Call for Papers

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

Recently, scholars who do not fit the white cishet male paradigm have been attacked on social media, at conferences, and in print. Because microaggressions, misogyny, and mansplaining all predate the modern era and occur regularly in medieval texts, it is important that we see how our past has create the dilemma that we’re in, but also how examination and dissemination of these texts can also push the conversation about this hate speech within the Ivory Tower and beyond. Papers in this session will examine the works of the Pearl-Poet for privilege and to examine the privilege of our own scholarship.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Platinum Latin

Close reading matters. Likewise being puzzled when appropriate. Have you thought long and hard about, or worried at, a passage? Has your thinking made an interesting difference to the text’s constitution, meaning, and significance? If your paper can show an audience how to find, define, and tackle problems, and if it effectively connects something deep in a text with a bigger picture, please send us an abstract! We seek intriguing readings of Latin texts from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages. Detailed handouts and/or a Powerpoint presentation, please. We want to read and think with you.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Platinum Latin

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Goliardic Society, Western Michigan Univ.

Let the games begin! Because popular culture often paints a dull and dismal picture of the Middle Ages, we often do not get to learn of all the ways in which medieval people entertained themselves, less loose, and had fun. This session explores the role of leisure in the Middle Ages, as well as the implications (be they cultural, social, religious, political, etc.) of having a good time. This session invites papers on the role of leisure in the Middle Ages, and welcomes approaches from all disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, and religious studies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association for Rural Studies (MARS)

Medieval Association for Rural Studies (MARS) organises a session entitled ‘Silk Road(s)’: Environmental and Economic History of ‘Medieval’ Central Asia and invites interested participants to submit paper proposal abstracts. The session takes a strongly multi-disciplinary approach, and as such, it will focus on research, whose sources, methods and findings are situated across several related disciplines, including (but not limited to) history, archaeology, palaeogenetics and palaeoclimatology. Although an old field, the history of ‘Silk Road(s)’ still suffers from old misconceptions and mis-constructs begging for a scholarly revision - an idea standing at the heart of the proposed session.

This panel seeks to explore the various way in which the medieval body is reproduced within medieval culture and later imaginings of the ‘medieval’. We interpret the term ‘body’ broadly as spanning from bodies within literature or art, to manuscripts as products of bodies, and thematic or generic bodies of work. Relevant topics include but are not limited to papers on sex and reproduction in texts, manuscript and book culture, reception studies and medievalisms, patterns of images or depictions of the body within medieval art and manuscripts, engendering bodily affect in performance settings, and the spread of contagion across bodies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

Contrapuntal techniques of any kind (written, oral, improvised) are at the center of the repertory in both secular and sacred music in the Middle Ages. This session invites papers on the many styles, genres, and practices of polyphonic singing, whose vestiges can be found in sources with music notation, as well as in treatises and other texts, and visual arts. Papers can address issues of repertory, techniques, performance and relations among the different genres; they can evaluate methodological tools and their results; and finally, they can deal with theoretical issues of counterpoint and their practical consequences in the repertory.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Exarc

The purpose of this session is to present research strategies, problems, and results - even if partial - related to projects and experiments focused on medieval drinks such as beer, cider, spiced wine and mead. This session is open to researchers and enthusiasts of experimental archaeology who are interested in discussing and sharing their experiences.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Univ.

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Univ.

Thanks to the contributions of critical archival studies, scholars of material culture are increasingly turning their attention toward an interrogation of the archive: what voices are included, and which ones are silenced? Who gets to collect, and what objects are, or have been, deemed worthy of collection? Who is welcomed into archival spaces, and who is excluded? These questions are especially critical for medievalists attempting to create equitable classrooms, and this panel will explore them through a pedagogical lens, asking how we can invite our students into close engagement with our collections and into an interrogation of their ethical dimensions.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Premodern Studies, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities

The Center for Premodern Studies at UMinnesota seeks proposals for our sponsored session "Affective Borders and Emotional Landscapes: Interiority in Medieval Mediterranean Studies." Affect Theory is helping the discipline think more comparatively about the role of emotions and sensory stimuli in the development of medieval letters. Senses, and the emotional responses they elicit, play a fundamental role in the negotiation of the self with the collective. This panel aims to explore how medieval Mediterranean authors relied on prevailing notions of feeling (broadly defined) to craft their work and codify into letters the multifaceted experience of their contemporary world.

Alfred the Great had a major impact on England from the late ninth century onwards. Whether he personally wrote and translated texts, designed new fortifications and ships, made legal innovations, sponsored the production of art and manuscripts, or made a name that others used to claim authority later, "King Alfred" calls to mind many significant works and developments. “Alfredian Texts and Contexts” welcomes submissions on the circle of Alfred and developments associated with it from both newcomers and established scholars. Proposals may focus on literature, history, archaeology, manuscript studies, art history, numismatics, or interdisciplinary work.

This panel will explore ideas about how tropes of gold and shining were used in Early English texts like those in the Beowulf manuscript to indicate otherness of many types, including the monstrous, heroic, or saintly. I am especially inviting papers exploring women's status, identity and "otherness," which speaks to many ongoing issues, both in understanding Early English culture and literature but also reflecting current issues.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art

Scholars based in North America have significantly enriched the study of Gothic architecture since the mid-twentieth century. This session, the first of three, examines the decades during and following the Second World War when European expatriates including Erwin Panofsky, Henri Focillon, Otto von Simson, Paul Frankl, and Jean Bony made fundamental contributions to the field while simultaneously training students who would become influential scholars in their own rights. This session welcomes papers considering the impact of these figures and their contemporaries, as well as papers addressing the development of trends and/or lacunae in the era’s scholarship.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art

Scholars based in North America have significantly enriched the study of Gothic architecture since the mid-twentieth century. This session, the second of three, examines the period from 1970-2000, which witnessed the growth of organizations including the ICMA and AVISTA, and the emergence of a new cohort interested in applying innovative analytical methods ranging from the socio-economic to the structural. Contributors to this session should consider the impact of researchers working in those transformative decades. Additional approaches might include considering methodological applications; discussing the international reception of North American scholarship; or analyzing trends and/or lacunae in the era’s scholarship.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art

Scholars based in North America have significantly enriched the study of Gothic architecture since the mid-twentieth century, effectively complementing the work of their European colleagues. This session, the third of three, examines the decades since the millennium Technology continues to transform methods of study and collaboration, but architecture has been displaced from center stage in the study of medieval art, and the humanities generally confront many challenges. This session welcomes papers considering recent trends such as these, speculating on upcoming trends, or evaluating the formation of blind spots in North American scholarship—what is missing, and why?

Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library ms lat. e5 is a strikingly unusual book, filled with annotations, corrections, and insertions that were pasted and rebound into the manuscript decades after its creation to bring the codex into conformity with the reforms of the Council of Trent. This book, along with its sister manuscripts now kept in the sacristy of the collegiate church in Mons, offers a unique and previously unstudied view of how two named revisers, a text scribe and a music scribe, did their complicated work. We have studied both the men’s and women’s liturgical practices (canons and canonesses).

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

The anchoritic life entailed a renunciation of one’s biological ties, yet family functioned as a central religious metaphor—between brothers and sisters in Christ and between the devotee and God the father or Jesus the spouse. In this session, we are interested in how the familial experiences of anchorites shaped their practices. How might past and continuing family relationships or a family’s political ambitions influence an anchorite’s religious life? Papers welcomed that approach the topic from multiple methodologies and disciplines. We hope the session will bring together researchers on the topic of anchorites and family across the medieval world.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History

Annual lecture sponsored by De Re Militari. The topic of the lecture is proposed by the speakers who are recognized scholars in medieval military history. Session includes a response by a scholar with recognized expertise in the lecture topic and a question-answer period. The lectures are published in the Journal of Medieval Military History the following year.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

This session considers the problems of identifying scribes, artists or printers, which have been the subject of lively recent debate. Scholars are encouraged to discuss their first-hand observations of problematic issues of identification in a specific case or cases, perhaps with brief reference to previous scholarship, OR they may wish to link a MS, illumination, woodcut, or printed book with a known scribe, artist or printer.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval-Renaissance Faculty Workshop, Univ. of Louisville

We are eager to receive submissions representing a variety of perspectives, methodologies, and disciplines. Speakers are invited to explore, not only Wulfstan’s writings themselves, but also his relationship with the kings he served, his received knowledge of both cross-channel and insular traditions of political thought, and the extent to which his work echoes or differs from that of his contemporaries. It is hoped that the session will serve as an opportunity to consider how Wulfstan’s writings contribute to our understanding of legal authority, ecclesiastical culture, and the complexities of English identity in an age of upheaval.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Univ. Autónoma de Madrid

Over the past thirty years, medieval archaeology in Spain and Portugal has yielded an enormous amount of historically valuable information. Many of the results have not been widely disseminated, especially when the findings originate outside of well-planned scientific projects. Cases of special relevance are the works developed in Cordoba, Medina Azahara and Granada. The works to be presented in this panel are related to the latest findings of the excavations in the courtyard of the Mosque of Cordoba, in the Palace of Medina Azahara and in the Alhambra in Granada.

2023 marks the 100th anniversary of Arthur Kingsley Porter’s seminal Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, providing an opportunity to revisit one of medieval art history’s foundational thinkers. These sessions aim to address the work of Porter and the paradigms he created for the field. Papers might address questions such as: what is the relevance of Porter's methodologies to art historical approaches of the 20th and 21st century? How have Porter’s approaches contributed to the continued nationalization of medieval art and architecture? How have ‘big ideas’ such as a pilgrimage road style fared in the development of medieval historiography?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

This panel invites explorations of the various ways in which the Arthurian tradition can be read as “generative,” from narrative generation to generative bodies to generations of Arthurian readers and writers. Speakers are encouraged to use the catalyst of Arthur and Arthuriana to think broadly about the affordances of this “once and future” King.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)

Asexuality is often conflated with abstinence or chastity by modern readers of medieval literature and historical record. However, when engaging with medieval persons who we might label as ‘chaste,’ be they fictional characters or historical figures, there is an opportunity to investigate how they interact with their society and its sexual norms; could they be rejecting these norms? subverting them? creating a new sexual moral of their own? This session endeavors to draw attention to accounts of asexual medieval people, examine how we—as modern scholars—can interpret these accounts, and foster conversation about asexuality in the Middle Ages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Institute for Medieval Studies, Univ. of New Mexico

Assertive medieval women transgress their patriarchally assigned positions of immanence, often with the pen, the sword, and through sex. In an attempt to break new ground, we seek contributions that explore assertive medieval women––both historical and fictional––from global perspectives. Comparative perspectives that trace similar experiences are highly encouraged. Reading the Middle Ages from a broader vantage point that illustrates how women worldwide were facing comparable experiences and challenges helps us understand the Middle Ages and feminism through a new lens.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Institute for Medieval Studies, Univ. of New Mexico

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval Studies, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities

The focus of most scholarly attention on medieval French history has been on a small area in northern France. Yet during the High Middle Ages French-speaking aristocracies were at home throughout the wider Mediterranean. They went as conquerors, colonizers, and crusaders and interacted with the societies they encountered in a variety of ways. These exchanges altered their own sense of identity and had profound consequences far beyond the local realities. Our session will explore some of these interactions to better understand the full breadth of the French or Frankish experience and challenge grand narratives about the rise of the West.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture

Processions celebrating feasts and festivals abounded in Byzantium. These were public events, traversing city-streets and making claims on civic space. The descriptions and instructions for these processions concentrate largely on the top of the social hierarchy involved and consequently their proper order was a major concern. However, these were public events whose success depended on their ability to move the citizenry. Yet the crowd’s place in public ceremonies remains understudied. This panel attempts to recover Byzantine audience experience through the exploration of textual, topographical, and visual evidence.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture Project (SOEALLC)

The Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture (SOEALLC) project invites submissions for a session entitled "Augustine in pre-Conquest England" at the 2023 ICMS. This session will explore how and why Augustine of Hippo was read in pre-Conquest England. Possible topics might include the influence of Augustinian themes on Old English poetry, how Augustinian the Alfredian Soliloquies truly is, or what manuscript evidence tells us about Augustine’s presence in early England. Though the session will focus on Augustine’s influence Old English and Anglo-Latin literary culture, we welcome proposals that cast a wider net as well.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture Project (SOEALLC)

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session invites contributions that problematize the idea of composition as a fixed, authoritative act and explore a more fluid relationship among the agents of music making. Medieval music repertories are pervasively anonymous. Contrary to today’s focus on composers and the individual, medieval performers interacted with authors to modify and re-create compositions, both in writing and in performance. The audience could be involved in this process through participation in dancing and singing. We invite papers that explore issues of attribution, performance, reworking, multiple versions and reception of any musical genre in the Middle Ages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)

The last two decades have seen a revival in queer readings of medieval and medieval-inspired texts, but an underexposed theme is BDSM. As BDSM aesthetics and jargon are heavily influenced by modern ideas about the medieval, this panel seeks to explore notions of fetish and kink in the Middle Ages and its Nachleben. We invite scholars to reflect on depictions of interpersonal relationships with a non-normative streak. Please note that we adhere to contemporary definitions that consider SSC (safe, sane and consensual) as the fundamental principle for the exercise of BDSM and require informed consent of all parties involved.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Benedictine Academy

In a meditation written in Nazareth in June 1898, Charles de Foucauld wrote that Jesus told him “your time is divided, as mine used to be, between work, prayer, and sacred reading,” a division approved by de Foucauld’s spiritual director. This division derives from the Rule of Benedict as has been seen by commentators as an example of Benedictine moderation and discretio. Papers in this session will in one way or another examine how medieval Benedictines interpreted this division of time in theory and in practice. Were they moderate? How beneficial was this division of time?

This session seeks papers interested in interrogating boundaries in the study of the islands of the North Atlantic in the first millennium. Papers are especially welcome from scholars who work on the edges of the defined boundaries of their region of study, chronological period, and/or home discipline. Papers may also concern a medieval instance of boundary-breaking or defying convention.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.

To allude to the provocative title of Rebecca Dekker’s book Babies Are Not Pizzas, were medieval babies born (actively) or delivered (passively)? To what extent was birthing understood as within the authority of the mother versus that of the birth attendant(s)? We invite to this conversation papers that consider the various modes of action and passion in the birthing spaces of the medieval world. At another register, we welcome proposals that consider how the memory—traumatic, empowering, or otherwise transformative—of a birth or a stillbirth might complicate the medieval parent’s subsequent experience of authority or agency.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) Student Committee

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)

This session seeks papers that investigate how late medieval visual culture blurs the border between the sacred and the secular throughout the late medieval global world (ca. 1250-1500). During this period, the creation of and haptic engagement with sacred and secular architectural spaces and objects in various media operated in a state of flux. Such variability and fluidity were dependent on the socio-political context of the production, circulation, and reception of such objects and spaces, and were critically shaped by contemporary ontological and hermeneutic questions of their very nature and interpretation.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) Student Committee

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)

This first session invites close readings/revaluations of Old Norse narratives dealing with experiencing supranormal phenomena, putting the spotlight upon the implicit human subjects (whether inside the texts as characters or outside-of-texts as contemporary audiences) and using these narrative moments for interrogating Old Norse constructions of personhood and sensory perceptions. Such phenomenological approaches open the notoriously terse Old Norse sagas to studies of premodern self-experiences, bypassing purely "literalist" readings and recognizing supranormal experiences as integral to Old Norse self-concepts and self-narrations. New approaches engaging disability studies, queer theory, and critical race studies are especially welcome.

This second session's thematic strand centers around literary constructions, narrations, and depictions of otherworldly, other-than-human, and otherwise ambiguous figures associated with paranormal phenomena across Medieval Scandinavia, inviting new critical approaches and creative re-interpretations. We especially welcome perspectives from ecocriticism, new materialism, object-oriented-ontology, and other rogue offshoots of contemporary critical theory to problematize how the very methodologies chosen for analyses tend to shape the interpretative results they yield. Paranormal phenomena becomes auspicious site for interrogating what, then, was considered normal in premodern North, exposing socio-historical contingencies of the very concept of normativity.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Boethius Society

The De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius is widely acknowledged by scholars as one of the most widely read and most frequently translated works of the early Middle Ages. Boethian concepts such as Fortune's Wheel, the Highest Good, and the Eternal Present inform and enrich the works of later writers and thinkers across the widest range of vernacular language traditions. This session seeks to feature speakers who will examine the translation, adaptation, and influence of Boethius's most famous work.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure Univ.

Bonaventure’s well-known reliance on the Franciscan School at Paris and the works produced by Alexander of Hales and his circle of early 13^th-century theologians can be seen clearly in his own Sentences Commentary—but where Bonaventure includes sources absent from Hales’ Gloss on the Sentences, a precedent is not infrequently found in Albert the Great’s own commentary. This session invites papers that examine both Bonaventure’s use of Albert as a direct source and the wider intellectual exchange between the Franciscan and Dominicans schools in Paris.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Harvard Medieval Colloquium

The panel welcomes work that addresses medieval border-crossings and border-crossers. What movements–of bodies, objects, cultures, communities–are depicted in the medieval British literary, documentary, and material record? How do such corpora move, migrate, and interact with one another, and what transformations do they undergo as they cross spaces and boundaries? Are such movements viewed as chiefly destructive and dislocative phenomena, or as giving rise to new formations, communities, and identities? What movements gave rise to the medieval texts we study today–and how can such texts cross into and inform our understanding of the movements and border-crossings of the present?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, Univ. of Texas–El Paso

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)

Foods grown, consumed, and held in esteem are means by which groups have drawn distinctions among themselves for millennia. In the case of Medieval Iberia, with the cohabitation of the “Three Religions of the Book,” this was particularly the case. But religious difference in food consumption is only one type of gastronomical limit. Geographical and climatic differences set limits of crops raised, and economic differences determined the accessibility of certain ingredients. This session welcomes proposals from a variety of disciplines whose objects of study demonstrate the various gastronomical borders of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

Medieval books communicate far more than the words on their pages. They were frequently subjected to damage and repair, to loss and addition, to division and recombination. Their bindings bear witness to the moments in their history that altered and shaped them, or -- in the case of still older books recycled into binding material -- destroyed them. This session is dedicated to everything about the codex that is not its text, to what Szirmai called "the archaeology of medieval bookbinding".

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Univ.

With rising interest in teaching material culture, more medievalists are assembling their own teaching collections of manuscripts and early books. That collecting, even when underwritten by institutional funds, is often undertaken by individuals who are new to book collecting – and who may not have substantial guidance within their institutions. This session addresses that gap, providing information about provenance research, ethical collecting, and budgeting, all in service of developing a collection that can support a wide range of pedagogical needs. In so doing, the panel seeks to promote and encourage object-based learning at a wider range of institutions.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages

Sometimes the most obvious examples of medievalism are right under our noses. C. S. Lewis obviously invested his imaginary world of Narnia with all sorts of medieval images, plots, themes, and characters. Not to mention costumes, props, and, sometimes, the awful language of tongue-in-cheek medievalism. We seek scholarly papers not so much reminding us of what we know, but reappraising what we thought we knew, about Narnian medievalism, with special emphases on cultural difference, race, gender, visionary experience, as well as topics we have not yet imagined.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages

At a Stratford Shakespeare conference the day before World War Two began, C. S. Lewis argued that Shakespeare was not a Renaissance author and, besides, the Renaissance was a fiction. Nothing could be more central to Lewis's own Medieval scholarship (and his medievalism) than his denial of the Renaissance. Although this tagged him as a dinosaur in his time, his position looks rather much like the status quo from our perspective. We seek papers exploring, interpreting, resisting, refuting, and/or explaining Lewis's position and its significance for both Medieval/Early Modern Studies and for his own scholarly and creative work.

Carolingian View from Creation tackles the Frankish world from the perspective of three actors: Antichrist, demons, and God. Panelists deploy a variety of media—textual, architectural, visual, material, and ritual—to reconstruct Carolingian Christianity through an otherworldly lens. The presenters survey Carolingian lands from the heavens to the abyss, from the frontier zone of empire to the centers of human authority, from the moment of Creation to the end of days. In so doing, the panelists center on what is (largely) unseen—God, demons, Antichrist—to gauge how the otherworldly manifests itself through disruptions of human bodies and earthly spaces.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

The session focuses on monophonic chant in its liturgical context, with a broad geographical and chronological scope ranging from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance (and beyond). While we expect papers to be primarily focused on music, we encourage interdisciplinary methodologies that place chant in its historical and cultural contexts. We also invite papers that compare Western chant with other monophonic liturgical traditions, providing a broader and more inclusive vision of how the sacred word has been musically projected in different cultures.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Ovidiana

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review

A persistent borrower from Classical poets and historians, Chaucer sets many of his narratives in the distant past of Rome, Troy, and various other ancient Christian and non-Christian spaces. His themes and ideas, however, are distinctly of his own time and place. Chaucer borrows, adapts, and sometimes completely rethinks and locates his sources, and his characters’ voices reveal the courts, schools, streets, and suburbs of medieval London, Oxford, and Paris. This session seeks papers that explore how Chaucer’s temporalities reflect his embeddedness in and adaptation of the discourses of his Antique forebears.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review

Chaucer’s Temporalities 2: Medieval and ModernEven as Chaucer has been praised through the centuries as the consummate poet of medieval English, contemporary scholars often question the (in)sensitivity of his attitudes about such value-laden topics as gender, sexuality, and family, politics and warfare, and science and religion. For this session, we seek papers that examine how modern Chaucer scholarship evaluates his narratives on our terms, how we rigorously examine his fourteenth-century consciousness in the light of twenty-first-century issues and principles. Papers that offer modern critiques of Chaucer’s contemporaries are also welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies (TACMRS)

Heroes, kings, nations, and individuals all seek an understanding of their purpose and place in the world. Philosophers, theologians, artists, and writers similarly strive to articulate answers to the questions about the meaning of life. Different systems of thought lead to tension between competing answers. Fate and free will, luck and fortune, and providence and destiny serve as touchstones for understanding the outcomes of events. This session will consider papers that explore the ways in which medieval culture represents the resolution of these tensions and seeks to find new ways of recognizing humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), North American Branch

Chrétien de Troyes is arguably the most important author of courtly literature and hence central to the International Courtly Literature Society's mission. The last decades, however, have been moving from the canon to previously neglected authors. The last years in particular have expanded the definition of medieval - and courtly - literature to be even more inclusive. Now the time has come to assess what this means for the foundational figure of a genre which is by definition elitist, aristocratic, Christian and Central European. This session will bring current research together with the courtly canon and its most prominent author.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: North American Patristics Society

The North American Patristics Society sponsored session Christianity in Late Antiquity 2 seeks abstracts engaging with any aspect of the study of Christianity in Late Antiquity (100-700 C. E.) from any region of the Near East, the Mediterranean, and Europe. These papers can focus on specific regions; comment on written texts and/or material culture; treat different social, intellectual, and religious developments; or discuss particular themes, persons, or events in the context of late ancient societies. Abstracts can call attention to newer methodologies and approaches to the study of late ancient Christianity and/or various aspects of patristics scholarship.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: North American Patristics Society

The North American Patristics Society sponsored session Christianity in Late Antiquity 2 seeks abstracts engaging with any aspect of the study of Christianity in Late Antiquity (100-700 C. E.) from any region of the Near East, the Mediterranean, and Europe. These papers can focus on specific regions; comment on written texts and/or material culture; treat different social, intellectual, and religious developments; or discuss particular themes, persons, or events in the context of late ancient societies. Abstracts can call attention to newer methodologies and approaches to the study of late ancient Christianity and/or various aspects of patristics scholarship.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

The publication of The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien in September 2022 affords us an opportunity to investigate the work of Christopher Tolkien as editor. Edited by the Bodleian’s librarian Richard Ovenden and Tolkien Archivist Catherine McIlwaine, this volume is well concerned with the work of reading and editing manuscripts. A medievalist by training, Christopher is best known as the editor of his father’s legendarium. This paper session invites contributions that engage with the memorial volume and consider the role of Christopher Tolkien’s background in medieval texts as editor of J. R. R. Tolkien’s manuscripts.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

Principal Sponsoring Organization: La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Military propaganda in medieval chronicles served as a tool either to justify one’s claims and acts or to bolster up social and political status and auctoritas. Victories in battle were aggrandized for a variety of political and religious reasons. But how did medieval chroniclers narrate and visualize military defeats? What rhetorical and affective strategies were employed to describe and to visually represent instances of defeat? How did they materially embody the ensuing trauma? This session will aim at answering these questions by exploring cultural practices that textually and visually document the trauma of defeat in Medieval Iberian chronicles

Principal Sponsoring Organization: La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies, Western Michigan Univ.

Papers are requested exploring the presence of Cistercian thought and themes in medieval literature in vernacular languages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies, Western Michigan Univ.

Mysticism is a most crucial phenomenon in the history of culture of the Western world since it deals with the highest goals and values of the human life. It was an important part of the Medieval monastic world and together with many other things it influenced deeply the intellectual culture of the Western world. The history of mysticism in the Western world is a history about the highest and most important ambitions and possibilities of the individual regarding the understanding of oneself and the divine. The focus of the session will be on the Cistercian contribution to this history.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies, Western Michigan Univ.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Aquinas and 'the Arabs' International Working Group

This session seeks papers on the Islamic philosophical tradition.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

Climate change is progressing at an alarming rate, but doesn’t just have to do with the weather. As politics and culture become more polarized around the world, we are witnessing extreme changes to social, political, and spiritual shifts, as well as ecological. In this panel, the IPPS will explore how these same monumental shifts hit the late medieval world, as reflected in the art and culture that remains extant today. This panel will also examine how these shifts in late medieval thought can be both a warning and a hope to modern readers.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Pearl-Poet Society

J. R. R. Tolkien was a reader, translator, and teacher of several medieval poets and their poetry. He demonstrated particular devotion to Anglo-Saxon riddles, The Battle of Maldon, Beowulf, The Poetic Edda, The Prose Edda, Sir Orfeo, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the works of Chaucer, and Arthurian legends, among other poems. His critical commentaries have influenced students, scholars, and readers of Tolkien’s fantasy fiction. The significance of Tolkien’s interpretations of medieval poetry deserves further investigation in terms of the theme of “climate change,” which can be explored in social, ecological, political, and spiritual terms in this session.

The patient analysis of Old English texts (prose or poetry)—word by word, phrase by phrase— is in itself rewarding, but is also foundational for other important endeavors in the field: e.g., comparative philology, lexicography, oral-formulaic analysis, editing, source study. This session will provide a forum for applied close readings of Old English literary texts. We encourage papers that move from the careful analysis of words and phrases to a broader interpretation of a single text. The session will focus more on the engagement with discreet verbal textures, rather than on historical contexts, comparative work, reception, or methodological reflections.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), Swiss Branch

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Univ. Zürich

Descriptions of men’s and women’s clothing are not especially common in medieval French narrative texts, despite particular attention, in some literary genres, to short but significant physical portrayals. When descriptions of personal attire are present, they are codified. This, in turn, reflects the codification of fashion in society, which is well represented, for example, in didactical literature, but which can also be observed in medieval renderings of Classical texts. This session aims to study some characteristics of this theme, with regard to different aspects of medieval French literary production.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), Swiss Branch

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Univ. Zürich

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

This session explores the uses of technology in eliciting information about the study of MSS and books, focusing on multispectral imaging, data recovery, new collation methods, and the digital humanities more generally. It is also envisioned as a sharing session with papers on useful repositories and other online resources scholars need to know about. Papers might further discuss new kinds of scholarly collaboration enabled by Zoom and social media.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Princeton Univ. Numismatic Collection

Byzantine coins and seals survive in enormous numbers, and thus provide some of the most important sources of evidence for economic and administrative history, historical geography, imperial messaging, and individual identity. Lead seals in particular are under exploited by scholars despite the rich onomastic and prosopographic data encoded on each specimen. Although focusing on coins and seals from Byzantium this panel welcomes speakers working on materials from a comparative perspective.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Princeton Univ. Numismatic Collection

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)

When lay audiences imagine the Middle Ages, they imagine gratuitous violence, overindulgent feasting, and a monolithic Church relentlessly punishing the weak. Nonetheless, there is something to be said for the excess and conspicuous consumption that often turns up in medieval literature. In this panel, we will look at how indulgence and gluttony are portrayed in medieval literary works: how the feasting, fighting, and tomfoolery indicate the values of a medieval audience, and why authors like the Pearl-Poet condemned such excess. This panel will also consider the dichotomy of church versus court, and class issues between the nobility and everyone else.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Jean Gerson Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Alain Chartier Society

Fifteenth-century European Christian thinkers confronted a variety of local and global Others: ongoing warfare, schism, and expulsions along with the emergence of the Ottoman Empire, the persistence of Hussite Bohemia, and the end of the Iberian reconquista all encouraged new ways of thinking about identity and difference. While scholarship on Gerson, Chartier, and others from their milieu is welcome, we also welcome scholarship exploring Otherness elsewhere in (and at the margins of) fifteenth-century Europe.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Academy of Jewish-Christian Studies

This session invites papers from scholars who are looking at the complex situation Jewish converts to Christianity faced in the Middle Ages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Academy of Jewish-Christian Studies

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Stanford Univ.

The medieval cult of saints resided at a hazy verge between the material world and the spiritual one. From the inception of saint veneration in late antiquity and throughout its expansion over the Middle Ages, this pantheon of powerful figures continually sundered, redefined, and crossed cultural boundaries. We invite papers that explore a specific aspect within this larger framework: how did medieval saints cross boundaries of gender and sexuality? Examples may include accounts of women saints who lived as monks or male hermits, reformed prostitutes who became exemplars, or saints who were conceived via supernatural or non-sexual methods.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Rencesvals, American-Canadian Branch

In his influential Palimpsests, Genette proposed terms to refer to the relationship among texts: intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality, and hypertextuality. Some of these connections are not new to medieval scholars. Yet, textual networks might be more productively explored against trade routes, religious and political invasions, and ideological shifts. How are textual transpositions anchored in cultural clashes and exchanges? We invite papers that consider intertextual transpositions where epics in romance languages are in the center, both as hypotexts (i.e. sources of characters, motifs, etc.) and hypertexts (that is, adaptations, appropriations, and translations of other stories, messages, etc. as source texts).

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society

In the dedicatory preface to his foundational philosophical work, De docta ignorantia (1440), Nicholas of Cusa stated that he had arrived at his insights through “a celestial gift from the Father of Lights”, while traveling on a galley from Constantinople to Venice. Is it possible that this event was, in fact, an electrical phenomenon as new evidence suggests? If so, what does that mean for Cusanus’ interpretation of this event, which he found so profoundly important for his theological speculative work that followed?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dante Society of America

The Dante Society of America is proposing 3 open sessions that invite scholars to engage with the work of Dante Alighieri both from within the field of Dante Studies and through a multitude of interdisciplinary perspectives. Coming off the centenary year of 2021, we are interested in a wide range of approaches such as those that seek to historicize Dante, those that consider his work in dialogue with global medieval culture, and those that consider the long history of his multicultural reception.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: CU Mediterranean Studies Group

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): CU Mediterranean Studies Group

Papers are sought that explore how people of various classes, genders, and religious traditions grappled with death, memorialized it, sanctified it or vilified it across the Mediterranean world, and to see how Christians, Muslims, and Jews from Europe, North Africa and West Asia commemorated, avenged, feared or forestalled death, and how they imagined it in art, literature and song. Interdisciplinary and comparative papers are particularly welcome as are those that employ innovative methodologies or approaches.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.

This panel invites contributors to present projects integrating the digital humanities with medieval environmental history research. How are digital tools such as GIS, databases, virtual re-creation, and AI expanding our understanding of human-nature relationships in the Middle Ages? How are medievalists using these tools to explore datasets from the period? What are the implications for present-day questions such as periodization and climate crisis? Some topics may include modeling, mapping, preservation, the digital humanities in environmental archaeology, and using digitized archives to characterize human-environment interactions. We invite contributions from scholars of all geographic regions working on environmental topics between 500-1500 C.E.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Corpus Burgundiae Medii Aevi / Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Laboratório de Teoria e História das Mídias Medievais, Univ. Federal do Rio de Janeiro

This paper session welcomes research concerned with: History writing, historiography and its relations with the use of digitized corpora of medieval documents; The epistemic analysis on the impacts of the use of digital documentation for the production of knowledge about the Middle Ages; Historiographical periodizations and the use of digital documentation; The impacts of the previous elements on the production of knowledge in historiographical specific fields such as hagiography, diplomatics, cartography, etc.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages

Recognizing that environments, climates, and diseases recognize no boundaries, Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2022) includes studies that touch on Europe, the wider Mediterranean world, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The contributions to this work engage with both historians and scientists to reflect upon landscapes of disease in the medieval world. In this panel, speakers will offer new research that builds on the book’s key themes, focusing in particular on medieval disease environments outside and beyond Europe.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)

DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion) invites paper proposals for “Dress and Textiles III: Written Clues.” This virtual session is designed to showcase new research on dress and textile references in a range of text sources, such as wills and court documents, inventories and trade records, sermons and clerical writing, and literature and poetry. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary analyses that contextualize and illuminate the written references with complementary data from other types of sources. Papers presented at the session will also be assessed for publication potential in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)

Principal Sponsoring Organization: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)

DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion) invites paper proposals for “Dress and Textiles I: Mysteries and Obscurities.” This session is designed to showcase new research on problematic dress and textile references from a range of source types. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary analyses that contextualize and illuminate these references with complementary data from other types of sources. Papers presented at the session will also be assessed for publication potential in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)

DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion) invites paper proposals for “Dress and Textiles II: Embellishment and Decoration.” This session is designed to showcase new research on actual examples and methods as well as on interpretation of depictions in art and writing. Any scholarly approach to medieval or early modern textiles and clothing is welcome, but we particularly encourage interdisciplinary analyses that contextualize and illuminate the topic with complementary data from multiple types of sources. Papers presented at the session will also be assessed for publication potential in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Academy of America

Movement, whether implied or supplied by the motion or imagination of the viewer, manipulated viewer response. Focusing on the visual arts of Eastern Christian cultures, the papers in this session will explore how dynamic decoration could guide perception and sensation, delight and wonder, and will consider new approaches to the analysis and interpretation of such motifs.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Medieval Europe

The journal Early Medieval Europe is a thoroughly interdisciplinary forum, encouraging the discussion of all aspects of the Early Middle Ages with a strong focus on Europe. Our sessions are multi-disciplinary, promoting the mixing of ideas and methodologies, topics and time frames, and geographical and chronological diversity. We welcome proposals from all early medievalists, including both newer and more prominent scholars.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Material Collective

The ongoing environmental crisis facing our planet calls for action in every field. Medieval art historians can help make sense of the situation by exploring the ways people conceived of, saw, and interacted with the natural world in the Middle Ages. Yet there are still relatively few scholarly studies that take an ecocritical approach to medieval art, despite the expansion of the approach in other subfields of art history. We invite papers on any topic within medieval art that will help the field work towards a richer body of literature on the environmental art history of the Middle Ages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

Digital Mappa (DM) is an open-source digital humanities platform for open-access workspaces, projects and publications, and it is particularly useful editing non-codex manuscripts such as rolls. This session seeks three papers by scholars who have used DM to edit projects featuring medieval rolls, with the aim to 1) showcase new projects, 2) show how DM supports project development (and suggestions for how it might be improved), and 3) encourage conversation and collaboration amongst scholars.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval People

This session is co-sponsored by the Haskins Society and Medieval People. It invites papers that address elite women and memory, broadly conceived. Topics might include women’s interaction with memory through material objects, manuscripts, documentary culture, patronage, bequests, donations and inventories. Examinations of kin groups, dynastic networks and non-familial bonds are also encouraged. The session would ideally be both geographically and chronologically expansive, allowing for topics from early- to late-medieval periods and from the disciplines of history, literature, object studies and cultural studies. Papers with a global perspective are especially encouraged.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval People

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval People

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Emblem Studies

The Society for Emblem Studies invites proposals on topics such as: Emblem books and manuscripts, medieval sources for emblems such as pilgrim badges, heraldry, court culture, and royal entries; emblem in arts and architecture, political and religious discourses and iconography; emblems in the material and visual culture. We welcome new approaches to emblem studies, including gender perspectives, global reception and production of emblems, contribution on the practice and theory of emblem digitization.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)

Medieval trans studies has emerged as a developing field that complicates modern assumptions about binary gender, gender nonconformity, and trans subjectivity in medieval literary, artistic, and historical documents. Medieval people employed a range of terms to denote various aspects of gender presentation, performance, and embodiment in medieval Europe, including nonbinary genders, in ways that do not neatly map onto modern trans or queer theory. As such, this session seeks papers that engage in questions and/or broach solutions to the theoretical and methodological challenges found within medieval trans studies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures

Failure remains a major unwritten part of the disciplinary history of digital medieval studies. By not knowing what others have tried (and failed at) before, we risk reinventing already-invented wheels; by only celebrating success stories, we risk disincentivizing digital work. This session aims to foster conversations about the value of digital failures and how we can accurately assess concepts like "success" and "failure" in a field that measures time in decades and centuries. We invite talks on shuttered or otherwise inaccessible projects, contemporary creative data reuse from earlier "failed" projects, unseen projects & medievalists doing important disciplinary work .

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Society of Irish Medieval Studies (ASIMS)

For the annual ASIMS Farrell Lecture, Dr. Elizabeth Boyle of Maynooth University, Ireland, will weave together the past and the present, addressing two questions: first, to what extent can we identify a concept of 'virtue ethics' in early medieval Ireland, as a philosophical strand of thinking not necessarily (or at least not wholly) derived from Christian morality? And second, how do we delineate and practice an ethics of the scholarly study of medieval Ireland in the twenty-first century, ensuring the development of an inclusive and equitable discipline? Westley Follett, Professor of History, University of Southern Mississippi will be the respondent.

Medieval towns were home to many people who were not engaged in food production, including craft-makers and religious specialists. This session will explore how archaeological and/or archival data can be used to reconstruct urban medieval diets and the relationships between urban consumers and rural food producers. Papers that draw on zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, artidfactual, and/or archival data are welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Mens et Mensa: Society for the Study of Food in the Middle Ages

Food, feasting, and fasting are consistent themes and powerfully resonant metaphors across many genres of late medieval Iberian works from the Latin Christian tradition, including hagiographic narratives, miracle tales, exempla, poetry, sermons, and visionary texts. While the obvious reference point is the Eucharist, this panel argues that food imagery provides fertile points of critical departure and a range of material approaches for examinations of morality, theology, gender roles, and textual practices.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies, Western Michigan Univ.

At the 2022 Cistercian & Monastic Studies Conference, several forgotten Cistercians, including Eutropious Proust, and Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, and Sophia were re-introduced, proving and elucidating the broad influence of the Cistercian community outside of the twelfth-century boundaries that often delimit our research. Many intriguing Cistercians remain to be re-discovered. Continuing the effort, launched by Jean Traux last year, this panel seeks to further identify and spark interest in the lives and accomplishments of unnoticed Cistercians, regardless of their time period or location. Of particular interest, are those individuals, like Boccone and Lobkowitz, whose writings intersect theology and science.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for International Brut Studies

The collection of semi-legendary historical texts known as the Brut is witnessed by over four-hundred manuscripts in English alone, many of which have been brought to light in the past few decades. This proposed session provides a forum for scholars to share findings about the Brut manuscripts, including new discoveries in individual manuscripts, comparisons of variant texts, and examination of paleographic and codicological features. The session especially encourages papers that compare various manuscripts, compare different manuscripts hands, examine manuscript features such as illustration and rubrication, and / or discuss the genealogy of the Brut.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

There have been excellent studies of the ways the Middle Ages is presented, represented and misrepresented in modern video games, but critical study of analog games lags behind. And yet, medieval-themed board and card games are wildly popular, covering topics from Vikings (Feast of Odin) to art (Sagrada) and literature (Beowulf), the Islamic world (Merv), and even Plague (Rattus Cartus), let alone the current popularity of fantasy role-play like D&D. In what ways do board and card games reflect and reinforce contemporary misconceptions about the Middle Ages, and how can games inform or even disrupt these tropes?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

Cultural game theorists have analyzed texts as games or how games are a fruitful analogical lens for examining literature, suggesting that storytellers and audiences play with or against each other within textual game spaces. Medieval manuscripts likewise highlight text as game, with marginalia left by scribes, readers, and illuminators indicating that texts were often understood as interactive games. Texts were also frequently performed, and audiences actively engaged with them by adopting theatrical, playful roles. This session proposes to explore the gaming relationships between texts, audiences, and storytellers to better understand how literary games served people of the Middle Ages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)

This open session on philology invites papers on Old English and Old Norse, and especially less frequently represented languages, including Old High German, Old Saxon, Gothic, Runic, Middle Dutch, and Old Yiddish.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Ovidiana

This panel invites papers that cast light on how medieval readers negotiated the tricky issues of Ovid's morality and utility. Questions that might be addressed include the following: What strategies were employed to redeem Ovid as an author? How was his poetic corpus redefined, delimited, or extended to render it safe or useful? How was Ovid read in the schoolroom, and what kinds of knowledge was he felt to impart? How did commentaries, translations, or adaptations mediate between difficult parts of his oeuvre and his readers? How are sensitive topics in Ovid’s poetry treated in medieval literary and visual media?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: John Gower Society

Though John Gower died in 1408, he remained a formidable literary presence throughout the early modern period. In many ways Gower undermines the walls of periodization erected by later scholars. This session asks medieval and early modern scholars to consider how Gower endured into and influenced the early modern, especially as English poetry and English looked back to the Ricardian period for continuity and difference, and to consider the problems of periodization with Gower generally.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: John Gower Society

During his lifetime, John Gower witnessed popular rebellion, climate and regime change, erosion of trust in institutions, social unrest, and a global pandemic. This session invites panelists to consider John Gower as a poet of uncertain times. Where in Gower's multilingual oeuvre can we identify intersections of instability, flux, change, transformation, and chaos? What significance might these moments of uncertainty hold for audiences both medieval and modern? How do Gower and his audience express and respond to existential uncertainty through art? Finally, what does it mean to read John Gower in our own uncertain times?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

While a saint’s text does not commonly serve as their relic in medieval hagiographies, the rendering of the vita as efficacious is not uncommon. In texts like the Life of Margaret of Antioch, saints’ words were believed to channel the grace she had when she was living, even beyond her death. In the case of the Life of Ida of Leuven, reading the vita was believed to be a performance of salvation, one that could facilitate affective and bodily healing. The panel seeks to explore these and/or other medieval hagiographical texts that were believed to be efficacious and curative.

This panel explores the conceptions of bodies, health, illness and medicine in the Nordic areas of Medieval Europe: England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Scandinavia and Iceland, with an emphasis on how social factors such as gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, physical ability and culture contact can impact such ideas. The interdisciplinary approach of the panel welcomes contributions from the fields of history, literature, philosophy, science, religion, art, archaeology, and manuscript studies. Contributors are invited to analyse their sources both in Latin and vernacular languages, addressing questions pertaining to the social constructions of health, illness and medicine and their historical framework.

As bishop of Hippo, Augustine defended orthodox Christianity against opponents of the Christian faith: Manichaeans, Donatists, Pelagians, Massilians. In each instance, Augustine encounters an opponent who also claims to possess the truth of Christianity. This session seeks to determine how, if at all, Augustine's encounters with his critics impacted his understanding of Christianity and to examine the legitimacy of his critics' accusations that his teachings are heterodox.

Despite the ubiquity of Latin writing across the British Isles, scholarship tends to focus on vernacular texts, crafting narratives of nascent literary traditions often seen through a proto-lingo-nationalistic lenses. And yet, the British Isles are home to some unique forms of decentralized Latin often resulting from extensive use of glossaries without the aid of the "native speakers" on the Continent.Of special interest are papers that focus on the interaction of various Latin traditions: Hiberno- and Anglo-, Insular and Continental, etc.; and papers that focus on Latin and vernacular interactions, whether they be linguistic, literary, geographical, political, or religious.

Medieval horses, and other equids, were put to different uses across times, geographies and cultures. It is only by understanding the many roles played by these versatile quadrupeds that we can obtain a balanced view of medieval societies. This session concentrates on the pragmatic and functional aspects of horsemanship and the use of other equids across the medieval world. We encourage interdisciplinary discourse from all fields of medieval studies, particularly papers looking beyond medieval Europe. Authors will be invited to submit their papers for publication in a special volume in the Rewriting Equestrian History series published by Trivent Medieval.

Medieval horses, and other equids, were put to different uses across times, geographies and cultures and, correspondingly, represented differently in art, literature, language and many other areas of medieval life. This session concentrates on the portrayal of equids and horsemanship across the medieval world. We encourage interdisciplinary contributions from all fields of medieval studies, particularly papers looking beyond medieval Europe. Authors will be invited to submit their papers for publication in a special volume in the Rewriting Equestrian History series published by Trivent Medieval.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)

The evidence of creativity among the "Three Cultures" of medieval Iberia (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) is abundant. Shifts in current understandings of the cognitive processes of creativity have also transformed our modern perceptions of the various medieval imaginaries. This panel seeks examinations of creativity as a concept in its various forms (literary, artistic, religious, legal, etc.) as well as the evolution of the ways medievalists have understood and studied imaginative phenomena in their medieval Iberian manifestations.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Index of Medieval Art, Princeton Univ.

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

This paper panel seeks to bring together scholars whose work has been influenced by Alison Stones’s scholarship on medieval manuscripts and their illuminations. Papers might include discussions of Arthurian manuscripts, the Miracles of Gautier de Coinci, or manuscripts associated with the cult of Saint James and the pilgrimage to Compostela, as well as broader issues of artistic attribution, the “Gothic style” of illumination, digital humanities, etc. The panel will seek to offer insight into the influence of Stones’s wide-ranging scholarship on medieval manuscripts over the last several decades.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Foremothers Society

This paper panel is one of two sessions honoring Bonnie Wheeler for her substantial contributions to and impact on the field of medieval studies generally, and feminist medieval studies specifically. We seek 15-20 minute papers on matters related to any of Dr. Wheeler's primary research subjects: the Arthurian legend, Chaucer, medieval romance, gender studies generally, and women writers, scholars, teachers, and leaders.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Ovidiana

This panel invites a variety of approaches to the study of incompleteness, omission, and the fragmentary in textual and/or visual traditions of the medieval Ovid. Proposals might consider: how medieval audiences reacted to lost or fragmentary Ovidian works or manuscripts; how Ovid was fragmented through excerption and compilation; how commentators filled in perceived gaps in Ovid’s works or lacunae in his biographical tradition; how authors adapted narratives of incompleteness in Ovid’s poetry; how those who translated or reworked Ovidian texts responded to incompleteness, or introduced incompleteness themselves; or how pseudo-Ovidian works served to relieve the Ovidian tradition of perceived incompleteness.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application (MEARCSTAPA)

This session considers various definitions of “insular” as they affect constructions of monstrosity. “Insularity” — bodies of land surrounded and connected by water, but also peoples and places perceived as cut off from larger communities of contact — bridges ideas, texts, artifacts, and concepts across our watery globe. Papers can think geographically and spatially, broadening the purview of the monstrous globally, including, for example, the monstrosity of the anthropocene and “New Thalassology.” Papers will emphasize the insular monster and the monstrosity of islands. We invite interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches that address the insularity of monsters, and the monstrousness of insularity.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (SSBMA)

Recent scholarship on the reception of Biblical texts in the medieval world is no longer confined to studies on Christian commentary. The biblical books, especially those of the Hebrew Biblical tradition, resonate in more than one religious tradition. The first books of the Bible, for instance, figure prominently in three Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as Torah, Pentateuch, and Tawrat, respectively. This session aims to highlight these biblical texts as loci of interfaith encounter and dialogue, and invites papers that address the reception of these biblical materials in an interfaith environment.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Academy of Jewish-Christian Studies

The session welcomes papers of scholars working on Jewish-Christian relations in terms of literature, theology, art, etc.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Arthurian Literature

This session questions several critical axioms about Arthurian literature. Texts and critics often emphasize the knight in mediaeval Arthurian literature; other scholars emphasize the importance of women to the tradition, Arthurian art can be found in religious settings, and manuscript evidence indicates chivalric and mercantile readers. Within the texts, the more famous knights and gentry ladies often rely on the unsung assistance of hermits, messengers, healers, and others to complete their quests. Yet Arthurian literature is generally associated with the chivalric class. This session invites papers from any methodology that explore non-armigerous characters in, or audiences around, Arthurian literature.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Arthurian Literature

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Late Antiquity

The Society for Late Antiquity sponsored session Late Antiquity I seeks abstract submissions for the thoughtful study of any aspect of late antiquity, from any period ranging from ca. 250-750, and from any region of Europe, the Mediterranean, world, and the Middle East. Such papers might focus on a specific region, time, or development; comment on a vast array of written and/or material sources; or treat a particular theme, person, or event, as long as they are late antique.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

As the language of the church, education, and civic administration, Latin was shared by clerical, monastic, and intellectual communities, creating pathways through which non-liturgical Latin song could travel. Yet, at the same time, the majority of Latin songs surviving in medieval sources are unique, reflecting local and often deeply personal engagement. This panel explores Latin song as it sits between the local and the trans-regional, the personal and the shared, locating ways in which songs written in a language that was no one’s mother tongue could become markers of personal and corporate identity.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval-Renaissance Faculty Workshop, Univ. of Louisville

We invite papers that examine the many ways in which law was made, understood, practiced, promulgated, and transcribed in early medieval Britain. We are eager to receive submissions representing a variety of perspectives, methodologies, and disciplines. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): royal legislation, legal manuscripts, law in/and literature, legal procedure, charters and diplomatics, writs and wills, dispute resolution, theories of law and justice, perceptions of early law in later periods, law in/and art. We welcome traditional philological and historicist approaches, as well as those informed by modern critical theory.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society

Marked by plague and protest, feast and famine, the fourteenth century was a time of social complexity and legal innovation. This panel will explore the interplay between law and society, broadly defined, in this tumultuous century. Topics could include: statutory responses to crisis, the interplay between custom and law, choice of forum in a world of competing jurisdictions, the use of written records, and the rise of the legal profession. Papers are welcome on any aspect of this broad theme, and geographic diversity, including beyond the bounds of western Europe, will be a priority in selecting papers for the panel.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Selden Society

We accept submissions from any area of legal history (e.g. English, Celtic, Continental, Roman, Canon) and from any period within the Middle Ages. We encourage a variety of methods, from traditional legal analysis to interdisciplinary approaches (merging legal history with, e.g., economics, political science, literature, anthropology, etc.), and also welcome junior scholars and graduate students.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Selden Society

We invite proposals that explore medieval law not as doctrine or precept but as performance: as lived, spatial, sensory, and performative experience. While we welcome discussion of any texts, images, or other sources that represent law as a performance practice, we’re especially interested in papers that treat historical legal events or practices as, themselves, modes of representation. We also seek approaches that break with the conventional critical norms or academic vocabulary of our era: for instance, those that draw their interpretive methodologies from the sources, and thus shed unexpected light on how contemporaries understood and experienced what they saw.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Jean Gerson Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Alain Chartier Society

All topics on Gerson, Chartier, and authors from their milieu are welcome. Comparative and intersectional approaches are encouraged. We are especially interested in the study of late medieval/early modern discourse that is highly personal to the author and addressed to a specific audience, yet also designed to engage with a wider readership through social/manuscript networking and in many cases, response and dialogue. Women and “heretics,” as well as establishment figures such as Gerson and Chartier, were involved in this process as writers, addressees, and participants in intertextual exchange. Last year’s topics included Marguerite Porete, Philippe de Mézières, and Jan Hus.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

In 2019, Daniel Sawyer (Merton College, Oxford) spoke to the international EBS conference in Dublin on “The books we lack.” Lost texts (and illustrations) pose a perennial problem for scholars. One wonders about Sir Thomas Malory’s French book, manuscripts and books mentioned in wills (rarely by title), books lent and lost (the Pastons’ Troilus lent to the Widow Wyngfelde), the “Book of Gower” cited in the will of Elizabeth Kyngeston Findern, and many others. Many medieval books are copies of copies; papers in this session will discuss non-extant books and their influence on the manuscripts and books that survive today.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Univ. of Colorado–Boulder

The session invites both traditional and innovative work on the poetics of compilation in the medieval period. We no longer consider medieval scribes or compilers as complete bumblers, and we tend to accept that even happenstance can produce a meaningful arrangement. Decades of more narrow scholarship have likely missed information that may be gleaned through a generous approach to medieval manuscripts. Many kinds of approach to medieval compilations are welcome, particularly those producing insight, new knowledge, and/or delight.

Which manuscripts were used for public reading? And how can we prove this use? How can we distinguish manuscripts for reading aloud in private and for public reading? The script, layout, punctuation and the use of tonic accents, even neumes or litterae significativae, but also the choice of texts can provide viable indications. ‘Scoring’ (Leonard E. Boyle) for reading aloud and other strategies of encoding and visualizing performance cues can be explored as part of a ‘Grammar of Legibility’ (Malcolm B. Parkes). We invite contributions on specific (Western) manuscripts as well as methodological discussions on this topic.

Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) was an avid book collector and self-proclaimed "vello-maniac". His extensive collection was dispersed around the world after his death. This session hopes to bring together papers on former Phillipps manuscripts, including but not limited to their acquisition, provenance, and/or material histories. The session especially welcomes discussion of manuscript fragments, either those acquired by Phillipps or those created from Phillipps manuscripts after the dispersal of the collection.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society

The crises of the fourteenth century wrought transformations in economic life and material culture. At the same time, a rich body of source material is available to scholars interested in material culture in the fourteenth century: inventories; wills; depictions of material objects in literature and visual arts; and, of course, material objects themselves. This session seeks papers that explore the relationship between people and things. Contributions from any disciplinary lens—including, but not limited to, history, literature, and art history. Papers may address any type of material culture – decorative or utilitarian, sacred or profane, elite or non-elite, luxurious or humble.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages

This panel explores the formulation and circulation of medical recipes and the practice of household science in medieval and early modern Europe. Papers will investigate the intellectual, cultural, and social forces that lead to the development and use of household recipes as well as the methods by which such medical formulations circulated within social networks. Attention will be given to discussing current research on the chemical science behind such medical recipes, such as new experiments focused on recreating their physical composition and testing formulations derived from ingredients and procedures described in medieval and early modern texts.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

Old English and other vernaculars of northwest Europe produced abundant remedies to preserve health. Some of these texts clearly draw from Latin sources, which in turn might derive from Greek, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern traditions. Others have no known textual tradition behind them and seem to owe much to the local experience of practitioners spanning many generations. Some remedies address familiar ailments like poor digestion, headaches, and difficult childbirth, while others offer magical protection from demonic possession or witchcraft. The focus of this session will be on vernacular remedies, but not to the exclusion of Latin or other languages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association

Relationships are at the core of humanity. This session will focus on the importance of interactions, friendships, and sexual relationships between pre-modern people. Papers will focus on a variety of these relationships: the interpersonal encounters between Muslims and Christians, along with extended conversations between individuals of the two faith cultures, the interactions between early medieval women, and testimony regarding sexual relationships and impotence. These social, legal, and textual relationships shed light on an important aspect of humanity and the historical insight they provide.

We invite proposals for papers engaging with Medieval Studies from a Caribbean location and/or perspective, or considering pre-Columbian Caribbean literature, religion, and cultures from any location or theoretical stance. Contributions might consider the impact of medieval discourse in the premodern and early modern Caribbean, or apply Caribbean theory to an analysis of medieval literature, among other possibilities.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval Documentary Cultures

This session invites papers on investigations of all aspects of documentary culture in the Middle Ages, including the commissioning, use and preservation of documents, whether manuscript, books or other types of documentary materials, by both secular and monastic entities. Possible topics include lay or ecclesiastical manuscript culture, rhetorical agency, manuscript and cartulary production and dissemination, the use of manuscripts and memory, including commissioning, production and dissemination of women’s secular and monastic writing. The session is also a natural fit for analysis of documentary artifacts as material sources: charters, letters, seals, iconography, illumination.

The recent fire at the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris has sparked much discussion on the spiritual faith, meaning, and sentiment that medieval churches convey and evoke. What insights did medieval church builders have into the reasons why a church building fosters personal commitment to the faith and even attachment to the building itself? Why and how do the laws of belief and prayer relate in essence to the laws of building and living (lex credendi, lex orandi, lex aedificandi, lex vivendi)? This session will propose and explore answers.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Ecocriticisms

This session seeks papers on gender and global medieval ecocriticisms, including queer, trans, and ecofeminist readings, which map and/or reconfigure our social, cultural, and physical, human, and non-human environments. What can dialogue across these intersections of medieval and modern temporal and spatial ecologies teach us and how can we think anew with them? We seek proposals from graduate students and early career as well as more established researchers working in archaeology, art history, economic and environmental history,music, religious studies and various medieval literatures. Please submit a title and 300-word abstract to heide.estes@gmail.com by Sept. 15, 2022.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Ecocriticisms

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Ecocriticisms

This session seeks papers on animals in global medieval studies with possible engagement with critical animal studies. What kinds of institutional and verbal structures influence the interactions among humans and animals? What makes a wild animal or a domesticated animal, possible? How does human difference affect human-animal relationships? We seek proposals from graduate students and early career as well as more established researchers working in archaeology, art history, critical animal studies, economic and environmental history,music, religious studies and various medieval literatures. Please submit a title and 300-word abstract to heide.estes@gmail.com by Sept. 15, 2022.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Ecocriticisms

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS)

This roundtable reassesses the importance of medieval Iberian pilgrimage routes in both the spread of diseases and healing. Participants will draw on historiographic and archaeological information to consider a range of topics, including hospitality infrastructure, the arrival of treatments, the impact and perception in medieval society of various infectious diseases, the roles played by disability and mental health, and the differences between Galicia and other European routes.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS)

This session seeks to bring together advances to our knowledge of the medieval Romance languages of Iberia. Presentations may focus on intrinsic linguistic features found on medieval texts, or on extrinsic aspects (e.g. social, cultural, political, artistic, literary) that affected the use or development of the medieval languages of Iberia. Any approach dealing with the use, contact, variation or change in any of the Ibero-Romance languages is welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval People

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval Studies Research Group, Univ. of Lincoln

This session highlights the experiences of people living in the town of Medieval Lincoln and the surrounding countryside. During the Middle Ages, Lincoln was an important hub of commerce, home to a thriving cathedral school, and politically strategic. Fortunately, there are rich sources —textual and material —that survive from medieval Lincoln and Lincolnshire. Using cutting edge methodologies and previously unexplored sources, these papers will explore the lives of a range of people who called medieval Lincoln home. This session also will publicize the newly re-launched journal Medieval People and the University of Lincoln Medieval Studies Research Group.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History

This session focuses on the period from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, roughly the sixth to twelfth centuries. Papers discussing all aspects of medieval warfare, broadly defined, are welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History

This session focuses on the period from the Central Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, roughly the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. Papers discussing all aspects of medieval warfare, broadly defined, are welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History

This session focuses on the period from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, roughly the fourth through sixteenth centuries. Papers discussing all aspects of military communications and logistics, broadly defined, are welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History

This session focuses on the technology of warfare, broadly defined, throughout the Middle Ages. Papers discussing all aspects of medieval warfare are welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

Digital tools available for musicological research run the gamut from the publication of online repositories of manuscript facsimiles and databases of musical repertories to innovative epistemological solutions in which the digital medium allows scholars to analyze and explore the inner features of musical and cultural phenomena. This panel will include presentations of new digital resources as well as papers that critically examine the theoretical and practical connections between computing and medieval musicology, address the technological divide among different parts of the world (and how this can affect the circulation of ideas), and illustrate possible pedagogical applications of digital medieval musicology.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: ERC Starting Grant NOTA, no. 948152

The study of medieval note-taking gives insight into how the classroom functioned, on how individuals worked with their notes, and on how certain practices and pieces of knowledge were transmitted by notebooks. Besides this knowledge related to medieval academia, notebooks also provide the researcher special insight into the culture of the time and the social status of their owner. Papers focusing on particular case-studies of notebooks from the Middle Ages are invited.This session is supported by the ERC Starting Grant NOTA "Note-Taking and Notebooks as Channels of Medieval Academic Dissemination across Europe" (project code 948152).

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society

The study of sermons and associated texts continues to grow. Sermons are now incorporated even into interdisciplinary studies and are mined for evidence of social and intellectual attitudes, liturgical and spiritual life. Much, however, remains to be discovered. This session encourages scholars to submit papers on both innovative and/or traditional approaches to sermon studies and interdisciplinary studies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society

The study of sermons and associated texts continues to grow. Sermons are now incorporated even into interdisciplinary studies and are mined for evidence of social and intellectual attitudes, liturgical and spiritual life. Much, however, remains to be discovered. This session encourages scholars to submit papers on both innovative and/or traditional approaches to sermon studies. This session will be in-person.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.

Over 300 years ago, the British textual scholar Richard Bentley asserted his preference for the power of human reason over the readings of a hundred manuscripts. While the art of textual criticism has advanced considerably in the intervening centuries through the development of systematic methodologies such as Lachmannian stemmatics, consensus on the ideal editorial theory for medieval texts remains elusive. We seek to gather scholars interested in interrogating past and current theories of textual criticism and evaluating their application to the editing of medieval texts—especially (but not limited to) the notoriously complex textual traditions found in hagiography and vernacular romance.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Goliardic Society, Western Michigan Univ.

The medieval past has been misheard, misunderstood, or purposefully re-interpreted for bigoted, harmful ends. This session explores different ways that we can listen to the voices of the Middle Ages and respond to their stories. Much work has been done to hear the voices that have been underprivileged in history and scholarship, and this session hopes to highlight that work. This session welcomes any methodology, but will prioritize contributions regarding underprivileged voices from the Middle Ages (this includes critical race theory, queer theory, gender studies, disability studies). We invite contributions of any geographic region within the period of 500-1500 CE.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Popular culture offers both positive and negative representations of medieval women in medievalist and medievalesque works from Arthuriana and depictions of Joan of Arc and Hildegard von Bingen to Disney’s Princesses, films like The Lord of the Rings, Snow White and the Huntress and The Duel, and streaming series like House of the Dragon and Rings of Power. There has been an increasing focus on these figures in both the popular press and academic discourse; however, much work remains to be done to more fully assess how these texts adapt, adopt, and/or appropriate medieval characters and tropes.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session explores the use of medieval music in the modern imagination. We encourage papers that explore (but are not limited to) the following topics: How composers re-imagined the Middle Ages sonically in their music compositions from the Early Modern period on, and how these works help shape our own understanding of the past; the use of medieval music as a cue for certain social, religious, and cultural ideas in film, television, video games, and recordings; and how ideas about the Middle Ages are embedded in certain musical genres, and how those genres are portrayed in different media.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Polytheism-Oriented Medievalists of North America (P-OMoNA)

Though not a formal academic, Michael J. “Mick” McCoy (May 7, 1941-May 3, 2021) was an informed artist, published author, theologian, and enthusiast for many subjects that were connected to medieval (and especially Celtic, and more specifically Irish) literature and myth, magic, religion, gender/sexuality, social structures, and cultural continuities. He was an avid supporter of P.-O.M.o.N.A.’s projects and mission, and this session commemorates him with one (or more) presentations on topics he would have enjoyed hearing about. Though not limited to Celtic/Irish topics, papers which have relevance to the pre-Christian religious phenomena, mindsets, and practices are of particular interest.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure Univ.

From c. 1215 onward, the Latin church had two parallel structures for reaching the laity, the seculars and the mendicants. As the latter exploded in numbers and popularity, the two became rivals, sometimes espousing radically different agendas for reform and concepts of the nature of the church itself. From time to time, this broke into open conflict. But the two could often co-operate, as when a parish priest invited a friar to preach, or even overlap, as when a friar was elected to the episcopate. Papers are invited that address the nature of these complex relationships.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society

This session would consider types of merchants and aspects of merchant life in the long 14th century. Papers could consider various merchant trades, travels, geographic scope, networks, capitalization, challenges, sovereign or local support or disapproval, socio-economic hierarchies, and merchant life. Historical, literary, economic, art-related and other types of papers are welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

Just prior to his death last October, Derek Pearsall finished, with Linne R. Mooney, the Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. He wrote extensively on Chaucer and Lydgate and produced an edition of Piers Plowman. Most of all, Derek promoted the study of the history of the book, first in his graduate programs at the University of York, later at Harvard and in his support of the Early Book Society. This session focuses on any aspect of the production of Middle English manuscripts or printed books.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Machaut Society

What value lies in the void? This session delves into the spaces, pauses, and absences present in later medieval experience, to assess the idea of ‘the gap’ and its potentialities across a variety of contexts and media. Distance and absence long structured human-divine relations, but other gaps emerging in musical, literary, or material initiatives (13th-15th centuries) could facilitate and/or complicate, through association with liminal genres; secular subjects and sites; formal, sensory or technological experimentation; untexted or marginalized voices. Open to various approaches, we welcome contributions that explore what is missing and why, and that consider implications for current interdisciplinary inquiry.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

The physical structure of manuscripts - how quires are arranged, and which leaves are physically attached - are important in manuscript studies, but how that structure is represented and aligned with other information such as illustrations and textual contents is underappreciated. For this session we are looking for papers about the structural modeling of manuscripts in general, the VisColl data model specifically, and projects that have used the VCEditor software (https://vceditor.library.upenn.edu/)

Between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, Europe gradually became a money economy. New financial practices developed, along with vexing ethical and practical questions. Literature and the arts bore witness to the complexity of the phenomenon. New genres, such as Nicole Oresme’s De Moneta, inaugurated the monetary treatise, and the fresh approaches of painters, sculptors and composers spoke to the excitement and the trepidation of the moment. This session proposes a fresh look, through the arts of the time, at the culture’s appreciation of its economic achievement and its grappling with the moral and strategic challenges that came with it.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

From the end of the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries, commerce, monetarization, taxation, and economic thinking significantly influenced European cultural and literary production, conditioning many social and cultural dynamics. These ideas apply to Medieval Iberia, we need important conversations deploying the explanatory value of economy and the fisc in historical and literary studies, considering them essential rather than curiosity or context. Proposals may include but are not limited to categories such as taxation, money, market, wealth, labor, property, consumption; representations of the economy and money; economic characters (tax-collectors, usurers, merchants); debates and conflicts (levies, usury, debasement of currency), etc.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Magistra: A Journal of Women's Spirituality in History

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies, Western Michigan Univ.

While some may think only of traditional monastic life when they think of medieval religious women, there were a variety of lifestyle options which will be explored in this session. Papers will identify, compare or otherwise elucidate the rules, practices and distinctions among them or discuss those who influenced them.

We invite papers that might address subjects such as how medieval sculptural programs shaped and transformed various social, political, or religious communities through direct and indirect contact. We welcome investigations excavating premodern performance practices via the paradigm of "social sculpture," with an emphasis on the diverse and global medieval world system. Possible subjects might include: participatory sculpture, performance, and spectacle, the role of the sculpted body-in-space in structuring religious ritual, manipulation of the body in penitential and confessory settings, and delimiting premodern race and community building through public oaths and acts of conversion.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

Magic, alchemy, geomancy, and other occult arts were never part of the official curriculum in any medieval Christian university faculty. Moreover, magical treatises abound in claims of legitimacy in terms of belonging alongside other more overtly recognized sciences. Nevertheless, the abundance of surviving treatises, manuals, and commentaries suggests that there must have been some means outside the bounds of officially recognized institutions for these bodies of knowledge and practices to have been taught, learned, and transmitted, despite the negative light often cast upon them in ‘mainstream’ circles. This session aims to investigate the pedagogy of such arts and practices.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

During the later Middle Ages, astrology began to play an ever more prominent role in university curricula. It was frequently merged with astronomy as one of the Seven Liberal Arts, and it became required knowledge for the practice of medicine. These developments created a need for new masters capable of rendering its intricacies intelligible to the next generation of doctors and other practitioners. This session aims to examine how the pedagogy of astrology functioned, and how the teaching of that discipline fits alongside the rest of the Liberal Arts curriculum.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society

This paper panel highlights the multidisciplinarity of Marie's works. Papers may address any of the known works by Marie de France (the Lais, the Fables, the Espurgatoire seint Patriz, and/or La Vie Seinte Audree) or her imitators and draw connections with various trends in contemporary scholarship. Our objective is to provide a space for Marie de France scholars to come together (rather than being scattered across thematic panels at the Congress) and to stimulate discussion regarding the ways that Marie can be incorporated into articles or monographs dealing with issues beyond Romance Studies.

This session brings together recent research on medieval music, musicians, and sources in the Low Countries. Papers dealing with any aspect of music and liturgy in the Low Countries are welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session investigates the relationship between music, space, and place in the Middle Ages. We invite contributions that address the locations—real or imagined—within which medieval music existed, analyzing the relationship between sonic, spatial and environmental experience. Topics may include acoustical spaces, medieval soundscapes, and the interactions of performed music with natural and artificial sound (such as animal poems or the ringing of bells). Looking beyond the court, the church, and/or the cloister, the session invites a fresh look at musical events outside of these traditional spaces and the way in which they interacted with their architectural or natural environment.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)

The COVID-19 pandemic instigated global mutual aid activity, inspired partly by Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Kropotkin draws from a variety of sources to argue that horizontal cooperation, rather than competition, is what has allowed various species to survive and thrive. He describes guilds and unions of the Middle Ages as sites where mutual aid thrived. 120 years after its publication, this paper panel considers how works of the Middle Ages might have explored cooperation, responsibility, and solidarity across experiences of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and class–and how such care may remain urgent and crucial today.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society (IAS), Swiss Branch

Recent studies allow modern readers to further discover late Arthurian prose romances such as Guiron, Prophecies de Merlin, or Suite-Merlin. These late romances contain a vast compilation of episodes narrating different adventures of the main characters. But who are their companions? The goal of this session is to shed light on the unknown heroes who, in the narrative structure of these late romances, play an important role in their respective episodes rather than in the compilation as a whole. We aim to provide thematic studies of one or more sidekicks appearing in late Arthurian romances. All methodological approaches are welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)

The allusions to the Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages made by far-right politicians and conservative political commentators, the claims for alternative regional and national identities within today’s Spain grounded on a medieval past, or the increasing presence of iconic figures such as El Cid in series and novels are just a few examples of the incidence of the Iberian Middle Ages in the public sphere.This panel welcomes papers that discuss and analyze the uses and misuses of the Middle Ages for modern day purposes through an array of different media.

This session proposes an interdisciplinary approach to women’s communities centered at French religious houses, and interprets creative, devotional, and other kinds of output inspired by these institutional contexts. How did music, art, liturgies, and literature figure in representations and articulations of these women’s voices? We consider how such works created networks among writers, readers, and performers, and we investigate how convents, functioning as inspiration and narrative loci, shaped lyric and text. We aim to newly demonstrate how particular institutional contexts framed gendered expression and communal life, and how particular works reflected and fashioned women’s voices, within and beyond convent walls.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Committee for the Nomination of St. Gertrude as a Doctor of the Church

Leipzig University Library's MS 827 is the oldest-known manuscript of "The Herald of God’s Loving-Kindness," copied shortly after Gertrude’s death. The comparison between Leipzig codex and the Legatus Standard Edition rises new critical issues, calling into questions what was hitertho known about the Legatus. This session aims to introduce the main features of the forthcoming edition of the codex, the critical issues raised by the text, and to explore some possible hermeneutic ways to solve them, with the larger goal of providing an inter-disciplinary forum for a wide discussion of all aspects involved in Leipzig MS 827.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for International Brut Studies

The multilingual character and enduring influence of the Brut tradition raise important questions about the relationship of language, history, authority, and ethnicity. The session welcomes papers that examine the Brut from a language-based methodology, including translation theory (Brut authors as translators or issues translating the Bruts), textual authority, and the relationship of language to ethnic identity or to gender. Issues for discussion include how translation reorients historical texts, how authors and translators establish textual authority, the relationship of language to ethnic identity and/or geographic borders, and related topics. Other critical approaches, such as border theory or eco-criticism, will be considered.

Parish churches were found throughout medieval Europe. Serving the spiritual needs of local populations, these buildings became centers of public life, providing religious services, processions, and pageants to secular assemblies, tax collection, and alms distribution. Surviving examples feature important architecture, sculpture, stained glass, wall painting, and liturgical furniture--most vastly understudied. These sessions seek to explore this extensive corpus of material from a range of temporal, regional, disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Especially welcome are contributions that reflect on how evolving research on the art and architecture of the parish church broadens, deepens, and transforms our understanding of medieval society.

Parish churches were found throughout medieval Europe. Serving the spiritual needs of local populations, these buildings became centers of public life, providing religious services, processions, and pageants to secular assemblies, tax collection, and alms distribution. Surviving examples feature important architecture, sculpture, stained glass, wall painting, and liturgical furniture--most vastly understudied. These sessions seek to explore this extensive corpus of material from a range of temporal, regional, disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Especially welcome are contributions that reflect on how evolving research on the art and architecture of the parish church broadens, deepens, and transforms our understanding of medieval society.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cleveland Museum of Art

The material alabaster, which reached its zenith in 15th century sculpture in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Spain, for example with the so-called Rimini Master, but also Tilman Riemenschneider, has only recently come back into focus. These works are characterized above all by their high quality and were often made for special commissions. This session focuses on the circle of the so-called Rimini Master and its importance for Early Netherlandish art. Paper proposals with different methodological approaches, including technological aspects and questions of materiality and perception are particularly welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cleveland Museum of Art

The material alabaster, which reached its zenith in 15th century sculpture in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Spain, for example with the so-called Rimini Master, but also Tilman Riemenschneider, has only recently come back into focus. These works are characterized above all by their high quality and were often made for special commissions. This session will focus on the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider with a focus on questions of materiality during the decades before the reformation. Paper proposals combining different methodological approaches are particularly welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS)

The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS) continues its annual tradition of inviting all scholars new to the field of early drama studies, specifically graduate students and recent PhDs (within four years of receiving the degree), to submit their work to the “New Voices” panel, which will consist of four papers and commentary from a respondent. The MRDS welcomes all approaches to early drama studies for this open-topic session. 1 September deadline. Please email a 250-word abstract to Maggie Solberg at esolberg@bowdoin.edu.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society

This session invites papers from graduate students and early career researchers who present on topics of interest in the many fields and periods of the medieval past to which Charles Homer Haskins contributed. These include, but are not limited to, early England, Viking, Norman, and Angevin history as well as the history of the neighboring peoples and territories that surrounded them. Of special interest are those papers that utilize new methodologies and combine sources in fresh ways. Papers presented in this session are eligible for the Denis Bethell Prize, awarded by the Haskins Society for the best early career paper.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England

Since 2003, the "New Voices on Early Medieval England" sessions at Kalamazoo (formerly "New Voices in Anglo-Saxon Studies") have been an ongoing and successful tradition for scholars of early English literature, history, and culture attending the annual conference. New and emerging scholars in studies on early medieval England working in any discipline are invited to submit proposals for consideration.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Royal Studies Network

The Royal Studies Network promotes and fosters new research in medieval monarchy studies, from rethinking old debates, such as who killed the Princes in the Tower, to new approaches to familiar subjects, such as bridal and wedding progresses. This panel invites papers that offer new approaches, new sources, or new interpretations to well-known royal medieval discourses and debates.

Authors who have recently published in the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures will discuss how they will move forward and expand on these projects.

Charity begins at home, but so, too, does alterity; notions of foreignness can emerge even in neighborhoods and other highly localized spaces where diverse populations coexist. We seek papers that interrogate the manifold inclusions and exclusions of the “strangers within” late medieval French society, and what the cultural representations of their proximate alterities reveal. Topics may include internal migration, religious difference and the Jewish experience, class, gender, and disability. Who is socially incorporated and who remains “foreign”? What is unique about later medieval French representations of the “other” next door? And what does it mean to “belong”?

Proposals might explore the factors shaping nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and fiction about the Middle Ages or that used the medieval as a pretext. What historical, social, and intellectual views shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to the Middle Ages? How did a self-conscious use of the Middle Ages that combines both the historical record and imagination allow writers and artists to reflect and critique commercial, social, and political realities as well as create the Middle Ages that their contemporaries desired and needed.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

North Africa saw unparalleled upheavals in late antiquity, from its place as a breadbasket of the western Roman Empire to its conquest in turn by the Vandals, Byzantium, and the Arabs. Through it all, North Africa remained a focal point of Mediterranean politics, thought, and commerce. Papers on this panel might investigate the region’s historical or theological developments; the material reflections of its ever-shifting political or social climates; or the changing economic bases that allowed the region to thrive despite these disturbances. Particularly welcome are papers that highlight connections between all three of these regions.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Texas Medieval Association (TEMA)

We invite papers that explore how objects of luxury, such as chess boards, textiles, sculptures, glass decorative items, religious objects, and even commissioned books or written works produced in the Muslim territories of al-Andalus (711-1492) were used in the Kingdom of Castille for purposes of propaganda by Christian kingdoms. The panelists argue that it was important for the 'owners' of the luxury items to associated themselves with these fetishized objects to argue for their own value by association. At the same time, these objects were purposefully de-contextualized so as to obscure their provenance and imply production.

The University of Waterloo’s Medieval DRAGEN Lab (DL) is North America’s first digital humanities lab dedicated to the study of historical climate and culture. As part of its mandate, the Lab’s Maker Space explores traditional and innovative ways of studying material objects. We invite papers from like-minded scholars engaged in new and/or traditional modes of making. Papers should explore the integration of new techniques and applications (for example 3D object printing, scanning, and model generating) in their historical contexts to illuminate how the study of the Middle Ages benefits from material and digital production in the present.

This session seeks paper proposals that explore Old English literature in the context of global analogues. Sagas taught with Beowulf demonstrate that examining analogues is a profitable endeavor, opening up possibilities of shared motifs; the folktale characteristics that underlie these stories; and how the stories vary. What do analogue studies and/or a comparative approach add to our understanding of an Old English text? The opposite also holds true—what does a reading or interpretation of an Old English text do for our understanding of a text from the global Middle Ages? We look forward to finding out.

Thomas Merton, Malcolm X, Dorothy Day, Jack Kerouac, C. S. Lewis: the list is long of modern converts (of different sorts) who present their experiences as a pilgrimage. Whether their source is Bunyan, Dante, other medieval pilgrims, Muslim traditional pilgrim tales, or the like, the desire to be "on the road" to truth (or meaning, fulfillment, God, transcendence) appears to be as old and as embedded in human consciousness as movement itself. This session seeks scholarly papers, reflections from pilgrims, and creative work to help us reconsider this most understand and appreciate this ancient and still-relevant practice.

Undergraduate students researching any aspect of the Middle Ages are invited to submit papers to this session.

Authorship in the Middle Ages is often questioned within the frameworks established by modern literary theories. Anonymity is not a problem, but the borrowing of another's name is more problematic. Pseudo-authorities today question our ability to understand authority in ways that are new to us. How can we place these pseudo-authorities in the intellectual context of their time and shed new light on their reception?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo

This panel considers Petrarch and Petrarchan landscapes—that is, the toponyms, cartographies, and geographies charted in and through Petrarch’s oeuvre, broadly understood. From his detailed figuration of Vaucluse to elaborate chartings of the Tiber, Arno, and Po; from comparisons of “foreign” soil to descriptions of olive trees and the hills and springs near Capranica; and from classical loci to troubadouric commonplaces, Petrarch gives great attention to the natural environment in all of his work. As Petrarch’s representation of the natural world often has intertextual or exemplary dimensions, we invite papers addressing Petrarchan ‘imitators,’ and Petrarch’s own literary borrowings.

There is much to discuss philosophically concerning courage and cowardice, individuality and community, sin and repentance, love and lust, fidelity and betrayal, honor and shame, and many other areas whose philosophical consideration offers an unusual and enlightening interdisciplinary approach to Malory’s world.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), North American Branch

Religious belief, even when not reflected in active practise, has a significant impact on social, political, and cultural values. Although medieval religious belief may share many dogmatic similarities to present religious belief, the medieval worldview exists on the opposite side of a seemingly unbridgeable conceptual divide from the present. This panel solicits papers that will help to navigate that gap in order better to understand how medieval peoples believed and how those beliefs may continue to shape the present. Abstracts of no more than 250 words should address piety and religious belief in courtly literature or courtly society.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Premodern Studies, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities

The Center for Premodern Studies at UMinnesota seeks proposals for our sponsored session "Piracy and Captivity in the Medieval Mediterranean." Mediterranean Studies is helping the field think more comparatively and bring into dialogue scholars working in many fields from Spanish, French, Arabic and Italian. Piracy and captivity affected the global Mediterranean in a way that linked multiple cultures and linguistic traditions through raiding, sea voyages, and the slave trade. This panel aims to explore how medieval Mediterranean authors crafted the image of the pirate--as well as the journey of their captives--and made sense of this dangerous and ubiquitous enterprise.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Premodern Studies, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association for Rural Studies (MARS)

Medieval Association for Rural Studies (MARS) organises a session entitled ‘Plague Studies: New Sources, Methods and Approaches’ and invites interested participants to submit paper proposal abstracts. The session takes a strongly multi-disciplinary approach, and as such, it will focus on research, whose sources, methods and findings are situated across several related disciplines, including (but not limited to) history, archaeology, palaeogenetics and palaeoclimatology. Plague studies is a fast changing field, in which both humanists and scientists are developing a consilient dialogue and collaboration, which the MARS session hopes to reflect.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: PSALM-Network (Politics, Society and Liturgy in the Middle Ages)

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Liturgica Poloniae

Although as long ago as the 1940s Ernst H. Kantorowicz exhorted medievalists to make greater use of liturgical sources, historians largely continued to ignore the "magic thicket of prayers, benedictions, and ecclesiastical rites" that comprise the liturgy. Instead they left liturgical sources to specialists interested in the development of individual rites through time. The individual papers of this session will focus on different polities and regions of medieval Christian Europe, but all will concentrate on the high Middle Ages, a period in which the importance of liturgy to political cultures has traditionally been seen as being in decline.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: MemId: Memoria e Identità

The iconic value of sculpture, readily adaptable to new contexts, makes it susceptible to be reused, reenforcing new social, political and cultural messages. The session, co-organized by Paola Vitolo, Laura Cavazzini and Clario Di Fabio, aims to analyse cases of reuse, repurposing and recarving of Medieval sculpture in the Modern Time (15th-18th centuries) inspired by the need to communicate new messages of high symbolic value. Papers will investigate strategies of visualization of political and social claims from the part of families and royal courts, within more general processes of creation and/or consolidation of dynastic memories and powers.

This session aims to analyze the sources and multimedia of Marian processions and pilgrimages to understand how these devotional practices could be perceived as a form of theatrical performance. Liturgy, music, drama, and visual arts - accompanying these events - will be examined to understand the dramatization of the Virgin’s cult. Moreover, the polysensoriality of these ephemeral practices encouraged ecclesiastical unity outside the space of the church: how did the civic environment interact and participate in these religious rituals? How did processions and pilgrimages contribute to developing an urban Marian cult by enhancing a deep local cohesion?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, Univ. of Texas–El Paso

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)

As a broader field, Border Studies is usually associated with physical boundaries among modern nation-states, often examined from a Post-Colonial perspective. There has been widespread academic debate about the applicability of such approaches in medieval contexts. This being the case, this session aims to interrogate what it means to do Border Studies within Medieval Studies, and specifically in an Ibero-Medieval Context. The organizers welcome proposals that approach this topic and these questions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Great Lakes Adiban Society

The Great Lakes Adiban Society seeks papers that both unpack the interaction of prose and poetry and consider the broader uses of prosimetrum among single works, scribal traditions, and performative settings. To facilitate a broad engagement with Islamicate prosimetra from the pre-modern world, this panel has an interdisciplinary focus, seeking scholars with backgrounds in languages, literature, music, history, art, religions, and philosophy. By exploring these aspects of prosimetra as a form of conceptual bridge-building, we hope to generate a discussion that will help scholars approach the use of this textual form with newfound insight and appreciation.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

The Psalter, a staple of medieval devotion, could be modest or deluxe, depending on the tastes and finances of its owner. This session looks at the ways in which the Psalms are presented in manuscripts and/or printed books. Speakers might discuss illustration, layout or translation from Latin into Middle English or French. Papers could consider allusions to the Psalms in marginalia or in reader annotations of the Psalms or of other works.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)

In her important research in historical linguistics, Ellen Lorraine Friedrich devoted herself to in-depth linguistic analysis of medieval French texts, particularly the Guillaume de Lorris Romance of the Rose and the fabliaux. In her meticulous analyses, she teased out the queerness of these texts, often in the form of innuendo and double-entendre. For these sessions we invite papers that use a linguistic or other interpretative approach to queer the Rose or other medieval texts.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Art Society

Since the early studies by Ernst Kitzinger and Hélène Toubert, art historians have interpreted the monumental decorative programs of Rome by placing formal inventiveness, new narrative strategies, and the intensification of figurative production of the reforming century in a causal relationship with the social issues of the Gregorian Reform movement. The purpose of the two sessions is to free our discipline from the epistemological rut of the “all-encompassing reform agenda” or the “non-existent reform agenda” in which it is stuck, by proceeding on a case-by-case basis, through the examination of singular monuments.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Art Society

Since the early studies by Ernst Kitzinger and Hélène Toubert, art historians have interpreted the monumental decorative programs of Rome by placing formal inventiveness, new narrative strategies, and the intensification of figurative production of the reforming century in a causal relationship with the social issues of the Gregorian Reform movement. The purpose of the two sessions is to free our discipline from the epistemological rut of the “all-encompassing reform agenda” or the “non-existent reform agenda” in which it is stuck, by proceeding on a case-by-case basis, through the examination of singular monuments.

Medieval conceptions of the “foreign” relied not only on the imagination of far-off people and places, but on constantly renegotiated relationships with nearer neighbors. For late medieval France, “intimate strangers” included Flanders, Burgundy, Brittany, Navarre, Savoie, the Empire – peoples with whom the French often shared familial, religious, and ethnic affinities, yet whom they distinguished from themselves in stark, sometimes racialized terms. This panel considers what happens to patterns of medieval race-thinking when political and cultural borders change: how is the former “other” incorporated, or the neighbor estranged? We welcome scholars from all disciplines working on late medieval French culture.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

In recent years, the subject of Critical Disability Studies, aka DisCrit, has become a significant and meaningful approach to literature and cultural history. Because of the confinement of anchoritic enclosure, the focus on the suffering body of Christ, and the elimination of sensual stimulation, anchoritic studies provides an excellent platform for examining the intersections of pain, disability, and impairment in the Middle Ages. This session will include intersecting perspectives on anchoritism and critical disability studies from a wide variety of perspectives. Proposals for papers are welcomed from across the fields represented by global Anchoritic Studies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS)

Historical audiences are difficult to locate and situate. Perhaps because of this, scholars of early performance have accepted the idea that most spectators of (usually religious) drama and festivals shared beliefs, cultures, languages, and ethnic identities. This panel seeks to bring an inclusive approach to the audiences of early performance, illuminating diversity and difference in race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, etc.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS)

The Medieval and Renaissance Drama society invites proposals for this session honoring Clifford Davidson, professor emeritus of English and Medieval Studies at WMU, who has been a driving force at the ICMS for the last fifty years producing and curating a wide range of diverse and engaging performances of medieval material. To celebrate this legacy (represented recently by the Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival in '17, '19, and in a different form for '23), we invite papers focused on the players, the creation of playing environments, the methods of playing, and the building of ensembles in both past and present performances.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Reformation Research

The Society for Reformation Research at the Medieval Congress invites 20 minute papers on the Long Reformation. We welcome Cross Disciplinary, Cross Cultural and Multi-Media papers in History, Literature, Science, and the Arts. Contact Maureen Thum, SRR Program Chair, for further information: mthum@umich.edu

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Reformation Research

The Society for Reformation Research at the Medieval Congress invites 20 minute papers on the Long Reformation. We welcome Cross Disciplinary, Cross Cultural and Multi-Media papers in History, Literature, Science, and the Arts. Contact Maureen Thum, SRR Program Chair, for further information: mthum@umich.edu

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tales after Tolkien Society

This session purposes to examine deployment of religious structures and ideologies in medievalist narratives derivative of or notably or avowedly influenced by Tolkien’s Legendarium (although excluding works by Tolkien himself). It is a commonplace that medieval life was permeated by specific religious structures; medievalist narratives across media might well make much of religious groups and ideologies, therefore. To what extent such is the case, and in what media and what bodies of work, indicates the extent to which popular understanding of the medieval accepts its own commonplaces, offering insight into how knowledge of the medieval works in the world.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Aware of ever-looming legislative battles which aim to govern reproductive bodies, this session will explore the how reproductivity is re-imagined in medievalist texts. Considering medievalist depictions of conception, abortion, pregnancy, and birth, presenters may consider such questions as: How are ideas of the medieval deployed to support political battles over reproductive bodies? How do White nationalist extremists use the medieval to portray reproductive bodies (especially as traditionally coded in terms of binary sex and gender) as part of their imaginary heritage? How do feminists and queer activists use medieval materials to re-imagine reproductive bodies?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

Alphanumeracy—the ontological equation of letter and number—is a peculiar feature of premodern Western cultures, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian. Semitic and Hellenistic, and above all Pythagorean, it came to be epitomized by the twin sciences of lettrism and kabbalah from the thirteenth century onward, both of which ritually approach the internal and external worlds as contiguous and fundamentally malleable. In particular, they pivot on divine-names prayer as an alphanumeric technology for the manipulation of mind and matter. This panel accordingly investigates these occult, talismanic, mathematical-linguistic disciplines at the intersection of the history of Western religion and science.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo

This panel aims to investigate interactions between the natural world and the human imagination, with a focus on the literary tradition of late medieval Italy (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, et al.). We solicit papers that investigate the agency of the natural world in medieval literature as a tool for re-modeling our relationship to the environment today. By thinking about and with the natural world in medieval literary texts, these writers and thinkers provide a pathway for re-imagining the role of the human as steward of an environment in crisis.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

We invite submissions on the broad topic of Saints and Work. Bridget of Kildare did dairy work, Paul made tents, and Julian was a hospitaller whom some compare to Oedipus! Benedict enjoined his monks to work and pray. How did work function in medieval accounts of the saints’ lives? Did it add to their saintly portfolios or detract from them? What about it was worldly, and what led them to the other world? Related topics are welcome as well.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies

Papers are invited on any aspect of Medieval Scandinavian Studies or modern Scandinavian medievalisms.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

While Science Fiction would seem to occupy the greatest distance from the Middle Ages, it remains deeply informed by Medievalism. Often presented through the epidsodic structure of medieval romance, Science Fiction, despite a focus on the future, often reaches back to the past for its imagery, its narratives, and its ideologies. We seek papers that consider this particular relationship between the medieval past and the projected future, whether in form, narrative, characters, worlds, or ideologies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)

Chaucer focuses on the Prioress's feasting, causing us to note that her inability to understand how others would see her, paired with her desire for respect, tell us much about how power was understood and acquired. This session invites scholars to explore Chaucer's deliberate pairings of feasting and celebration with characters who are exposed by key moments in their prologues and tales. The Prioress's genuine emotion for animals over innocent people says much about the preoccupations of her "kind." Papers will explore what Chaucer might have intended by the Prioress’s and others’ varied exposures in these food settings.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Languages and Linguistics

Medievalists by necessity deal with a linguistic barrier, whether their language is Old English, Old French, Middle High German, Medieval Latin, etc. Philologists of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries pioneered the study of these languages, and now linguistic theorists are reexamining them from a socio-historical perspective. Some linguists work on phonology and metrics, some on morphology and syntax, and some on discourse analysis. We plan to offer two sessions of papers covering the widest possible assortment of approaches to various medieval languages.

Ellen L. Friedrich was a scholar of French and Spanish literature, and published work about French romance and the comic. This session encourages submissions focused on the comic, particularly about gender perceptions, sexuality, and gender relations. The works do not need to be specifically comic, but the topic should cover issues of the comic and its purpose in the literature. Ideally, the papers would focus on continental literature, but any topic related to gender and the comic will be considered.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Sidney Society

The International Sidney Society invites papers on any and all topics related to Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth, the Sidney family or their extensive British and Continental network, inclluding Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, William Herbert, Alberico Gentili, Veronica Franco, Vittoria Colonna, George Buchanan, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Étienne de La Boétie, Giordano Bruno, Justus Lipsius, and others. We encourage submissions by newcomers, including graduate students, and by established scholars of all ranks.

How do you do, fellow [teens]? This session invites papers covering teenagers in medievalism/medievalism for teenagers, considering genres such as literature, television/movies, video/tabletop games, comic books, etc. We investigate questions such as: Why do creators turn to young adult (YA) media to tell medieval stories? What makes medievalism useful for teenage audiences? “Who”--in the words of Tracy Deonn--“gets to be legendary”? Perspectives might consider both the Middle Ages and teenage years as being caught “in the middle”, the pedagogy of teaching YA medievalism, global medievalism in YA media, how teenage medievalisms center BIPOC, queer, and gender diverse perspectives, etc.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

Although much scholarship has focused on communities and social bonds in Arthurian texts, most studies that consider characters acting alone focus on their goals or activities or their surroundings. This session would consider how Arthurian texts depict loneliness and its counterpart solitude. How do Arthurian texts depict being alone as something to be desired or something to be avoided, beyond solitude's usefulness for prayer or knightly achievement or appreciating nature? How do they depict loneliness and isolation, beyond as a temporary condition to be overcome?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Stanford Univ.

This panel brings together papers discussing examples of so-called Soul and Body literature originating between the 11th and 14th centuries. This widely diffused literary trope pits the Soul and the Body against one another in debate or confrontation, often at the moment of death or shortly after. Presenters are encouraged to offer studies drawing on a variety of disciplines, including literary history, rhetorical analysis, manuscript studies, queer theory, history of thought and religion. Proposals focusing on Soul and Body literature in manuscript context are particularly welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Guilhem IX

We take “speculative philology” as a term for any moment when an editor or critic or performer is obliged to fill in a lacuna in the surviving text or melody, whether the gap has been created by damage to the manuscript, by a scribal error or oversight such as an eye skip, or by a copyist’s more intentional suppression of a passage. Faced with such a lacuna, the scholar must choose between printing an ellipsis and offering an educated guess for the missing material. What are the broader literary, philological, and musicological implications of these choices in a modern edition?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Speech Act Society

This session will examine discourses that influence—or are influenced by—the social status of discourse participants. Pragmatics and speech act theory recognize that the intended meaning of an utterance (illocution) must be understood as a function of the relationship between what is said (locution) and the cultural and speech-situational context in which a discourse occurs. Social status is a fundamental part of speech-situational context and must be acknowledged as contributing to the illocution of an utterance. A complete understanding of discourse in medieval texts must therefore account for social status. Papers may address texts from anywhere in the global medieval world.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Spenser at Kalamazoo

Spenser at Kalamazoo invites paper abstracts on any topic dealing with Edmund Spenser, including teaching. As always, we encourage submissions from newcomers, including graduate students, and from established scholars of all ranks. Abstracts that outline an argument are usually more successful than ones that just announce a topic. Reading time for the completed paper should not exceed 20 minutes. According to Congress rules, those submitting abstracts for one session may not submit abstracts for other sessions in the same year. Papers submitted should not have been read elsewhere nor be scheduled for publication in the near future.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)

Feminist medievalists are uniquely trained to consider history, difference, gender, embodiment, and identity. As monuments honoring “the winners of history” are removed from their plinths, this panel considers how we might use our skills to engage with public history and community memorialization programs to present more honest and more just histories. We ask: how does our training help us stand accountable for the unacknowledged histories under our own feet? How does it affirm a commitment to recuperating and memorializing “ugly” histories? How might public history and community memorialization projects help resist the nostalgia that dominates received narratives about the past?

This session seeks abstracts examining any aspect of the Hêliand, the chief surviving text written in the Old Saxon language. In this remarkable work, the poet adapts Tatian's Diatessaron into a Germanic epic by, among other things, adopting alliterative verse and refiguring Jesus as a Germanic lord. While all topics and approaches are welcome, we are especially interested in: the relationship between the Hêliand, its sources, and other Germanic translations of the Diatessaron; the poet's choices while adapting the text; and the Hêliand’s relationship to works of Old English literature.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval People

This session honors George Beech, one of the founders of the journal Medieval Prosopography (recently transformed into Medieval People). Professor Beech's area of interest was medieval France, particularly the region of Poitou. His scholarly contributions ranged from an analysis of a bishop from the region who traveled to Italy to the origins of the crystal vase given to Louis VII by Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was also one of the early scholars to use prosopography in his research. Papers addressing the history of medieval France and/or new methodologies for exploring the lives of medieval people would be welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center

Many of us have tried various forms of distance learning over the past few years. Teachers and students in early medieval Britain and Ireland often found themselves separated from each other by clerical assignments, missionary activities, even life at royal courts. How did they continue learning and teaching over long distances with the technologies they had? Papers in the session might treat manuscript exchanges and correspondence among scholars in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, and mainland Europe. We welcome a variety of approaches, including but not limited to historical, literary, social network theory, feminist theory, and manuscript studies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

Medieval education, whether in Latin or the vernacular, is the focus of this session. Papers might consider the production of schoolbooks, student notebooks, even courtesy books, as guides to the correct use of language, literary or classical learning, and proper behavior. Along with grammars by John Stanbridge, Robert Whittinton, John of Garland, Donatus, and John Holt, works like Lydgate’s English translation of Stans puer ad mensam (The Child at the Table) or his Book of Curtesye, also known as “Little John,” as well as Aesop and Ovid, were viewed as instructive texts, and circulated in both manuscript and print.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Joan of Arc Society / Société Internationale de l'étude de Jeanne d'Arc

This panel seeks papers from those teaching about Joan of Arc and her world in and out of the classroom with an emphasis of understanding the culture and period surrounding Joan. Some potential topics to explore include: What digital experiences, especially during the pandemic, connected with students? Are these same digital experiences useful in person?What methods required honing in order to better connect with students?How do you identify and overcome students’ preconceived ideas of Joan and her world? What texts connect with students? And of course, what did the students teach you about Joan and her world?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)

This session seeks papers that explore the particular challenges and opportunities that arise when teaching medieval topics in Midwestern classrooms. We are particularly interested in work from graduate students who have navigated medieval teaching experiences in the Midwest at the university level, but we are also interested in individuals speaking about community outreach and other educational experiences. Speakers may also address resources particularly accessible to Midwest classrooms as well as classroom trends that seem dissimilar to those on the U.S. coasts. We seek papers exploring pedagogical practices, course development, student engagement, assignment creation, interdisciplinary education, and public outreach.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)

Translations into modern languages expand the size of the audience that can access and engage with medieval texts. This session focuses on recent bilingual editions, e.g., in the TEAMS series of Medieval German texts. We seek to foster a how-to conversation about how translators envision their audience or adapt their translations to their intended audience (scholars, students, etc.). Several of the current translators as well as the editors will be on hand to discuss the how, the what, and the why of projects that will play a significant role in further interdisciplinary conversations across medieval languages and cultures.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)

Translations into modern languages expand access to medieval texts; however, translations in the middle ages took myriad creative forms. This session will discuss translation broadly in cultural context throughout the middle ages to the present. Papers will address topics like: the intended audience (and reception) of medieval translations of medieval or earlier texts; translations between two medieval languages or translations of older texts into a medieval language/context; translations that transform manuscript text into physical objects (in the sense of artwork and crafts) or contribute to our understanding physical objects from the medieval period (manuscripts, archeology, clothing, arms/armor).

In the thirteenth century, the institution of Purgatory engendered a new vision of the hereafter. An interim state between Heaven and Hell, Purgatory was a temporary place for the purification of the souls prior to their access to Heaven. Soon, representations of Purgatory bourgeoned in different media. Nonetheless, they have not received proper scholarly investigation. Speakers in this session are encouraged to consider how the belief in Purgatory shaped the medieval collective imagination and triggered reconsiderations of eternal damnation and salvation. We welcome papers exploring Purgatory imagery, its iconographic developments, and/or its dialogue with depictions of death and the afterlife.

This session encourages participants to consider constructions of the medieval past in the Middle Ages and after, particularly as manifested in the interactions between the medieval(ist) literature, historiography, and/or material culture of postmedieval periods. Juxtaposing papers that engage with one or more historical periods, this session will reopen debates about the problems and possibilities of periodization while illuminating how medievalists and postmedieval scholars can productively collaborate across period boundaries. Potential topics/approaches include: popular medievalisms, archival studies, new materialism, media archaeology. Papers showcasing cross-period collaborations between scholars or contributions from scholars specializing in multiple periods are particularly welcome.

This session brings attention to Victorine developments in the training of novices, in liturgical life, in education, and in the role of the Abbey in the religious and intellectual life in Paris. Publication of Victorine Texts in Translation brings together well-known and lesser-known texts with full introductions to highlight the spectrum of sources available to expand knowledge of the rich life of this twelfth-century community of Regular Canons.

This session brings attention to Victorine developments in spiritual teaching and theological reflection which were major contributions to those traditions leading into the thirteenth and later centuries. Hugh and Richard were masters in both of these areas and their works combine texts and (“structural”) images (particularly Biblical, e.g. Ark of Noah, Ark of Moses, 12 stones in crossing the Jordan) in powerful narrative and transformative ways.

This session brings attention to the foundational Victorine emphasis on reading, textual interpretation, learning in the proper order, the importance of historical/literal interpretation for Biblical exegesis, and the ultimate goal of reading and interpretation: Wisdom. Hugh’s statement captures the breadth of the Victorine commitment to learning: “Learn all things, and subsequently you will see that nothing is superfluous. A meager knowledge is not a pleasant thing.”

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies, Western Michigan Univ.

Spirituality of the world belongs to both creation theology and soteriology. Drawing on sources going back to the Timaeus, and on their lives with the Psalms, the Cistercians, dwelling in monastic microcosms, articulated Christological meaning for the world’s goodness in the lives of repentant sinners ranging from a world with beatific potential to a well-defined sense of the cosmos as good in itself and good for the soul that seeks divine unification. This panel seeks papers that explore what the cosmological understandings of world offer Cistercian theology, might offer contemporary philosophies of the environment, regardless of time period or location.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Society for the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (SSBMA)

The importance of commentaries for the exegesis of the scriptures in preaching has traditionally been neglected both in the fields of sermon studies and exegetical studies. This session will investigate how preachers performed the all-important task of communicating the interpretation of holy scriptures to a wide range of audiences and in a variety of contexts. Proposals for papers on patristic, medieval, and early modern preachers from a variety of cultures and faiths are encouraged.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies, Western Michigan Univ.

This session invites paper that will explore historical and contemporary relationships between the Cistercians and the wine industry and that shed light on the relationship of wine production to the material, economic, and spiritual life of Cistercian monasteries.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Academy of America

The purpose of this open-ended session is to enhance and complicate understanding of cruciform expressions of resurrection, salvation, and protection emphasized in recent studies of crosses and the symbolism of the cross. Papers addressing the cross as an instrument of combat may consider a wide range of imagery, from visions of crosses before battle and crosses carried in military parades, to the sign of the cross as it marked actual weapons, the image of the cross-topped lance wielded by equestrian saints, and the sign of the cross wielded in spiritual warfare.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Cusanus Society of UK and Ireland

After Nicholas of Cusa’s death, his writings were studied by early modern Christian humanists. But during his lifetime they were first read by erudite Benedictines at the Tegernsee Abbey in Bavaria. What was learned ignorance, and why was it controversial? What did it mean for Dionysian mystical theology, whether the way of knowledge or the way of love? What did learned ignorance have to do with Cusanus’s notorious defense of the papacy? This panel considers the works of Bernard of Waging, Vincent of Aggsbach, Johannes Schlitpacher, Marquard Sprenger and other participants in the Tegernsee Debate between 1451 and 1464.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Framing the Late Antique and Early Medieval Economy (FLAME)

Papers on aspects of the early medieval economy, including but not limited to topics such as economic networks or coin circulation, would be welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Christine de Pizan Society, North American Branch

This look toward the future of manuscript studies will emphasize the enduring impact of two of the most prolific, pioneering, and respected scholars in the field of Christine studies, both of whom were lost during a period of just under six months in 2021-2022. Areas of potential interest for this forward-looking session include, among others, the digital humanities, new theoretical approaches, and interdisciplinary initiatives. We seek to explore new horizons in manuscript studies that will honor, in any number of ways, the pioneering work of Angus J. Kennedy and Liliane Dulac.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

A rich body of scholarship has emerged exploring the connections between games, medieval chivalry, theology, and the romance narrative. Our session will continue the study of games in Sir Gawain, and will extend the study of games to the other poems in the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript, and St. Erkenewald, as well as (re)imaginings of these narratives in metatexts like films and RPGs. With this metatextual approach, the session will explore play not only as represented within the texts’ narratives, but also in the creative acts of production and interpretation undertaken by both authors and readers over time.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)

The papers in this session will reflect Ellen's joy for life as they examine the celebration of life's pleasures--spiritual and physical--in literary works from medieval Iberia and France.

These sessions on The Medieval Tradition of Natural Law welcome papers that explore not only the Natural Law thinking in a wide range of Medieval thinkers but also papers that explore the impact of the tradition in subsequent centuries on both political and moral philosophy.

These sessions bring together scholars working on Natural Law that have few other opportunities to gather to discuss each other's research and share ideas and paths forward for new research.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)

The Robin Hood tradition has never been objective or ideologically naïve: alongside their undeniable entertainment value, the narratives served to bolster, create, or attack ideological perspectives. Yet diverse interpretations of the story coexist with each other, and apparently mutually exclusive interpretations of the tradition can enhance its popularity. This panel seeks papers that explore these ideological perspectives across media, whether the traditional late medieval / early modern ballads, novels, performances, art, music, and modern film. How are ideologies of the past still relevant within medieval and post-medieval Robin Hood texts? How do post-medieval ideologies contribute to or problematize the tradition?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Romance Society

Increased social mobility and technological advances in modern society, as well as the advent of postcolonial studies, have spurred scholars to investigate the ‘interconnectedness’ of the global Middle Ages, and to challenge Western-centrism. This session is open to papers that apply these critical approaches to romance texts. We welcome scholars who consider the textual representations of cross-culturalism, and of networks that transcend regional and national boundaries. Also invited are papers that examine depictions of networks from outside the medieval West. We particularly encourage participants who use decolonizing methodologies. Proposals should be 250 words for a 20-minute paper.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Romance Society

In recent years, scholars have increasingly posed questions about the relationship between medieval romance and the material. This session seeks to contribute to this discussion, inviting papers that interrogate material culture and its networks in relation to romance texts. Participants might examine how characters interacted with material objects, or the connections between ‘things’ and space in romance. Also invited are papers that consider the circulation, transmission, and reception of romance manuscripts. Proposals should be 250 words for a 20-minute paper.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Romance Society

A growing body of research by medievalists examines the intersectionality of identities, experiences, and relationships. However, it also tends to overlook the instability of overlapping social categories. This session challenges the assumption that intersecting identities, experiences, and relationships in the Middle Ages were static. It does so through interrogating the multiple and complex features of social networks in romance, whether that be on a micro or macro level. Topics could include but are not limited to the family, religious orders, local communities, and civic institutions. Proposals should be 250 words for a 20-minute paper.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lydgate Society

There is a popular tendency to approach written works, art, and other cultural products online as "content." For material objects of the fifteenth century this presents a problem of presentation. When virtually presented, the contexts of these objects are often not fully considered, encouraging the perpetuation of stereotypes about authors, artists, and scribes because the divided text is then re-contextualized to fit more modern notions of the medieval rather than those of the times it was written within. The Lydgate Society invites papers on any aspect of this problem as it relates to manuscripts and authors of the fifteenth century.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

Many saintly figures were afflicted by chronic and incurable illnesses, wounds, or disabilities that they endured within the paradigm of holy suffering. Many of them also performed miraculous healings while still alive. This session focuses on saintly figures from a range of religious traditions who combined these two faces of illness. How did they negotiate their own illnesses or disabilities in a life of service and devotion? Did their own illnesses condition the way they approached other sufferers and offer miraculous healings? How did others view their illnesses and how did they approach them in search of healing miracles?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Univ. degli Studi di Ferrara

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Univ. degli Studi di Genova

The present session aims at bringing together scholars working on the vernacular (Romance, Germanic, Hebrew) renderings of both Lanfranc’s of Milan Chirurgia parva and Chirurgia magna from different (philological, linguistic, terminological, comparative, medical-historical) perspectives. Possible fields of investigation include, but are not limited to: - Textual critical problems connected with the editions of these vernacular versions - The comparison between the Latin text and its vernacular rendering - The rendering of specialized terminology into vernacular - The influence of Lanfranc’s translation on later surgical works- The difficulties connected with the absence of a scholarly edition of the Latin sources

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)

A 2018 exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France paired images from Hrabanus Maurus's publications with modern and contemporary pieces to create a visual dialogue. This relationship is often understudied, but Hrabanus's work, in particular, offers an opportunity to examine the longevity, applicability, and adaptability of medieval material across time and space. We invite proposals from various disciplines, including literary studies, art history, history, public humanities, and digital humanities, to build a picture of the current state of research into the relationship between word and image, both within Hrabanus's work itself and in current scholarly projects that respond to him.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Thomas Aquinas Society

This session will focus on Thomas Aquinas as an interpreter of Scripture with special attention to his Catena aurea.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Thomas Aquinas Society

This session is dedicated to the life and work of Thomas Aquinas. Multiple disciplinary perspectives welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Thomistic Studies, Univ. of St. Thomas, Houston

This session is devoted to philosophical or theological thought connected to Thomas Aquinas. Paper submissions will be accepted for any topic concerning the philosophy or theology of Aquinas, his sources, or contemporary applications of his thought.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: D. B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership, Viterbo Univ.

Most scholarship on the medieval influences on Tolkien tends to concern story and myth, and while there has been research on the influence of late Classical thinkers such as Boethius and Augustine on his writing, the Roman Catholicism that the author attested was important to his world building owes at least as much to the thought of such theologians as Aquinas, Bonaventure and Scotus. This session intends to explore the influences of thinkers of the "High Middle Ages" on Tolkien, and is a sequel to the session on Tolkien and Evil held at the 57th ICMS.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Great Lakes Adiban Society

The Great Lakes Adiban Society seeks papers that consider translation in the pre-modern Islamicate world. Multilingual writers working across traditions were constantly "moving" topics, ideas, and motifs from one context to another, bridging time, space, materials, and even the senses themselves. Through this approach, we aim to host a variety of scholars studying Islamicate literary, visual, historical, and material traditions of the pre-modern world for a discussion on how translation both broadens and creates epistemological and artistic frames.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session will welcome scholars working on topics, religions, and cultures traditionally considered to be outside the scope of the study of medieval music, including (but by no means limited to) historical ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and so on. It explores how we can de-canonize both Western and non-Western musical cultures. We anticipate papers that will address issues of multilingualism (in historical sources as well as in modern scholarship), multimedia, and cross-cultural exchange, and the usefulness and limits of comparative approaches.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Art Society

Since Antiquity, Southern Italy has been hosting civilizations committed to thorough preservation of the material legacy of the past. During the Middle Ages, the splitting in separated cultural entities prompted competition in the reclamation of such a legacy.This session aims at collecting study-cases of re-temporalized past in medieval Southern Italy, focusing on the material evidence of conceptualizations of time embodied by architecture and other works of art (e.g. the use of spolia, objects, relics and traces from different strata of time) exemplifying the practice of folding and unfolding time in the political and social reality of Medieval cultures.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, Univ. of Glasgow

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) left an unparalleled legacy of masterworks in science fiction and fantasy. Several of her imagined worlds were founded upon or enriched by global medieval influences from Europe, Asia, North & South America. This paper session will explore and examine some of Le Guin’s marvelous medievalisms, her sources and influences, and their effects on her fiction. Papers might employ any scholarly approach. Possible texts include Always Coming Home, Annals of the Western Shore (Gifts, Voices, Powers), The Beginning Place, Earthsea series, Eye of the Heron, Hainish cycle, Lavinia, Orsinian Tales, and Le Guin’s short stories.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)

While some pop-cultural images of Vikings—a sense of adventure, a disregard for authority, and a kind of reckless courage—may be deemed innocuous or even admirable, other modern appropriations of (often erroneously-labeled) ‘Viking’ identities by extremist mentalities pose a threat to peace and civil society. This session invites scholars to consider any of three aspects of the problem: (1) the history of the romanticization of Vikings and medieval violence, (2) the differences between medieval and modern cultural memories of the Vikings, and (3) ways that medievalists as public intellectuals ought to represent and respond to Vikings and medieval violence.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Univ. of Oklahoma

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester

This session seeks papers that explore how seeing Arthuriana—as opposed to, or in conjunction with, reading it—can enhance, challenge, reframe, and otherwise enlarge the viewers’ engagement with the tradition, in any period and any form of media. What happened, for example, when a medieval person read a text and then looked at the accompanying illumination? What would happen if the illumination didn’t match the text they’d just read? How did medieval and later people relate to the architecture, the objects, the paintings that embodied Arthuriania? How does the visible presence of non-white actors at the Round Table challenge established perceptions?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)

The concept of Schrödinger’s Cat inspires new lenses for examining the Middle Ages: what appears simultaneously alive and dead in medieval scholarship today? Where does one find life and death intersecting in and across medieval fields? This session invites panelists to explore ways that conceptions of death and understandings of what it means to live interweave in every aspect of medieval life. This includes looking at saints, monastic culture, and the power of relics. It also encourages exploration of the ways that medieval scholars breathe new life into their fields, employing modern theories of translation and contemporary medievalism, for example.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

On the one hand astrology is part of the quadrivium, a discipline understood (with certain provisos) to be legitimate. Stellar forces were known to impact and, in some ways, govern the sublunar world. On the other hand, various theological problems arose with things claimed for astrology, including the problem of astrological determinism, and the problem that “natural” astral magic often crept into demonic territory. Is there such a thing as truly natural magic? if so what does it look like? How does Islamic philosophy impact this picture? This session invites papers considering how astrology and magic interact conceptually and practically.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Society of Irish Medieval Studies (ASIMS)

This session invites 15-20 minute papers dealing with any aspect of female authority in/and the Irish medieval Church, broadly construed. We encourage in particular papers that challenge traditional disciplinary and methodological boundaries, including interdisciplinary/comparative approaches and the use of hagiographical, archaeological, and/or historical sources, employing gender, material, philological, and digital humanities lenses and theories.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Proverb Society

The key form to be considered is the mercurial proverb, but broader remarks are welcome. Fundamental questions of defining and classifying medieval proverbs include desiderata for study of the global proverb beyond the “usual suspects” of Latin and Western European languages. Some possible approaches might include thinking about proverbs as “strategic signs” in sociopolitical discourse (Mieder 2018); revisting the tactics of the proverb as summation; and querying the traditional assemblage of proverbs into collections. Thoughts on the “anti-“proverb are invited, as well as on the general characterization of proverbs as repositories of authority or as “vulgar aphorisms” (Lord Chesterfield).

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Polytheism-Oriented Medievalists of North America (P-OMoNA)

The idea of words as agents of specific actions and changes of status, or means by which changes occur in the world, is inherent in many forms of literate and verbal communication, underlying social phenomena as diverse as legal systems, religious community formation and processes, and the practice of magic. Deeds, dedicatory inscriptions, textual amulets, and other written matter -- even alphabets! -- can convey notions of the agency of words, both potential and actual. This session explores various aspects, reflected in examples in pre-modern periods and cultures, from the Iron Age to the Renaissance, and across wide geographic ranges.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

The International Pearl-Poet Society invites proposals for a pedagogy roundtable on presenting the works of the Poet in classroom settings. Papers might: consider some of the many translations and adaptations of the poems for non-specialist audiences (versions for younger readers, comics and graphic novels, films, and video games); engage how digitization and online tools generate interest in the material culture of books in the Middle Ages and today; or consider the poems’ strikingly relevant themes in this moment of growing public anxieties about classroom content--how can teaching these poems address concerns about politics, social justice, racial and ethnic difference?

In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs meditatively interrogates the language of the natural sciences and its attendant racialized, gender-essentialized assumptions. This interrogation provides a model for identifying similar logics in Medieval Studies. Recent attention on the integration of Women of Color Feminisms in Medieval Studies has illuminated how these logics make the "circumstances" of such integration "unbreathable" (Gumbs 3). In this roundtable, we welcome submissions which engage with the possibility of Women of Color Feminisms' ability to breathe in such circumstances from any subfield of Medieval Studies on any topic.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Roundtable participants will examine Nadia Altschul's Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America in light of cultural studies, colonialism, and the study of medievalism and race studies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)

This roundtable in honor of Bonnie Wheeler and her support of TEAMS invites former students, friends and colleagues to discuss the impact of Prof. Wheeler’s scholarly activities, sponsorships, encouragement of women scholars, and her work for TEAMS has had on medieval studies. Discussions of the history and influence of TEAMS, the emphasis on the importance of inspirational teaching and innovative scholarship that is the hallmark of Prof. Wheeler’s work are all welcome. This panel discussion hopes to draw scholars from across the disciplines and may result in a dedicated volume of The Once and Future Classroom.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages

In a moment in which conversations about the historical rootedness of legal rights and social privileges are lively and necessary, it is particularly pertinent to talk about how we teach medieval disability. This roundtable seeks contributions that address how we can ask our students to consider the following of medieval societies: what was possible? What was perceived as dangerous or desirable? Who was conceived of as needing protection? What were the obligations of society to the vulnerable? We welcome submissions from across disciplines, including literature, art, history, religion, and philosophy.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain

The Matter of Britain is a living tradition with new texts produced each year in a variety of media and genres. The vastness, vitality, and adaptability of the corpus, from medieval to modern, allow for an incredibly rich potential for scholarship and teaching. However, the availability and cost of many items greatly restrict what can actually be accessed by ourselves and our students. In this session, we’d like to start a conversation related to the digital humanities about Arthurian works that are open-access materials or open-educational resources centered and how they can best be used in the classroom and research.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Exemplaria: Medieval / Early Modern / Theory

How do we theorize the Global Middle Ages? Scholars across disciplines have relied upon Janet Abu-Lughod’s book Before European Hegemony, published in 1989, as a means of conceptualizing the premodern world. We propose a discussion of emerging frameworks as well as revisions to or new applications of Abu-Lughod’s groundbreaking ideas. We encourage scholars from a wide variety of disciplines – history, sociology, literature, art history, philosophy, music, religious studies, world-systems theory and more – to join us for a roundtable discussion. How do frames shift across disciplines, what can we share, and what sets our approaches apart?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art

Scholars based in America have significantly enriched the study of Gothic architecture since the middle of the twentieth century, effectively complementing the work of their European colleagues. This roundtable, conceived in relation to three regular sessions, invites panelists and the audience to discuss these contributions, the professional organizations and networks that have fostered them, and the prospects for future development in the field. Although the discussion should evolve organically, prospective panelists should provide the organizers with brief (100-200 word) paragraphs outlining themes that they would like to address and explaining how their background prepares them to comment on them.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

In this session, we seek to interrogate the anchoritic state beyond just the removal of oneself from society by analyzing anchorites and anchoritic practices in relation to theories of intersectionality. We invite proposals that examine anchorites and anchoresses through, but not limited to, race, class, gender, and sexuality. By attempting to explore disparities within these highly ascetic practices, modern scholarship can reveal differences in medieval conceptions of around race and its relation to other identities. Through these commentaries and research, pairing anchorites and intersectionality begins to deconstruct identity during the Middle Ages.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Institute for Medieval Studies, Univ. of New Mexico

Assertive medieval women transgress their patriarchally assigned positions of immanence, often with the pen, the sword, and through sex. In an attempt to break new ground, we seek contributions that explore assertive medieval women––historical and fictional––from global perspectives. Comparative perspectives that trace similar experiences are encouraged. Reading the Middle Ages from a vantage point that illustrates how women worldwide were facing comparable experiences and challenges helps us understand the Middle Ages and feminism through a new lens. This virtual roundtable seeks to give more international scholars a chance to participate and broaden the range of voices in this discussion.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Institute for Medieval Studies, Univ. of New Mexico

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages

For the fifth year in a row, we propose a lightning-round panel that gives up to ten scholars three minutes each--strictly enforced--to present informally a current research idea or problem. The audience and session participants will then respond with suggestions about how best to develop their ideas. This panel, modeled initially on similar successful sessions at the AHA, aims to foster research in its early stages, to build connections and collaborations, to track the emerging state of the field, and to generate paper proposals for the next year's Congress.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Liturgica Poloniae

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): PSALM-Network (Politics, Society and Liturgy in the Middle Ages)

In the digital era of today, alongside traditional problems of cataloging liturgical manuscripts, new challenges arise due to the perplexity of technologies available to manuscript catalogers (TEI, MEI, etc). This roundtable seeks to identify the crucial challenges of preparing a highly detailed but also accessible description of a liturgical manuscript. Furthermore, the roundtable serves to share experiences received during the realization of the project "Liturgica Poloniae" whose goal is to publish the catalog of medieval liturgical manuscripts preserved in Poland. The meeting will enable the audience to discuss various approaches to cataloging liturgical codices and fragments.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), North American Branch

The International Courtly Literature Society is sponsoring a roundtable on four recently-departed founders of our society: Samuel N. Rosenberg, Douglas Kelly, Simon Gaunt, and Ellen Friedrich. Presenters are to address ways in their scholarship has been shaped by the honorees, be it via scholarly collaboration or through mentorship.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages

Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Perspectives from Across the Mediterranean and Beyond (York Medieval Press, 2022) reveals that Christian, Islamic, and Jewish experiences of death and disease were ubiquitous across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world due to shared inherited medical paradigms, healing traditions, and disease environments. Yet customs of diagnosing, explaining, and coping with disease and death often diverged through local knowledge and practice. The volume’s geographical breadth highlights the reality that medieval "European" history cannot be understood in a vacuum. This roundtable explores the book’s key themes and their application "beyond Europe."

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Material Collective

The ongoing environmental crisis facing our planet calls for action in every field. As teachers, medieval art historians can help their students make sense of the situation by exploring the ways people conceived of, saw, and interacted with the natural world in the Middle Ages. For this roundtable, we invite participants to discuss their experiences building courses or individual class sessions around ecological topics, focusing on both challenges and successful strategies for helping students work with the material.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Index of Medieval Art, Princeton Univ.

This roundtable seeks to draw together scholars whose scholarship and teaching have benefitted from Alison Stones’s groundbreaking work on medieval art history. The session seeks to foster dialogue about where we are in our study of the art of the Middle Ages, but will also open possibilities for future interdisciplinary work in medieval manuscripts, digital humanities, and beyond. In honor of Dr. Stones’s amazingly interdisciplinary reach, the roundtable will focus on Art History in the broadest sense and we encourage scholars from a variety of fields to participate, including but not limited to codicology, literary studies, musicology, and history.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Foremothers Society

This is the second of two sessions honoring Bonnie Wheeler as one of the Foremothers of modern medieval studies. Roundtable participants will present on the research they conducted with the assistance of funding from the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship, discuss the significant impact of financial support for women scholars, where we’ve been and where we are trying to go as women in the field of medieval studies, and the kinds of support that is still needed.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, St. Louis Univ.

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)

Traditional scholarship has been obsessed over finding narrative origins and then claiming, in almost patriotic terms, that a particular modern nation had been “home” for the “original.” This session seeks to explore Norse-Continental literary relations that debunk these myths and instead to showcase the dynamic intersections of this literary and cultural exchange across a significant part of the medieval world, both during medieval times and all the way to modern times. This theme has received relatively little scholarly attention and this session therefore aims to spur conversation among Norse and continental scholars and to encourage innovative research into it.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)

YA fantasy author Tamora Pierce is well-known for her world-building based on extensive medieval research. Over the course of her thirty year, forty book career, Pierce's medievalism has evolved alongside our scholarly understandings of the racial, gendered, and sexual diversity of the Global Middle Ages. Taking feminism as its central ethos, Pierce's ouvre moves between reifying whiteness and providing visions of a medieval world unrestrained by cis hetero patriarchy. This roundtable welcomes respondents' critiques on the relationship between Pierce and medievalism, reflections on Pierce's work in relationship to speakers' own experience as medievalists, and proposals beyond these suggestions.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Stanford Univ.

This roundtable brings together scholars who share the premise that material aspects of historiographical manuscripts impact what history is. Working with any methodology that places manuscripts first in their study of medieval historiography broadly understood, panelists are invited to prepare 5- to 10-minute presentations of a case study before sharing perspectives, questions, and queries about method, book history, and disciplinary trends. A list of possible questions for discussion will be shared with panelists prior to the roundtable, and questions from the audience will be encouraged. Scholars working on non-Western traditions are particularly welcome to apply.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: CARA (Committee on Centers and Regional Associations, Medieval Academy of America)

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)

Moving beyond the traditional media of lectio and lectura, medievalists in a wide range of disciplines have integrated making, doing, and performance into their classroom practice and curricula. This roundtable invites colleagues working in K-12 as well as university settings to share their innovations, experiences, and insights about the role of "hands-on" activities and lesson plans in promoting and advancing their students' engagement with and understanding of the Middle Ages, including (but not limited to) musical and dramatic performance, artistic and craft production, and experimental archeology.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: CARA (Committee on Centers and Regional Associations, Medieval Academy of America)

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)

Moving beyond the traditional media of lectio and lectura, medievalists in a wide range of disciplines have integrated making, doing, and performance into their classroom practice and curricula. This roundtable invites colleagues working in K-12 as well as university settings to share their innovations, experiences, and insights about the role of "hands-on" activities and lesson plans in promoting and advancing their students' engagement with and understanding of the Middle Ages, including (but not limited to) musical and dramatic performance, artistic and craft production, and experimental archeology.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society

As a 12th-century woman writing in French at the English court, Marie de France is one of the most important authors of the Middle Ages. This roundtable will bring together scholars, artists, writers, and performers to talk about projects—past, present, and future—that connect Marie with the general public. Topics may include Lauren Groff's New York Times bestseller Matrix (2021); interdisciplinary, public-facing projects; fan fiction and artwork; film; and/or any number of future or imagined projects that introduce Marie to a modern audience of non-specialists.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)

In this roundtable, participants address the intersection of the terms "medieval" and "California" in the following ways: 1) the temporality of the Middle Ages in Californian contexts that center Indigenous studies; 2) the presence of medieval concepts (such as mission systems) and objects (museum collections) in the state as continuing a history of colonialism; 3) neomedieval art/architecture in this region from universities to cemeteries to private estates; and 4) the leading role that creators across the state play in the formation of modern pop culture Middle Ages in film, themed spaces, and more.

This roundtable intends to discuss ableism within medievalist scholarship. With the growth of disability as an area of interest for medievalists, it is imperative for scholars to interrogate their assumptions around ability, disability, normativity, monstrousness, and embodiment. Topics for discussion may include any aspect of how ableism impacts medieval disability scholarship, from the specific (eg, access barriers) to the conceptual (eg, the language used in writing). Scholars who identify as disabled are particularly encouraged to participate and priority will be given to disabled voices, but non-disabled scholars are also welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Ecocriticisms

This session seeks new approaches to global medieval ecocriticism. Medieval ecocriticism has primarily attracted literary scholars. How can scholars in fields such as archaeology, history, music, philosophy, visual arts, religion, and disability studies engage with medieval ecocriticisms? What theoretical or critical methodologies might enrich the subfield? What documentary or literary texts that have not been read ecocritically would contribute new perspectives? We seek proposals from graduate students and early career as well as more established researchers. Please submit a title and statement of interest/approach to heide.estes@gmail.com by Sept. 15, 2022.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

The upcoming Amazon Prime series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, due to premiere in September 2022, explores the Second Age of Middle-earth. The announcement of the series, followed by the release of images and a trailer, has suggested that the world constructed by the show contains a number of elements that appear to draw on the Middle Ages. This roundtable invites contributions that consider the medieval elements in the series, both elements of design and narrative, and including structures of society, government, and relations among societies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

Games and gamification are buzzwords in education and pedagogy. In addition to popular curricular games such as Reacting to the Past, many teachers are incorporating games, the idea of game-play, and the study of medieval texts as games and play into the classroom. This roundtable session seeks proposals that discuss ways in which we can use the appeal of games/game-play in the classroom to make medieval literature and culture more accessible to the digital generation.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

In the Middle Ages, mental illness was blamed upon demonic possession. However, legal thought found that mentally ill criminals should not be held accountable for their actions. Constantinus Africanus's writings argue that mental illnesses were caused by either internal or environmental factors, such as black bile affecting the heart or a blow to the head affecting the brain. How are current "justifications" for crimes, such as mass killings, rooted in medieval ideas of mental illness? One might consider the historical relationships between religion, medicine, and law as they have developed in the Middle Ages, as well as since then.

Medievalismhas been a common, and hardly innocent practice, in both Russian and Ukrainian political discourse ever since the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s. Both Russia and Ukraine have laid claims to the prominent historical figures of the Kievan/Kyivan Rus', and the recent military conflict has led to renewed interest in the history of medieval Rus'. Our aim is to establish fruitful and respectful critical dialogue of this sensitive issue among scholars coming from various cultural backgrounds with an interest in Slavic studies, medievalism and the use of medieval history in public discourse, working in all relevant disciplines.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society of Medievalist Librarians

Librarians, especially those who work in universities or special collections, offer one-to-one instruction, workshops, and classroom teaching on a wide range of medieval studies topics. This session aims to bring together librarians and those who work with them to share ideas and best practice for how and why we teach and where our pedagogy might go next. Presenters will talk about sessions that they have designed or developed, approaches to medieval studies teaching in a library context, and professional and pedagogical development.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society of Medievalist Librarians

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society

Panelists will present on topics related to the place and function of visual sensory or quasi-sensory input and phenomena in mystical praxis and experiences. From apparitions of persons and objects to the use of art as aid in contemplation, this panel will discuss the importance of the visible across different genres of mystical apprehensions. This is a timely topic given the recent discussion of these themes in Jeffrey F. Hamburger’s Color in Cusanus (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2021). Panelists are further encouraged to comment upon either the influence between mysticism and artistic style or mysticism and the natural in art.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages

A great deal of medieval disability scholarship in recent years has focused on mental disability, specifically madness and intellectual disability (eg Metzler 2016; McNabb 2020). These two topics are often separated from one another in scholarship. This roundtable asks scholars to bring them together, along with other forms of mental difference, under the umbrella of neurodiversity. How can we conceptualize neurodiversity in the medieval period? How do neurodiverse scholars enrich our understandings of the medieval period itself? We encourage submissions from all medieval disciplines to address one or both of these questions.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)

Taking its cue from the Critical Terms issue of Studies in Iconography from 2012, this roundtable aims to review current theoretical discussions about art historical practice and map out new paths. It situates these terms within cross-cultural frameworks to consider connections and disjuncture across disciplines and sub-disciplines. Six participants will give short presentations on critical terms before a discussion exploring the challenges and opportunities of these theoretical and geographic approaches. Possible critical terms, emerging from the discussions of an International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) task force: materiality, visuality, ephemerality, environment, posthuman, global, ornament, dress/wearable, fragment, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, sensory.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Royal Studies Network

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)

In this unique roundtable session, two authors of recently published monographs in medieval German Studies present their work. In 2023, our focus is translation with CJ Jones discussing her Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance (St Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. Toronto: PIMS Publications, 2019) and William T. Whobrey discussing his Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan and Isolde with Ulrich von Türheim’s Continuation (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. Inc., 2020). These monographs make a major contribution not only to German but also to the field of medieval studies across disciplines.

This roundtable seeks proposals addressing either the intercultural contexts of the Hêliand or how translations of the poem drive current engagement. Any approach to addressing how the Hêliand intersects with other medieval cultural contexts (such as Early England) or how translation questions affect contemporary understandings of the text are encouraged. We especially welcome submissions from a diverse range of teaching contexts, including departments of religion, art history, literature, and language.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Beneventan Studies

The Brill Companion to the Beneventan Zone provides an interdisciplinary research guide to the area of Southern Italy and the Dalmatian coastline defined by E. A. Lowe and later scholars according the Beneventan script. It explores cultural, political, musical, liturgical, architectural, artistic, and intelectual development in the "zone", and explores the extent to which they overlap. The invited contributors will explore the challenges they experienced in writing their contributions, and chart new directions for collaborative research on the basis of multidisicplinary and interdisciplinary research in the Zone.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

After Alfonso X’s period of cultural production, the reign of his son Sancho IV (1284-1295), and María de Molina’s regency until 1321, sparked a revival of orthodox cultural manifestations in Castile that thrived until at least 1325. This roundtable invites presentations that explore the persistence and ramifications of Sancho IV’s return to orthodoxy in various areas of cultural production, including but not limited to literature, art, and architecture. How does Sancho’s ideological agenda react to the scientific, political, and cultural program of his father, and attempt to reconfigure the role of the crown in the promotion of culture?

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Texas Medieval Association (TEMA)

As its 27th volume, Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations recently published a new edition, translation, and commentary of the part of Paul of Venice's Logica magna that is devoted to insolubles--that is, logical paradoxes. The volume, authored by Stephen Read and Barbara Bartocci, greatly enhances our understanding of the development of logic, in particular of the semantics of propositions, during a crucial century in its history. This roundtable will be devoted to all aspects of Paul of Venice's treatise on insolubles, from the question of its authenticity to the validity of the account of insolubles that it proposes.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Machaut Society

We invite proposals for roundtable contributions that explore or portray the experience of performing medieval music, theater or poetry. Contributors can investigate performance archaeology, questioning medieval practices, instruments and venues; or focus on modern techniques and evolving styles. This can be directly or indirectly related to Machaut and his milieu. Rather than offer analysis on the experience of performance attendees or the reception of works, we encourage participants to investigate or exemplify the lived or embodied experience of performance and performers. We welcome presentation media including but not limited to speech, live or recorded sound, video, sign language, and dance.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies

This roundtable reflects on the varied legacies, and futures, of philological border-crossing. Medieval studies has grappled with legacies of philological nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Now we ask: how has philology transgressed boundaries of polity, canon, ethnos, faith, and historical period? Do such traversals establish, as well as contest, regimes of power? From premodern translation programs to twentieth-century émigrés, onward to reimaginings of language-study today—what resources from the history of philology help us reimagine our disciplines? Inspirations include Edward Said, Maria Rosa Menocal, Carolyn Dinshaw, Sheldon Pollock, Nadia Altschul, Karla Mallette, Michelle Warren, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, and others.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies

As medievalists, we have regularly had to navigate popular uses and misuses of the medieval past. One way scholars have done this is through the medium of podcasting, which makes medieval history accessible to academic and wider public audiences alike. This roundtable session proposes to explore how podcasts related to the global Middle Ages can enrich and invigorate medieval studies. The session seeks to bring together a group of podcasters able to speak together on a geographically and thematically diverse array of podcasts. Roundtable contributions should address the podcast’s origins and goals, as well as its relationship to medieval studies.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)

Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages is but a single intervention in a changing horizon of understanding of medieval race and racializing practices in the European Middle Ages. This roundtable seeks to address some of the more vexing questions that have emerged of late as they relate specifically to the medieval Iberian context, including but not limited to whether all modes of constructing difference (ethnic, religious, linguistic, etc.) are constitutive of race. We also invite reflections on pedagogy and our own positionality as researchers and teachers.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

The world-wide pandemic has changed how we live, work, and think. As anchoritic scholars, we would like to examine the experiences of lock-down and social isolation caused by COVID to the theory and experience of anchoritism. Past studies have looked at incarceration fruitfully, but the past two years have offered a unique perspective on voluntary withdrawal from the world and society that we believe needs further exploration. How might the psychology of medieval reclusion be applicable to us today? What can we learn from extended isolation in the past? Presentations from any discipline and any cultural tradition encouraged and welcomed.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Christine de Pizan Society, North American Branch

With a corpus containing everything from love poetry to political treatises and allegory to autobiography, Christine de Pizan has received attention from scholars in a range of fields and with a variety of interests. For this roundtable, current scholars of Christine will reexplore the work of their groundbreaking predecessors and discuss how their critical insights have shaped our understanding of the medieval author’s texts. In the process, the roundtable will emphasize the complexity and multi-faceted richness of what Christine de Pizan left for us, and speculate on what is yet to be discovered.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application (MEARCSTAPA)

While a great deal has been written about Palamedes, Morien, and Feirefiz, this session would be interested in thinking about less-discussed knights hailing from non-Latin Christian polities as well as approaches beyond literary studies (ranging the medieval to medievalism). This session would be especially interested in: Arthurian enemies, lacunas in approaches like art history & philological studies, the presence of Arthurian narratives in non-Latin Christian contexts, teaching experiences around “Race in Arthuriana,” and the roles "Knights of Color" play in medievalism when imagining a post-racial Camelot without having a post-racial present.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)

For audiences of Robin Hood texts, there is a tendency to describe the tradition as grounded in realism. This roundtable seeks papers that explore how the medieval and post-medieval Robin Hood tradition negotiates the reality of outlawry and the historical contexts associated with the outlaw, alongside tropes that belong to genres such as speculative fiction, fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, and contemporary romance in literature and media. Have we fully moved toward an un-real Robin Hood, and if so, what are the implications? In focusing on the fantastical, this panel seeks to interrogate the value of fiction as fiction.

We invite roundtable contributions considering ways to teach and research Medieval Studies from a Caribbean location and/or perspective, as well as methods for analyzing pre-Columbian Caribbean literature, religion, and cultures from any location or theoretical stance. Contributions might consider the impact of medieval discourse in the premodern and early modern Caribbean, or apply Caribbean theory to an analysis of medieval literature, among other possibilities.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture Project (SOEALLC)

The Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture (SOEALLC) project invites submissions for a roundtable entitled "Source Study and Material Culture." This session will gather several scholars to discuss the impact the study of material culture can have on the traditionally textual enterprise of source study. We aim for a lively dialogue that enriches our understanding of pre-Conquest literary culture as it opens up new possibilities for future work. While our principle focus is pre-Conquest England, we invite participants to define the period broadly, and we welcome proposals that seek to innovate methodologically.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Guilhem IX

This roundtable, the second in the Société Guilhem IX’s “spotlight” series, will focus on Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, one of the most innovative and widely-traveled of the troubadours. Moving from his native Provence into Italy, and then, with Boniface I of Montferrat, to Constantinople and Thessalonica, Raimbaut experimented with versification, multi-lingual poems, and new genres, lyric or otherwise. Eight of his melodies survive. We welcome proposals dealing with any aspect of Raimbaut’s work or biography. We particularly encourage participants to engage with songs that are not frequently the object of scholarly commentary

Principal Sponsoring Organization: TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)

The Bonnie Wheeler Foundation Fellowship Program’s supports women medievalists below the rank of full professor. Founded in 2011 in honor of Professor Emerita Bonnie Wheeler, (Arthurian, Chaucerian, feminist), the fellowship continues to support women scholars seeking promotion beyond the Associate Professor level and to enable them to rise to leadership positions. In celebration of the countless contributions Prof. Wheeler has made to TEAMS in addition to many other organizations and publications, this session will honor her by presenting Fellowship winners the opportunity to discuss how the Fellowship and Prof. Wheeler’s support enriched their scholarship and their careers.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: ROMARD

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Early Theatre

Medieval and Early Modern Studies encapsulate many disciplines, each with its own history, methods, and materials. As such, a plethora of academic journals derive from the interdisciplinary nature of these fields. This roundtable aims to demystify the editorial processes of journals across the fields of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Questions will address editorial practices, the peer-review process, content offerings, de-colonialist and anti-racist efforts, audience cultivation and scholarly reception--not to mention tips for getting published. The organizers ask only those involved in editorial processes and/or members of editorial boards for peer-reviewed journals apply to join the roundtable.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dept. of English, Temple Univ.

This roundtable focuses on liberation-driven approaches to medieval scholarship which build upon Black feminism’s foundational commitment to challenging inequity, probing how different forms of power and domination intersect with one another, and seeking justice. In light of the field’s ongoing negotiations with its dedication to equity and broader crises of social injustice, this session examines the medieval roots of harmful ideologies–and strategies of resistance–to shape better institutional and global futures. We seek talks addressing inequities in the medieval past, the field of medieval studies, and the wider world we inhabit. We particularly solicit talks explicitly situated within Black feminist thought.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)

Organizers invite proposals for roundtable presentations that explore the medieval episcopacy within a teaching context. As civic and ecclesiastical leaders, bishops engaged all aspects of society. The bishop was simultaneously an ideal and an agent who adapted to specific contexts that varied across time and place. These intersectional identities make the bishop a vibrant figure “to think with” in the classroom. Proposals should explain the approach and how it engages students with possible themes such as authority, cultural interaction, dissent, gender, patronage, and community. Submissions that address non-specialist students, innovative pedagogies, and global intersections are especially welcome.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

This roundtable focuses on teaching autohagiography, an elastic category that might include Augustine’s Confessions, Angela of Foligno’s Memorial, Margery Kempe’s Book, for example, and which sometimes raise complex questions about authorship and audience. Teaching autohagiograpy presents challenges and opportunities that both overlap with and differ from other sorts of hagiographical writings. We welcome papers that consider difficulties that emerge in the teaching of such texts as well as illustrations of productive ways of reading autohagiography. We welcome broader considerations such as the value of teaching such texts in any discipline of the liberal arts curriculum.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (SSBMA)

In the last fifteen years, the study of the Glossa ordinaria on the Bible has undergone significant developments. In 2009, Lesley Smith published her foundational monograph in the Commentaria series. Several critical editions of the Gloss appeared in the Corpus Christianorum series (in cooperation with PIMS, Toronto), and a comprehensive electronic edition is online, hosted by the CNRS (France). This session aims to bring together several of the contributors to these scholarly endeavors for the first time, to provide as assessment of what has been accomplished, and what still needs to be done.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Arthuriana

This session will explore scenes of resistance in Arthurian texts/media and uses of the legend as a source of resistance and a tool for action--particularly how Arthurian literature and media promote resistance and push back against the legend’s more violent associations. We welcome papers from a wide range of disciplines such as medieval or contemporary literature, art, music, pedagogy, film, games, exhibitions, fanfiction, tourism, and more! Please submit a title and abstract of 300 words through the International Congress on Medieval Studies submission portal and expect your presentation to be no more than 10 minutes.

The Canterbury Fails Podcast explores medieval texts that have generated two or fewer scholarly publications since 2000. Grounded in an ethos of academic conviviality, it introduces ignored works of medieval literature and stages a lighthearted but informed discussion of their dubious highlights. Why, you ask, would anyone do this? Despite their arcane nature, these texts open questions of canon formation and reveal medieval and modern habits of thought. They also illuminate marginalized corners of medieval culture, while the freewheeling discussions model a collaborative, public-facing mode of inquiry. This session encourages participants to make discoveries among lost, ignored, and suppressed texts.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Rencesvals, American-Canadian Branch

Technology has enriched the practice of people working in scholarly research, university teaching, and education of the general public. Open-access and digitized manuscripts and editions, georeferencing and map visualizations of textual corpus, immersive and augmented realities from the past: technologies have provided opportunities to collectively analyze, represent and disseminate information related to medieval literature and culture. This roundtable session will consider the intersection of diverse technologies and the romance epic. More than simply showcasing accomplishments, we invite to a conversation considering limitations and forward-looking approaches to using technologies in connection to epics and their contexts.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lydgate Society

Ever since David Lawton's "Dullness and the Fifteenth-Century" there has been a concerted effort to reasses the literary accomplishments of authors such as Lydgate and Hoccleve; these efforts have not translated to the average undergraduate British Literature Survey, where books such as the Norton tend to leave these poets as a bit of an afterthought relegated to ancillary online material. To combat this we would like to invite participants in a roundtable in a virtual roundtable (to cast as wide a net as possible) regarding methods to bring fifteenth-century authors into the undergraduate classroom in the best possible light.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): New Queer Medievalisms

The parable of the Lord and the Servant in Julian of Norwich’s Showings has striking similarities with ideas of submission as challenging power structures in BDSM literature, from Paulhan’s “A slave revolt” to Sade's Justine. Moreover, the ascetics of anchorites seem to explore concepts of violence as submission to God’s will (e.g., the Life of Dorothea of Montau). How are these early auto-fictions and mystical treatises entangled with contemporary BDSM practices and the way they are represented? In this session we invite proposals exploring the ascetics and aesthetics of violence from the intersection between anchoritic studies and BDSM theory.

How can academics take advantage of new forms of social media for digital pedagogy? What does ethical engagement look like on apps that some see as vehicles for misinformation? This roundtable will bring together medievalists active on TikTok to discuss the pedagogical power but also potential pitfalls of the platform.

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, Univ. of Glasgow

The construction of race in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth narratives, legendarium, and their adaptations represents even now a gap within Tolkien scholarship. The adverse reactions to the 2021 Tolkien Society’s “Tolkien and Diversity” Seminar and the diverse casting of the upcoming Lord of the Rings series highlight the pressing importance of addressing this subject from all areas of Tolkien scholarship, including medieval studies. This roundtable will bring these discussions to the forefront, with special consideration towards the ground-breaking, critical inputs by medievalists of colour and the field’s intersection with postcolonial theory. Contributions from all scholarly approaches are welcome.

In Winter's Tale, Hermione's presence lingers in her absence. But, what happens to her when she exits, and what does re-entering look like? Drawing on medieval miracle and morality plays, as well as Greene's Pandosto Shakespeare places Hermione in a liminal space (or does he?). This roundtable will invite lively discussion of different explorations of where Hermione might have gone, how far she might have gone, whether or not she traversed the bounds of mortality in her absence, the risks and benefits of using spiritual language to describe her journey, and why we should wonder about where she is anyway.