The twenty-third biennial New College Conference on Medieval & Renaissance Studies will take place 5– 7 March 2026.

This is a preliminary version of the program that does not yet include room or chair assignments. If you are presenting, please check that your name, affiliation, and paper title are all correct. We look forward to seeing all participants in Sarasota in March!

DRAFT Program

1. Manuscripts: Tradition and Evolving Narrative

From Little Flowers to Little Plant: Redefining Franciscan Manuscripts

Georgina Blackwell and Yunji Li, Columbia University

The Early Transmission of the Legenda Aurea until 1350

Constanze Albers, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

The Myth of the Monolith: The Transmission of Ekkehard of Aura's Chronicle in the 12th Century

Thomas McCarthy, New College of Florida

2. Mediterranean as Melting-Pot

Medieval Italy as Part of the Dār al-Islām: the Reign of Sawdān, Emir of Bari (857-71)

Valerie Ramseyer, Wellesley College

Status and Song: Qiyān, Trobairitz, and the Poetics of Courtly Love

Radman Rasti, Texas Tech University

Courtly Behavior in the Law Codes of Crusader Cyprus

Laura Morreale, independent scholar

3. Portraits of Strong Men: Power and the Play of Emotion

Feigning Anger with Purpose: The Hero's Sulk in Erec et Enide

David S. King, Stockton University

Legends of Leadership: The "King in the Mountain" Myths of Frederick Barbarossa and Constantine XI Palaiologos

Ananda Majumdar, North Central Theological Seminary

Between the English and the Welsh: The Conflicted Career of Sir Gruffydd Llywd

Madigan Swartz, independent scholar

4. Objects and Context in Italian Renaissance Art

Meltdown: The Sacred Silver of S. Agostino in Campo Marzio and the 1527 Sack of Rome

Sharon Lee Cowan, John Cabot University

What Exactly Did John Ringling Purchase? Reconsidering a Plaster Relief Attributed to Pierino da Vinci (c. 1548-50)

Jerry A. Marino, independent scholar

Response

Sarah Cartwright, John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art

5. Who Is a Christian?

Christian Texts in Tang China: Syriac Christianity's Eastern Expansion in Late Antiquity (635–750)

Alexis Balmont, University of Hong Kong 

The Kingdom of Serbia and the Papacy in the Early Fourteenth Century

Joan Dusa, independent scholar

The Discourse of Blood in Early Fifteenth-Century Baptized Jewish Communities

Zachary Young, University of Florida

6. Testing the Boundaries of Medieval Christendom

An Early Reformation: Ideas Exposed, Lessons Learned

Kathryn Karrer, independent scholar

Prester John and the Merchants of His Land of Riches in the 14th-Century Franco-Italian Huon d'Auvergne

Shira Schwam-Baird, University of North Florida

Regions, Peoples, History: Chorography in Pietro Ranzano's Annales omnium temporum

Tiziano Tubay, Sapientia College of Theology of Religious Orders, Budapest

7. Texts and Contexts in Early England

The Ecocritical Eardstapa: Developing Earthly Perceptions and Emerging Christian Consciousness in The Wanderer

Braden Burton, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The Wonder of Beowulf

Nicole Guenther Discenza, University of South Florida

Royal Consorts, Royal Power, and Abbatial Appointments in Mid-Tenth-Century England

Mary Blanchard, Ave Maria University

8. Conceptualizing Gender in the Early Modern World

Conversations Across Generations: Women Debating the Life Course in Moderata Fonte's The Worth of Women

Caroline Castiglione, Brown University

"We Wanted to Take the Young Woman": Glimpses of Indigenous Women in the New World 

Kateri Smith, independent scholar

Daniel Gives Birth to a Baby Girl: The Unusual Case of Daniel Burckhammer

Konrad Eisenbichler, University of Toronto

9. Writing & Rewriting the Conquest of Outremer

The Jewish-Christian Scholastic Legacy in the William of Tyre Tradition

Philip Handyside, Stetson Universitry

Editing El caballero del Cisne: A Reconsideration of its Textual Variants

David Arbesu, University of South Florida

Thoughts on Translation: The Old French Origins of the Spanish Swan Knight

Anne Latowsky, University of South Florida

10. Teaching Book Technology

Information Technology and Bookish Culture in Late Antiquity: Once Again, Whither Codex and Desk from Scroll and Lap

David Edwards, New College of Florida

Reimagining Manuscript Pedagogy through New Technologies

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz, University of Leeds

Medievalisms avant la lettre

Richard Utz, Georgia Institute of Technology

11. The Spiritual Lives of Holy Women

Hidden and in Plain Sight: Performing Humility in the Vitae of Elizabeth of Hungary

Adam J. Davis, Denison University

Margery Kempe's Avenging Angel

Mary Dzon, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Realms of the Senses: The Besloten Hofjes and Women's Cultivation of Ideal Spiritual Identity Through Sensorial Environments

Meredith Vigan-Wilbur, University of South Florida

12. Power and Place in the Islamicate World

Barāthā and the Politics of Prayer: Sacred Space and Caliphal Authority in Baghdad (312-451 AH / 924–1060 CE)

Nassima Neggaz, New College of Florida

Shipbuilding, Conquest, and Trade in the Central Mediterranean: The Ships of the Zirid Dynasty (972-1148 CE)

Matt King, University of South Florida

Government of Religious Difference in the Mamluk Sultanate: Rules and Covenants in Ibn Taymīyah (1263-1328)

Julio César Cárdenas Arenas, Complutense University of Madrid

13. Theory vs. Application in Italian Law

Machiavelli's Art of War as His Imaginary Principality

Casey Wheatland, New College of Florida

Gambling and Blaspheming: Crime, Sin, or Both?

Alison Williams Lewin, Saint Joseph's University

A Consilium of Paolo di Castro (1360/62-1441) on a Usurer's Testament: Vernacular Culture in the Law

Thomas Kuehn, Clemson University

14. Absence and Presence in Shakespearean Drama

We Are Underlings: Supernatural Forces Both Mythical and Human in Julius Caesar and The Purge: Election Year (2016)

Shay Williams, University of New Hampshire

Absence in Macbeth

Lizz Angello, independent scholar

"Things invisible to see": Allegory and Agency in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy

Nova Myhill, New College of Florida

15. The Wakefield "Noah": A Roundtable Discussion

Organizer and Chair: Cameron Hunt McNabb, University of Tampa

16. Navigating Gender in Premodern Italy

Maternal Love and Guardianship

Elena Brizio, Georgetown University, Villa Le Balze (Fiesole)

Happy to Stay Single? Artisan Men and Delayed Marriage in Quattrocento Florence

Tovah Bender, Florida International University

The Politics of Penance: Gender, Confession, and the Venetian Interdict

Kathryn Taylor, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

17. Ottomans & Safavids in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Early Modern Religious Dialogue between European Prints and Persian Marginalia in the Bellini Album Manuscript

Kourosh Nejad, Ohio University 

"With all allegiance and with honour": Mediterranean Imperial Entanglement in George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (c. 1558)

Aisha Hussain, University of Salford, UK

How to Behold the Calligrapher: Revisiting Sheikh Hamdullah in Ottoman Political History

Abdullah Sami Sümer, Hitit University, Turkey

18. Dante & Music

Musica Narrativa: The Harmonics of Poetic Architecture in Dante's Divine Comedy

Shannon Valenzuela, University of Dallas

Memory and Transformation: Renaissance Legacy and Baroque Context in Isabella Leonarda's Mottetti a 1, 2 e 3 voci con violini e senza, Op. 13

Francesco Monti, Pontifical Ambrosian University Institute of Sacred Music, Milan

Afterlives: Liszt's Dantesque Monuments

Charles Hulin, Southeastern University

19. "Noah" from the Wakefield Cycle

Organizer: Sara Munson Deats, University of South Florida

Script: Ann Basso, University of South Florida

A lunchtime staged reading of the medieval mystery play "Noah," from the Wakefield cycle—perhaps one of the most entertaining of the cycle plays, in which the uxorious Noah is depicted as a hen-pecked husband, and his wife as a shrewish doubter. It will be presented with modernized language, with a duration not to exceed 30 minutes. The cast will include: Robert Logan, University of Hartford; Sara Munson Deats; Su Senapati, University of South Florida; John Wright; Barry Karpay; Giulio Basso; Lagretta Lenker, University of South Florida; Joyce Karpay, University of South Florida; and Ann Basso.

20. Bodies, Sculpture, and Representation

The Lions, the Creatures, and the Chrismon: Jaca Cathedral's Brotherly Agents of Religious Change

Coral Silver, John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art

The Joint Depiction of Artist and Commissioner: A New Pictorial Form in the Social History of Renaissance Art

Hannah Semsarha, University of Bonn & Harvard University

The Body in Early Modern Science: Sculptures of the Supine Dead Christ in Golden Age Spain

Ilenia Colón Mendoza, University of Central Florida

21. Early Christianity in Context

On Saint Augustine and the Philosophico-Theological Terminology of "Analogy" with Reference to Christian Theology before 500 AD

David Francis Sherwood, Ave Maria University

Preaching Jupiter: Lay Piety and Anti-Pagan Erudition in Late Antique Sermons

Mattias Gassman, University of Florida

The Life and Letters of Desiderius of Cahors: The Evidence of Social Network Analysis

Ralph Mathisen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

22. What's in a Name? Patronyms, Toponyms, and Community in Late Medieval Italy

Organizer: Bianca Lopez, Southern Methodist University

The Countryside Comes Home: Urban Monasteries and Regional Migration Towards the City

Lee Morrison, Washington University in St. Louis

Names and the Creation of Pre-modern Ethnicity in the Notarial Records of Fifteenth-Century Adriatic Italy

Bianca Lopez, Southern Methodist University

Labelling the Globe: Toponymic Challenges of the 15th and 21st Centuries

Carrie Beneš, New College of Florida

23. Early Modern Female Devotional Writers

Devotional Obligations and Sanctified Social Mobility in Aemilia Lanyer's "The Description of Cooke-ham"

Sarah Dorr, University of West Florida

Embodied Resurrection in the Emblems of Hester Pulter

Hannah Bocz, University of West Florida

Baroque Devotion and Female Authorship: "Fawor miłości Boskiej" (The Favor of Divine Love) attributed to Anna Teresa Piotrkowczykowa

Katarzyna Kaczor-Scheitler, University of Lodz, Poland

24. Puritan Rhetoric

In the Company of "that merry man Rablays": The Decorum of Antimarprelate Grotesques

Chris Hill, University of Tennessee at Martin

Labor as a Necessity: Puritan Motivations for an Industrious Life

R.A. Miller, independent scholar

25. Memento Mori: Visualizing Vanity, Death, and Judgment in European Art and Eschatology

Organizer: Elizabeth Lisot-Nelson, University of Texas at Tyler

The Power of Petrarch in the Depiction of the Triumph of Death in Italian Renaissance Art

Margaret Ann Zaho, University of Central Florida

All is Vanity: References to Northern Renaissance Motifs of Death in Three Interwar Paintings by Otto Dix

Kaia Magnusen, University of Tampa

The Last Judgment and the Triumph of Death: Michelangelo's Concealed Sources

Elizabeth Lisot-Nelson

26. Pigs in Space & Time

The Will of a Pig in Late Antiquity

David Rohrbacher, New College of Florida

Piglets and Pudenda: Tracing a Comic Euphemism across Millennia

Carl Shaw, New College of Florida

Divine Swine? The Role of Pigs in Byzantium

Michael Decker, University of South Florida

27. The Latinity of Early Modern Religion

Organizer: Nathaniel Hess, Warburg Institute

 The Jesuits' Demon in the Press: Errata and the Printing of Donne's Conclave Ignati

T. M. Vozar, University of Florida

Latin and Diplomacy in the Early Seventeenth Century

Eloise Davies, University of Florida

All royal and politique? Latin Writing and the French Wars of Religion

Nathaniel Hess