Open Call for MAD Blog Submissions

Many scholars researching the Middle Ages come across references to animals, but these references are sometimes tangential and they are relegated to a footnote if they ever make it into an article or book at all. The Medieval Animal Data-Network is trying to bring these stranded pieces of evidence regarding animals in the Middle Ages to the forefront in the form of short peer-reviewed blog entries. If you usually work on animals or you found a reference about an animal, consider the option of writing a short blog entry and publishing it with us. We also accept blog entries on book reviews about animals in the Middle Ages. The publication guidelines below will give all the necessary information regarding the extent and the format for the blog entries as well as the address where you should send the submissions. Happy writing!

Publication Guidelines

Types of entries accepted:

• Short papers (specific for the blog, or given in a conference).
• Book reviews.
• Case studies.
• Study, notice about an animal.
• Zoological treaties and their authors.
• Colloquia programs and announcements.

Entries must deal with animals in the following areas of scientific inquiry:

• History.
• Art history.
• Philology (Latin, Greek, Arabic).
• Archaeozoology.
• Material culture.

Format, length and style for the entries:

• A blog post is NOT an academic paper; it is shorter, easy-reading, possibly readable by a larger audience.
• Entries should be sent in .rtf or .doc formats (no PDFs).
• Length: max. 10 000 signs including spaces and bibliography.
• Language: English (priority); German; French; Spanish.
• Give 5-10 keywords describing your paper.
• Great importance shall be given to the first lines of the post, that must give a precise description of the following content. These first lines will be displayed as an extract on the front-page of the blog.

Peer review:

• All papers will be accepted after being reviewed by two members of MAD Network (among them, historians, art historians, archaeozoologists, etc.).
• Evaluation will consider both conformation to the present editorial guidelines (entries that are too long will be refused or send back to the authors for reduction) and scientific interest.

Authorship:

• Include a couple of sentences presenting yourself (see example at: http://mad.hypotheses.org/37).
• Give a link to your personal academic webpage, if available.
• Photographic portrait (Jpeg; 500 pixels maximum image size).

Bibliography / references:

• No footnotes nor endnotes.
• Must contain a final bibliography, limited to a dozen titles maximum.
• Bibliographic style: Author-Date system in the Chicago Manual of Style for Writers. See: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html
• References in the text (Author date, pages).

Illustrations:

• Beware of copyright!
• The number of pictures is limited to 7 due to the short length of the blog entry.
• You have to give at least one image that will be displayed as an icon in the front-page of the blog, beside the title, and the first lines of the entry (“featured image”).
• Maximum image size: 1000px x 700 px.
• List of illustrations has to be given at the end of the paper with very precise captions (copyright, shelf-mark, origin, institution of conservation, etc.).
• Longer descriptions of images should be given in the main text, and not in the caption.

Submission:

You can send your blog submissions to medievalanimal at gmail.com