Beauty

Call for Papers:

The Medieval and Renaissance Postgraduate Discussion Group at Durham University invites abstracts for its fifth annual conference on 23 and 24 June 2011 addressing the theme of “Beauty”. The interdisciplinary conference aims to offer a broad ranging forum, and will be followed by a display of Durham’s medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, introduced by staf from the University’s Palace Green Library.

Possible areas of discussion might include, but are by no means limited to:

~The appreciation of beauty within literature; poems, manuscripts, and books as beautiful objects; the performance of beauty in drama.
~Changing historical attitudes to beauty traced in contemporary historiography; the debates on aesthetic qualities in medieval and Renaissance philosophy; the infuence of Continental Humanism.
~Theological interactions with beauty; the moral implications for appreciating and/or consuming human beauty; the Divine image; signs of grace.
~Gendered beauty; fashioning by the self and society; race and beauty; power and authority; infuence of the New World.
~Beauty and the visual in art or architecture; beauty in music; beauty as a valuable commodity.
~Scientifc recognition of beauty; the human form; beauty and medicine; ordered, symmetrical, and systematised beauty.

Abstracts for twenty minute papers are invited from postgraduates and post-doctoral researchers working in the Medieval and Renaissance periods in the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences. Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent via email to Jamie McKinstry, j.a.mckinstry@durham.ac.uk, By 11 April 2011.