Call for papers for an interdisciplinary conference exploring the relationships between women and death–sure to inspire scholars of the Gothic and the fantastic.
Death and the Maiden has long been an artistic genre in the West, with its roots in the Dance Macabre tradition. In c1426, the English poet and Benediction monk, John Lydgate, adapted the Parisian cycle to include women with those taken away by a skeletal death, and in c1495, the German painter and printmaker, Albrecht Dürer, engraved a distinctly male death ravishing a young woman. But women’s connection with death go far deeper than the subject of art, for in the Greek and Roman times, it was a woman’s job to close the corpses eyes and mouth; indeed across time and space women have typically been the layers-out of the deceased.
From the practical to the representational, this interdisciplinary conference which is collaboration between the Dead Maidens, and Dr Christina Welch of the University of Winchester, seeks to draws widely on the connections between death and women, examining, exploring, and celebrating the intimate relationship between Death and the Maiden.
