collective grief can take, and bereavement could of course hardly be “planetary” when the relevant technology was not there. Women's laments of the Antiquity opened up a long series of mourning practices, the modalities, rituals and practicalities of which can be addressed from a historical point of view.
Although the study of death has long been of special interest to medievalists far and wide, the theme of mourning has not benefited from a similar degree of scholarly attention. The institution of All Souls by the abbot of Cluny, the development of the practice of mortuary rolls, and the procession of mourners to the tombs all provide keys to understanding the collective handling of death. And yet, a good number of practices, notably secular ones, are less clearly established, and it is out task to define their existence, their history, their elements, juxtaposing literary, iconographic, and archaeological sources. Quite recently, modern historians have addressed the question of mourning and memory after the two World Wars, but this is a more specific and consequently restricted approach. This Conference is here to redress the balance, but we will also pay special attention to submittals from other fields: sociology, media studies, religious studies…, where scholars have been more daring.
This conference covers not only a long historical continuum from Antiquity, but also a vast geographical area, hoping to include also non-European practices, and numerous rituals, such as the turning of the bones in Madagascar. Among our interests will feature patterns of mourning; the people who feel concerned, and the degree to which they feel concerned; collective behaviours linked to mourning, spontaneous and/or ritualized ; the hows, wheres and whens of mourning crowds, in particular in urban environments; the way authorities tried to channel these crowds in order to avoid any suspicious behaviour.
Abstracts in French or English of 300 words (+ CV/resume) for a 20 minutes paper should be emailed to Christine Bousquet (email@example.com) and Manuel Royo firstname.lastname@example.org (copy to email@example.com) no later than 1st of july 2013 Authors of accepted papers will be responsible for their own travel costs and accommodation; registration fees (50 euros, discounted rates available for PhD and post-doctoral students) cover all meals and a volume per person of pre-conference proceedings. Proceedings will be eventually published in book form.
université François-Rabelais, Tours
3 rue des Tanneurs
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