Notes and Comments

NOTES AND COMMENTS Association News The president of the American Catholic Historical Association, Jay P. Dolan, has appointed Jo Ann Kay McNamara of Hunter College of the City University of New York chairwoman of the Committee on Program for the seventyseventh annual meeting, which will be held in New York on January 3-5, 1997. Proposals for papers or (preferably) complete sessions should be sent to Professor McNamara by January 9, 1996, at her home address: 500 West 111th Street, Apartment 5?, New York, New York 10025; telephone: 212749 -6299. Conferences, Seminars, and Programs A seminar on "Sanctity and Society in the Medieval West" is being conducted by Thomas Head of Washington University for the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago every Thursday afternoon from October 5 to December 14, 1995. It is designed as an introduction to hagiography . Various facets of the cult of the saints in the Middle Ages are being examined, and the recent work of scholars in various fields such as the history of spirituality, art history, social history, and literature which is based on hagiography is being studied. At the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference that will take place in San Francisco on October 26-28, 1995, Massimo Firpo of the University of Turin will be chairman of a round table on "Recent Works on the Reformation in Italy" and speaker at the luncheon and second plenary session; his topic will be "The Italian Reformation andJuan de Valdés." The Society for Confraternity Studies will sponsor two sessions: one on "The Iconography of Confraternal Piety," in which papers will be read by James R Banker of North Carolina State University on "Processional Banners of Italian Renaissance Confraternities "; by Laura MacCaskey of the State University of New York at Binghamton on "Sacred Representation of the Life of the Virgin at Santa Maria della Consolazione "; and by Liana Bertoldi Lenoci of the University of Trieste on "Faith and Action of Charity: The Ospedale di Santa Maria della Pietà in Bari"; the other on "Confraternities as Political Agents in Early Modern Italy and France," in which papers will be read by Konrad Eisenbichler of the University of 649 650NOTES AND COMMENTS Toronto on "The Politics of Playing: Confraternal Drama and the State"; by Christopher Stocker of the University of British Columbia on "The Confraternity of the Holy Name of Jesus: Religious Devotion and Political Organization in Paris and Orleans under the Catholic League"; and by Nicholas Terpstra of the University of Regina on "The Hand of the Brother, The Hand of the Law: Confraternities, Magistrates, and Orphanages in Early Modern Florence and Bologna." Craig Harline of Brigham Young University will be the chairman of a session on "Catholic Spiritualities of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in which Francesco Cesáreo ofJohn Carroll University will present a paper on "The Spiritual Teaching of Archbishop Girolamo Seripando "; Barbara B. Diefendorf of Boston University on "The Devout Family in Counter-Reformation France"; and Susan Eileen Dinan of the University of Wisconsin at Madison on "Creating Gender in the Catholic Reformation: The Development of the Daughters of Charity in Seventeenth-Century France." Elisabeth G. Gleason ofthe University ofSan Francisco will preside at a session on "The Eucharist and Counter-Reformation Images in Italy"; Frederick McGinness of Mount Holyoke College will speak on "Eucharistie Devotion and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome"; Thomas Worthen ofDrake University on "Eucharistie Imagery at the Banco of the Venetian Scuola del SS. Sacramento during the Counter-Reformation"; and Michelle M. Fontaine of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock on "The Bishop, the Eucharist, and the Image of Religious Unity in Counter-Reformation Modena." The twenty-sixth annual conference of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of Ohio State University will be devoted to the theme "Crucibles of Conflict: Religious Confrontation and Compromise in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe." It will be held on February 22—24, 1996. Papers in which the interrelationships of religious movements through official and popular expressions offaith, philosophical and theological writings, historical and literary texts, canon and secular law, and visual and musical representations are explored are especially sought. Participants from all disciplines will be welcome. Scholars...