ORGANIZERS:
Elisheva Baumgarten (Bar-Ilan University)
Judah Galinsky (Bar-Ilan University)
The conference will focus on the thirteenth century in medieval France as a period of innovation and change. The purpose of this gathering is to define the changes that took place in medieval society during this century. On the one hand, the thirteenth century in medieval Northern France is often sandwiched between the so-called "twelfth century Renaissance" and the fourteenth century, which was characterized by famine and disease and changed the face of Europe. At the same time, the thirteenth century is regularly examined in many contexts: the pinnacle of apostolic power; the rise of the mendicant movement (orders) and popular piety; the expansion of universities as well as substantial urban economic growth; a century of major deterioration in Christian-Jewish relations resulting in expulsions in England and later in France, and organized attacks on Jewish communities in Germany. These developments are seldom discussed simultaneously and one of the goals of the conference is to devote some attention to all these trends.
The conference will focus on specific issues such as religious polemic, Bible and society, legal developments, gender, social history, language and artistic portrayals within the Jewish and Christian traditions.
The conference is supported by the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, the Israel Science Foundation, the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Women in Judaism and the Research Authority at Bar-Ilan University, the Bernard Revel Graduate School and the Centre de recherche français de Jérusalem (CRFJ).
SPEAKERS:
Elisheva Baumgarten (Bar-Ilan University)
Ram Ben-Shalom (Open University)
David Berger (Bernard Revel Graduate School, YU)
Jeremy Cohen (Tel-Aviv University)
Mordechai Cohen (Bernard Revel Graduate School, YU)
Sophie Delmas (University of Lyon 2)
Sharon Farmer (UC Santa Barbara)
Gad Freudenthal (CNRS, Paris and University of Geneva)
Kirsten Fudeman (University of Pittsburgh)
Ari Geiger (Bar-Ilan University)
Joseph Goering (University of Toronto)
Jonathan Jacobs, (Bar-Ilan University)
Ephraim Kanarfogel (Bernard Revel Graduate School, YU)
Daniel Lasker (Ben-Gurion University and Boston College)
Anne E. Lester (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Ora Limor (Open University)
Sara Lipton (SUNY Stony Brook)
Sara Offenberg (Ben-Gurion University)
Karl Shoemaker (University of Wisconsin – Madison)
Lesley Smith (University of Oxford)
Margo Stroumsa-Uzan (Ben-Gurion University)
John Tolan (University of Nantes)
Anders Winroth (Yale University)
Israel Yuval (The Hebrew University)