A one-day symposium at Mystic Seaport Museum, September 21, 2018
Sponsored by Mystic Seaport Museum and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
The exhibition “Science, Myth, and Mystery: The Vinland Map Saga” will be open at Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Conn., USA from May 19-September 30, 2018. Organized in collaboration with the Beinecke Library, this exhibition places the Vinland Map (VM) and its sister manuscripts, the Tartar Relation and Speculum Historiale, on public view at a US venue outside Yale for the first time in over fifty years. The exhibition outlines the story of how the manuscripts arrived at Yale, how they were announced to the public in 1965, the overwhelming public response, the scholarly debate in the humanities, and finally how scientific inquiry has dominated the question of the VM’s authenticity since the 1970s. The exhibition shares the research and viewpoints of a consensus of scholars in the humanities and sciences concluding the VM is a modern forgery.
Papers may address topics including:
– The manuscripts’ treatment by scholars and scientists since 1957
– Humanistic and scientific approaches to manuscript inquiry
– Medieval cartography
– Paleography
– Manuscript forgeries
– Analysis of the Tartar Relation and Speculum Historiale
– Norse seafaring and contact with North America
– The politics of the 1965 announcement, including reactions among Italian-American and Scandinavian-American communities
– Public and scholarly responses to the VM in Europe and Scandinavia
– Perspectives in education on first European contact with North America
– The roles of Christopher Columbus and Leif Ericson in monument culture
– Why the VM persists in the public imagination
Speakers will be awarded an honorarium of $500.
Please email a 300-word abstract and brief CV to Nicholas Bell, Senior Vice President for Curatorial Affairs at Mystic Seaport Museum:
nicholas.bell@mysticseaport.
Submissions are due Friday July 20 at 6pm EDT (UTC -4)
Notifications to successful applicants will be made by Friday, August 3.
