Announcing:
34th Annual Conference
Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University
The French of Outremer: Communities, Communications, Confabulations
Saturday March 28, 2014
with related activities Sunday, March 29, 2014
Lincoln Center Campus, New York City
The 34th annual conference of Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies is an extension of its French of Outremer Project (www.fordham.edu/frenchofoutremer). This project aims to expand awareness of the French-language writings produced in Outremer (the settlements established in the lands of the near East after the First Crusade until the sixteenth century) and the communities in which these texts were produced. To date, these texts and communities have principally received scholarly attention from art historians, scholars of language and literature, and historians. Given the wide variety of works belonging to the French-language corpus of Outremer, the conference will offer a platform for work across disciplines to view these texts in a new light, as products of an environment in which the French language was a viable and often desirable linguistic option.
We encourage work on a wide range of topics related to the French of Outremer, including:
– Differences between the real and the imagined Outremer;
– The cultural identities of communities in the Latin East and the mechanisms that perpetuated or contravened these identities;
– Ties developed with the West through crusading, pilgrimage, and merchant activities and their contributions to the “French” quality of these communities;
– Single texts or textual traditions that originated or were preserved in Outremer;
– French-language translations in the Latin East;
– The role of Outremer in the diversification of French-language genres or French-inspired cultural products (art, architecture, legal and intellectual concepts, sacred or urban spaces);
– The place of Outremer within a Francophone medieval world.
One of the conference aims is stimulate further contributions to the website in the form of overview essays, descriptions of relevant archival material, annotations of primary and secondary sources in print, or digital tools that take advantage of new humanities software platforms. Because the French of Outremer Project began as a digital initiative, this conference provides an excellent opportunity to foster a dialogue about how innovative digital tools promote and help develop a new and highly interdisciplinary field within Medieval Studies.
For inquiries about the conference or the French of Outremer project, contact Laura Morreale at medievals@fordham.edu, or visit our site, www.fordham.edu/mvst.
(See our calendar for more conferences)
