“Voces”. Latin Middle Ages through Key Words
« Voces ». Le Moyen Âge latin à travers ses mots-clés
Limits and Boundaries
Limites et Frontières
Published on Friday, June 06, 2025
Abstract
The conference cycle “Voces. Latin Middle Ages through Key Words” aims to take a closer look at Latin words that have played an important role in the medieval culture. Every two year we propose to focus on a different major medieval concept and its linguistic expressions. This year’s edition will focus on Limits and Boundaries.
Announcement
Workshop – 16th-17th October 2025 – Lisbon
Argument
In this edition, we turn our attention to the concepts of BOUNDARIES and LIMITS – a theme that permeates medieval thought, language, and society. Medieval boundaries manifested in diverse forms: physical frontiers between territories, linguistic divisions between Latin and vernacular, conceptual limits in scientific and religious discourse, and social demarcations between communities and individuals. The vocabulary used to express these boundaries reveals much about how medieval people understood their world and navigated its complexities.
These boundaries were rarely fixed; they functioned as fluid, permeable sites of negotiation, transgression, and cultural exchange. The terminology of limits evolved as ideas, texts, and practices traversed geographical and intellectual spaces. This fluidity challenges modern scholarly categories, whether in distinguishing medieval from Renaissance vocabulary, delineating genre boundaries, or mapping the porous limits between specialized discourses. Digital humanities approaches have recently transformed how we analyze this boundary-related terminology, enabling more nuanced explorations of how medieval society organized knowledge, power, and identity through language.
Suggested topics
We invite submissions addressing both individual words or concepts as well as complete lexical fields or conceptual domains. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary contributions that combine linguistic and historical analysis (sociological, anthropological, etc.), or provide cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspectives. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Representation of Boundaries in the Middle Ages: Latin and vernacular terminology for limits, boundaries, and caesuras; Physical and abstract boundaries (Property boundaries; Society: inclusion and exclusion; Human and non-human, male and female, etc.); Literal and metaphorical transgression (Crime and sin; Sacred vs. profane; Orthodoxy vs. heresy); Vocabulary and medieval categories: time and space
- Delineating Limits: Geographical variation in vocabulary; Blurred boundaries between Latin and vernacular languages; Still Medieval or yet Renaissance vocabulary?
- Vocabulary across Boundaries: Lexical transfer between cultures and languages; Vocabulary exchange between different communities of practice; Vocabulary domains vs. knowledge domains
- Approaches, Methods, and Tools: Addressing ambiguity and vagueness; Digital methods in medieval vocabulary studies; Lexical borrowing and semantic change
Submission Guidelines
We welcome two forms of submissions:
- Long papers (20 minutes, 10 minutes discussion), that go beyond a single text or author, and provide either wider (historical, social, cultural etc.) context for the discussion or pose important theoretical and methodological questions (historical change, methodological issues etc.);
- Short papers (10 minutes, 5 minutes discussion), which are more limited in scope, but still bring forward links between vocabulary, conceptualization and socio-cultural reality of the Middle Ages.
Conference languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish.
Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=voces2025)
by June 15th 2025 (23:59 CEST)
- long papers: 300-500 words (including references)
- communications courtes : 200-250 words (including references)
Important dates
- submission: by 15 June 2025
- acceptance notice: 30 June 2025
- registration: from 1st September 2025
- conference date : 16-17th October 2025
Organizing Committee
- Krzysztof Nowak (IJP-PAN)
- Renaud Alexandre (IRHT-CNRS)
Subjects
Places
- Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa - Alameda da Universidade
Lisbon, Portugal
Event attendance modalities
Hybrid event (on site and online)
Date(s)
- Sunday, June 15, 2025
Attached files
Keywords
- historical semantics, medieval Latin, corpus linguistics, history of concepts, boundaries
Contact(s)
- IRHT - Section de Lexicographie et Sémantique
courriel : section [dot] lexicographie [at] irht [dot] cnrs [dot] fr
Reference Urls
Information source
- Renaud Alexandre
courriel : renaud [dot] alexandre [at] irht [dot] cnrs [dot] fr
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« “Voces”. Latin Middle Ages through Key Words », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Friday, June 06, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/142kq
