AEMA20 | Call for Papers, deadline – 18 July 2025
Tempestuous Times: Crisis, Change, and Allegory in the Early Medieval and Medieval World
2–4 October 2025 | Australian Catholic University, Melbourne Campus and Online
Tempests – violent, disruptive, elemental – have long served as metaphors for crisis and transformation. From divine wrath and natural catastrophe to invasion, exile, and eschatological dread, medieval sources often cast upheaval in stormy terms. This conference aims to explore the tempest as historiographical lens, symbolic structure, and cultural diagnosis. We seek to examine how crises, whether political, environmental, social, or spiritual, were imagined, recorded, and interpreted in the medieval world. As such, we invite proposals that interrogate how such narratives were constructed, how they functioned, and how metaphor of tempest might shape our understanding of medieval change, continuity, and crisis.
We welcome papers that engage with the concept of the tempest in a broad sense, including (but not limited to):
- Political or dynastic collapse, or social unrest.
- Storms as allegory in sermons, chronicles, and visionary texts.
- The sea as space of danger, displacement, or testing.
- Iconographies of turbulence in medieval art and manuscript culture.
- Theological or philosophical responses to chaos and disorder.
- Historiographical models of crisis and recovery.
- Environmental disaster and its cultural representations.
- Affective histories of fear, awe, or dislocation.
Papers may approach these topics from a range of disciplinary angles, including history, theology, art history, literary studies, environmental humanities, manuscript studies, and archaeology. We also encourage historiographical reflections on how tempestuous frameworks shape our interpretation of medieval pasts.
In keeping with the inclusive spirit of AEMA’s annual international conferences, submissions may be thematically tempestuous – or not. There are no geographical limitations, only a requirement that submissions relate to the early medieval period (c. 400–1200 CE) – or to its reception in later contexts.
Please email submissions for a 20-minute paper (+Q&A time) to conference@aema.org.au by 18 July 2025.
Each proposal should include: the presenter/s, their academic affiliation/s (if applicable), paper title, an abstract of 150–250 words, a short presenter/s biography of 50–100 words, planned mode of presentation (in-person or online), including the timezone if online.
We warmly invite all prospective presenters to consider submitting a full version of their paper to our journal, JAEMA, for a planned special themed issue in 2026. Submissions may be made either before or after the conference.
AEMA members who are either Graduates or Early-Career Researchers are eligible to apply for a limited number of travel bursaries, and will go into the running for our Best Paper Prize awarded to both an in-person and an online presentation.
We look forward to submissions that offer tumultuous insights into the crises of the early medieval world!