman-French romances, but the motif's origin remains unknown. This discussion focuses on the rich cycle of romances (including tales that found their way into the Thousand and One Nights) that developed in Islamic civilization around the Arab conquest of Spain in AD 711, featuring the magic table of King Solomon's world rule supposedly found by the Muslim conquerors in the palace of the Visigothic kings of Toledo.

From the ultimate Germanic, Byzantine and Rabbinical origins of the Spanish-Islamic mythic cycle, to its attested impact on 11th- and 12th-century Latin and Romance literatures, reasons become clear why, to quote Sir Thomas Malory's celebrated 15th-century English summary of the Old French Queste del Saint-Graal: "Also Merlin made the Round Table in tokening of the roundness of the world, for by the Round Table is the world signified by right, for all the world, Christian and paynim, repair unto the Round Table ("apres cele table fu la Table Reonde par le conseil Merlin, qui ne fu pas establie sanz grant senefiance. Car en ce qu'ele est appelee Table Reonde est entendue la reondece del monde et la circonstance des planetes et des elemenz el firmament; et es circonstances dou firmament voit len les estoiles et mainte autre chose; dont len puet dire en la Table Reonde est li monde senefiez a droit. Car vos poez veoir que de toutes terres ou chevaleries repere, soit de crestienté ou paiennie, viennent à la Table Reonde li chevalier").

Erica Dodd

2010-08-16T21:34:00.000-07:00

Erica Dodd is an Adjunct Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, in the Department of History in Art, University of Victoria.

She received her B.A.in the History of Art from Wellesley College in 1951, and her Ph.D. in Byzantine art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in 1958. She subsequently studied Islamic art as a Junior Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University.

Dr. Dodd has taught at several universities, and lectured at Harvard, Oxford, London, Michigan, McMaster, McGill, and Toronto among others. She has held Fellowships at Oxford, Dumbarton Oaks and Cairo.

Dr. Dodd taught at the American University of Beirut for twenty years, where she conducted extensive research in Early Christian and early Islamic art. Her early research was in Byzantine Silver. She is presently engaged in the publication of a Supplement to her book, Byzantine Silver Stamps.

While teaching in the Middle East she became interested in the way Islamic inscriptions were used in architecture and published a book entitled The Image of the Word. She is now following up on this work with a study of the Wazir Khan Mosque, in Lahore, Pakistan.

Presently she is an Emeritus Fellow at the Center for the Studies of Religion and Society, University of Victoria, where she is completing two books on Medieval Painting in Syria and the Lebanon during the Crusades.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

Byzantine Silver Stamps, Dumbarton Oaks Studies, VII, l962

Byzantine Silver Treasures, Mongraphiender Abegg-Stiftung, Bern, l973

(with Shereen Khairallah), The Image of the Word, American University of Beirut, l982.

Mar Musa el-Habashi, near Nebek, Syria. The Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. In press.

Articles

"The Image of the Word", Berytus, XVIII, 1969, 35-6l.

"The Monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi, near Nebek, Syria", Arte medievale, 2nd Ser., VI ,(1992), pp. 61-144.

UBC Medieval Workshop 2010

NEXT WORKSHOP

Quest and Conquest: Spiritual Symbols and Myths in the Indo-Mediterranean and European Worlds

Sponsors

Organizing Committee

Vancouver accommodation

Workshop locations

Image credits

Daniela Boccassini

Michael Barry: ABSTRACT: "King Arthur's Round Table and the Thousand and One Nights"

Erica Dodd

Erica Dodd: ABSTRACT: "The Virgo Lactans: From Jerusalem to Michelangelo"

Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani

Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani: ABSTRACT: "The quest of words unread: Islamic inscriptions in Christian art"

Amie Kraus

Amie Kraus: ABSTRACT: “Themes of Conquest and Social Allegory in Medieval Europe: The Game of Chess in Les gius partiz des eschez (Anglo-norman, 14th century)”

Valerio Cappozzo

Valerio Cappozzo: ABSTRACT: "Islamic Intersections: the Conquest of Dream Sciences in Medieval Italian Miscellanies"

Livia Stoenescu

Livia Stoenescu: ABSTRACT: Re-Interpreting the Myth of Trojan Descent

Marina Lushchenko

Marina Lushchenko: ABSTRACT: "Searching for the Origins of the Turks in the Medieval West: William of Tyre, Hayton of Corycus and the genre of origo gentis"

Roberta Morosini

Roberta Morosini: ABSTRACT: “Alexander the traveler in Medieval and Renaissance Italian tradition : when a conquest is a quest”

Marco Prina

Marco Prina: ABSTRACT: “Political, aesthetic and symbolic meanings of the domed basilicas of Sicily during the comital Norman reign (1091-1130)”

Gregory Stone

Gregory Stone: ABSTRACT: "Dante's Crusade, World Peace, and the Conquest of Islam"

Jean-Luc Nardone

Jean-Luc Nardone: ABSTRACT: Quest and Conquest of the Self: The Pretext of the Crusades from the 'Fioretti' (XXIV) to the 'Decameron' (X, 9)"

Kirsten Rusko: ABSTRACT: “Jus Ad Bellum: Slaughter as an act of penitence in 'Sir Gowther' ”

Dorothy-June Fraser: ABSTRACT: “Seeing the Divine Light- Cultural Parallels and Optical Theory in Medieval Glass Mosaic- A Preliminary Study”

Michael Barry

Michael Barry: ABSTRACT: "The Moor of Venice: Averroes and the Representations of Islamic Philosophy in Medieval and Renaissance European Art"

Farid Laroussi

Farid Laroussi: ABSTRACT: "Struggling with Jihad"

Niall Christie

Niall Christie: ABSTRACT: "Fighting on Earth to Gain Heaven: The 'Vision of Paradise' Motif in the Kitab al-Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106)"

Juliet O'Brien

Juliet O’Brien: ABSTRACT: "The Cansó de la Crozada and Literary Heresy"

Filippo Andrei

Alexis Statz: ABSTRACT: “The Beloved Saracen: Reimagining the Conventional Heroine in 'Sir Bevis of Hampton' ”

Filippo Andrei: ABSTRACT: "Albert of Aachen and the Chanson de Jérusalem"

Call for Papers