MONSTERS I: Haunting the Middle Ages
Organizer: Asa Simon Mittman, California State University-Chico; Sarah Alison Miller, Duquesne University
This panel proposes to explore those monstrous figures that haunt the borders between the living and the dead: ghosts, revenants, animated corpses and skeletons. What do these figures reveal about the porous boundaries between life and death, soul and body? What do they communicate about the relationship between haunting, trauma and memory? How is haunting associated with space, whether that space be a geographical location, a physical structure, a fantasized realm, or human consciousness? How were these figures depicted in art and material culture? How might monster studies be considered a haunted domain? How might the Middle Ages be considered a haunted age?
MONSTERS II: Down to the skin: Images of Flaying in the Middle Ages
Organizers: Larissa Tracy, Longwood University and Asa Simon Mittman, California State University-Chico
Presider: Larissa Tracy
From images of Saint Bartholomew holding his skin in his arms, to scenes of demons flaying the damned within the mouth of hell, to grisly execution in Havelok the Dane, to laws that prescribed it as a punishment for treason, this session explores the gruesome, even monstrous, practice of skin removal—flaying—in the Middle Ages. This session proposes to examine the widely diverse examples of this grisly practice, and explore the layered responses to skin-removal in art, history, literature, manuscript studies and law. How common was this punishment in practice? How does art reflect spiritual response? How is flaying, in any form, used to further political or religious goals? The papers in this session will literally get beneath the skin of medieval sensibilities regarding punishment and sacrifice in a nuanced discussion of medieval flaying.
Send proposals to Asa Mittman, Kat Tracy, and/or Sarah Alison Miller.
