Bible française abrégée, XIIIe siècle [Bible de Saint-Jean d’Acre], 1250-1254, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms-5211 réserve, fol. 69v.
The Chair for Medieval and Early Modern History of Europe at TU Chemnitz is inviting paper proposals from across all disciplines of Medieval and Early Modern Studies engaging with all aspects of “Warfare and the Belliphonic”.As an intense sensory experience, pre-modern war was understood and reflected by contemporary observers as an acoustic event. Thus, in order to understand how wars were planned, waged, perceived, and portrayed, is has been established as a productive novel approach to ‘listen’ to medieval warfare: the sounds of weapons, screams, speeches, music, and signals, which created and structured social spaces and narrations organised around war and warfare. These sounds are what is studied under the term ‘the belliphonic’.For this session we are particularly interested in papers exploring the weaponisation and utilisation of sound and its perception for the purposes of warfare. Proposed papers might examine, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Sonic warfare.
- Sound and noise as psychological warfare.
- Pragmatic sounds as a means of communication like commands and signals.
- Hearing (and not hearing) as analytical tool in warfare.
- The purposeful suppression of sound as a tactic.
- All other aspects of the belliphonic.
We will be organising one or more session(s) addressing these topics. If interested please send abstracts of no more than 300 words plus your contact details, academic status and institutional affiliation to
christoph-joseph.pretzer@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
until September 9, 2024.
Cityfall 