MAPPING MEDIEVAL GEOGRAPHIES

Cartography and Geographical Thought in the Latin West and Beyond: 300-1600

A CMRS Ahmanson Conference at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Thursday May 28th – Saturday May 30th 2009

Geography as it was understood and practiced in the Middle Ages, within both eastern and western traditions, and as represented both graphically and textually, is a subject of renewed interest and importance among historians, philologists and geographers. This conference aims to promote an exchange between those of different disciplines working on geographical ideas and thinking from late Antiquity to the Renaissance on the themes of ‘Translation, transmission, transculturation’, and ‘Mapping, imagining, placing’.

Key speakers are: Daniel Birkholz (University of Texas at Austin), Veronica della Dora (University of Bristol), Kathy Lavezzo (University of Iowa), Natalia Lozovsky (UC Berkeley), Andrew Merrills (University of Leicester), Meg Roland (Marylhurst University), Emilie Savage-Smith (Oxford University), and Alessandro Scafi (Warburg Institute, London).

Paper contributions are invited which address the two conference themes, either (1) on the continuities in geographical knowledge from Antiquity into and through the Middle Ages; the complex transculturation of formal geographical and cartographic knowledge between Latin, Byzantine and Islamic scholars and travelers; and the copying and transmission of ‘key’ geographical texts and sources and their selection and adaptation, or (2) on questions of ‘scale, place and the geographical imagination’ looking at the changing distinctiveness, character and uses of ‘geography’ in medieval thought; the intertextual nature of ‘medieval geography’ between visual (cartographic) and textual descriptions, and connections between ‘thinking geographically’ (ie. spatial sensibility) and ‘geographical thinking’ (ie. writing and visualizing ‘geography’) in the Middle Ages.

Please send a 150-word abstract of your suggested paper, including title and contact details to: Dr Keith D. Lilley, School of Geography, Archaeology & Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, BT7 1NN. Or email it to: k.lilley@qub.ac.uk

Closing date for abstract submission: September 30 2008.

Limited funds are available to help support doctoral students present papers thanks to the Historical Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG.

Keith D Lilley
School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast
Northern Ireland
United Kingdom
BT7 1NN
Email: k.lilley@qub.ac.uk
Visit the website at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/mapping_medieval_geographies.pdf