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Call for Papers - '16th Annual Medieval Postgraduate Student Colloquium: The Medieval Copy'
Saturday 5 February 2011
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Somerset House, Strand, London WC2
Copies, mass-production, emulation, and originality have been significant and problematic concepts for the reception of medieval art and architecture in both its academic study and popular understanding. They continue to exert their influence on perceptions and scholarship, particularly in functioning as commonplaces for periodization, and in privileging the ‘original’ and ‘originality’. This colloquium aims to balance such tendencies, bringing together approaches from a broad chronological and geographic range of sources – Late Antique, Medieval, Byzantine, Islamic, and Renaissance – both to the idea of imitation and to the study of individual works that involve emulation, reproduction, and mass-production.
Topics for discussion might include:
- Mass-production
- Works of multiple impressions: woodcuts, badges, tokens, coins, seals, printed books
- Workshop practices, exempla, and model-books
- Medieval conceptions of the copy, emulation, and invention
- Imitations among artistic media
- Cross-cultural exchange
- Antiquarianism
- ‘Architectural copies’
- Iconographic borrowing and repetition
- Forgery
- The historiography of emulation, copying, and originality in medieval art
The Medieval Colloquium offers the opportunity for research students at all levels from different universities in the UK and abroad to present their research and receive feedback in a friendly and constructive environment. We cannot offer travel subsidies for speakers, however students from outside London are encouraged to apply to their institutions for funding to attend the colloquium.
Please send proposals of 200–300 words, for papers of 15–20 minutes, to jessica.berenbeim@courtauld.ac.uk by the closing date of 1 December 2010.