Welcome to The Venerable Blog, a biweekly update highlighting the wide range of digital activities taking place on the sites hosted by Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies. We invite you to comment and participate as our digital projects change and expand!
This week, we’d like to bring attention to our annual conference taking place March 29-30 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. This year’s topic, “The French of Outremer: Communities and Communication in the Crusading Mediterranean,” grows out of the French of Outremer website hosted by the Center. The French of Outremer (or FOO) conference will feature roughly 50 speakers coming from Lebanon, Cyprus, Italy, France, Denmark, the UK, Canada, and the US who will offer papers exploring the artistic, geographical, historical, linguistic, literary, musical, and religious aspects of the French penetration and colonization of lands in the eastern Mediterranean. Two of the three plenary sessions will showcase well-known French of Outremer scholars Peter Edbury (Cardiff University) and Laura Minervini (University of Naples), and the third will feature a sneak peek from two Metropolitan Museum of Art curators who are planning the MET’s 2016 exhibition, “Jerusalem, 1000-1400.” An updated version of the program, including speaker names along with their paper abstracts, can be found here. If you are unable to join us in person, be sure to follow the conference on twitter, at #FOO2014. We will be live-streaming Dr. Edbury’s presentation, so check the conference web-page for instructions on how to follow the presentation and tweet in comments or questions.
We are looking forward to the conference with great excitement, and view it as a real opportunity to expand the activities and reach of the site. The French of Outremer site currently serves as a scholarly meeting place for those interested in French-language texts and communities from the Latin East.
We are continuously updating the various source pages and adding new scholarly submissions to our “thematic essay” page. An exciting recent contribution by French scholar Pierre-Vincent Claverie provides an introduction to the topic of Frankish epigraphy, and includes detailed images of both Latin- and French-language inscriptions etched on tombstones and other stone surfaces from the Latin East. We will soon be posting two more essays, one on textual translation in the Latin East, and another on wills from the Levant.
Our next blog post will highlight the latest additions to the French of England website, for those wishing to perfect their Anglo-Norman accents!