Dear colleagues,

Please find below a CFP of interest for the upcoming 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (May 10-13, 2018), sponsored by the association Italians and Italianists at Kalamazoo. The panel is titled A Science of the Human: Medical Discourse as a Way of Knowing. We are looking at interdisciplinary papers that challenge the boundaries between the fields of Medieval Studies (literature, philosophy, history of medicine, religion, to name a few).

The deadline is approaching soon: Friday, September 15th.

Please address any question to Matteo Pace, mp3171@columbia.edu

____________________________________________________________________

Dear colleagues,

I am forwarding to you a Call for Papers for a panel that I am organizing for the upcoming International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo (May 10-13, 2018). The panel is titled A Science of the Human: Medical Discourse as a Way of Knowing, and it is sponsored by the association Italians and Italianists at Kalamazoo.

Please take good care of the rules governing participation in the congress (http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/policies) and submission of abstracts (http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions).

Description of the Panel

 Medical literature paves an interesting thread of knowledge in the Italian literature of the Middle Ages. From the engagement with scientific literature of the Scuola Siciliana, to the complex psychology of the Stilnovisti, to Dante’s anthropology and Boccaccio’s turns on the human, the study of the medical and physiological patterns sheds light on the way literature helped shape and reframe issues concerning body and mind.

Moreover, Medieval Italian literature engages historically with the great (re)discoveries of science, from the much celebrated court of Frederick II and Manfred and the translations from Greek and Arabic sources, to the ethical discourses brought forth by the Tuscan poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo and the other Siculo Toscani, to the tension between Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti, up to the

intersections between the Bolognese school of Taddeo Alderotti and the vernacular literature of the century.

This panel seeks to attract scholars and researcher from a variety of disciplines (literature, philology, manuscript studies, history of science, to name a few), with a focus on the intersections between medical knowledge and the Italian literature of the 13th and 14th centuries. The aim is to bridge the gap between these fields, to show how the history of science can benefit from the history of Medieval literature, and vice versa.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• the interplay between mind and body;
• human action and determinism;
• embryology and human life;
• biological determinism and ethical response;
• gender, sex, and identity;
• narratives of physicians, and medical

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, together with the Participant Information Form (http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions), before Friday, September 15th, 2017 to me at mp3171@columbia.edu.

Best regards,

Matteo Pace
Ph.D. Candidate in Italian and Comparative Literature
Department of Italian and ICLS
Columbia University
1130 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027