Call for Papers
2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 9 - 11, 2024)
Download the Quick Guide for Paper Proposals here!
Download the Quick Guide for Roundtables here!
All those working in the field of medieval studies, including graduate students and independent scholars and artists, may submit proposals to the International Congress on Medieval Studies. We invite contributions to Sponsored and Special Sessions, which are sessions on predetermined topics organized by colleagues around the world. We also welcome proposals for General Sessions, which are ad hoc sessions organized by the Program Committee in Kalamazoo. The topics of General Sessions are determined by the paper proposals submitted and accepted.
Please review our policies before submitting your proposal below. In particular, note that undergraduate students may submit proposals only to the "Papers by Undergraduates" sessions (listed under Sponsored and Special Sessions of Papers).
Instructions:
You are invited to make one paper proposal to one session of papers. This may be to one of the Sponsored or Special Sessions of Papers, which are organized by colleagues around the world, OR to the General Sessions of Papers, which are organized by the Program Committee in Kalamazoo. You may propose an unlimited number of roundtable contributions. However, you will not be scheduled as an active participant (as a paper presenter, roundtable discussant, presider, respondent, workshop leader, or performer) in more than three sessions..
Session Selection
Sessions are grouped by format (sessions of papers and roundtables). You can browse the sessions by format below. You can also view the session offerings in the call for papers on the Congress website.
Demonstrations, Performances, and Workshops are not included here, because organizers are responsible for naming their own participants and contributions are not solicited.
Title and Presentation Information
Enter the title of the proposed paper. (Contributions to roundtables do not have titles.) Confirm your willingness to make your presentation in the time established by the session’s organizer(s) and indicate your social media preferences and whether you are willing to have your contribution recorded.
People
Enter the name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information for the author(s).
Abstract
Supply an abstract (300 words) describing your proposed paper or roundtable contribution. If your proposal is for a hybrid session, indicate whether you intend to present in person or virtually.
Short Description
Supply a short description (50 words) of your proposed paper or roundtable contribution. If your proposal is accepted, this will be posted on the meeting site.
Technical Support
For help in submitting a proposal online, Contact technical support.
Session Selection:
Click a session format and then select the name of a session of papers or roundtable in order to begin your paper proposal. Only select "General Sessions" if you do not wish to make a proposal to a sponsored or special session (proposals to the general sessions will be reviewed directly by the ICMS program committee).
General Sessions of Papers
General Sessions of Papers
Roundtables
"Here's fine revolution": Shakespeare's Memento Mori (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Sarah Waters ; sarah.waters@buckingham.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Shakespeare at Kalamazoo
A skull in his hand, a young man contemplates the brevity of life and the ironic, even absurd, unreality of power, riches, and achievement. This and other scenes resonate with the late medieval "Memento Mori" tradition. Shakespeare not only shows death, he shows characters facing death, its implications for how they should have lived, the message one's death leaves for those who live on, etc. We seek five or more short presentations for a roundtable discussion extending beyond the individual presentations to a robust discussion of the overarching theme.
"Maken vertu of necessitee": Teaching Medieval and What Else? (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Stephen Yandell ; yandell@xavier.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)
What do you teach beyond the Middle Ages, and what have you learned in preparing yourself? Medievalists are increasingly called to teach classes like World literature, Classics, Early Modern, First Year Seminar, and writing across the disciplines. This roundtable invites participants to discuss best strategies for teaching beyond the medieval along with the numerous benefits. Speakers might explore topics like 1) surprising ways teaching outside the medieval has influenced their research; 2) how cross-disciplinary positions have inspired new courses, team-teaching, or experimental pedagogy; and 3) how individuals have let their medieval flag fly in a variety of courses.
Beowulf in Translation (2): What's Next? (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Christopher Abram ; cabram@nd.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Translating Beowulf is a thriving industry. In the twenty-first century, at least two new modern English versions are being published per year, on average. People (including translators, publishers, and, presumably, readers) perceive that there is still unfinished business with this poem, leading to a remarkably vibrant efflorescence of new Beowulfs. But are these the translations, as welcome as they are in their diversity, the Beowulfs that we want or need? This roundtable will invite participants to reflect on the current state of Beowulf-translating and to propose productive pathways for the poem's future in modern English versions.
Cantorales in the Americas (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Debra Lacoste
Contact Person: Alison Altstatt
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Musicology at Kalamazoo
This session invites contributions on the study of “cantorales,” that is, late medieval and early modern large-format choir books that transmit liturgical chant from Spain and the Spanish-speaking diaspora. Manuscript cantorales in the Americas include both codices imported from Spain and those made locally. Additionally, fragments of cantorales of both European and Latin American books are among the most frequently encountered sources of medieval chant in North American collections. This roundtable will focus on emergent methodologies for the cataloguing,digitization, analysis, and interpretation of both complete codices and manuscript fragments.
Eruditio Monastica: Teaching Medieval Monastic Materials (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Tyler Sergent
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
Panelists are invited to bring a wide array of teaching experience to the discussion of teaching medieval monastic history and texts from various classroom settings, including undergraduate and graduate students, monastic novitiate students, etc. The goal of the roundtable is to share strategies that have been effective in these settings and to share ideas for developing new techniques that reflect a variety of pedagogies for helping students to engage, understand, and appreciate the medieval monastic material.
JMRC @ 50: New Directions in Medieval Religious Studies (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Barbara Zimbalist
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (JMRC)
Joyeux anniversaire: Celebrating the Belle Dame Sans Mercy as She Turns 600 (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Linda Burke ; lindaebb@aol.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Alain Chartier Society
We invite a range of approaches to Chartier's Belle Dame and her associated querelle. The study of manuscript collections, in which the Belle dame often appears, offers insight into the real-life reading habits of late medieval women and men as manuscripts may be well-thumbed and autographed by readers. In the study of text, we expect to learn from critical approaches indebted to other voices, feminism/gender politics, literary theory, teaching experience, manuscript patronage, stage and film interpretations, and more. Art history also applies, as the Belle dame often appears in luxury manuscripts where the text is complemented with intricate, custom-designed illuminations.
La corónica International Book Award: A Roundtable in Honor of Dr. Henry Berlin for Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia
Contact Person: Michelle Hamilton
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
We have a panel of scholars working in the field.
A Kid's Seat at the (Round) Table: Teaching the Middle Ages for Youth Audiences (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Meg Cornell ; meganec3@illinois.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This roundtable aims to explore pedagogical and educational experiences centered around youth engagement with the Middle Ages. Presenting and analyzing medieval worlds, cultures, and languages alongside contemporary youth audiences provides both unique challenges and opportunities for resonance, and this panel welcomes flexible and creative educators, museum curators, librarians, performing arts directors, and interested scholars or any kind to share their insights, experiences, and pedagogical approaches. We invite presentations which address the highs and lows of pedagogical play and experimentation in teaching medieval source material, as well as medieval reception and youth medievalism materials in classrooms and/or learning environments.
Anchoritic Phenomenology: Sense Perception, Memory, and Enclosure (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Scott Wells
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society
Presenters will explore enclosure as a condition shaped not only by vision and sound, but also by a range of other sensory experiences, from tastes, smells, textures, and temperatures to movement, stillness, pain, and euphoria. Participants might address similarities and differences in medieval and contemporary understandings of the body’s sensory receptors; of what it was possible for the senses to perceive; and/or of the relationship between sense perception and memory in the development of experiential knowledge and understanding of the sensible world, including the place of the human creature within it. Any connection to the physiology of sense perception welcomed.
Bodies and Beyond: Exploring Medieval (Dis)embodiment (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Margaret McCurry ; mm9659@nyu.edu
Contact Person: Sarah Ganzel
Contact Person: Grant Miner
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: The Consortium Medievalists
The Consortium Medievalists invite proposals for our roundtable, “Bodies and Beyond: Exploring Medieval (Dis)embodiment.” This interdisciplinary session will explore manifestations of (dis)embodiment in the literature, historical accounts, artistic expressions, devotional practices, and philosophical investigations of the Middle Ages. Potential topics include but are not limited to metamorphosis and metempsychosis; mysticism and visionary accounts; relics and reliquaries; and spirits, apparitions, and the supernatural. We welcome contributions from diverse academic disciplines to foster a multifaceted dialogue. Please submit 300-word abstracts and curriculum vitae to consortium.medievalists@gmail.com.
Bringing Medieval Chronicles to the Twenty-First Century (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Amelia Hutchinson ; orchiduk@msn.com
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Instituto de Estudos Medievais, Univ. Nova de Lisboa
Roundtable on Iberian chronicles and the need for translations for research and teaching, as paramount sources on 14th-15th-century western Europe. Interaction among Iberian kingdoms requires complementary sources and cross-referencing for a clearer understanding. Fernão Lopes’s chronicles, valuable counterparts to those of López de Ayala and Jean Froissart, present perennial human concerns relevant to the 21st century: political and economic crisis, war, refugees, food shortages, disease, ecology, the search for ‘truth’. Editors and translators of The Chronicles of Fernão Lopes (2023) share their experience and discuss Lopes’s surprisingly modern strategies of research and narrative transmitting the detailed impression of an age.
Building and Growing Medieval Studies: Creating Communities of Passion Beyond the Classroom (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Kisha Tracy ; ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: CARA (Committee on Centers and Regional Associations, Medieval Academy of America)
During the COVID pandemic, Medieval Studies outreach and engagement became more difficult. Those challenges, however, also encouraged new efforts to inspire passion for the Middle Ages among a broader community, spearheaded by academic associations and institutes, student organizations, K-12 teachers, libraries, and museums. This roundtable invites contributors to share outreach initiatives that have worked as well as ones that didn’t connect and their advice for others who want to create interest in and excitement about medieval objects, stories, and subjects in their own communities.
Chaucer's Authorities: A Roundtable in Honor of Alastair J. Minnis
Contact Person: Robyn Bartlett
Contact Person: Michael Van Dussen
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Christine de Pizan Across the Disciplines (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Geri Smith ; Geri.Smith@ucf.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Christine de Pizan Society, North American Branch
The study and appreciation of Christine de Pizan and her works are not limited to the literature classroom. This roundtable seeks to encourage wide-ranging discussion of Christine’s “presence” in today’s academic and extracurricular context. Where and how does Christine figure in classrooms, research agendas, and creative projects in the areas of women’s studies, philosophy, the performing arts, political and cultural studies, and beyond?
Cistercians and the Mother of God (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Joseph Van House
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
In 2021 David N. Bell published a major monograph with new appraisals regarding the early Cistercian appreciation of Mary, a topic which has often been hidden in plain sight, languishing under the weight of platitudes. Bell’s work, the appearance in English of many new sermons by Aelred, and the perennial significance of the topic all call us to renew the question in our own generation of scholars: what is most important about Cistercian devotion to the Mother of God, and what should scholars most consider for enriching their own understanding and advancing the state of knowledge?
Dante, Eschatology, and the Christian Tradition: A Roundtable in Honor of Ronald B. Herzman
Contact Person: Lydia Kertz ; lydia.kertz@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This roundtable invites colleagues, collaborators, students, and friends to celebrate Professor Ronald Herzman’s outstanding career in medieval studies. We envision it as a reflection of Herzman’s wide range of scholarly and pedagogical influence. Herzman is particularly renowned for making Dante’s complex eschatological and political work accessible to scholars and students. Herzman’s collaborative project with William R. Cook on The Medieval World View has proved to be so wide-reaching that it is now in its third edition. We seek short papers that are accessible for non-specialists while contributing to our collective knowledge of the premodern world.
Defending the Medieval to Your University: Practical Discussions for Students, Colleagues, and Administrators (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Mickey Sweeney ; msweeney@dom.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)
The medieval world—including its literature, history, faith practices, customers, and cultures—has come under attack for its colonialist impulses, its traditional inclusion in the liberal arts canon, and its misappropriation by modern extremists. Should we continue defending teaching this material, and if so, what different arguments work best for convincing our students, colleagues, and administrators? This roundtable will bring together multiple voices to contribute diverse answers and offer valuable resources for attendees needing a breadth of defense strategies.
Digital Humanities without a Budget (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Helen Davies
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: University of Colorado Colorado Springs Digital Humanities Center
This roundtable seeks to foster discussion on teaching the digital humanities, doing research in this growing subfield or using it for outreach when there may be no institutional support for this work. This roundtable will highlight practical suggestions for how to work within any aspect of the digital humanities without a budget. The emphasis here is on the how-to. Papers from precarious academics, early career researchers, grad students, librarians and (perhaps especially) alt-ac persons would be particularly valued in this discussion. Frequently those who think most outside the box are those who cannot be sure of their place within it.
Digitized Manuscripts as Sources for Research (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Deborah McGrady
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures
The massive digitization of medieval manuscripts has dramatically changed the research experience. After decades of speaking about the shortcomings of conducting research based on digitized surrogates, it is time to direct our attention to how to use these resources responsibly and productively. This roundtable seeks informed scholars who have participated in digitization projects, created tools for working with this material, as well as scholars who can speak of the central role digitized surrogates have played in their scholarship. Collectively, roundtable participants will work toward a list of “best practices” for scholars working with digitized manuscripts.
Dismantling Illusions and Decentering Perspectives: Rethinking Approaches to the Medieval Survey Classroom (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Machaut Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Lydgate Society
The medieval survey classroom often presents itself as representing a complete, albeit brief, overview of the literature of the middle ages. This, however, is hardly true. Instead, it presents the path of least resistance, altering its offerings to make nods towards current scholarship regarding major figures without considering the full context of their works in their own time, much less acknowledging how elements of nineteenth-century thinking remain as cysts in the study of the period. As redress for these misconceptions this session will explore how pedagogy can foreground lesser-known authors and cross the contrived divide between English and French studies.
Episcopus Twenty Years On (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Evan Gatti ; egatti@elon.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages
In 2024, EPISCOPUS is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its founding. To mark the occasion, we are inviting scholars who have presented papers in sessions or conferences sponsored or co-sponsored by Episcopus to participate in an anniversary roundtable. The roundtable will examine the state of research on the medieval episcopate and the secular clergy as well as feature updates or expansions of previously presented papers. The session will feature a response from Episcopus’ past President and founder, John Ott, and will offer in-person and remote participation.
Futures of Fragmentology? (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Benjamin Albritton
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures
Manuscript fragments - individual leaves from dismembered codices, fragments from bindings, cuttings - are often the first medieval items many people encounter, due to their prevalence in North American collections and on the open market. With increased imaging of these materials, new methodologies are arising that feed into a "digital fragmentology", but many questions arise as well: what is the object of study, do different book cultures agree on what a fragment is, how are we preserving and communicating findings about these objects? In short, what is the future of fragmentology?
Generative AI in the Medieval Classroom (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Deborah Sinnreich-Levi ; dsinnrei@stevens.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Iter
Since ChatGPT 3.5 debuted late in 2022, AI-bots’ uses, influences and threats have grown exponentially. Generative AI has already changed education more widely and profoundly than any other digital tool. Widely touted as an ancilla to save workers in all fields valuable time and energy, this handmaiden also serves dark forces. AI can generate syllabi, slide decks, lecture notes and images. It can help students brainstorm and proofread. It can also help students cheat on tests and papers, and hallucinate false information and sources. But it's not going away, so how will it affect teaching for good and for ill?
Gregory of Tours's Book of the Miracles of the Blessed Andrew the Apostle (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Kelly Gibson ; kgibson@udallas.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations
This roundtable seeks to demonstrate ways that Gregory of Tours's Book of the Miracles of the Blessed Andrew the Apostle can contribute to teaching and research. Contributions are welcome from those working on Gregory of Tours, Late Antiquity, and/or hagiography, and it is my hope that the roundtable will represent a variety of approaches to this text.
Haptic and Affective Engagement with Medieval Material Culture (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Gina Hurley
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Bibliographical Society of America
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript: Rolls and Fragments (DEMMR/F)
Medieval material culture often sparks feelings of estrangement and excitement, sometimes simultaneously. We suggest that these affective responses, along with haptic engagement with objects, facsimiles, or the raw materials thereof, can help students develop traditional disciplinary skills while also expanding the range of canonical objects under study and broadening disciplinary inquiry. How can we use these affective responses and haptic experiences to prompt deep engagement with medieval objects, their surrogates, and their parallels? This panel draws together pedagogical approaches from a wide range of classrooms to inspire innovation and understand student motivations.
Hospitals Holistically: A Wide View of Hospitals and Caregiving in the Middle Ages (3) (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Brittany Forniotis
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Network for the History of Hospitals
This roundtable aims to bring together a methodologically diverse group of scholars working on topics related to medieval hospitals and leprosaria in a discussion of all aspects of the institution. Topics of interest within the hospital include, but are not limited to: labor practices, the spatial organization of caregiving, methods and tools of treatment, medical education and theory, representations and understandings of hospitals, and local and regional community-building. We encourage discussants addressing a wide range of geographies and time periods.
How Interdisciplinary Can We Be? (Re)Conceiving the Scope of Medieval Studies Today (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Michael Torregrossa
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
In our recent business meetings, we've been hearing from individuals left out of current conversations about the Middle Ages and our reception of the era. Their work is as valid as anyone else’s, but, because of the approach, they are unsupported. Our hope in organizing this session is to expand the focus of Medieval Studies beyond the currently expected fields and to highlight the ways that other disciplines (including those outside of the humanities) can contribute to discussion and debate about the medieval past. Explorations might come from anthropology, archaeology, comparative studies, engineering, folklore, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, technology, etc.
I Want to Sex (Ed) You Up (3) (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Nichola Harris ; harrisn@sunyulster.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages
This roundtable seeks to honor the legacy of Rudolph Bell (Holy Anorexia, How to Do It) with a discussion of medieval experiences and attitudes towards fertility, impotence, sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy, and childbirth. This roundtable will consider past developments in scholarship as well as some of the most recent methodologies, sources, and research on medieval approaches to sexual health and healing.
In Honor of Monica H. Green (1): Integrating Women into Medieval History (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Kersti Francis
Contact Person: Jennifer Edwards
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Foremothers Society
This roundtable is the first of two sessions honoring of Monica Green as one of the Foremothers of modern medieval studies, gathering students, colleagues, and scholars who have benefitted from her decades of scholarship and teaching. Monica Green’s celebrated work documents the history of medicine and lives of women, using a global lens to prove the existence of texts and networks overlooked by scholars. Roundtable participants will consider women’s history’s important accomplishments over the last forty years, and their impact on the study of medieval and global history.
In Honor of Monica H. Green (2): Integrating Medicine into Medieval History (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Jennifer Edwards
Contact Person: Kersti Francis
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Foremothers Society
This roundtable is the second of two sessions honoring Monica Green as one of the Foremothers of modern medieval studies, gathering students, colleagues, and scholars who have benefitted from her decades of scholarship and teaching. Monica Green’s celebrated work documents the history of medicine and lives of women, using a global lens to prove the existence of texts and networks overlooked by scholars. Roundtable participants will consider the major accomplishments of medical history over the last forty years, and their impact on the study of medieval history.
In Memory of Kaaren Grimstad and Ed Haymes: Norse Continental Continuations (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Evelyn Meyer ; evelyn.meyer@slu.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)
Exploring Norse continental connections was at the heart of the scholarship of Kaaren Grimstad and Edward Haymes, who we lost recently. This session seeks to honor them by continuing their legacy of innovative scholarship which explores Norse-Continental literary relations that 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.
Inclusive Medievalisms in Film and Television (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Leah Haught ; lhhaught@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism
Medievalisms in Film and Television show no sign of slowing down, every season brings new examples. Whether purely fantasy or based in some kind of historical reality, these instantiations suggest an ongoing preoccupation with the medieval past. But to what end? More specifically, how do diverse casting choices (or the lack thereof) impact popular conceptions of the "premodern" past? This roundtable will investigate different visions of medieval society put forth recently in an attempt to determine how they might reflect the use and abuse of the Middle Ages in contemporary discourses on diversity and inclusion.
Late Medieval and Early Modern English Monarchy and Myth-Making (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Valerie Schutte
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Royal Studies Network
This roundtable will encourage presenters that will describe, analyze, and debunk commonly held, mistaken, and lazily repeated myths that alter, embroider, or exaggerate the truth about real events, individuals, and other elements in late-medieval and early modern English monarchical histories. Few other monarchs match the popularity of this time period among present-day readers of history and fiction, viewers of film, television, documentaries, and theater, attendees at art galleries, historical sites, and museums. While often entertaining, myths about them are not history, and, in fact, impeded modern understanding of the monarchs and their era.
Learning Technologies and the Case Study of the Capitular Archive in Vercelli (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Evan Gatti ; egatti@elon.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
The Archivio Capitolare in Vercelli is home to seven sheets of parchment, called rotoli figurati or “figured” scrolls, that preserve diverse ways of knowing the medieval world. This rare cache of documents offers insight into the breadth of technologies associated with medieval learning and so it is fitting that they have also inspired new technologies, such as multispectral analysis, that allows scholars to see information that has been lost, damaged, or gone unnoticed. This roundtable will feature papers from scholars working on the scrolls and reflections on how new knowledge is produced by the intersections of medieval and contemporary technologies.
Liberation Driven: Black Feminist Approaches to Medieval Studies (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Sarah Baechle
Contact Person: Carissa Harris
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: English Department, Temple University
We seek proposals for brief talks that respond to and extend the interventions in our 2023 roundtable “Talking Back,” which drew on the work of Black feminist theorists to gain new insights into medieval texts, genres, concepts, and social practices and to illuminate unexpected survivals. Building on the success of that generative panel, this roundtable proposes a conversation on liberation-driven approaches to medieval scholarship centered on Black feminism’s foundational commitment to challenging inequity, probing how different forms of power and domination intersect with one another, and seeking justice.
Lines of Exclusion/Lines of Collaboration: Pioneering Female Medievalists (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Stacie Vos ; svos@sandiego.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Women's exclusion from the university and from academic and bibliographic societies gave way to unique examples of collaborative research and publication, such as the Hroswitha Club's Hroswitha of Gandersheim (1965). Fascinated by anchoresses who cultivated autonomous spaces for the development of the mind, pioneering female literary critics, historians, and archivists helped to shape Medieval Studies. Paradoxically, the solitary figure drew together large communities. What drew Virginia Woolf, Hope Emily Allen, Eileen Power and others to the study of the Middle Ages? Who are the lesser-known figures who assisted these writers at a time when few universities granted degrees to women?
Marsilius of Padua's Defensor pacis at 700: Then and Now (3) (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Cary Nederman ; cary-j-nederman@tamu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
2024 marks the 700th anniversary of the completion of the one of the most influential and controversial works of medieval political thought, Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis. It is proposed to memorialize of this event with sessions that provide an opportunity for engagement among historians, political theorists, philosophers and scholars from cognate disciplines with an interest in Marsilius’s thought. Topics may include (but are not limited to) addressing his sources, biography and associates, contemporaneous authors, readers and critics, political and intellectual contexts, and receptions, as well as his own doctrines as articulated in the Defensor pacis and his other writings.
Medieval and Medievalist Masculinities (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Lauryn Mayer ; lmayer@washjeff.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)
"The search for a transcendent, timeless definition of manhood is a sociological phenomenon - we search for the timeless and eternal during moments of crisis...." Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America." The current conflict between those who reject traditional models of manhood and those who attempt to forcibly impose such models reveals the culturally contingent nature of masculinity. This roundtable invites discussion of the following: How do medievalist fantasies engage with the question of masculinity? How might medieval texts provide alternatives to reductive definitions of masculinity? What are the intersections among medievalism, toxic masculinity and white supremacy?
Medieval Ecocriticisms (3): New Approaches (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Heide Estes
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
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.
Medieval Gaming (2): Playing with Pedagogy (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Medieval Reproductive Justice (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Jennifer Borland
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Academy of America
Medievalist Librarians in Technical Services (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Allison McCormack ; allie.mccormack@utah.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society of Medievalist Librarians
Library technical services – including collection development, cataloging, and processing – is not well understood by the public. However, teaching, research, and other services offered by libraries would not be possible without this behind-the-scenes work. Presenters will shine a light on technical services roles, explain the skills needed for success in these positions, and share how their medievalist backgrounds influence their work.
Merlin (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Molly Martin
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)
This panel invites short papers (5-10 minutes) on Merlin across the Arthurian tradition. We are interested in Merlin in the various linguistic branches of the tradition, in both medieval and post-medieval incarnations, and in different media.
Neomedievalism and New Media (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Alan Perry
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This roundtable discussion seeks participants interested in discussing how the pressing topics of imagined medievalism in popular culture, hierarchies and power dynamics in technology, and new media art intersect. We will critically analyze and examine the parallels between digital platforms and technological change in the Late Middle Ages with regards to their implications for governance, culture, and social dynamics. Additionally, we will assess the influence of neomedievalism in shaping communication, information dissemination, and the construction of knowledge in new media.
Notable Books in Medieval Germanic Studies (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Evelyn Meyer ; evelyn.meyer@slu.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)
Notre Dame in Color (4) (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Jennifer Feltman
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art
Notre Dame in Paris was once a multi-chromatic visual environment, enhanced by polychromed sculpture, stained glass, rich textiles, clerical vestments, and references to color in polyphonic chant. This roundtable with panelists from the three Notre Dame in Color sessions will focus on the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to accomplish research on the polychromy of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. It is organized in anticipation of the 5yr anniversary of the fire at Notre Dame and completion of its restoration in December 2024.
Open Educational Resources (OER): Finding, Using, and Creating Free Material for the Medieval Studies Classroom (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Michele Behr
Contact Person: Susan Steuer
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Services, Western Michigan University Libraries
As costs for higher education continue to rise, instructors and institutions are seeking ways to make college more affordable. Medievalists have been at the forefront in creating repositories for primary sources which are freely accessible and sharing information. This session invites creators, compilers, curators, and librarians to share information on old and new projects which offer free, authoritative materials for teaching about the global middle ages and discuss ways that scholars can develop new projects so that the work has a positive impact on their careers.
Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching Celtic Studies (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Coral Lumbley
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Celtic Studies Association of North America
Pedagogical Resources and Approaches for Medieval Music (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Contact Person: Rebecca Maloy
Contact Person: Andrea Klassen
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo
How do we utilize pedagogical tools and resources to establish and articulate cosmopolitan conceptions of intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic authority in the scholarship and teaching of medieval music? This roundtable invites intentional and interactive conversations to accommodate diverse learners with different interests within medieval musicology, with topics such as digital humanities, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, etc.
Performing Rituals and Ritual Performance of the Middle Ages (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Isabel Howard ; ihoward@unc.edu
Contact Person: Phoenix Gonzalez ; phoenix.gonzalez@u.northwestern.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
What effect did medieval ritual and performance have on the formation of individual and communal identities? What effects do reinterpretations of ritual and performance have on these formations today? This roundtable seeks to explore intersections between ritual and performance, capaciously defined, with a focus on actors, action, and audience and the relationship between them. As performance and ritual often blur traditional boundaries, this panel encourages interdisciplinary work that similarly experiments with conventions and perspectives. We welcome submissions from a range of fields and methods, including art history, literature, liturgical studies, public humanities, and performance studies, among others.
Problematic Medievalisms and Tolkien's Legendarium (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Christopher Vaccaro ; cvaccaro@uvm.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
Psychoanalysis, Transgender Studies, and Medieval Culture (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Jessica Rosenfeld ; jrosenfe@wustl.edu
Contact Person: Ruth Evans
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
What can medieval studies contribute to ongoing critical conversations about the fraught yet potentially productive relationship between transgender studies and psychoanalytic theory? How might transgender studies approaches alter our understandings of medieval cultural phenomena that have been explored via the lens of psychoanalysis: courtly love, sacrifice, martyrdom, chivalry, imitatio Christi, etc.? How can medieval narratives and ideas shed light on the nexus of psychoanalytic theory and transgender identities?
Publishing as a Graduate Student (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Maria Thomas
Contact Person: Andrea Klassen
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Academy Graduate Student Committee
As the academic job market is becoming increasingly competitive, understanding publishing is an important skill that can provide a professional edge. This roundtable is aimed at graduate students and early-career scholars to help them navigate the world of academic publishing. Panelists will give a breakdown of the publishing process and share tips on evaluating potential publications, maneuvering stages of peer review, and working with publishers from various markets.
Publishing New Work in Medieval Religion and Hagiography (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Jessica Barr
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (JMRC)
A roundtable featuring speakers with experience in academic publishing, including editors from the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures and the Hagiography Society’s book series, will discuss tips and strategies for querying presses and journals, revising for publication, and manuscript submission. Time will be provided for questions and discussion and, if possible, small-group or one-on-one conversations with editors.
Queer Medievalist Archives (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
With the rebranding of the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages (SSHMA) to Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS), a roundtable discussion will be held on the importance of queer medieval archives. This will also highlight the efforts of Dr. Graham N. Drake to document early paper correspondence with members, old newsletters, paperwork for proposed sessions, paper confirmations of sessions, other miscellaneous items, paper address lists, and a set of several decades of Kalamazoo programs. Queer history expands through time and technology and we invite people to discuss the significance of documenting the queer past.
Race in Comparative Context: The Case of Iberia (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Gregory Hutcheson
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
This roundtable seeks to explore race as constructed not only within but across the diverse polities and confessional/linguistic/ethnic communities of the medieval Iberian peninsula. Critical questions include: What are the connects and disconnects between race as it is construed by each of Iberia's polities/communities? Where do racial constructs travel across borders (whether real or conceptual) and how are they interpreted, challenged, appropriated, or repurposed? How do class, gender, and lineage intersect with racial constructs (e.g., in the case of marriage alliances)? We welcome especially scholars that focus on the Islamicate, Jewish, and other non-Romance traditions of the peninsula.
Re-Creating Camelot? Community-Building in Arthurian Studies (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Michael Torregrossa
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)
Building off our session idea, we’d like to highlight the ways that Arthurian enthusiasts and scholars have come together over the ages outside of fiction. Questions to guide us include: How have the Arthurian legends influenced and inspired the formation of groups seeking to continue the work of the fellowship of the Round Table and/or help us to promote the Matter of Britain? How have these communities succeeded? In what ways could they do/have done better? Presentations could focus on historic events and/or groups as well as current academic organizations and publications.
Reader Reports: How to Write Them, How to Read Them (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Christopher Bellitto ; cbellitt@kean.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Brill Academic Publishers
Peer reviews are an important part of the scholarly effort, yet for such a critical task, there is a striking lack of preparation. How can a peer reviewer do a good job? What does an editor need that reviewer to accomplish? What is a manuscript author to do when there are two conflicting peer reviews? This very practical panel endeavors to shed light on what is but certainly shouldn’t be a mysterious process. We will draw on experience from a variety of editors: journals, monographs, book series, collected volumes.
Recent Work on Ranulph Higden (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Philipp Rosemann
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations
This roundtable is devoted to discussion of the current state and future avenues in research on and around the works of Ranulph Higden. In particular, how have the edition-translations of the Distinctiones and the Speculum curatorum rounded out our picture of Higden, who is of course best known as the author of the Polychronicon? What are the most pressing desiderata for future work in the field?
Reflective Roundtable in Honor of Liz Herbert McAvoy and Naoe Kukita Yoshikawa
Contact Person: Michelle Sauer
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society
We are soliciting presentations reflecting on the significance of Liz Herbert McAvoy's and/or Naoe Kukita Yoshikawa's contributions to anchoritic studies. Possible presentations could include any of the following: personal reflections combined with a scholarly output; the outline of a project designed following their methodologies; an overview of a project that directly engages with their work on a particular text or concept; creative works based on their scholarship; other pieces crafted in their honor.
Resting in God: Current Literature on Mysticism (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Christopher Bellitto ; cbellitt@kean.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society
Retrospect and Prospect for P-OMoNA: As the Curtain Falls (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Phillip Bernhardt-House ; phillip.bernhardthouse@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Polytheism-Oriented Medievalists of North America (P-OMoNA)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
P-OMoNA was founded to provide a specific and dedicated forum for what had been occurring for more than a century in various Medieval Studies disciplines: namely, discussing the use (and abuse!) of medieval sources for understanding the polytheistic practices of pre-Christian Europe. As the organization comes to its final event, we ask: was it worth it, and is there a future need for this sort of specialized forum in relation to this topic?
Revisiting Stigmata: St. Francis and Others (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Jessalynn Bird ; jbird@saintmarys.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure Univ.
With the anniversary of the reception of Saint Francis' stigmata looming and the recent publication of Carolyn Muessig's The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, this roundtable examines past, present, and future methodologies for the study of stigmata and their meaning in the medieval period, across cultures and religious traditions. Those interested in presenting in roundtable format are encouraged to apply to the organizers.
Revisiting Supernova 1054: Science, Society, and Symbols (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Kristine Larsen ; larsen@ccsu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Honors Program, Central Connecticut State University
The paucity of Western observations of the spectacular 1054 CE supernova noted by Eastern annals is often explained as a case of astronomical ignorance or religious/political pressures to ignore evidence counter to the immutability of the heavens. However, a trio of papers published in the European Journal of Science and Theology in 2021-2 revisited this event through an interdisciplinary lens and demonstrated that it might have been recorded through the use of cyphers (including coins and gravestones). This roundtable seeks participants who will provide fresh interdisciplinary approaches to this problem to continue the conversation and spark new avenues for research.
Skynet Philology: Machine Learning Applied to Premodern Languages (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Thomas Leek ; tleek@uwsp.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
SMFS Best First Book in Medieval Feminist Studies Roundtable: The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation by Laura Saetveit Miles
Contact Person: Kathryn Maude
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)
This roundtable celebrates Laura Saetveit Miles' book The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England (D.S. Brewer, 2020) the winner of the SMFS Best First Book in Medieval Feminist Studies Award 2022. The book argues that Mary's reading at the Annunciation provided a sophisticated model of reading and interpretation that was foundational to devotional practices across all spectrums of society in medieval England. The roundtable invites responses to Miles' groundbreaking work in order to honour its contribution to medieval feminist scholarship.
So, What Are You Gonna Do with That? Prospects and Possibilities for the Graduate Medievalist (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Gale Sigal ; sigal@wfu.edu
Contact Person: Kisha Tracy ; ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: CARA (Committee on Centers and Regional Associations, Medieval Academy of America)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)
As the academic job market tightens and the definition of “academia” itself evolves, those pursuing and holding graduate degrees in medieval fields increasingly ask “what will I do with this?” We invite roundtable contributors to share their stories of graduate work on the Middle Ages, perspectives on how that graduate training continues to shape them, the career paths to which it has led, and how they continue defining themselves as “medievalists,” highlighting the diversity and importance of all medievalists and the critical need for collegiality and inclusion to sustain Medieval Studies as a thriving field in the coming decades.
Sourcing Early English Homilies (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Benjamin Weber
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
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 "Sourcing Early English Homilies (a Roundtable)." This session will gather several scholars together in a roundtable format to discuss how source criticism can enrich our understanding of early Medieval homilies. Participants might offer new arguments about sources for particular homilies, consider the methodological challenges of homiletic corpora, or discuss how manuscript circulation complicates the project of identifying source relationships in homilies. 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.
Spotlight Series: Raimbaut d'Aurenga (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Courtney Wells
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Guilhem IX
One of the most formally and thematically innovative troubadours, Raimbaut played with the limits of rhyme in his famous poem Ar resplan la flors enversa and verse itself in his devinalh Escotatz, mas no say que s’es by integrating prose codas into his poetry. He is also one of the most prolific troubadours: he has more than 40 poems attributed to him. Yet, there has not been an updated critical edition of his complete poems since 1952. For this roundtable, we invite contributions that adopt new approaches to Raimbaut’s rich and diverse corpus.
Strong Women in Courtly Culture (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Suzanne Hagedorn ; schage@wm.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), North American Branch
In this roundtable, the ICLS-NAB asks participants to address the topic of strong women in courtly culture—both women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie de Champagne who ruled over courts in which troubadours and trobairitz composed poetry and strong women who figure in courtly poetry, as poets, as addressees, or as characters within courtly romances. We encourage a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and hope that this roundtable will address a wide variety of courtly literature in various medieval vernaculars in order to generate debate and dialogue. We especially encourage "short takes" on particular patrons, poets, and characters.
Studying the Medieval Manuscripts of Ovid: Rewards and Challenges (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: William Little ; little.447@osu.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Ovidiana
This roundtable invites short presentations based on concrete studies of particular manuscripts (or sets of manuscripts) containing works by, or in any way involving, Ovid. Contributions are welcomed from any discipline or methodology that will show how the study of manuscript books can cast light on the medieval reception of Ovid. Contributors are also encouraged to share any problems they face in their examination of the manuscript(s) in question; these will form one basis for discussion among the participants after the presentation of the short papers.
Teaching the (German) Middle Ages (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Annegret Oehme
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)
The appearance of ChatGPT and the disappearance of Middle High German classes in curricula present only two central challenges that instructors face in the higher education classroom. As medievalists, we are already creatively working to create appealing and relevant classes for students who need more basic knowledge of the Middle Ages and Middle High German (or, more generally, Germanic) literature and language. This roundtable is envisioned as a think tank that invites scholars to share in brief presentations (5 minutes) tricks, tips, and innovations in their classrooms, ranging from exercises to syllabi.
Teaching the Middle English Text Series (METS): A Roundtable in Honor of Russell A. Peck
Contact Person: Anna Siebach-Larsen ; annasiebachlarsen@rochester.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)
This roundtable will celebrate the legacy of Russell Peck as the founder of the TEAMS Middle English Text Series (METS) and an award-winning educator. It will also celebrate the launch of the METS' new digital editions. We invite participants to share innovative approaches to using METS texts in the classroom -- and outside of it. We particularly encourage approaches that utilize less-common METS texts, that pair METS editions with digital tools, the use of METS in diverse classroom communities, and challenges posed by the Series, as well as proposed new ways forward.
Texts and the City: Editing London (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Eric Weiskott ; weiskott@bc.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
With two new editions of Geoffrey Chaucer's complete works forthcoming, a student edition of Piers Plowman A under contract, a student edition of John Lydgate's Life of Our Lady forthcoming, and a long-awaited translation and edition of John Gower's Vox clamantis expected, now is an excellent time to reconsider the editing of early London literature. This roundtable offers reports from in-progress and recent editorial projects.
The AI-Generated Middle Ages: The Pitfalls and the Potentials (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Brian Cook ; bsc0028@auburn.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Rapidly growing in both sophistication and ubiquity, AI will revolutionize the way academics and the general public understand the Middle Ages. Yet, when we ask an AI, what does it tell us? If an AI is only as good as its sourced training data, then whose stories are being told? Whose are left out? Is there any valuable content at all? Participants are asked to produce short presentations using AI as part of their process, with the goal of identifying gaps in an AI-generated Middle Ages and providing a new look at well-worn scholarly narratives as sites for future scholarship.
The Canterbury Fails: Live and In Person (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: David Coley ; david_coley@sfu.ca
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
The Canterbury Fails explores medieval texts that have generated two or fewer scholarly publications since 2000. Grounded in an ethos of academic bonhomie, 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. The session will encourages participants to make discoveries among lost, ignored, and suppressed texts.
The Extra-Anchoritic: Reclusion at the Margins of Reclusion (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Liz McAvoy
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society
Outside of anchorites, hermits, and to some extent beguines, other forms of reclusion/ semi-reclusion have received less attention, especially those belonging to non-European cultures. This roundtable will focus on less-understood reclusive practices: for example, those of tertiaries, vowesses and devout widows; wealthy corrodians or benefactors; pious mercantile women and noblewomen etc. The resultant discussions will spotlight these (pseudo-)reclusive practices to indicate new pathways for further study that will bring them into line with the now extensive knowledge we have about more traditional anchoritic ways of life.
The Global Middle Ages in the Library: Building and Using Diverse Medieval Studies Collections (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Anna Siebach-Larsen ; annasiebachlarsen@rochester.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society of Medievalist Librarians
The last few years have seen long-overdue discussions about the representation of a diverse and global Middle Ages in our classroom and research. However, missing from these conversations is the role of library collections in shaping and supporting this approach to scholarship and pedagogy. Moreover, this vital aspect of librarianship is often unseen or misunderstood by the public. This panel invites librarians and curators to discuss the challenges and opportunities of developing diverse collections in premodern studies, taking into consideration issues of staffing, funding, expertise, provenance, open access, and classroom integration. Presentations will be followed by discussion and collective brain-storming.
The Languages of the Hêliand (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: David Clark ; clarkd@sunysuffolk.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
This session invites scholars interested in discussing any aspect of the way in which Old Saxon poetry intersects with other languages, whether through influence, physical proximity, or genetic relationship. Moreover, we hope to put scholars employing a range of methodological approaches to interrogating these relationships into conversation.
The Post-COVID Lone Medievalist (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Kisha Tracy ; ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lone Medievalist
Our (somewhat) post-COVID moment is testing teachers/scholars in new ways. These include overcoming the “learning gap” in college/secondary classrooms, learning to manage “long COVID” while working with limited resources, making the case for the relevance of the humanities in the post-COVID university, assessing the effects of remote work on the already-isolated Lone Medievalists, and navigating the challenges to producing scholarship and attending conferences in the post-COVID world. These are only a few of the concerns that are a part of our new “normal.” In short, what issues do Lone Medievalists face post-COVID? This discussion hopes to provide insights and advice.
The TEAMS Bonnie Wheeler Session: The Seductions of Chivalry (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Gale Sigal ; sigal@wfu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)
Bonnie Wheeler, in "King Arthur and the Seductions of Chivalry," observed that including the words "chivalry" or "King Arthur" in a course title attracts students from many fields. Is the variety of student fields advantageous to faculty and students? Do students come to your Arthurian course with basic knowledge or a set of distorted mass media commonplaces? How do you expand your pedagogical focus to include themes beyond Arthuriana? Is your approach interdisciplinary? multicultural? global? Grounded by a specific text? Discuss successes and challenges.
Tolkien and Twenty-First Century Challenges (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Geoffrey Elliott
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tales after Tolkien Society
Traditional Ways of Knowing in the Middle Ages (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Michelle Hamilton
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval Studies, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities
Several fields have turned to the past to recover traditional ways of knowing (foodways, medicine, cosmetics, manufacturing, agriculture, science/magic, the arts, etc.) in the face of challenges to modern, industrialized life. This interdisciplinary roundtable will provide a forum for scholars engaged in a variety of methodologies (literary history/manuscript studies, comparative study of medieval and modern understandings, recreation or traditional methods and techniques) to discuss the challenges, opportunities and limitations that such traditional ways of knowing present. Scholars working in the medieval Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Americas and other areas outside of Western Europe are encouraged to submit a proposal.
Translingual England, ca. 1100–1350 (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Carla Thomas
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Middle English Society
It's clear that medieval England was multilingual, or, as Jonathan Hsy argues in Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (2013), “translingual.” Multilingual England would've had “the capacity for languages [...] to interact: to influence and transform each other through networks of exchange” (7). Elizabeth M. Tyler argues similarly in a chapter on late Old English and early French of England texts in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al’s Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100-1500 (2009). This roundtable invites scholars from French, English, Latin, Welsh, etc to contribute to a (hopefully ongoing) dialogue on translingual medieval England.
Very Minor Arthurian Characters (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: K. Whetter ; kevin.whetter@acadiau.ca
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)
This roundtable on “Very Minor Arthurian Characters” welcomes scholars of all Arthurian literatures, timelines, languages, and media. Character study is an old-fashioned but important element of literary or cinematic criticism, but the methodology of this roundtable is delibertaely welcoming of a diverse range of approaches to character. The focus on very minor Arthurian characters (and contexts) is designed to highlight some of the unsung characters who help keep the story and its more well-known protagonists alive or interesting. Minor characters also allow authors to highlight new or lesser-used themes or ideas or adaptation strategies.
What's a Nice Medievalist Like You Doing in a Digital Humanities Project Like That? (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Patrick Murray-John ; p.murray-john@northeastern.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This roundtable aims to demystify digital humanities for medievalists. It includes discussants trained in Medieval Studies who have incorporated Digital Humanities at any level into their work. Each discussant will give a brief narrative of how and why they adopted DH practices. The lion's share of this attendee-driven session will consist of free-form Q&A about DH, starting with core terms and concepts that attendees have heard and merit a gloss. Attendees are encouraged to add their own during the session. In-depth discussion around participants' projects or general discussion regarding DH will follow from attendee questions.
Wisdom of the North: A Roundtable in Honor of Richard L. Harris
Contact Person: Karl Persson ; kpersson@seatofwisdom.ca
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Proverb Society (EPS)
In his recently published Islandica volume Wisdom of the North, Richard Harris uses Chomskian linguistics to develop his innovative theory of paroemial cognitive patterning in Old Icelandic literature. Paroemial cognitive patterning refers to thought-habits developed in the shared preliterate social matrix from which emerged Eddic and saga material. Analyzing extant proverbs as well as allusions to cultural networks of proverbial meaning, Harris demonstrates that paroemial cognitive patterning is evident in a variety of Old Icelandic sagas. In honour of Harris’s achievements, this roundtable invites responses to his contributions in the study of proverbs and wisdom culture in Northern medieval literature.
Women and Knowledge in the Works of Marie de France (A Roundtable)
Contact Person: Joseph Johnson ; jj892@georgetown.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society
Marie de France is an author who asserts her knowledge and who creates women and female animal characters that embody and impart forms of wisdom, care-giving, medicine, and savoir-faire. We seek short contributions (8-10 minutes) that examine the role(s) of feminine forms of knowledge, wisdom, mysticism, and medicine in the œuvre of Marie de France. Interdisciplinary and intertextual approaches are welcome. Our objective is to provide a space for Marie de France scholars to come together and to stimulate discussion regarding the ways that Marie can be incorporated into articles or monographs dealing with issues beyond Romance Studies.
Sponsored and Special Sessions of Papers
"O beata Perpetua / Duc nos ad vitae pascua": Writing about Female Saints in the Latin Middle Ages
Contact Person: Eleonora Celora ; ecelora@nd.edu
Contact Person: Hannah VanSyckel ; hvansyck@nd.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Institute, Univ. of Notre Dame
Lives of female saints were recorded since the early centuries of Christianity, as in the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, and were re-written and re-interpreted throughout the Middle Ages, appearing, for example, in poetic versions and liturgical hymns. This panel invites papers studying the stories of female saints written in Latin, from Late Antiquity to the Reformation. We welcome research on vitae and other hagiographical texts, including feast day musical compositions, that emphasize aspects of textuality, transmission, and manuscripts. We prioritize work on understudied saints and encourage varied approaches and methodologies, including source and literary criticism, musicology, and manuscript studies.
"Spooky action at a distance": Approaches to the Marvelous, the Miraculous, and the Monstrous in Medieval Iberian Texts
Contact Person: John Bollweg ; trecento@comcast.net
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: North American Catalan Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)
Medieval natural philosophers from Thierry of Chartres onward accept a divinely-created natural order, within which preternatural phenomena such as prophecy, miracles, and the monstrous occur. The tension between an orderly cosmos and the freedom of divine power color later medieval natural philosophy as it absorbed earlier philosophical texts and ideas. The Iberian peninsula plays an important role in the transmission of texts concerning both natural philosophy and the preternatural. For this session, we seek papers on examples from any medieval Iberian culture or language of literary, philosophical, or religious texts accounting for the preternatural within a natural order.
"The intrusion of Gaia": Textual, Musical, and Material Ecologies of the Later Middle Ages
Contact Person: Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Machaut Society
This session explores the concept of ecological intrusion – when human exceptionalism is threatened, challenged, or reassessed through the encroachment of non-human and more-than-human agencies – within the textual, musical, and material environments of Guillaume de Machaut and his global contemporaries. We welcome contributions that address the fragilities of anthropocentrism exposed by thematic, formal, sensorial, and material zones of entanglement and interdependency that reveal the productive and/or destructive potentialities of more than human worlds.
"Þis ful tokene": Computational Methods and the Fifteenth Century
Contact Person: Matthew Davis ; matthew@matthewedavis.net
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lydgate Society
The rise of computational methods and the Large Language Models built in part on them presents a conundrum for scholars of the Middle Ages; the variation in dialect and orthography means that fifteenth-century texts cannot be run on the models as they exist without a significant amount of work that often goes unnoticed. To draw attention to the potential of this work the Lydgate society seeks papers on completed projects and works in progress from scholars who are actively attempting to use computational tools to work with the poetry and prose of the fifteenth century.
(Hung) Parlement of Foule Playe
Contact Person: Kavita Finn
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Pseudo Society
The Pseudo Society (we are still extant!) encourages submissions from all disciplines, periods, locations, and affiliations (or lack thereof). Ridiculous marginalia is a bonus.
(Re)Defining Medieval Masculinities (1994): Ideals and Archetypes of Medieval Men Thirty Years Later
Contact Person: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
Thirty years after the publication of Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, this session will (re)examine the nuances of masculinity and the forms it can take through the Middle Ages, from clergy to laymen to nobility. As queer studies experience a renaissance and growth within our field, masculinity is a rich vein for re-examination and contextualization within our new approaches to sexuality and gender. Any discipline is welcome; bringing scholars together from multiple disciplines to discuss the different ways one could be a man in the Middle Ages will promote new insights and understandings of the medieval world.
(Un)natural Ecologies: Encountering Self and Stone in Twelfth-Century Religious Sculpture
Contact Person: Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen ; martin.w.jurgensen@natmus.dk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: The National Museum of Denmark
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): The Stone Mirrors Research Group
We have a full session of papers already and will not need a call for papers.
Beowulf in Translation (1): 25 Years after Heaney and Liuzza
Contact Person: Christopher Abram ; cabram@nd.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
2024 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Seamus Heaney's landmark translation of Beowulf, as well as the near-contemporary version produced by Roy Liuzza. This session will examine the legacy of these two influential texts as well as the ways that the poem's treatment has changed over 25 years that have produced at least 45 further modern English translations of the poem. Papers are invited on any topic relating to the translations of Beowulf that have been produced in the twenty-first century, as well as those that focus directly on Heaney and/or Liuzza.
Cinematic Illuminations: A Session in Honor of Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman
Contact Person: Mary Ramsey ; mary.ramsey@emich.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
For this session in honor of Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, we invite papers that explore medievalism in contemporary television and film.
Mester de clerecía: 800 Years Later
Contact Person: Connie Scarborough ; connie.scarborough@ttu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)
Please see "Importance" section above which will also serve a CFP.
Se mon conte volez entendre: Recent Performance-as-Research with Pneuma Ensemble
Contact Person: Tricia Postle
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
n/a
Sed ad ludum properamus: Leisure in the Middle Ages
Contact Person: Katarina Rexing ; katarina.rexing@wmich.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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, let loose, and had fun. This session will explore 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.
A Natural Treasure: Ecocriticism and the Epics
Contact Person: Norval Bard ; nlbard@noctrl.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Rencesvals, American-Canadian Branch
For over a century, studies of the medieval epic in romance languages have focused on questions of genesis, transmission, themes, symbols, and motifs, but the contributions from the non-human—but very real—natural world to this literature remains under-represented. These epics bear witness to a profound understanding of the inter-relatedness of all life forms and to the consequences of its denial. This session invites scholars from diverse disciplines to reconsider medieval romance epic traditions that reaffirm the bond between the human and non-human, and that address any human eclipse due to the discounting of the natural world.
A Newly-Discovered Carolingian Glossary Fragment with Some Early English Parallels
Contact Person: Thomas Bredehoft ; tabrede@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chancery Hill Books and Antiques
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Richard Rawlinson Center
Papers investigating a newly discovered binding fragment leaf from a Carolingian glossary, now held in a private collection. Perspectives may include paleography, multi-spectral imaging, codicology, contextual studies, or other relevant approaches.
Alchemical Manuscripts, Early Printed Books, and Other Materials
Contact Person: David Porreca
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica
By the later Middle Ages, alchemy was a venerable tradition that had generated hundreds of texts that ranged from the practical (laboratory manuals and notebooks) to the mystical (alternative interpretations of the practical manuals written in cose) to the aesthetic (lavishly illustrated manuscripts of the first two types). This session proposes to examine all three of these, since the endeavour of providing modern editions of these texts that had such an influence on the history of science, the history of mysticism, and art history is far from complete. Papers on the intersection of manuscripts and laboratory equipment are also welcome.
Alfredian Texts and Contexts
Contact Person: Nicole Discenza ; ndiscenza@usf.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
King Alfred has long been connected with crucial developments in early medieval England. He, his court and nobles, and others using the king’s name but not necessarily affiliated with him led advances in law, government, defense, the production of art and manuscripts, and the translation and composition of works in Old English. “Alfredian Texts and Contexts” welcomes submissions on the circle of Alfred and its later influence from newcomers, independent scholars, and established faculty. Proposals may be interdisciplinary or from any discipline.
Aljamiado Language and Literary Studies in Medieval Iberia and Beyond
Contact Person: Donald Wood
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
This panel seeks papers on any area of Aljamiado language or literary studies. “Aljamiado” may be interpreted broadly to include Romance language texts composed in Hebrew or Arabic characters in the Iberian Peninsula or in the diaspora from the Middle Ages through 1700. Of particular interest are innovative approaches to current theoretical and methodological trends such as border studies, liminality, hybridity, and the application of postcolonial theory. We invite proposals whose contributions will bring diverse fields, such as literary studies, history, material culture, linguistics, or interdisciplinary studies, into productive dialogue. Papers by graduate students and emerging scholars are particularly welcome.
Alternative Medievalisms against the Tolkienian Tradition
Contact Person: Geoffrey Elliott
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tales after Tolkien Society
While it is the case that Tolkien’s works are a primary lens through which contemporary popular culture views the medieval, it is far from the only such lens, and the English and European medieval from which Tolkien’s works borrow so extensively are not the only medievals to be found. This paper session seeks to examine how contemporary works employ medievalisms other than those commonly associated with the Tolkienian tradition, how that employment contrasts with that tradition, and how that contrast can better illuminate how current popular cultures understand, and *can* understand, the medieval in its multitudes.
Anchorites and Their Place within Larger Monastic Networks
Contact Person: Alicia Smith
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society
This panel considers the relationships between recluses and monastics, whether formal or informal, nominal or vital, supervisory or supportive. Although an early anchoritic model featured monks who “graduated” from the communal life into the elite solitary status, this paradigm was radically altered through the medieval period, especially considering more women than men were recluses, and further led to a contrasting lay model of reclusion. Proposals are welcomed examining relationships, real or imagined, between cenobitic religious and solitaries; models of reclusion enmeshed in communal religious networks; and exchanges and movements of people, resources, and ideas between the anchorhold and the monastery.
Anchorites and Their Textual Communities
Contact Person: Joshua Easterling
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society
The lives of medieval recluses were shaped in myriad ways by their access to texts, whether Latin or vernacular, as they routinely employed their talents as copyists, read religious writings, or otherwise organized their lives around the written word. From Diemut of Wessobrunn in eleventh-century Germany to the sixteenth-century English recluse Simon Appulby most enjoyed some acquaintance with texts and the “implications” of that contact. This session seeks to elucidate this aspect of the anchoritic vocation, broadly framed, as well as the intellectual (including methodological) challenges textuality presents to the study of anchoritic culture. This could also include visual representations.
Annual Journal of Medieval Military History Lecture
Contact Person: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
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.
Apocryphilia: Recentering Biblical Apocrypha in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Contact Person: Brandon Hawk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL)
The North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL) seeks proposals for papers for a session about "Apocryphilia: Recentering Biblical Apocrypha in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages" at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2024. NASSCAL seeks to encourage new research on the subject of biblical apocrypha from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, and to bring together scholars from different fields (for example, scholars of early Judaism, early Christianity, early Islam, medieval Europe, and Byzantine studies). Papers might include focuses on text-critical work, translation studies, reception history, theory, and other approaches.
Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval Translation and Rereading
Contact Person: Daniel Donoghue
Contact Person: Nicole Eddy
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
The story of Apollonius of Tyre is as widely traveled as its hero, with versions extant in Latin and an array of European vernaculars. The story finds its way into the Carmina Burana and the Confessio Amantis, and was enjoyed by readers from Castile to Greece. Its sensationalizing adventures of pirates and shipwrecks, evil kings and generous ones, love lost and families reunited, riddles, incest, and miraculous resurrections—all captivated medieval audiences. This session seeks papers that explore the Apollonius story in any of its adaptations. Submissions may employ any methodogy, and we welcome fresh approaches to this key work.
Approaches to a Miscellany: NLW Brogyntyn MS ii.1
Contact Person: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society
This is a prearranged session for which speakers will be invited contributors to a collection of essays about NLW Brogyntyn MS ii.1 (edited by Nancy P. Pope). The subjects under consideration are memento mori poems, almanac texts, conduct advice, and historical legend, along with descriptions of the MS.
Archaeology in Medieval Europe
Contact Person: Deanna Forsman
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe (JEMNE)
JEMNE (Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe) invites paper proposals for a session dedicated to archaeological approaches to medieval Europe (400–1400 CE). Of particular interest are proposals highlighting work using innovative methods—such as aDNA analysis, remote sensing, and non-invasive imaging technologies—or fresh approaches to traditional methods. We hope to broaden the conversation around the unique insights archaeological methods provide into the material culture and lived environments of medieval societies.
Archbishop Wulfstan of York
Contact Person: Andrew Rabin
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval-Renaissance Faculty Workshop, Univ. of Louisville
Arthurian Space, Place, and Movement
Contact Person: Maggie Myers ; myersm2@xavier.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)
Arthurian literature has always had a vested interest in space, place, and movement. From chronicles tying Britain to Troy to romances charting knights’ travel through the Forest of Adventure, the Arthurian world is demarcated by striking locations and movement between them. This panel invites spatial and movement-based approaches to Arthurian literature regardless of time period or geographic location. We welcome a wide range of topics and methodologies (e.g. medievalism, pedagogy, and archival research) as well as approaches that blend space and/or movement with other theoretical approaches (such as race, gender, sexuality, ecocriticism, etc.).
Arthurian Studies in Honor of David F. Johnson (1)
Contact Person: K. Whetter ; kevin.whetter@acadiau.ca
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Arthurian Literature
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)
The panels ‘Arthurian Studies in Honor of David F. Johnson’ are deliberately open topics on any aspect of Arthurian Studies, thereby matching the impressively wide range of Professor Johnson’s own interests, especially but far from exclusively in Dutch and Middle English Arthuriana, or the character of Sir Dinadan. An open call for papers on any Arthurian subject matches Professor Johnson’s interests; it also makes as welcoming and collegial a venue as possible for scholars from all aspects of Arthurian Studies to explore their research, regardless of the regional, linguistic, or temporal Arthurian tradition they investigate or the methodologies employed.
Arthurian Studies in Honor of David F. Johnson (2)
Contact Person: K. Whetter ; kevin.whetter@acadiau.ca
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Arthurian Literature
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)
The panels ‘Arthurian Studies in Honor of David F. Johnson’ are deliberately open topics on any aspect of Arthurian Studies, thereby matching the impressively wide range of Professor Johnson’s own interests, especially but far from exclusively in Dutch and Middle English Arthuriana, or the character of Sir Dinadan. An open call for papers on any Arthurian subject matches Professor Johnson’s interests; it also makes as welcoming and collegial a venue as possible in which scholars from all aspects of Arthurian Studies can explore their research, regardless of the regional, linguistic, or temporal Arthurian tradition they investigate or the methodologies employed.
Bad Examples: The Limits of Exemplarity in Medieval Literature
Contact Person: Alejandro Cuadrado ; alejandro.cuadrado@yale.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo
How is exemplarity used in medieval literature and what are its limits? How, and when, do examples cease to be effective? And how do writers use these limits for their own narratives? This panel invites papers on the exemplary genre in medieval literature and is open to considerations of classical exemplarity, sermons, hagiography, etc. While the focus is on Italian literature, we are also open to other areas of inquiry (history, art history, etc.) and other linguistic traditions.
Bede as a Source
Contact Person: Sharon Rowley ; srowley@cnu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Old English Newsletter
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s):
Bede’s writings are some of the few narrative sources for the late seventh and early eighth centuries in Britain. As such, his work is sometimes asked to respond to scholarly questions it is unable to answer. The Old English Newsletter invites essays on the limits and possibilities of Bede's writings as sources. What does he reveal, and what does he ignore? We encourage papers that explore new areas of inquiry in Bedan studies in the 21st century.
Beginnings and Endings in Gower: In Memory of Peter G. Beidler
Contact Person: Brian Gastle ; bgastle@wcu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: John Gower Society
In honor of Peter Beidler’s interest in literary transformations and narrative technique in Gower’s work, this session seeks papers that engage with Gower’s use of beginnings and endings, from the traditional to the subversive. Papers may address the narrative structure of tales and frame in the Confessio, consider Gower’s interest in the beginnings and endings of religions and societies, or examine Gower’s interest in work (physical, intellectual, literary, etc.) well begun and the ends of human endeavors across his oeuvre, his protology and eschatology.
Belligerent Saints: Violence in Eastern Christian Hagiography
Contact Person: Nikolas Churik ; nchurik@princeton.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
We invite papers that explore questions about saints as enactors of violence. While we welcome submissions about military saints, we are especially interested in papers that examine lesser-known belligerent saints who have no cultic association with the military. Proposals should explore themes of valorization of, witnessing of, and responses to violence as well as the conceptual boundaries between spiritual and physical violence. In addition to studies based on individual vitae, we welcome contributions that explore hagiographical dossiers that appear in metaphrastic collections, synaxaria, menologia, as well as stories about saints appearing in historiographical sources and material culture.
Beowulf the Monster
Contact Person: Richard Fahey ; rfahey@nd.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Research Blog at the University of Notre Dame
This session will interrogate conventional approaches, which valorize Beowulf’s alignment with warrior ethics while condemning the monsters for similar behavior. Topics may include the tension between heroic deeds and monstrous acts, the intersection between Beowulf and his opponents, the destructive role of revenge and tribalism (specifically the rhetoric of in-group vs out-group), the ways in which heroic actions frequently result in devastating outcomes, and the monstrous attributes of such characters as Heremod, Fremu, Unferth, etc. In sum, any project that explores the connection, whether lexical or narratological, between representations of heroism and monstrosity in the poem may be considered.
Bernard of Clairvaux's Exegetical Imagination
Contact Person: Isaac Slater
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
Known as “the last of the fathers and first of the moderns,” Bernard of Clairvaux’s ingenious scriptural symbolism invites careful attention, in particular, with regard to the way clusters of scriptural images are repeated in new contexts with subtle modulations. This session invites paper from across a variety of writings to explore the rich and varied rhetorical terrain of Bernard’s densely symbolic interpretation of Scripture.
Body, Mind, and Matter in Medieval Scandinavia (1): New Critical Approaches to Medieval Norse Personhood and the Human Sensorium
Contact Person: Miriam Mayburd ; myryamm@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
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.
Body, Mind, and Matter in Medieval Scandinavia (2): Supernatural Entities, Cognitive Alterities, and More-than-Human Ecologies
Contact Person: Miriam Mayburd ; myryamm@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
This session invites revaluations and creative re-interpretations surrounding literary constructions, narrations, and depictions of otherworldly, other-than-human, and otherwise ambiguous figures associated with paranormal phenomena across Medieval Scandinavia. Paranormal phenomena becomes an auspicious site for interrogating what, then, was considered normal in premodern North, exposing socio-historical contingencies of the very concept of normativity. 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.
Boethius's Influence Through the Ages: 524–2024
Contact Person: Philip Phillips ; philip.phillips@mtsu.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Boethius Society
The year 2024 marks the 1500th anniversary of the death/martyrdom of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius in Pavia. Papers are invited that address any aspect of Boethius's life, times, works, and remarkable influence from late antiquity to the present day. Of particular interest are presentations on De consolatione philosophiae, its vernacular translations, its reception, and its influence on later literary, theological, or philosophical works.
Broken Bodies: Relic-Making and Embodiment in Hagiographic Sources
Contact Person: Lydia Walker
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society
The role of relics in the development and perpetuation of the veneration of holy people remains a rich topic for investigating the multifaceted notions of the human body. Transported, encased, and venerated, these varied processes by which pieces of holy bodies were imbued with power, started with the physical fragmentation of a human body. This session seeks papers that explore evidence for the process of fragmentation as revealed in hagiographical materials—understood broadly. How were bodies broken and distributed? How do textual and visual sources treat these fragmentations?
C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (1): Planets? Narnia? (Re)Considering the Heavens
Contact Person: Joe Ricke ; jsricke@outlook.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages
Twenty years after first unveiling his thesis that the seven Narnia Chronicles may be explained, at least in part, by a secret code linking each novel to one of the planets of medieval cosmology, Michael Ward's "Narnia Code" has apparently silenced most of his doubters and critics. So much so that new theories about other works are praised as "doing for X what Michael Ward has done for Narnia." This session seeks a panel of scholarly papers which will reconsider Ward's scheme -- resisting, reaffirming, reorienting, and/or revitalizing the planetary argument and, more broadly, Narnia scholarship.
C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (2): Lewis and the Amazons
Contact Person: Joe Ricke ; jsricke@outlook.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages
Despite abundant criticism of his definition (creation?) of the beloved lady of "courtly love," when rendering female heroism (and sometimes villainy), C. S. Lewis often turned to other sources. From his extended discussion of Spenser's Britomart in The Allegory of Love, to the bow and arrow and hunting horn of Queen Susan the (not-so-) Gentle, to, most famously, Queen Orual in Till We Have Faces, Lewis often imagines female heroism using the myth of the Amazon warrior woman for his model. This session will explore this rarely-noted aspect of Lewis's imagination and its relevance to his critical and creative works.
Caesarius of Heisterbach and His Amazing Dialogue of Miracles!
Contact Person: Marsha Dutton ; dutton@ohio.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
This session will contain papers about Caesarius’s works and their reception and translation, revealing both the monastic teaching Caesarius offered through his exempla and the way readers through centuries—from monks to scholars—have responded to them.
Chant and Liturgy
Contact Person: Christina Kim
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Contact Person: Andrea Klassen
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Musicological Society Cantus Planus Study Group
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 vision of how the sacred word has been musically projected in different cultures. This session is co-sponsored by the Cantus Planus Study Group of the International Musicological Society, in celebration of its fortieth anniversary.
Chaucer Studies in Memory of Peter G. Beidler (1): Chaucer's Canterbury Comedies
Contact Person: David Raybin ; draybin@eiu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review
Pete Beidler's 2011 book, Chaucer's Canterbury Comedies: Origins and Originality, collects twenty essays in which he examines Chaucer's comic accomplishment in the Miller's Tale, Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, Shipman's Tale, Merchant's Tale, and Pardoner's Tale. We seek papers that offer new approaches to Chaucer's comedy. Approaches that interrogate the foundations of fabliau comedy are also welcome.
Chaucer Studies in Memory of Peter G. Beidler (2): Sources, Analogues, and Retellings
Contact Person: David Raybin ; draybin@eiu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review
Pete Beidler was intensely curious about sources, analogues, and modern retellings of Chaucer's tales. Along with authoring the "Reeve's Tale" chapter for Correale and Hamel's Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, Beidler wrote frequently about these subjects, most often for The Chaucer Review. We seek papers that identify new sources, analogues, or modern retellings; offer fresh insight on earlier proposals, or suggest new approaches to the study of sources, analogues, and retellings.
Chaucer Studies in Memory of Peter G. Beidler (3): The Wife of Bath—Theory and Pedagogy
Contact Person: David Raybin ; draybin@eiu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review
Pete Beidler's 1996 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives was for many years the single-tale volume most used in college classrooms. Beidler adapted the "Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism" format to craft a book that models New Historicist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Deconstructionist, and Feminist perspectives with which scholars have approached the head-spinning narrator of the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. We invite papers that offer new, critically-informed approaches to the Wife. Papers treating Marion Turner's The Wife of Bath: A Biography are welcome.
Chaucer Studies in Memory of Peter G. Beidler (4): Masculinities in Chaucer
Contact Person: David Raybin ; draybin@eiu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review
Pete Beidler's 1998 edited collection, Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, brought together essays by seventeen scholars in the first book-length exploration of Chaucer's treatment of masculinity. The field has since blossomed--we think, for example, of two volumes that appeared in 2008: Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec, eds., Masculinities in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; and Holly A. Crocker, Chaucer's Visions of Manhood. For this session, we seek papers that offer fresh insight in Chaucer's portrayals of men in single poems or across his work.
Childhood and Parenthood in Medieval Iberia
Contact Person: Simon Doubleday ; simon.r.doubleday@hofstra.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
This session welcomes contributions by historians and archaeologists of the Christian kingdoms and/or al-Andalus, and innovative collaborations between them. What were the distinguishing features of childhood in medieval Iberia? Since there are few material objects associated exclusively with non-adults, what can archaeology tell us? What can we learn about the spiritual status of children, in medieval Christian, Jewish, or Muslim Iberia? What can stable isotope analysis reveal of living conditions, diet, and disease? What can written texts reveal about parent-child relations, and the social construction of childhood? And to what extent was the lived experience of childhood dependent on gender?
Cine-Medievalismos (1)
Contact Person: Erika Loic ; eloic@fsu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Instituto de Estudos Medievais, Univ. Nova de Lisboa
The majority of publications on the Middle Ages in film focus on Anglo- and Francophone cinemas, and especially the reception and reinterpretation of medieval history unfolding north of the Pyrenees. We invite papers for two sessions that shift the focus to the Iberian Middle Ages and works of cinema and television from Spanish and Portuguese creators and industries. Papers may delve into issues of recreation, invention, and accuracy, as well as uses and misuses of the Middle Ages as a means of addressing issues of identity or nationality.
Cine-Medievalismos (2)
Contact Person: Alicia Miguélez ; alicia.miguelez@fcsh.unl.pt
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Instituto de Estudos Medievais, Univ. Nova de Lisboa
The majority of publications on the Middle Ages in film focus on Anglo- and Francophone cinemas, and especially the reception and reinterpretation of medieval history unfolding north of the Pyrenees. We invite papers for two sessions that shift the focus to the Iberian Middle Ages and works of cinema and television from Spanish and Portuguese creators and industries. Papers may delve into issues of recreation, invention, and accuracy, as well as uses and misuses of the Middle Ages as a means of addressing issues of identity or nationality.
Cistercian Mysticism
Contact Person: Aage Rydstrøm-Poulsen ; aarp@uni.gl
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
Mysticism is a crucial phenomenon in the history of the Western world’s culture, dealing with the highest human goals and values. 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. This session will focus on the Cistercian contribution to this history.
Cistercians in the Vernacular
Contact Person: Marsha Dutton ; dutton@ohio.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
This session welcomes papers about medieval vernacular works that translate Latin Cistercian works, incorporate Cistercian thought and themes, or portray historical Cistercian figures within works of literature.
Classical Philosophy in the Lands of Islam and Its Influence
Contact Person: Nicholas Oschman
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Aquinas and 'the Arabs' International Working Group
Coins and Seals in Byzantium
Contact Person: Jonathan Shea
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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, social and religious developments, onomastics and prosopography. This panel welcomes papers working on all aspects of coins and seals and although focusing on Byzantium is open to speakers working on materials from a comparative perspective.
Collaborative Teaching with Archives and Special Collections
Contact Person: Kristin Leaman
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies
Conceptualizing the Knowledge of Artists and Builders in the Global Middle Ages
Contact Person: Joseph Williams
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
How can the knowledge of medieval artists and builders be conceptualized? Without frameworks for understanding medieval modes of artistic knowledge, we inadvertently apply a modern lens in which printed treatises and industrial processes have allowed art to be abstracted from the activities of making. What methods may be used to reintroduce considerations of materials and manufacture to the study of artistic knowledge, along with its development and exchange in the global Middle Ages? Contributions to this 'state of the question' session may be historiographical syntheses or case studies of particular objects, buildings, or texts that inform medieval ways of knowing.
Confronting Taboos, Medieval and Modern
Contact Person: Jeanette Patterson
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Mediaevalia: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Medieval Studies Worldwide
This session considers the treatment of taboo subjects in medieval texts, artworks and other cultural products as well as their modern transmission and the responses of modern translators, editors, etc. to content that is/was more taboo than in the context of its creation. Topics may include: self-censorship by scribes, translators, editors, in either medieval or modern textual transmission; works that flaunt taboo words and topics (e.g. fabliaux); medieval discourses, concepts and categories of taboo (surrounding sex, religion, bodies, politics, social difference, etc.); approaches to teaching taboo subject material; restoring/confronting taboo elements lost in modern translation/transmission (e.g. LGBTQ+ references)
Conjuring Wombs: Magic for Female Reproductive Disorders
Contact Person: Claire Fanger
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica
A rich heritage of charms for uterine problems in Byzantine and Slavic areas depict the womb as a fierce creature meandering through the female body. Conjurations like "Womb, black, blackening, as a snake you coil and as a serpent you hiss and as a lion you roar, and as a lamb, lie down" enjoin the womb to return to its place. Such bestial motifs seem rarer in Latin but do exist. This session welcomes studies of charms for uterine issues in Latin, Greek, and any vernacular languages, that may help trace intercultural influences and concerns about the womb
Contexts and Contacts of Early Middle English
Contact Person: Adrienne Williams Boyarin
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
This online session is devoted to English literature and its production ca. 1100–1350 and takes a wide view of this lively period of literary experimentation. With a focus on the contexts and era of eME, the organizer especially welcomes papers on multilingual interactions (e.g., of Englishes, Welsh, Hebrew, French, etc); contexts not traditionally part of early Middle English studies (e.g., Anglo-Jewish literature and history); or interdisciplinary perspectives (e.g., medical texts, scholastic contexts, or linguistics). Participants will have the opportunity to publish their papers in the journal Early Middle English, and ECRs and international scholars are especially encouraged to submit.
Courtesans and Carnage: Depicting Ancient and Medieval Societies in Modern Video Games
Contact Person: Anise Strong
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Hundreds of millions of people today have their first exposure to medieval and ancient cultures and history through console and computer games, whether meticulously researched alternate histories like Pentiment, Forgotten City, and the later Assassin's Creed games or medieval and classical fantasy games like Zelda or God of War. Recent trends have emphasized both historical accuracy and the inclusion of modern Western norms of gender and sexuality in these games, as well as a growing awareness of the diverse peoples of premodern Eurasia. "Dark Ages" themes also predominate. How do these shape popular understanding of the premodern past?
Courtly Foods and Feasting
Contact Person: Gloria Allaire ; gkallaire@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), North American Branch
(same as above rationale)
Courtly Loves: Queer(ing) Courts in Medieval Literature
Contact Person: Logan Spencer
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Arthuriana
This session reads queer courts and queers courts in medieval literature from all traditions and geographies. We invite proposals on queer readings/interpretations, queer coding, queer medievalisms, and queer pedagogy as they relate to the concept of “courts.” By reading the court–often viewed as the site of exclusively heterosexual love and desire–through a queer lens, we challenge the idea that the queer community does not have a vibrant past or culture. We aim for the discussion to be as intersectional as possible and invite discourse regarding queer and other theoretical studies.
Crafting the Afterlife: Depictions of Heaven, Hell, and Unearthly Spaces in Medieval Literature
Contact Person: Krista Telford ; ktelford@unc.edu
Contact Person: Harry Cushman
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS), Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
Depictions of the afterlife abound in medieval texts of every genre. From descriptions of heaven, hell, and purgatory to explorations of reincarnation and mythical spaces like Hades, medieval thinkers utilized art, music, literature, and theology to imagine different forms of life after death. In turn, such texts shaped what the afterlife looked like, sounded like, and felt like. This session seeks to examine how life after death was depicted, interpreted, and experienced in medieval culture. We invite proposals that examine the crafting of heaven, hell, and other unearthly spaces and especially encourage papers that consider multiple or interdisciplinary texts.
Creating Camelot(s): The Idea of Community in Arthurian Texts
Contact Person: Michael Torregrossa
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)
Although we often refer to the Matter of Britain as the Arthurian tradition, the figure of King Arthur is merely the centerpoint of the story. The tales are about the community that Arthur builds. Through Arthur and those he surrounds himself with, Camelot becomes a living thing, and we experience its birth, maturity, and death, as well as its re-creation across the ages. In this session, we’d like to highlight the multiple ways that Arthur’s realm has been constructed from the Middle Ages to the present. We seek contributions from scholars within the humanities as well as other disciplines.
Crises of Authority in the Fifteenth Century
Contact Person: Christopher Bellitto ; cbellitt@kean.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Cusanus Society of UK and Ireland
Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Alps: Medieval Artistic Production in the Historic County of Tyrol
Contact Person: Sarah Cohen ; sfc2112@columbia.edu
Contact Person: Emma Leidy ; ecl2177@columbia.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)
Crossing Boundaries: A Session in Honor of Robert L. A. Clark
Contact Person: Mario Longtin
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS)
Our friend and colleague Robert L. A. Clark passed away unexpectedly a few weeks prior the 58th edition of Congress. Bob was a great French medievalist and a fabulous ambassador of French culture in the USA. Bob was known to cross boundaries and to build bridges over differences. We would like to invite contributions that reflect on the idea of boundaries and offer ways to bridge fields and differences.
Crossing Boundaries: Exile, Freethinking, and Radicalism in the Global Fifteenth Century
Contact Person: Linda Burke ; lindaebb@aol.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Alain Chartier Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Jean Gerson Society
All topics on Gerson, Chartier, and the global fifteenth century are welcome. Comparative and intersectional approaches are encouraged. We are especially interested in the experience of wandering and exile, whether by bodily displacement, or intellectual questioning and dissent from authority. Both Gerson and Chartier accepted a life of physical exile due to the courage of their convictions. Both were staunch Catholics who nonetheless engaged in freethinking to the point of heresy on religious and political topics of their day. The experience of exile and estrangement of one kind or another was vividly expressed by women authors as well as men.
Crusading Nostalgia and the Politics of Othering in Late Medieval Literature
Contact Person: Deborah McGrady
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Nostalgia for the crusading past inspired much late-medieval literature that is regularly mined for its propagandist value with little attention given to how this literature engaged with ideologies of the past. How did writers contend with outdated propaganda and when did nostalgic treatment of difference lead to critical thinking about race, religion, ethnicity, disability, and class? We seek papers that contribute to the recovery of overlooked texts from continental Europe and the Mediterranean—especially those unavailable in English translations—whose idiosyncratic or against-the-grain perspectives on “others” will advance cutting-edge critical work on medieval identities. Send 200-word abstracts to Deborah McGrady at dlm4z@virginia.edu.
Cultural Contacts in Umayyad Cordoba: New Evidence from Archaeology
Contact Person: Felix Arnold
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Madrid
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Alamut, Ltd., Archaeology & Heritage Studies
We invite contributors to discuss the current stage and latest developments of studies on Islamic Cordoba
Curiosa: Starting or Ending Up in Strange Places
Contact Person: Danuta Shanzer
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Platinum Latin
This session is for those who have a short and specific problem that mixes things up or ends up in a strange place. We never know where the evidence may lead. Have you pulled at a loose thread only to find yourself down a rabbit hole or on the way into a labyrinth? Were the start and the end of the problem in different disciplinary areas or different time-zones? If you have something intriguing, perhaps exotic, but 20-minutes short that is worth recounting, please submit!
Dante (1)
Contact Person: Akash Kumar
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Decolonizing Medieval Irish Studies
Contact Person: Margaret Smith
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Society of Irish Medieval Studies (ASIMS)
Desiderata
Contact Person: Sharon Rowley ; srowley@cnu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Old English Newsletter
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s):
Research and funding priorities change rapidly, as do theoretical approaches. As we race to meet deadlines and understand the latest ideas, we sometimes leave unanswered questions behind or disappear down scholarly rabbit holes. We also sometimes find new questions that must await answers. Alternately, new approaches illuminate or challenge fields of studies in different ways: What has your sub-specialty left unaddressed? What do you wish had been written, catalogued, or edited? The Old English Newsletter invites papers that optimistically propose potential redresses of scholarly gaps in long research projects in your field or subfield of early medieval English studies.
Digitizing the Middle Ages: The Impacts of Digitized Corpora on Medieval Historiography
Contact Person: Gabriel Castanho ; gabriel.castanho@historia.ufrj.br
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Corpus de la Bourgogne du Moyen Âge (CBMA), Laboratoire de médiévistique occidentale de Paris (LaMOP) - Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Laboratório de Teoria e História das Mídias Medievais (LATHIMM), Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
This session of papers proposes to discuss how the arguments produced by digital corpora impact the medievalist research of the 21st century. Research concerned with the following aspects of the impacts of digitized corpora on Medieval Historiography are welcome: History writing, historiography and its relations with the use of digitized corpora; 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 (hagiography, diplomatics, cartography, etc).
Disability and Tolkien's Medievalisms
Contact Person: Kit Richards ; klr272@student.bham.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages
We welcome papers that deal with any aspect of disability and impairment in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Papers may focus on the ways in which Tolkien adopts, adapts, or critiques common motifs around bodies from medieval material, how his work is situated in twentieth-century debates around disability, or how his medievalism can create new perspectives on modern attitudes towards impairment. We encourage papers that are intersectional and examine the complex interplay between disability, race, gender, and sexuality. This panel also encourages interdisciplinary approaches, inviting academics from a variety of fields to shine new light on this topic.
Domestic Slavery in the Middle Ages
Contact Person: Jamie Wood ; jwood@lincoln.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval People
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Domestic Slavery and Sexual Exploitation project (University of Leicester)
Dress and Textiles (1): Flora and Fauna
Contact Person: Robin Netherton ; distaff.org@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval Dress and Textile Society (MEDATS)
DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion) and MEDATS (the Medieval Dress and Textile Society) invite paper proposals for “Dress and Textiles (1): Flora and Fauna.” This session allows for any interpretation of this topic, ranging from the use of plant and animal forms as decorative motifs, to the relationship between the creators and users of textiles and the living sources of the material from which those textiles are made. Papers presented at the session will also be assessed for publication potential in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles.
Dress and Textiles (2): Evidence and Evolution
Contact Person: Robin Netherton ; distaff.org@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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 (2): Evidence and Evolution.” This session will focus on definitional surveys that bring together a range of examples (including artistic representations, surviving artifacts, and other types of source material) to establish the existence, the geographic and temporal distribution, and the stylistic evolution of specific types of garments or textile furnishings. Papers presented at the session will also be assessed for publication potential in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles.
Dress and Textiles (3): Written Records
Contact Person: Robin Netherton ; distaff.org@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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 (3): Written Records.” This session is designed to showcase new research on dress and textile references in a range of text sources, such as wills, inventories, trade records, and legal documents. 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.
Dress and Textiles (4): Dyes and Colors
Contact Person: Robin Netherton ; distaff.org@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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 (4): Dyes and Colors.” Papers might address the usage of specific dyestuffs, dyeing methods and processes, the dyeing industry, and the social or symbolic implications of particular colors in dress. 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.
Early Medieval Europe
Contact Person: Maya Maskarinec ; maskarin@usc.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Medieval Europe
We welcome papers by scholars at every stage in their careers on any aspect of research into the Early Middle Ages.
Earth, Water, Air, and Fire: The Elements in Cistercian and Monastic Sermons
Contact Person: Jason Crow ; Jason.crow@monash.edu
Contact Person: Philip O'Mara
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
The employment of elemental theories for the origin of the material world, its transformation over time, and its ultimate return to unity with the divine had the potential to guide the thoughts and actions of religious contemplation and labor. Approaching Cistercian and monastic exegesis from this material perspective offers insight into how study of the terrestrial realm led to greater knowledge of God. The panel seeks papers that unpack how the elements of creation – earth, air, fire, and water (the fire of love, vivifying waters, clefts in the rock, etc.) —were treated in the sermons of Cistercian/monastic authors.
Ecomedieval Robin Hood
Contact Person: Anna Czarnowus
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)
Even though the Robin Hood tradition is identified as medieval, most of the texts are post-medieval, hence medievalist. These are often situated against the background of natural environment, for which Valerie Johnson coined the term “ecomedievalism”. Therefore, discussion of neomedievalist texts of popular culture, such as films and TV series about Robin Hood, is welcome. The Robin Hood tradition contains different interpretations of the environment, such as the myth of unspoiled nature, but also nature as dangerous and apocalyptic. This session invites such ecocritical readings of various neomedievalist texts that represent nature or the relationship of nature to culture.
Editing and Studying Medieval Annals (1)
Contact Person: Covadonga Valdaliso ; cCasanova@letras.ulisboa.pt
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS)
ARANHIS (Archivum Annalisticum Hispanum) is a research project focused on the study of Medieval annals, in particular to their transmission and to the study of their uses during that period. An interdisciplinary team of scholars, presently working on different European universities, is developing electronic editions and studies on Medieval Iberian annals, but the project aims to create an international network on brief historiography written during the Middle Ages. Proposals on this subject are welcomed to join the sessions.
Editing and Studying Medieval Annals (2)
Contact Person: Covadonga Valdaliso ; cCasanova@letras.ulisboa.pt
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS)
ARANHIS (Archivum Annalisticum Hispanum) is a research project focused on the study of Medieval annals, in particular on their transmission and on the study of their uses during that period. An interdisciplinary team of scholars, presently working on different European universities, is developing electronic editions and studies on Medieval Iberian annals, but the project aims to create an international network on brief historiography written during the Middle Ages. Proposals on this subject are welcomed to join the sessions.
Educational Texts in Pre-Conquest England
Contact Person: Benjamin Weber
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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 “Educational Texts in Pre-Conquest England” at ICMS 2024. This session will explore the role educational texts played as both sources and repositories of information in England before the Norman Conquest. Papers might consider the sources of the English ars grammatica, the reception of philosophic dialogues in Alfred’s court, or how a nugget of Patristic wisdom ended up in the poetic or hagiographic corpora. While our principal focus is Pre-Conquest England, we are delighted to consider papers that consider source relationships across conventional chronological and geographical boundaries.
Elite Women and Memory
Contact Person: Laura Gathagan ; laura.gathagan@cortland.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval Studies Research Group, Univ. of Lincoln
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 and cultural studies. Papers from non-western areas of the world are especially encouraged.
Emblem Studies
Contact Person: Sabine Moedersheim ; smoedersheim@wisc.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
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.
Eolas Lecture
Contact Person: Melanie Maddox
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Society of Irish Medieval Studies (ASIMS)
Epic Soundscapes
Contact Person: Simone Pinet ; sp349@cornell.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Rencesvals, American-Canadian Branch
Working with Murray’s notion of the soundscape--a notion that puts the aural and the spatial together as structuring each other--this session seeks papers that investigate the production and reproduction of soundscapes in medieval romance epic, looking to contrast and compare different literary and scholarly traditions. We encourage participants to think of spaces in epic marked by specific sounds, such as the space of battle or of the court, that of the war council or of the feast as complex constructions in which the aural dimension as a whole, and not only the oral, play a major role.
Epiros: The Other Western Rome
Contact Person: Evan Zarkadas ; evanzarkadas@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This conference session will explore the historical and cultural significance of Epiros as the “Other West” or the place between Byzantium and the West. Epiros after 1204 held a vital role as a separatist entity in the highly fragmented Mediterranean and the sociopolitical landscape of the late Byzantine empire. We hope to bring together scholars from diverse fields and backgrounds to foster a deeper understanding of the region's rich history and its enduring cultural legacy. By exploring Epiros as the "land in between" we aim to broaden our understanding of the Byzantine world and its impact on the Mediterranean region.
Erasures
Contact Person: Rachel Wilson
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.
Erasure has many valences, from a blank space on a page or a missing figure in an artwork, to a missing figure in a scholarly discourse or a blank space in a historical narrative. This session seeks contributions from medievalists from any field who seek to consider literal and metaphorical destruction and removal of forms of material evidence. Historiographical and methodological reflection is especially encouraged. Intentionality and reception merge in engagement with lost moments of representation.
Est quaedam etiam nesciendi ars atque scientia
Contact Person: Danuta Shanzer
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
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.
Even More Forgotten Cistercians
Contact Person: Jason Crow ; Jason.crow@monash.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
At the 2022 and 2023 International Congress on Medieval Studies, several forgotten Cistercians, including Eutropious Proust and Margaret of Roskilde, were re-introduced to the Cistercian and Monastic Studies Group, 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, over the past two ICMS conferences, this panel seeks to further identify and spark interest in the lives and accomplishments of unnoticed Cistercians, regardless of the time period or country in which they lived.
Exploding the Cotton Nero Canon: Manuscript Studies in Cotton Nero A.x and Harley 2250
Contact Person: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society
This session invites exploration of the manuscripts associated with the Pearl-Poet. It seeks to push the boundaries of the Cotton Nero canon by placing Harley 2250 (which includes St. Erkenwald) in conversation with Cotton Nero A.x. Both manuscripts are digitized, and this creates exciting opportunities for continued scholarship on scribal practices, imagery, selection and arrangement of texts, physical details of the manuscripts, and more. Proposals may focus on either of the two manuscripts or may explore them together. Discussion of the impact of digitization and related projects on study of the Pearl-Poet is also welcome.
Flora, Fauna, and Fantasy: Medieval Poets and J. R. R. Tolkien
Contact Person: Jane Beal ; janebeal@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Tolkien at Kalamazoo
This session focuses on “flora, fauna, and fantasy” in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and the medieval poets. We invite proposals that explore nature and ecocritical concerns in the work of Tolkien and the medieval poets while placing them in conversation. Proposals might consider sources, analogues, and influence from a comparative point of view. They might also consider reception of Tolkien and medieval poetry by exploring related literary and filmic texts.
Food and Consumption in the Fourteenth Century
Contact Person: Sarah Ifft Decker
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society
Food served many functions in the fourteenth century: it was not only nourishment, but also a means of socially ostentatious display, a way to maintain (and subvert) interreligious boundaries, a potent religious symbol, and more. The absence of food also played crucial social and cultural roles, both in the context of the regular famines that punctuated the fourteenth century and the choice to voluntarily fast. This panel seeks to bring together a set of papers from a range of disciplinary approaches that address food, eating, and consumption in the fourteenth century.
Fragments and the Big Picture: Using Manuscript Fragments as Historical Sources
Contact Person: Jaakko Tahkokallio ; jaakko.tahkokallio@helsinki.fi
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: BOMPAC (Books of the Medieval Parish Church; ERC Starting Grant no. 948497)
Over the last decades, manuscript fragments have received increased scholarly attention and international collaboration. Much of this work has concentrated on reconstructing now fragmented codices, highlighting rare survivals, or cataloguing. While such efforts are crucially important, there is great research potential in the capacity of collections of fragments to expand our view of medieval history more broadly. This session welcomes papers exploring how fragment corpora (manuscript or incunabula) – and the meta-data on their provenance and early-modern recycling history – can be used as historical sources to inform medieval book culture and other historical phenomena more broadly.
From Bede to Ælred: Literary Approaches among Early Medieval English Theologians
Contact Person: John Bequette ; jbequette@holyapostles.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
The session welcomes proposals that explore the thought of various pre-scholastic theologians from early medieval Anglo-Saxon England, focusing particularly on the role of various literary and rhetorical approaches to theology.
Gaming the Metanarrative: RPGs, TTRPGs, and the Context of Play
Contact Person: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society
Roleplay, cosplay, cooperative vs competitive: these concepts have been part of gaming and literary culture for millennia. Reading as interactive group activity can also be understood as a game. With the earliest table-top games manual in Europe dating back to the 13th century, the Hunting Game's presence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight comes as no surprise. In this panel, we examine the interplay between games and story in medieval texts and their afterlives. We invite proposals exploring how game influences medieval narrative and how medieval games are received and represented in post-medieval RPGs, TTRPGS, and other gaming traditions.
Gender and Nature in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
Contact Person: Kara Rush
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS), Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
This panel seeks papers that explore the relationship between gender and nature in medieval and early modern literature. Papers might explore, for example, how forests, ruins, or waterways are used to mediate queer expression, how bestiaries transgressed or engaged in gender formation, and the role of maternity and the transformation of the natural world. Also welcome are global approaches that discuss gender transformation in ecological contact zones. What role does nature play in the formation of individual gender identity and/or communal gender hierarchies? How has the relationship between gender and nature changed or maintained across medieval and early modern time?
Germanness in the Middle Ages
Contact Person: Jonathan Martin
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)
The question ‘what is German?’ has motivated centuries of reflection by philosophers, poets, politicians, and others in modernity. What is premodern ‘German’? What are the lexical, literary, and material traces of ‘Germanness’, how were they defined in various contexts, how and what did they signify, and how have they changed diachronically? This session will investigate this central question of German history in the textual records of German-speaking Europe prior to the addition of deutscher nation/nationis germanicæ to the name of the Holy Roman Empire (1512) via premodern perspectives on the wider, perennial discussion of this topic in German studies.
Global Courtly Culture
Contact Person: Kathy Krause ; KrauseK@umkc.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), North American Branch
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Mid-America Medieval Association (MAMA)
The International Courtly Literature Society - North American Branch seeks papers on any aspect of global literary court culture, including but not limited to: literary production, patronage, and circulation at court, and courtly culture as depicted in medieval literary texts (in any language). In all cases, the focus should be global, understood in the largest sense possible. Possible topics could include depictions of distant courts in literary texts of another region; intercultural copying and translating of courtly texts; dissemination of courtly texts (or texts about courts) across cultures via marriage, trade, conflict, etc.
Global Petrarch(s) and Petrarchism
Contact Person: Alani Hicks-Bartlett ; alani_hicks-bartlett@brown.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo
This panel invites participants to consider the global reach and expanse of Petrarch and Petrarchan concepts, as reflected in: Petrarch's work itself; his engagement with other literary/linguistic traditions; and Petrarchism and intertextual responses to his work. Countering longstanding perceptions of an “insular” Petrarch who primarily gazes inward, this panel considers the sociopolitical, transhistorical, comparative, intertextual, polyvocal, and plurilinguistic frameworks that reveal a Petrarch who can be understood “globally,” in both his Latin and vernacular writings. Comparative, interdisciplinary, and transhistorical approaches, critical approaches engaging with contemporary theory, and papers considering non-western texts, languages, and/or frameworks are especially welcome.
Going Medieval: Teaching the Middle Ages beyond the Classroom with Community-Engaged Outreach
Contact Person: Jessie Bonafede ; jkbonafede@unm.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Institute for Medieval Studies, Univ. of New Mexico
This session is seeking papers and presentations that address educational community-engaged outreach activities on the Middle Ages and related topics of medievalism conducted beyond the traditional classroom environment. The Middle Ages remains of popular interest in our contemporary media, including television shows, movies, graphic novels, and LARPing (live action role play). Furthermore, the demands of responsible stewardship necessitate discussions concerning how we as scholars within institutions of education can and should connect with larger public communities both on and off campus. We welcome presentations that discuss strategies, methodologies, and or results of community-engaged outreach activities or events.
Gower and Sovereignty: In Memory of Russell A. Peck
Contact Person: Brian Gastle ; bgastle@wcu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: John Gower Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester
In memory of the groundbreaking work and influence on Gower studies of Russell A. Peck, this panel seeks papers that address the idea of sovereignty in Gower’s works. One of Peck’s primary interests was Gower’s notion of the role of kingship and sovereignty, and his influential monograph, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis, proposes that Gower’s interest in sovereignty in the Confessio Amantis is not just political, but personal, a call for self-rule. The panel seeks papers that continue to broaden Peck’s work by exploring issues of sovereignty writ large.
Here Be Dragons: Tolkien at the Medieval Margins
Contact Person: Dimitra Fimi
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, Univ. of Glasgow
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Tolkien at Kalamazoo
Tolkien's medievalist fantasy shows a keen interest in boundaries and margins: from negotiating fantastical geographies and their borders, to examining liminal characters in-between political/racial/cultural boundaries, even challenging borders of traditional genres within the legendarium (fairy-tale, romance, epic, science fantasy, etc.). At the same time, contemporary fantasy and Tolkien scholarship is at last opening up towards the experiences and perspectives of racially, culturally, and ethnically marginalised readers, fans, and scholars. We invite paper proposals that seek to examine boundaries and margins in Tolkien's legendarium, be they textual, linguistic, geographical, embodied, or imposed.
Hiberno- and Anglo-Latin Studies
Contact Person: Brian Cook ; bsc0028@auburn.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Despite the ubiquity of Latin writing across medieval Britain and Ireland, scholarship tends to focus on vernacular texts, crafting narratives of nascent literary traditions often seen through proto-linguistic-nationalistic lenses. And yet, the region is home to some unique forms of decentralized Latin. Of special interest are papers that focus on the interaction of differing Latin and/or Latin and vernacular traditions, whether these interactions be linguistic, literary, geographical, political, or religious. Graduate student submissions are particularly welcome, and at least one spot on the panel will be held for a graduate student who submits a promising proposal.
History, Romance, Fantasy, and Others: The Blending of Genres in Arthuriana
Contact Person: Rachael Warmington ; rachael.warmington@shu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)
The blending of genres in medieval Arthuriana signifies a crucial evolution in storytelling. These blended narratives resonate with contemporary audiences, fostering renewed interest in Arthuriana. As cultural norms shift, this intermingling of genres enables nuanced discussions of identity, ethics, and social roles. Additionally, these blended genres make possible reimaginations of the narratives that offer relevant and profound explorations of the human condition which foster a dialogue between the past and present. The diversity and hybridity of Arthuriana, particularly in chronicles, romances, and fantasies, align with contemporary literary tastes, enabling greater accessibility, relevance, and inclusivity.
Holy Bishops: Bishops, the Cult of the Saints, and Holiness in the Medieval World
Contact Person: Kyle Lincoln
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Hagiography Society
Medieval Bishops and their clerics were intimately tied to the work of the cults of saints. The wide array of saints and their cults across Christendom--many of which were promoted, suppressed, surveilled and politicized by Bishops--speaks to the importance of both institutions in the Medieval Church. This session, co-sponsored by the Hagiography Society and Episcopus, is intended to offer new and exciting contributions from scholars of the Medieval Secular clergy and Hagiography for Kalamazoo 2024. Researchers from all stages are invited to submit their papers for consideration, and joint-presenters are welcome.
Holy Iberians: Holy People and Hagiography in Medieval Iberia
Contact Person: Kyle Lincoln
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Hagiography Society
As a major intellectual crossroads in the Medieval Latin West, the Iberian Peninsula has been recognized by scholars as a laboratory and marketplace for a comprehensive array of historical developments. This co-sponsored panel, offered by The American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain and the Hagiography Society, is designed to offer new contributions and perspectives about Hagiography from the Iberian Peninsula in order to help continue both organizations' efforts to add greater nuance to their respective interests and build lasting multidisciplinary relationships between scholars. Papers from researchers at all stages are invited, as well as from joint presenters.
Hospitals Holistically: A Wide View of Hospitals and Caregiving in the Middle Ages (1)
Contact Person: Brittany Forniotis
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Network for the History of Hospitals
This panel aims to bring together a methodologically diverse group of scholars working on topics related to medieval hospitals and leprosaria in a discussion of all aspects of the institution. Topics of interest within the hospital include, but are not limited to: labor practices, the spatial organization of caregiving, methods and tools of treatment, medical education and theory, representations and understandings of hospitals, and local and regional community-building. We encourage papers addressing a wide range of geographies and time periods.
I Want to Sex (Ed) You Up (1): From Conception to Postpartum
Contact Person: Nichola Harris ; harrisn@sunyulster.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages
This panel seeks to honor Rudolph Bell’s legacy by exploring the role of healing knowledge related to medieval women and children, in particular, how people experienced fertility issues, including miscarriage, abortion and contraception, as well as pregnancy, labor and postpartum care.
I Want to Sex (Ed) You Up (2): From Infection to Impotence
Contact Person: Anna Peterson
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages
As the research contributions of Rudolph Bell revealed, the sex lives of medieval people were complex, deliberate and often informed by contemporary advice manuals or medical ideas. This session will look at sexual education as it relates to illness, infection, and men. It will explore remedies for and the socio-cultural context regarding impotence and infertility, the unfortunate link between sex work and contagion, gender stereotypes in sexual disfunction and disease, among others.
Iberian Chronicles in Global Context
Contact Person: Iona McCleery ; i.mccleery@leeds.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Iberian chronicles need to be studied in multi-disciplinary ways in order to study their interpretation of late medieval culture. The chronicles appeal to modern audiences because of their action scenes, plot and characterisation, but also because they increasingly dealt with seemingly modern warfare, including firepower artillery, refugee crises, food shortages and disease. Some of these Iberian narratives of expansionist politics directly relate to later accounts of colonial conflict, many of which are modelled on older accounts and styles. Through case studies this session will present some close comparative readings of Iberian chronicles.
In Honor of Carolyn Dinshaw: Reflections on 25 Years of Getting Medieval
Contact Person: Kersti Francis
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
2024 marks the 25th anniversary of Carolyn Dinshaw's groundbreaking Getting Medieval (Duke UP 1999), a monograph that helped define queer, feminist, and gender studies for generations of medievalists. This session seeks to honor Getting Medieval's impact with a panel of papers ranging from celebrations to critiques of how this volume has shaped panelists' own work. We welcome proposals from all subfields of medieval studies as long as they directly engage with any part of this specific work. We hope that by bringing together a diverse group of papers in conversation with Getting Medieval, this panel reflects its widespread reach.
In Memoriam Nicholas Howe (1)
Contact Person: Stacy Klein ; ssklein@english.rutgers.edu
Contact Person: Mary Kate Hurley ; hurleym1@ohio.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Ohio State University
These sessions honor the career of Nicholas Howe, whose research laid the groundwork for many of our present concerns in early medieval studies: migration and conquest, imagination and geography, and public scholarship. We encourage papers that engage with the rich array of methodologies, genres, and perspectives that informed Nick’s work, ranging from traditional scholarly research to more creative modes of expression. We especially welcome papers that intersect with Nick's many areas of expertise, including place, history, geography, reading, catalogue poetry, the organization of knowledge, creative nonfiction, and England in the world. Please send 250-300 word abstracts to ssklein@english.rutgers.edu and hurleym1@ohio.edu.
Interpreting Inventories
Contact Person: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society
Inventories, handlists, mention of books in wills, household accounts, even chapters in tables of contents and what can be gleaned from them, are the subject of this session. How do modern researchers interpret these historical records? What do inventories and related lists suggest about medieval reading, book ownership, or personal or institutional libraries?
Intersecting Iberias: Disability, Gender, and Race
Contact Person: Alexander Korte
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
Intersections between Art, Science, and Cistercian Theology
Contact Person: Jason Crow ; Jason.crow@monash.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
The aesthetic theory and practice of the Spanish and polymath, Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, appears, on the surface to be incompatible with Cistercian mystical theology. Although Caramuel wrote extensively on a broad range of topics, mathematical approaches to moral theory and to the reconciliation of the divine with the terrestrial factor heavily in his treatises on architecture and music. This panel seeks to broaden our understanding of Caramuel’s work by examining the intersection of his aesthetic and scientific theories with Cistercian theology, exposing the underlying method of his probabilism leading to insight into his integration of art, science, and theology.
Intersections of Medieval Dis/Ability and Race/Making
Contact Person: Kisha Tracy ; ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages
Medieval race scholars, such as Geraldine Heng and Cord Whitaker, have opened up the fields of medieval studies and critical race theory. One way in which they’ve done so–and the primary matter this panel hopes to expand upon–is by demonstrating how race-making employs multiple rhetorical technologies across time, beyond medical paradigms that make up eugenic “science.” This conversation opens up new possibilities for medieval disability: what racializing rhetorics make up ability/disability? Are there spaces within premodern disability that studies of race could help clarify/vice versa? This panel examines what it means to think about premodern race and premodern dis/ability together.
Invisible, Perhaps Inaudible... But Not Ineffectual: The Impact of the Unnoticed and the Unseen in Fact and Fiction
Contact Person: Deborah Sinnreich-Levi ; dsinnrei@stevens.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)
The public's perception of the Middle Ages rests on visions of the upper classes whose impact is primarily on the imagination. But other people outnumbered the nobles and heroes. As the public's fascination with a Middle Ages that never existed swells, scholars of many fields - especially social history, literature, and prosopography - present marginal and marginalized voices; dispel romanticized notions of an imaginary time; and counter the co-opting of images, ideas and contributions of workers, craftsmen, servants and people of color, the differently abled, and the cloistered. This session focuses on the people who actually made society run.
Irrationality and Madness
Contact Person: Filip Radovic
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: University of Gothenburg
It's Complicated: Constructing the Virtues and Vices in the Global Fifteenth Century
Contact Person: Joan McRae
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Jean Gerson Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Alain Chartier Society
We invite a range of approaches to the virtues and vices as defined in Gerson, Chartier, and other authors of the global fifteenth century, both women and men. Manuscript study offers insight into the textual channels that disseminated pastoral guidance (including the virtues and vices) to the laity, as well as more subversive moral discourse such as Chartier’s Belle dame. In the study of text, we expect to learn from approaches indebted to medieval theology, literary theory, feminism/gender politics, debate on morals, questioning clerical authority, and more. Iconology also applies, as the virtues and vices were often represented in art.
Italian Art for a Persecuting Society
Contact Person: Theresa Flanigan ; Theresa.Flanigan@ttu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Art Society
R.I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society (2007) argued that medieval Europe experienced the systematic, targeted persecution of diverse minority groups (i.e., heretics, Jews, lepers, and sexual deviants), which society proclaimed “dangerous,” thereby legitimizing violence against them. Notable about this period was the creation of a “rhetoric and apparatus of persecution capable of being turned at will from one category of victim to another, including, if necessary, those invented for this purpose,” establishing “patterns of persecution that endure in our own times” (pp. 145-51). This session explores Italian art’s role in the construction and reinforcement of persecuting systems.
Jewish-Christian Interaction in the Middle Ages (1)
Contact Person: Steven McMichael
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Academy of Jewish-Christian Studies
The Academy of Jewish-Christian Studies and the Institute for Jewish History in Austria are proposing to two jointly-sponsored sessions for the 2024 Conference. These sessions are dedicated to the relations between Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages in all their forms: social, cultural, political, economic, artistic, and theological, and both in peaceful encounters as well as in polemics and Christian violence. We invite scholars to present their recent research on various disciplines including interreligious relations, medieval literature, cultural transfer, Hispanic studies, and women’s and gender studies.
Jewish-Christian Interaction in the Middle Ages (2)
Contact Person: Birgit Wiedl ; birgit.wiedl@injoest.ac.at
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Institute for Jewish History in Austria
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Academy of Jewish-Christian Studies
Kings and Their Magi in the Catalan-Speaking Lands of the Medieval Mediterranean
Contact Person: John Bollweg ; trecento@comcast.net
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: North American Catalan Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)
Michael Ryan (A Kingdom of Stargazers, 2012) presents the Crown of Aragon in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as a site where political crises and precarity of status supported an interest in astrology, divination, and occult arts. Courts and advisors throughout Europe shared this interest, but for this session, the North American Catalan Society (in co-sponsorship with the Ibero-Medieval Association of North America) seeks papers on examples from the Catalan-speaking lands between 1100 and 1500 of kings, nobles, their advisors, or members of court using prophecy, astrology, etc. to extend their power, secure patronage, or just to amuse.
Landscape and Environment in the Fourteenth Century
Contact Person: Lili Caron
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society
The 14th century experienced its own climate change, the Little Ice Age, which lasted for approximately five centuries. This session seeks papers that explore 14th-century land use and relationships to the environment. Topics of particular interest include landscape design, gardens, and the management of water supply, as well as how people's relationship to the environment intersected with emotions including grief and hope. The panel seeks to draw together an interdisciplinary array of papers, drawing on visual sources, literary texts, and documentary records, within in a global framework that includes non-Western contexts.
Language, Power, Geography (1)
Contact Person: Nathan Tabor ; nathan.tabor@wmich.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Great Lakes Adiban Society
GLAS seeks papers about connections, divergences, and parallel frames among histories of translocal languages and texts. We seek scholars focused on historical linguistics, culture, religion, and visual arts among cosmopolitan languages of the pre-modern world. The panel will discuss notions of power, shared epistemes, and strategies for shaping geography. We concentrate on literary genre, reading practices, scribal technologies, notions of criticism/commentary, and visual rhetoric. By addressing broad categories of power, geography, and creativity, we seek to foster dialogue and points of comparison among scholars from a variety of literary and cultural traditions of the globalized pre-modern world.
Language, Power, Geography (2)
Contact Person: Nathan Tabor ; nathan.tabor@wmich.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Great Lakes Adiban Society
GLAS seeks papers about connections, divergences, and parallel frames among histories of translocal languages and texts. We seek scholars focused on historical linguistics, culture, religion, and visual arts among cosmopolitan languages of the pre-modern world. The panel will discuss notions of power, shared epistemes, and strategies for shaping geography. We concentrate on literary genre, reading practices, scribal technologies, notions of criticism/commentary, and visual rhetoric. By addressing broad categories of power, geography, and creativity, we seek to foster dialogue and points of comparison among scholars from a variety of literary and cultural traditions of the globalized pre-modern world.
Late Antiquity (1)
Contact Person: Jonathan Arnold ; jon-arnold@utulsa.edu
Contact Person: Tiggy McLaughlin ; tiggy.mclaughlin@cathedralprep.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Late Antiquity
The Society for Late Antiquity is pleased to announce its sponsorship of two in-person sessions at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 9-11, 2024, at Western Michigan University. These sessions are intentionally broad in scope, allowing for an extensive range of topics relating to the history, literature, religion, art, archaeology, culture, and society of Late Antiquity, that is, the European, North African, and Western Asian world, c. 250–750.
Law and Legal Culture in Early Medieval Britain (1)
Contact Person: Andrew Rabin
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Law as Culture XXIV: Substance, Procedure, and Institutions in the Middle Ages
Contact Person: Alexander Volokh ; volokh@post.harvard.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Selden Society
The "Law as Culture" panel, which has been going on at Kalamazoo for over 20 years, welcomes any paper on any aspect of legal history. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches (merging legal history with, e.g., economics, political science, literature, anthropology, etc.), and encourage the participation of junior scholars and graduate students. We welcome submissions from any area, e.g. English, Celtic, Continental, Roman, Canon, and from any period within the Middle Ages.
Lay Learning and Holy Women, in Honor of Alastair J. Minnis
Contact Person: Michael Van Dussen
Contact Person: Robyn Bartlett
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lollard Society
Letter Writing in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Contact Person: Hope Williard ; h.williard@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Papers in this session will explore letter writing in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. A wide range of letters and letter collections survives from the fourth through tenth centuries. This session will provide a space to consider answers to some key questions about epistolography in this period, including issues of genre, the role of women and nonelites in letter writing, the sending and receiving of letters, the influences of late antique and early medieval letter writing on later epistolary traditions, and more.
Letters, Couriers, and Post Offices: Mail in the Medieval World
Contact Person: David Sorenson
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Postal History at Kalamazoo
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
Mail has played an important part in human activity in literate societies, in the West as elsewhere, since the days of the Sumerians. Providing the primary means of conveying information at a distance, it functioned as a vital part of the pre-modern infrastructure. In this session we cover various technical aspects of medieval mail; rather than studying its contents, we will look at its delivery systems in their various aspects. Whether private or governmental, whether involving “stamps” or postmarks, whether private or public, mail helped make the world, and we propose a session dedicated to studying its role.
Light from the East? Byzantine Enamels in Cross-Cultural Context (Ninth through Eleventh Centuries)
Contact Person: Antje Bosselmann-Ruickbie
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture
Byzantine enamels on gold were high-quality luxury artworks, essential for imperial and religious representation and ‘international’ diplomacy. With their combination of brilliant translucent and opaque colors, they were more than decorative objects, also representing the high level of technology in Byzantium. This session will consider Byzantine enamels from an intercultural perspective and compare contemporary developments in the Carolingian and Ottonian West, as well as the Fatimid world. Especially in focus will be technology and ‘cultural competition’ in this historical period, formative for the relations of these three ‘global’ players.
Loss and Grief in the Fourteenth Century
Contact Person: Sarah Ifft Decker
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society
Death, loss, and grief are universal elements of the human experience, but responses to loss and expressions of grief are informed by specific cultural contexts. The fourteenth century is a particularly striking context in which to examine responses to loss, given the need to respond to mass casualties due to plague, famine, war, and massacres. This panel seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of papers that explore how people in the fourteenth century, across the medieval world, responded to loss and grief, both personally and communally.
Lyric Networks: New Approaches to Occitan and Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poetics
Contact Person: Courtney Wells
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Guilhem IX
From scholars of the literatures of the Iberian peninsula, we know that Occitan lyric had an important influence on the Galician-Portuguese poetry that flourished throughout medieval Iberia. However, there remains much we do not know about the modalities and the extent of this influence. For this panel, we encourage further enquiry into dynamic relationships existing between Occitan and Galician-Portuguese troubadours. Moving beyond unidirectional rubrics of influence and genealogy, how might we see Occitan and Galician-Portuguese poetics as the expression of a network of linguistic, cultural, and poetic exchange?
Magic and Power in Elite and Popular Culture
Contact Person: Vajra Regan ; vajra.regan@mail.utoronto.ca
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica
Definitions of magic often focus on relations of power. The operator manipulates the hidden or spiritual powers in order to affect people or things in the natural world. This session seeks to explore the dynamics and varieties of magic power both within and between elite and popular culture. How was magic power socially constructed? What beliefs authorized such power? And how were claims of magical powers used to assert the authority of individuals and institutions?
Magic, Nature, and the Environment
Contact Person: Samuel Gillis Hogan ; spgh14@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica
From natural magic (that uses metals, gems, and part of animals) to necromantic operations (that summon spirits of wind, direction, or land) this panel explores the ways in which magic instructions and theory drew upon and sought to manipulate the natural environment. Humanity’s relationship with (and definition of) “nature” differs vastly in various eras and cultures. Examining how esoteric texts reflect or challenge these mainstream perspectives provides insights that complicate and contextualise received narratives about the environment and humanity’s place within it. This panel will be illuminating not only to histories of magic, but of the environment, space, and place.
Making Sense of Medieval Sensory Disabilities
Contact Person: Margaret McCurry ; mm9659@nyu.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages
The SSDMA seeks proposals for papers exploring medieval representations of sensory disabilities such as visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and proprioceptive impairments and their profound implications for social, cultural, historical, philosophical, and religious paradigms. By generating scholarly discourse across numerous domains, including literary portrayals, historical accounts, and artistic expressions; cultural and religious implications; and developments in architectural design and assistive technology, this session aims to deepen our understanding of disability studies and to reshape our perceptions of the medieval sensorium. Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words and curriculum vitae to Margaret McCurry at margaret.mccurry@nyu.edu.
Making Space: Women's Agency Within a Patriarchal Hegemony
Contact Person: Anne Crafton ; acrafto2@nd.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Institute, Univ. of Notre Dame
It is often said that well-behaved women seldom make history. Yet, simply because they are not the subject of multivolume biographies does not mean that “well-behaved” women did not have agency in their daily lives. This panel seeks to highlight the agentic force of the medieval women who did not subvert the patriarchal norms of their time. How did medieval women make use of patriarchal norms to their own advantage? Specifically, how did religious women, lay or monastic, live their own lives, create their own spaces, and make their own choices within the medieval patriarchal hegemony?
Managing Reproduction in the Middle Ages
Contact Person: Jennifer Borland
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Academy of America
Manuscript Compilation, Poetics of Compilation
Contact Person: Tiffany Beechy ; tiffany.beechy@colorado.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Univ. of Colorado–Boulder
Manuscript Manifestations: Post-Medieval Perceptions of Medieval Material Culture (1)
Contact Person: Catrin Haberfield
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Stanford Univ.
Literature, art, and, more recently, film have used the invented medieval manuscript to signal, invent, or untangle a relationship to a distant past. We seek 15-20 minute papers from any discipline that examine post-medieval perceptions and deployments of manuscripts and manuscript culture.
Manuscript Vicissitudes
Contact Person: Jonathan Martin
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS)
More than thirty years have elapsed since the dawn of the ‘new philology,’ a material turn that has restored the individuality of the manuscript to its central place in medieval studies. As unique objects, medieval manuscripts do not merely contain text – they often have histories and stories of their own, sometimes traveling vast distances or facing destruction. This session invites papers that discuss the journeys and fates of medieval manuscripts. It also invites papers that explore alterations, redactions, variation, and the use and reuse of the manuscript codex.
Manuscripts Before the Year 1000
Contact Person: Bruce Gilchrist
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This session solicits research on any aspects of manuscript study from late Classical through the Early Medieval era, notably palaeography and codicology, but also study of mise-en-page, transmission, and editing. Discussion of manuscripts from all eras and global origins before the year 1000 is welcomed, especially papers which may deal with cross-cultural exchange and movement of manuscripts across the medieval world conceived broadly (China, India, the Near East, Africa just as much as Europe and the Mediterranean).
Marie de France and the Medieval Fable Tradition: Text, Image, and Context
Contact Person: Joseph Johnson ; jj892@georgetown.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society
The Fables of Marie de France stands as the first vernacular collection of Aesopian fables; it was also Marie’s most popular work among medieval audiences, surviving in 25 manuscripts. This panel seeks to revisit Marie de France’s Fables in their original, manuscript context by inviting papers that highlight the relationship between the written word and images or other paratextual material. Proposals are also invited by scholars working on the wider medieval fable tradition with which Marie’s Fables connect, including but not limited to the Romulus Nilantii and the Hebrew fables of Berechiah ha-Nakdan. Proposals are encouraged from any discipline(s).
Marked by Change: (De)coding Differences in Textual and Visual Translations
Contact Person: Brianna Oliver ; bsoliver@uark.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, Univ. of Arkansas–Fayetteville
The panel will examine variations or distinctions within the realm of textual and visual translations in medieval literature and explore how transformations and shifts have impacted the field of medieval literature. It will also investigate the relationship between written texts and visual representations in medieval literature and delve into the process of deciphering or interpreting textual and visual translations in such sources.
Marking the Body: Medieval Adornment and Tattooing
Contact Person: Katharine Scherff ; Katharine.d.scherff@ttu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Popular forms of body modifications have been shared by many postindustrial cultures. Tattoos and other body modification have been practiced as method of expressing pilgrimage, rite of passage, folk medicine, ancestral connections, and marks of difference. This session will center on the practice of marking the body with the goal to uncover impetuses behind body marking, the meaning of the corporeal body, as well as myth and bias associated with the practice. This session would encompass discourse surrounding the tradition from antiquity to the height of peregrination. All societal, cultural, performative, ethnic, and regional practices will be given consideration.
Marsilius of Padua's Defensor pacis at 700: Then and Now (1)
Contact Person: Cary Nederman ; cary-j-nederman@tamu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
2024 marks the 700th anniversary of the completion of the one of the most influential and controversial works of medieval political thought, Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis. It is proposed to memorialize of this event with sessions that provide an opportunity for engagement among historians, political theorists, philosophers and scholars from cognate disciplines with an interest in Marsilius’s thought. Topics may include (but are not limited to) addressing his sources, biography and associates, contemporaneous authors, readers and critics, political and intellectual contexts, and receptions, as well as his own doctrines as articulated in the Defensor pacis and his other writings.
Masters of the Sacred Page
Contact Person: Mark Zier ; markzier@sbcglobal.net
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (SSBMA)
The schools in twelfth century Paris were incubators for much of the theological discussion and speculation around Christian theology that eventually led to the theological syntheses of the thirteenth. Peter Comestor, Peter Lombard and Stephen Langton were among the leaders of this movement that led to Hugh of St. Cher, Bonaventure and Aquinas. Several of these scholars have had separate conferences dedicated to them in the past decade, but so far, a comprehensive comparative approach has not been attempted since Smalley, now almost seventy years ago. This session hopes to encourage this collaborative comparison.
Material Culture in the Fourteenth Century
Contact Person: Gabriela Chitwood ; gchitwoo@uoregon.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society
The 14th century was plagued by a series of crises in environmental, religious, economic, and political spheres. The material culture of this tumultuous century bears witness to the tribulations and cultural changes resulting from these crises. This session invites papers to examine the relationship between material culture as a witness, participant, or respondent in crisis. This session encourages papers to examine a variety of material cultures, including textiles, paintings, manuscripts, inventories, sculptures, and architecture. Contributions from any disciplinary lens—including, but not limited to, history, literature, and art history—are encouraged. The session is additionally open to all geographies.
Material Remains of Medieval and Early Modern Commerce and Correspondence
Contact Person: Mildred Budny
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
The Datini Archives (Prato, Italy) are an extraordinary testimony to the materials and methods of commercial and financial activity in the 14th and early 15th centuries, with various formats and materials. What material evidence survives, and what does it tell us about the working life of people engaged in commerce and business of the era? Historians use such materials to construct larger narratives, but not the practices and practicalities of such accounts and accounting. This panel seeks that more granular understanding of the documentation itself, down to the substrate(s) and inscription(s), and what matter tells us as well as words.
Material Resonances: Unifying Object-Based Study and the Digital Humanities
Contact Person: Gina Hurley
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Bibliographical Society of America
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript: Rolls and Fragments (DEMMR/F)
This panel seizes upon the intersections and divergences of material culture and digital humanities, asking how they might reshape our pedagogy and spark our students’ imaginations. Where previous panels have considered the use of objects and of digital surrogates in the classroom as separate enterprises, we seek to explore the benefits and pitfalls of bringing the two together to teach students about the Middle Ages and about the politics of collections and access. Potential questions include: How might digitization practices emphasise or obscure aspects of the material object? How might examining parchment or ink help students understand the digital book?
Matters in Medieval Art and Architecture: In Tribute to Sheila Bonde (1)
Contact Person: Erica Nunn-Kinias ; enunnkinias@western.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Proposals celebrating the impact of Professor Sheila Bonde, Brown University, to the field of medieval studies. Papers included in these two sessions address a wide range of topics reflecting the breadth of Professor’s Bonde’s scholarship. These include medieval art and architectural space; medieval monasticism; sensory studies, and archaeology.
Medieval Benedictines Think about Salvation
Contact Person: Hugh Feiss ; hughf@idahomonks.org
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Benedictine Academy
The purpose of Benedictine monasticism is, it seems, salvation in Christ. How Benedictine monasticism leads to salvation is thus a fundamental question. This session will ask how the Rule of Benedict, Gregory's Life of Benedict and medieval Benedictines thought about salvation: what it is; how attain it; for whom; the interplay of monastic effort with divine grace. Once the participants for the sessions are selected and their papers developed, we will invite them to help develop a brief introduction showing how their papers fit together in the context of medieval theology.
Medieval Documentary Cultures
Contact Person: Laura Gathagan ; laura.gathagan@cortland.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society
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.
Medieval Ecocriticisms (1): Gender and Sexuality
Contact Person: Heide Estes
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
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, 2023.
Medieval Ecocriticisms (2): Animals
Contact Person: Heide Estes
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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, 2023.
Medieval Education
Contact Person: Joseph Turner
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval-Renaissance Faculty Workshop, Univ. of Louisville
This session welcomes submissions on medieval educational traditions, broadly conceived to include pedagogical theory and practice, the history of rhetoric, and the influence of medieval pedagogy on other domains (e.g. the production or analysis of poetry). In light of the recent passing of James J. Murphy and the recent retirements of Martin Camargo and Marjorie Curry Woods, there will be a special focus on areas of inquiry that have been transformed by these scholars.
Medieval for Children: Adapting the Medieval in Modern Books for Children
Contact Person: Susan Steuer
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Special Collections and Rare Book Department, Western Michigan University
Mass-produced books for children have long incorporated medieval stories, themes and images. Because children's literature is often assumed to have an educational component and serve as an opportunity to shape the attitudes of future generations, medieval content could be used or mis-used for reasons beyond historical knowledge or entertainment. This session invites scholars of medievalism in children's literature to describe how authors and artists in the age of print have interpreted "medieval" for the children of their time.and their intended, or unintended, audiences.
Medieval Horsemanship (1): No Animal Is Nobler than a Horse
Contact Person: Anastasija Ropa
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cheiron: The International Journal of Equine and Equestrian History
Jordanus Rufus begins his famous hippiatric treatise with the statement “No Animal Is Nobler than a Horse,” a sentiment echoed by other authors writing on horses in Europe and beyond from antiquity to Renaissance. In the two sessions on medieval horsemanship, we are going to explore the broad range of horse and human interactions that constitute the concept of horsemanship in the Middle Ages. We encourage papers that employ experimental and transdisciplinary approaches; however, traditional approaches are also welcome. The authors will be invited to submit their papers for publication in Cheiron: The International Journal of Equine and Equestrian History.
Medieval Horsemanship (2): I Know You by the Horse You Ride
Contact Person: Anastasija Ropa
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cheiron: The International Journal of Equine and Equestrian History
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Equine History Collective
In the premodern world, a horse or other animal one rode could be used to assess the person's social status, and even his/her character. In the second sessions on medieval horsemanship, we are going to explore the broad range of horse and human interactions that constitute the concept of horsemanship in the Middle Ages. We encourage papers that employ experimental and transdisciplinary approaches; however, traditional approaches are also welcome. The authors will be invited to submit their papers for publication in Cheiron: The International Journal of Equine and Equestrian History.
Medieval Ibero-Romance Languages: Alfonso X's Scriptorium and the Digital Humanities
Contact Person: Pablo Pastrana-Pérez
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS)
This session seeks to bring together recent advances in the production of digital editions of the works of Alfonso X, such as Estoria de España Digital, 7PartidasDigital, 7PDgap, or the Digital Edition of the General Estoria, to name a few. These efforts employ different theoretical frameworks and a plethora of digital humanities tools. This session seeks to bring into dialogue these projects, and similar undertakings, to share their experiences, discoveries and challenges, but also to elicit reflections on their work of editing the works of Alfonso X in the digital age.
Medieval Mediterranean Women and Food
Contact Person: Dianne Moneypenny
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
In its denomination of the Mediterranean diet as an intelligible cultural heritage, UNESCO highlights the role of women as transmitters of the "knowledge of the Mediterranean diet: they safeguard its techniques, respect seasonal rhythms and festive events, and transmit the values of the element to new generations." This session focuses on the central role women played in the transmission of cultural knowledge through foodstuffs in the medieval period. This interdisciplinary session seeks to bring to light the understudied role of women who created, passed down, promoted, and negotiated Mediterranean diets, meals, and foodstuffs.
Medieval Military History (1): Early Medieval Warfare
Contact Person: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Medieval Military History (2): Late Medieval Warfare
Contact Person: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Medieval Military History (3): Current Topics in Medieval Warfare
Contact Person: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History
Papers discussing aspects of medieval warfare such as communications and logistics, siegecraft, female lordship, administration and finance, espionage, unlikely sources, etc. are welcome.
Medieval Military History (4): Medieval Military Technology
Contact Person: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Medieval Music and Digital Humanities
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Contact Person: Christina Kim
Contact Person: Andrea Klassen
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
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.
Medieval Sermon Studies (1)
Contact Person: Jessalynn Bird ; jbird@saintmarys.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society
The field of sermon studies has expanded from a niche specialty to an interdisciplinary field leveraged by historians and literary theorists across cultures and time periods. These sessions offer both scholars new to the field and well-versed in it the opportunity to discuss methodologies and the latest techniques and findings in the field of sermon studies.
Medieval Sermon Studies (2)
Contact Person: Jessalynn Bird ; jbird@saintmarys.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society
The field of sermon studies has expanded from a niche specialty to an interdisciplinary field leveraged by historians and literary theorists across cultures and time periods. These sessions offer scholars new to the field and well-versed in it the opportunity to discuss methodologies and the latest techniques and findings in the field of sermon studies.
Medieval Voices: Tools for Listening to the Past
Contact Person: Katarina Rexing ; katarina.rexing@wmich.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Medievalism and Contemporary Romance
Contact Person: Angela Weisl ; angela.weisl@shu.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism
One of the Middle Ages' most popular genres was the romance. The contemporary romance, whether on film or in print, remains one of the most prolific genres. How does the latter build on, inflect, or reflect the former? Papers should consider contemporary romances (print or screen, from anywhere in the world) in conversation with medieval antecedents, whether in specific detail, narrative strategies or structures, character features, etc.
Medievalism and Music
Contact Person: Christina Kim
Contact Person: Rebecca Maloy
Contact Person: Andrea Klassen
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
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.
Medievalisms in Contemporary Middle Grade and Young Adult Media
Contact Person: Amelia Lehosit
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Money, Minting, and Administration in the Medieval World
Contact Person: David Yoon ; dyoon@numismatics.org
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Numismatic Society
Money has been a fundamental tool of government since its origin. However, it offers actors, both within and outside government, a continual temptation to malfeasance. As a result, the production of money itself requires considerable administrative effort, as does managing the flow of money into, out of, and within a government. The papers in this session will examine the topic of money and administration from the material evidence of monetary objects, which commonly bear administrative information directly, as well as from the written evidence produced by those managing or regulating the production or flow of money
Monsters in/of/and the Archive
Contact Person: Mary Leech ; mary.leech@uc.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application (MEARCSTAPA)
Often we find something unexpectedly, or in an unexpected place while doing archival research or working with rare materials. This panel invites papers that describe situations when the archival material itself is a find that defies category or definition, or when it contains or is contained within an unexpected context. The panel will take a multidisciplinary, transhistorical approach to the “crypto-archival,” when something sleeping for centuries is awakened by the scholar and refuses to behave. We invite papers on new discoveries, on the messiness of dealing with unedited manuscripts, on the monstrosity in the historiographical archive
Monstrosity, Madness, and Marie de France
Contact Person: Joseph Johnson ; jj892@georgetown.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society
This panel examines encounters with monstrosity, madness, isolation, identity, and alterity. We seek contributions that explore the themes of disability, deformity, illness, mental health, transformation, and more in the works of Marie de France (the Lais, the Fables, the Espurgatoire seint Patriz, and/or La Vie Seinte Audree). Intertextual and interdisciplinary approaches that connect Marie’s œuvre to the larger medieval world are welcome. Our objective is to provide a space for Marie de France scholars to come together and to stimulate discussion about how Marie can be incorporated into articles or monographs dealing with issues beyond Romance Studies.
More is More: Maximalism, Materiality, and the Medieval Aesthetics of Embellishment
Contact Person: Grace Greiner ; grace.catherine.greiner@utexas.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Post-pandemic, one mantra reigns in contemporary art, fashion, and design: “more is more.” Maximalist, medieval-inspired prints by William Morris et al. grace modern furnishings, while fashion’s influencers–like Amans stitching up his sleeves for a springtime jaunt in Le roman de la rose–have emerged from the work-from-home sartorial doldrums with flamboyance and flair. Medieval people, of course, were no strangers to a maximalist aesthetics. Across medieval manuscript borders, tapestries, textiles, cathedrals, romances, dream visions, and theological and rhetorical texts, the aesthetics of “more” proliferates. Accordingly, this session seeks papers that explore the many medieval spaces where–like now–maximalism and materiality fantastically collide.
Music and Identity
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Contact Person: Alison Altstatt
Contact Person: Rebecca Maloy
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo
Music and musical practices can be tied to a sense of self and can forge distinctive, collective identities. Recent scholarly discourse within medieval studies has tied in music and sound’s links with gender and sexuality, as well as how the sonic can manifest expressions of social-cultural, ethnic, and religious ideas of belonging or otherness. This session explores how music and sound contribute to the shaping and recognition of identities throughout the Middle Ages. We encourage submissions from topics including, but not limited to, music and/or sound and aspects of: race, ethnicity, religion, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality, social-cultural groups, and embodiment.
Music and Materiality
Contact Person: Alison Altstatt
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Contact Person: Rebecca Maloy
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo
While music can seem to be a transcendent phenomenon, it can also be based in and created by material practices and sources. From instruments to manuscripts to cathedrals, this session invites any papers dealing with the physical manifestation of music or physical objects containing musical information. We envision this session to be inclusive of both musical sources and musical instruments, and branching into the materiality of physical spaces. In doing so, this session creates an environment to deal with the materiality of music in all its forms.
Music Medievalism in Popular Culture
Contact Person: Anna Czarnowus
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
Jonathan Le Cocq (forthcoming, 2024) defines music medievalism as either the influence of the medieval on later music or the impact of medieval music (real and imagined) on any later cultural practice. In popular culture, we can find both music that has been influenced by the actual medieval one and music influenced by some folk music imagined as medieval. There are diverse genres within music medievalism. Medievalist music such as pagan folk music (Troyer in: Meyer and Yri 2020) can be used in various media. Some music videos and video games scores exemplify the influence of music imagined as medieval.
Networks of Exchange in the Early Middle Ages
Contact Person: Lee Mordechai
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Framing the Late Antique and Early Medieval Economy (FLAME)
This panel explores the economic transformations of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. We welcome scholarly works that approach these themes from fresh angles, be it through the lens of trade networks, material culture, economic policies, or other innovative perspectives. This panel aims to promote a wide-ranging and inclusive discussion on the economic underpinnings of this era.
Networks of Song and Story: Medieval Convents and Communities
Contact Person: Rachel Golden ; rmgolden@utk.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This session adopts an interdisciplinary approach to womenʼs communities centered at religious houses, and interprets creative, devotional, and other kinds of output inspired by these institutional contexts. How did music, art, liturgies, and texts figure in representations and articulations of these womenʼs voices? We demonstrate how particular institutional contexts framed gendered expression and communal life, and how particular works reflected and fashioned womenʼs voices. Further, we investigate how convents, functioning as inspiration and narrative loci, shaped lyric and text, and we consider how such works created networks among writers, readers, and performers, within and beyond convent walls.
New Directions in Old English Pedagogy
Contact Person: Tarren Andrews ; tarren.andrews@yale.edu
Contact Person: Mary Kate Hurley ; hurleym1@ohio.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Disinventing Old English
While scholars of race, gender, disability, and the digital humanities are all rethinking the way we study Old English literature and culture, many pedagogical tools still prioritize the Grammar-Translation method of language learning. Vocabulary and readings that still support imperial and ethnocentric modes of thinking, often using violent, sexist, racist, and ableist examples of literature from the period. This session invites papers that interrogate our usual methods of teaching Old English and lay the groundwork for more inclusive pedagogical modes.
New Research on the Art and Architecture of the Medieval Parish Church (1)
Contact Person: Sarah Blick ; blicks@kenyon.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
New Research on the Art and Architecture of the Medieval Parish Church (2)
Contact Person: Sarah Blick ; blicks@kenyon.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
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.
New Voices in Early Drama
Contact Person: Emma Solberg
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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 and performance 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.
New Voices in Medieval History
Contact Person: Laura Gathagan ; laura.gathagan@cortland.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
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 annual Denis Bethell Prize.
New Voices on Early Medieval England (1)
Contact Person: Chelsea Shields-Más ; shieldsmasc@oldwestbury.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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, archaeology, 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.
New Voices on Early Medieval England (2)
Contact Person: Chelsea Shields-Más ; shieldsmasc@oldwestbury.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
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, archaeology, 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.
New Work by Early-Career Scholars in Celtic Studies
Contact Person: Joshua Smith ; jbs016@uark.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Celtic Studies Association of North America
This session welcomes recent research on any topic relevant to medieval Celtic Studies—in any discipline and relating to any of the Celtic countries and their cultures—by scholars who have not yet completed their final degree or who are otherwise at an early stage of their career. Scholars who wish to propose a 20-minute paper for inclusion in this session should send a paper proposal (including both a one-page abstract of the topic and a completed Participant Information Form: ) to Professor Joshua Byron Smith. (jbs016@uark.edu) by Tuesday, August 1, 2023.
Not Just Nicola: Medieval Women in Office, ca. 700–1400
Contact Person: Mary Blanchard
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval People, Medieval Studies Research Group, Univ. of Lincoln
Inspired by Nicola de la Haie, who inherited the office of constable of Lincoln Castle and was appointed the sheriff of Lincolnshire during the thirteenth century, this session asks how and why certain women held office in the Middle Ages. What obligations came with these offices, and how did women fulfill them? Did nuns and secular women execute their duties in similar manner, indicating a shared culture between them? We seek papers from across the medieval period and situated in different regions to help answer whether there noticeable differences in female office-holding across time or across regions.
Notre Dame in Color (1): Aesthetics and Meanings of Color
Contact Person: Jennifer Feltman
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art
Notre Dame in Paris was once a multi-chromatic visual environment, enhanced by polychromed sculpture, stained glass, rich textiles, clerical vestments, and references to color in polyphonic chant. This session, the first of three, examines the aesthetics of the Gothic Cathedral of Paris and the theological and social meanings of is colors. It is organized in anticipation of the 5yr anniversary of the fire at Notre Dame and completion of its restoration in December 2024. We welcome papers considering the color schema and pigments used in the cathedral's glass, sculpture, and architecture as well as papers addressing color in contemporary manuscripts/monuments.
Notre Dame in Color (2): Scientific Analysis of Color
Contact Person: Jennifer Feltman
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art
Notre Dame in Paris was once a multi-chromatic visual environment, enhanced by polychromed sculpture, stained glass, rich textiles, clerical vestments, and references to color in polyphonic chant. This session, the second of three, presents new studies of polychromed sculptures conducted by the Laboratoire de recherche des monuments historique. It is organized in anticipation of the 5yr anniversary of the fire at Notre Dame and completion of its restoration in December 2024. We welcome papers considering the polychromy of sculpture and its relation to construction sequence and iconography.
Notre Dame in Color (3): Technologies to Visualize Color
Contact Person: Jennifer Feltman
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art
Notre Dame in Paris was once a multi-chromatic visual environment, enhanced by polychromed sculpture, stained glass, rich textiles, clerical vestments, and references to color in polyphonic chant. This session, the third of three, discusses the uses and challenges of 3D modeling and visualization technologies to document, preserve, and represent polychromed sculptures. It is organized in anticipation of the 5yr anniversary of the fire at Notre Dame and completion of its restoration in December 2024. We welcome papers considering uses of laser and structured-light scanning, photogrammetry, digital textures, and light projection technologies to visualize the colors of Notre Dame.
Occult Computing
Contact Person: Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica
Old Books, New Technologies
Contact Person: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
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.
Old English and Anglo-Latin Fragments and Microtexts
Contact Person: Lindy Brady
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center
Improved technology and enhanced awareness have heightened our appreciation for the importance of microtexts and fragments in helping us understand the cultural and intellectual climate of pre-Norman Britain. This session welcomes papers studying any type of Old English or Anglo-Latin microtext or fragment: from binding fragments, to marginalia, to drypoint, to erased or damaged text newly recovered via multispectral imaging. The session seeks to place these micro-, marginalised, fragmented, and damaged texts in dialogue with their means of preservation, with larger texts which may once have contained them, and with one another.
Old English Ecologies
Contact Person: Lindy Brady
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center
Old Norse Literature and the Performance of Law
Contact Person: Jana Schulman ; jana.schulman@wmich.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Medieval Icelandic literature’s incorporation of law and legal procedure is extremely vivid and informative. For example, a mention of an only daughter and her dowry can clue the well-versed reader in so as to appreciate the rarity of the former and the significance of the latter. Given the significance of law in medieval Icelandic texts, how might we define or read the performance of law to understand its significance in the texts and the society that produced them? This session seeks papers that approach medieval Icelandic literature and law using some aspect of performance theory.
Old Questions, New Discoveries: Revisiting the Relationship between Author and Manuscript
Contact Person: Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Machaut Society
A slew of recent discoveries has reshaped our understanding of Guillaume de Machaut’s biography, his patrons, his material legacy and the circulation of his works. This session will concentrate on how close inspection molds this process of reassessment, from the level of fine detail to large-scale theorization and interpretation. The society solicits contributions from Machaut students and scholars, of course, but the topic is sufficiently general, we hope, to attract interesting papers relating to the intersection of other authors and manuscripts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
Old Wine, New Skins: Manuscripts and Books Adapted, Emended, Repurposed
Contact Person: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society
Talks may address translations of texts or texts revised, emended, or censored to suit different audiences, as well as texts given new illustrative programs, or the ways in which print tries to approximate or replicate manuscript formats.
On Gowerian Poetics, in Honor of Alastair J. Minnis
Contact Person: Michael Van Dussen
Contact Person: Robyn Bartlett
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lollard Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): John Gower Society
Outlaw Environments
Contact Person: Anna Czarnowus
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)
A popular saying has it that “Robin Hood in greenwood stood” and something similar can be found in other outlaw texts and traditions. Such outlaws as Fouke le Fitz Waryn, Twm Shon Catty, or the Slovak Janosik all functioned in a specific natural environment. It needs to be examined how important this background was for their respective legends. The landscape was presented as a romanticized version of nature or as wilderness that went well with what was believed to be the outlaws’ “natural” brutality and violence. This tradition is important, as it is present not only in English-speaking countries.
Pacific Perspectives on Medieval Studies
Contact Person: Anthony Perron ; aperron@lmu.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Pacific
Over the last century, scholarship on the Middle Ages has thrived around the Pacific Rim. This session invites papers that broadly consider the place of the Pacific in medieval studies, and of medieval studies in the Pacific. This might include (but is not limited to) submissions on the challenges and opportunities of studying the Middle Ages in Asia, western North America, Oceania, and Latin America, or presentations that take a comparative look at medieval Europe and “other” Middle Ages. Papers that take a cross-cultural and/or interdisciplinary perspective are especially encouraged.
Papers by Undergraduates (1)
Contact Person: Richard Nicholas ; rnicholas@stfrancis.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This session seeks papers by undergraduate students on a wide variety of topics pertaining to the Middle Ages.
Pastoral Care and Secular Clergy
Contact Person: William Campbell ; whc7@pitt.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages
Much of the literature on pastoral care focuses on the impact on the mendicant orders. However, the bulk of pastoral care fell to bishops and the secular clergy they oversaw within their diocese. What did the provision of pastoral care look like in the medieval period in theory and practice, across regions and time periods? Innovative and traditional approaches to the study of pastoral care (preaching, instruction, the sacraments and sacramentals, charity) by secular clergy are encouraged.
Perceptions of Self and Others in Late Medieval Textual and Visual Evidence
Contact Person: Gerhard Jaritz ; jaritzg@ceu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies, Central European University
The session aims at a comparative and context-dependent approach to the variety of ways how self and others were seen and evaluated in the textual (secular and religious literature, legal sources, travelogues, etc.) and visual cultures of the late Middle Ages. The discussion should give rise to the question whether certain patterns of classification and evaluation as well as their alterations are discernable.
Performing and Activism: Adaptations of Medieval Drama
Contact Person: Sarah Bischoff
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Personal and Private: Marian Idols and Shrines of the Home
Contact Person: Brooke Adamski
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal: New Research on Late Medieval Art and Culture in Burgundy and Beyond (1)
Contact Person: Gerhard Lutz ; glutz@clevelandart.org
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cleveland Museum of Art
Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy since 1419, is among the most illustrious rulers of the 15th century. In addition to the Burgundian and Netherlandish territories that he inherited from his father, he was able to extent his rule over Brabant, Holland, the Hainault and various other prosperous territories. His reign marked periods of unprecedented economic prosperity and cultural flowering. The sessions would like to challenge the traditional image that has often been limited to the "great men" of history and purely art-historical questions. Contributions that go beyond individual disciplines or challenge traditional perspectives and views are particularly welcome.
Plague Studies: New Directions, Approaches, and Sources
Contact Person: Phil Slavin ; philip.slavin@stir.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association for Rural Studies (MARS)
Playing with Game Theory (1): Performance as Play
Contact Person: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society
Middle English does not carry the word “drama” within its vocabulary but uses “pley,” “ludi,” or “jeux” to describe what we would term as a dramatic work. This idea suggests the boundaries between “plays” and “playing,” games and performance, weren't as defined in the Middle Ages as they are today. In addition to plays, medieval texts in general were often read aloud and performed, and audiences actively engaged with them by adopting performative, playful roles. This session will explore the relationship between play and performance to better understand the often-correlating functions of performance, texts, and play in the Middle Ages.
Playing with Game Theory (2): A Cultural History of Medieval Gaming
Contact Person: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society
Games were one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the Middle Ages and yet only a handful of studies exist on the importance of games in medieval culture. This session proposes to explore the social and cultural significance of medieval games, ranging from actual games like chess to literary texts and social games like the hunt, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, showcasing the relationship between medieval games and medieval culture.
Political Medievalisms: A Global View
Contact Person: Luiz Guerra ; anchietaguerra@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism
In 2019, Christchurch in New Zealand followed the same footsteps as 2017 Charlottesville, when christian terrorist Brenton Tarrant attacked two mosques and murdered 51 people, using (amongst other weapons) an assault rifle riddled with inscriptions alluding to medieval themes, characters and events. Despite not being a new phenomenon, 21st Century political (neo)medievalism seems to be finally showing its more brutal facade - once confined to the ends of the internet and other restricted underworlds it is now crawling its way into the public scene and even gaining relevance in places and countries where it was previously unknown.
Polyphony
Contact Person: Alison Altstatt
Contact Person: Rebecca Maloy
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo
Polyphonic techniques (written, oral, improvised) were central to the performance of 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 the 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 principles and their practical consequences in the repertory.
Power in the Blood
Contact Person: Rochelle Rojas
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
This session invites presentations which consider the power or powers of blood from various perspectives, as revealed by the textual, material, or other sources. We seek to explore such aspects as descriptions of the nature or conditions of blood, invocations of its meaning and potency, blood sacrifice and symbolism, blood and the body/human condition, bleeding and putrefaction, blood pacts, devil's marks, and vampirism, menstrual blood and love magic, and prohibitions regarding blood.
Premodern Digital Ecologies
Contact Person: Deborah McGrady
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures
This session explores how digital tools and approaches can help us to model and explore environments from across the medieval world. What changes about our experiences of medieval materials and ecosystems when we interact with them through a digital medium? How can digital tools enable work in the public humanities? What do digital models reveal about the relationships between local, regional, and global environments in medieval conceptions of the world? How can we build on the lessons of premodern digital ecology to understand our contemporary ecological moment? And how do we account for the inherent environmental costs of digital methods?
Prognostication, Palliation, and Prayer from Manuscript to Print
Contact Person: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society
This session explores the malleable boundaries between religious, medical, and magical texts. Scholars might discuss ways in which magic and medicine or magic and religion or all three coincide in a single text or in a range of texts found in manuscript and/or printed books. What might this suggest about the connections between folk belief and religion? Between magic and medicine? About the audiences and readers of such books?
Provender, Place, and Palate: Food, Culture, and Exchange in the Global Middle Ages (1)
Contact Person: John Bollweg ; trecento@comcast.net
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Mens et Mensa: Society for the Study of Food in the Middle Ages
Rooted in place and culture, foods and ideas have traveled as far back as historical and archaeological records reach. Food-ways can be the site for daily re-enactment of religious or cultural practices. As travelers and their foods move through trade networks to distant, different communities, practices and ideas move with them. Neither food-ways nor practices and ideas are ever appropriated without adaptation -- sometimes rejected outright, as in differences in the food practices of medieval European Jews and Christians. Papers discussing foods or food-ways exchanges during the Global Middle Ages (500-1500), how the receiving community adapted related practices and ideas.
Queer and Trans Pregnancy in the Middle Ages
Contact Person: A. E. Whitacre
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
In the Middle Ages as in the present, the pregnant body is a potent site for the interrogation of gender, autonomy, and power. Pregnancy is often figured as the epitome of femaleness and femininity, yet premodern texts also evince a deep anxiety about the gendered expression of the pregnant body. Moreover, questions of the autonomy of pregnant people and their rights to their own body overlap significantly with debates over queer and trans autonomy. This session invites papers that consider the intersection of and resonance between pregnancy and queer and trans embodiments in the medieval world.
Queer Crips: Exploring the Intersectionality of Queerness and Disability in the Medieval Period
Contact Person: Kit Richards ; klr272@student.bham.ac.uk
Contact Person: Sarah Bischoff
Contact Person: Alison Purnell
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
Queer(ing) Medieval Art (1)
Contact Person: Gerry Guest ; geraldbguest@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This session seeks papers that bring queer methodologies to the study of medieval visual culture. Case studies from across the medieval globe are welcome as are a broad range of methodologies. Among the questions for consideration are the following: Under what circumstances does queerness become apprehensible within the visual field? What contextual factors allow it to be sensed, consciously or unconsciously? And once queerness is found to reside within the medieval artwork, does it then have some kind of agency?
Queer, Trans, and QTPOC Youth Medievalisms
Contact Person: Meg Cornell ; meganec3@illinois.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
Among the medievalisms targeted in recent library bans, Daniel Haack’s queer picture books “Prince and Knight” and “Maiden and Princess” are challenged for “indoctrination,” as they inclusively populate the Middle Ages with queer and multiracial figures.This panel examines how medievalisms aimed at youth, broadly defined, incorporate expansive visions of a multigendered, multicultural Middle Ages. We welcome proposals from scholars, librarians, and educators invested in queer, trans, and QTPOC youth medievalisms that, via any format, explore LGBTQIA2+ identities, queer activisms, and intersectional queer identities. We especially encourage panelists interested in queer of color critique, queer-centered librarianship, and queer disability studies.
Race, Ethnicities, and the Medieval Ovid
Contact Person: Rebecca Menmuir ; r.menmuir@qmul.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Ovidiana
This panel invites a variety of approaches to the study of race and ethnicities in the textual and/or visual traditions of the medieval Ovid. Proposals might consider: racism and/or tolerance in Ovid and his medieval reception; how race and ethnicity is translated in medieval adaptations of Ovid, and/or in conjunction with later or modern translations; medieval depictions of the Getes/Sarmatians, Ovid’s neighbours in exile; visual representations of race or ethnicity in medieval manuscripts; or how current and ongoing discussions about premodern race and ethnicity can impact the study of Ovid in the Middle Ages, or classical reception more broadly.
Reading the Archpriest: Deconstructing Autobiography and the Libro de buen amor
Contact Person: Paul Larson
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)
Please see "Importance" section above. This description will also serve as the CFP.
Reassessing Michael of Cornwall
Contact Person: Thomas Sawyer
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
George Rigg declared that Michael of Cornwall’s Versus contra Henricum Abrincensem “surpass anything yet written in Anglo-Latin.” Michael’s invectives extend the limitations of Anglo-Latin satire well beyond the scurrilous bounds established by the goliards; and the crass humor of his philippic is overshadowed only by the depth of his demonstrated education. In 2023, we celebrate the first translation of the First Invective into English and look to lay the groundwork for future scholarship in this important figure. We invite papers of literary or historical interest on a broad range of topics, including satire, school culture, law, national identity, and poetics.
Recent Research on Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts
Contact Person: Reed O'Mara ; rao44@case.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This session aims to showcase recent research on Jewish illuminated manuscripts made for either communal or private use. We welcome 20-minute papers that use methodologies and explore topics that have not been commonly considered in the study of Jewish art. These include, but are not limited to, performativity, memory, materiality, gender, and ecocriticism. This session is accepting original papers addressing any aspect of Jewish illuminated manuscripts that hail from Ashkenaz, Sepharad, or Italy. Papers dealing with understudied genres, like illuminated legal codes and philosophical works, are encouraged.
Reformation (1): Interiority, Power, and Voice in the Reformation: Narratives, Sermons, Autobiography and Other Writings
Contact Person: Maureen Thum ; mthum@umich.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Reformation Research
Society for Reformation Research Sponsored Sessions 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 Potential Sessions include: 1) Reformation I: Interiority, Power, and Voice in the Reformation: Narratives, Sermons, Autobiography and other writings2) Reformation II: Borderlands, Peripheries, Liminal Spaces: Mainstream and “non-orthodox” Protestantisms in the Reformation ;3) Reformation III: Unfolding the Past and Constructing the Future: Medieval Roots and Modern Developments4) Reformation IV: Domestication, Compliance, and Resistance: Men’s and Women’s Voices and Roles in the Reformation
Reformation (2): Borderlands, Peripheries, Liminal Spaces: Mainstream and "Non-Orthodox" Protestantisms in the Reformation
Contact Person: Maureen Thum ; mthum@umich.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Reformation Research
Society for Reformation Research Sponsored Sessions 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 Potential Sessions include: 1) Reformation I: Interiority, Power, and Voice in the Reformation: Narratives, Sermons, Autobiography and other writings 2) Reformation II: Borderlands, Peripheries, Liminal Spaces: Mainstream and “non-orthodox” Protestantisms in the Reformation ;3) Reformation III: Unfolding the Past and Constructing the Future: Medieval Roots and Modern Developments 4) Reformation IV: Domestication, Compliance, and Resistance: Women’s Voices and Roles in the Reformation
Reformation (3): Unfolding the Past and Constructing the Future: Medieval Roots and Modern Developments
Contact Person: Maureen Thum ; mthum@umich.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Reformation Research
Society for Reformation Research Sponsored Sessions at the Medieval Congress invite 20 minute papers on the Long Reformation. We welcome Cross Disciplinary, Cross Cultural and Multi-Media papers in History, Literature, Science, and the Arts Proposed Sessions include:1) Reformation I: Interiority, Power and Voice in the Reformation: Narratives, Sermons, Autobiography and other writings 2) Reformation II: Borderlands, Peripheries, Liminal Spaces: Mainstream and “non-orthodox” Protestantisms in the Reformation 3) Reformation III: Unfolding the Past and Constructing the Future: Medieval Roots and Modern Developments. 4) Reformation IV: Domestication, Compliance and Resistance: Women’s Voices and Roles in the Long Reformation.
Reformation (4): Domestication, Compliance and Resistance: Women’s Voices and Roles in the Reformation
Contact Person: Maureen Thum ; mthum@umich.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Reformation Research
Society for Reformation Research Sponsored Sessions at the Medieval Congress invite 20 minute papers on the Long Reformation. We welcome Cross Disciplinary, Cross Cultural and Multi-Media papers in History, Literature, Science, and the Arts. Proposed Sessions include:1) Reformation I: Interiority, Power and Voice in the Reformation: Narratives, Sermons, Autobiography and other writings; 2) Reformation II: Borderlands, Peripheries, Liminal Spaces: Mainstream and “non-orthodox” Protestantisms in the Reformation 3) Reformation III: Unfolding the Past and Constructing the Future: Medieval Roots and Modern Developments. 4) Reformation IV: Domestication, Compliance and Resistance: Women’s Voices and Roles in the Long Reformation.
Representations of Space in Medieval Iberia
Contact Person: Anita Savo ; asavo@bu.edu
Contact Person: Wiktoria Bryzys
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA)
In line with the “spatial turn” in humanistic inquiry, this session invites papers that analyze the construction of space in medieval Iberian literature and historiography. How do writers within the various Iberian literary traditions represent familiar spaces in contrast to alien, strange, or hostile spaces? How do they represent imaginary or oneiric spaces? We are especially interested in representations of space in works that blend history with fiction, such as the epic, chronicles, ballads, autobiography, and travel literature, as well as works that reflect on the presence and absence of Christian, Muslim and Jewish spaces in the Iberian literary imagination.
Resisting Regulation: Queer Space in Early Medieval England
Contact Person: Alexandra Bauer ; a.bauer@mail.utoronto.ca
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Reuse and Recycling
Contact Person: Alison Altstatt
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Contact Person: Rebecca Maloy
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo
This session welcomes proposals dealing with any type of contrafactum or musical repurposing in the Middle Ages, in terms of melody, text, or materiality throughout the Middle Ages with an emphasis of how it was reiterated, reused, and recycled. The practice of musical borrowing was one of the most prevalent phenomena of the Middle Ages. Whether it be through =cantus firmus technique or adding new text to existing melodies, the reuse and recycling of melodies was a culturally dominant and important practice in medieval music.
Reuses and Abuses: Engagement with Old English and Anglo-Latin Manuscripts after 1066
Contact Person: Lindy Brady
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center
Manuscripts containing Old English and Anglo-Latin texts were not abandoned after the Norman Conquest of England, but rather, scribes, annotators, antiquarians, and modern scholars continued to engage with both text and physical object for centuries to come. This session's timeliness stems from renewed attention to the ways in which the actions of prior generations of antiquarians and scholars have shaped our current understanding of the texts and manuscripts we continue to study. The session welcomes papers studying the afterlife of Old English and/or Anglo-Latin manuscripts from any time period, from antiquarian annotations to modern digital humanities approaches.
Revising Late Medieval England: Authors, Texts, and Manuscripts
Contact Person: Eric Weiskott ; weiskott@bc.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Several of the most important literary monuments from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, from William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women to John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, are known to have undergone authorial revision. As compared with texts surviving in single manuscripts or single textual forms, revision poses special problems for manuscript studies, textual criticism, and literary history. Between the shape of texts and the shape of versions, the application of thought must mediate. This panel collates conversations about method and interpretation carried out separately in various author-based societies.
Revisiting Carolingian Iconoclasm
Contact Person: Thomas Greene ; thomas.greene@ung.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
We seek contributions that broaden our understanding of the Carolingian iconoclasm debate. We hope for submissions that offer innovative approaches to the study of iconoclasm: that hear echoes of the controversy in non-traditional textual sources such as hagiography; that consider the issues raised by Carolingian authors from a material perspective, or that ask questions about how the iconoclastic discourse was entangled with other aspects of Carolingian culture and politics. We also welcome papers that interrogate the afterlife of the debate.
Revisiting Medieval Charters
Contact Person: Stewart Brookes ; stewart.brookes@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Models of Authority
This session aims to foreground current research in the field of charter studies. Topics under discussion could include the importance of material context, such as cartularies; the encoding, editing and transcription of charters; the visualisation of data; computer-assisted approaches; and palaeographic features of style.
Revisiting Speech Acts of the Medieval North
Contact Person: Stephen Yandell ; yandell@xavier.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval Speech Act Society
This session will address the function of discourse in medieval northern world as evident in Old Norse-Icelandic, Germanic, Old English, and related Latin texts. Past studies of verbal exchanges in these corpora have prompted some of the most enduring questions about medieval life and literature—questions about flyting, gender identity, religious conversion, political upheaval, and social status, to name a few. The application of the linguistic studies of pragmatics and speech act theory to these longstanding topics promises to bring fresh insights due to the methodologies’ systematic approach to the relationship between intended speaker-meaning and cultural and speech-situational context.
Sacraments in Medieval Theology
Contact Person: Richard Nicholas ; rnicholas@stfrancis.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
The sacraments are central to Christian spirituality. While the Church Fathers commented on the sacraments at length, a systematic treatment of the sacraments was not fully developed until the Middle Ages. With the introduction of Aristotelianism, new questions were asked of the sacraments. The quest for answers led to the development of a highly systematic treatment of the sacraments. Recent scholarship has revisited how medieval sacramental theology influenced later sacramental theologies. This session will showcase papers that reassess the medieval systematic treatment of the sacraments and show how what is found there can augment and enrich contemporary theological issues.
Saintly Voices, Worldly Noise: Sounding Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Hagiography
Contact Person: Catherine Saucier ; Catherine.Saucier@asu.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society
This session explores the intersection of natural and supernatural sounds associated with saints and their environments, as depicted in a variety of media. From the sweetness of angelic singing to the terror of thunderous noise to the mystery of unintelligible speech, sanctity was signaled through a broad spectrum of sounds. What motivated such variety of saintly sounds? How did they interact with the sonic environment of the natural world? How were they perceived and how can they be understood? Hagiographic analysis might engage with any number of other methodologies such as mythology, biblical exegesis, environmental studies, and sensory perception.
Saints and Crisis: Saints and the End of Days
Contact Person: Anna Harrison ; annaharrison@lmu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society
The Hagiography Society will sponsor a panel exploring the relationship between saintly charisma and apocalyptic expectations. We welcome papers on "crisis" more generally to consider the ways in which holy persons deployed visions, devotional practices, and other mystical experiences to proclaim End Times or insert themselves (or their contemporaries) into the apocalyptic drama. To what extend did the sense of living in a time of apocalyptic crisis empower such persons to challenge existing social, religious, political, or gender norms? How did others react to them? Organizers welcome proposals from researchers in a variety of disciplines, geographical areas, and periods.
Saints and Sermons
Contact Person: Lydia Walker
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Medieval Sermon Studies Society
Building on the interest from our successful co-sponsored panels at ICMS 2022, Saints and Sermons, seeks to highlight new research that emphasizes the link between hagiography and sermons, which in turn can provide a promising venue for collaboration among scholars from these two overlapping fields. The intersections between saints and sermons remain a rich avenue for inquiry with numerous points of connection for valuable investigation including: preachers who became saints, hagiography utilized as sermon materials,sermons composed for specific saint-days, authors who wrote both sermons and hagiographic materials, and shared audiences or reception history of these materials.
Saints from East and West: Hagiography across Cultures and Languages
Contact Person: Matthew Heintzelman ; mheintzelma@hmml.org
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML)
The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) invites proposals for presentations on all aspects of medieval and early modern hagiography, with an emphasis on Eastern Christian traditions in languages such as Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic, and Arabic. Papers on western traditions will also be considered, especially as they relate to Eastern hagiographical traditions.
Scandinavian Studies
Contact Person: Shaun Hughes ; sfdh@purdue.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies
Papers on all aspects of West and East Norse medieval are invited for the open session, Scandinavian Studies. This includes but is not confined to, papers on literary, historical, and archaeological topics.
Scholarship and Play in Medieval-Themed Games
Contact Person: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society
This panel will investigate how late 20th and early 21st century medieval-themed games participate in medievalism through their characterizations of knowledge and play. Games such as Dungeons & Dragons (1974-pres.) and Magic: The Gathering (1993-pres.) invite players to participate in medieval-themed fantasy worlds through interactive experiences in which imaginary participation in the setting forms part of the fun. What are the implications if we consider how players are positioned as scholars conducting research into these medieval settings, such that the games’ experience of play becomes bound up with the experience and the labor of knowledge, scholarship, and discovery?
Science Fiction Medievalisms
Contact Person: Christina De Clerck-Szilagyi ; christinaszilagyi@delta.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism
Though so much of Science Fiction is set in the future, it reflects our ideas of the past and the present. When looking at the past, however, much of what is presented is less the reality and more the fantasies of Medievalism. Papers may consider all varieties of science fiction, whether on screen or in print, and may investigate them through any medievalist lens.
Session in Honor of V. A. Kolve: Text and Image
Contact Person: Harry Cushman
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS)
This session honors the legacy of the work of V. A. Kolve, in particular his work as it concerns the relationship between text and images.
Session in Memory of Robert L. A. Clark
Contact Person: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
The Society for Queer Medieval Studies is happy to invite papers that build on, respond to, resituate, orreinvigorate the scholarship of Dr. Robert Clark. Clark’s excellent work with conduct and devotionalliterature can be seen in Medieval Conduct, which he also co-edited. This session is interested in topicsincluding medieval French literature, drama, conduct literature, and the queer Middle Ages, but we willalso consider papers employing queer and gendered approaches to other literatures. We especiallyencourage papers expanding the scope of Dr. Clark’s work and applying it in new contexts. Preferencewill be given to papers that significantly utilize and center Dr. Clark’s scholarship.
Shakespeare's Medievalism
Contact Person: Grace Tiffany
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Shakespeare at Kalamazoo
We seek papers exploring the ways in which Shakespeare's plays contributed to the early-modern idea of the "medieval." Topics may include Shakespeare's adaptation of the work of medieval authors (e.g., Gower, Chaucer); the history plays' restagings of the conflicts of Catholic Britain or England for an early-modern Protestant audience; the influence of or nostalgia for medieval drama or Catholic worship in Shakespeare's plays; or any other aspect of Shakespeare's medievalism. Studies of stagecraft (including contemporary productions), adaptations from page to stage, religion and politics, poetry, the use and construction of history, and any other focus on "medieval" Shakespeare are welcome.
Sidney at Kalamazoo (1)
Contact Person: Joel Davis ; jbdavis@stetson.edu
Contact Person: Brad Tuggle
Contact Person: Timothy Crowley
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Sidney Society
This year the International Sidney Society is sponsoring three open sessions and invites papers on topics related to early modern historical, cultural, and literary studies, as they relate to Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth, the Sidney family or their extensive British and Continental network, including humanists and reformers George Buchanan, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Étienne de La Boétie, Giordano Bruno, Justus Lipsius, Alberico Gentili, Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, William Herbert, and others. We encourage submissions by newcomers, including graduate students, and by established scholars of all ranks.
Silk Roads (1): Trade and Exchange from the Sassanids to Timurids
Contact Person: Phil Slavin ; philip.slavin@stir.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association for Rural Studies (MARS)
Silk Roads (2): Ecologies, Climates, and Diseases from the Sassanids to Timurids
Contact Person: Phil Slavin ; philip.slavin@stir.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association for Rural Studies (MARS)
Sites of Tension (1): Islands and Isolation
Contact Person: Brittany Forniotis
Contact Person: Gabriela Chitwood ; gchitwoo@uoregon.edu
Contact Person: Shannah Rose
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) Student Committee
Intended as a guide for sailors, Isolario describes many major global islands and ports. Several of illustrations of these sites are among the earliest printed maps of them which are all represented as isolated islands lacking contact with other geographies or cultures. This session seeks papers that explore the practical or cognitive effects of building and experiencing lives on islands and considers the ways that such geographies affected built environments or visual culture. We seek papers that address how art and architecture on islands—conceived physically or literally—operated according to their unique geographies and contributed to the formation of specific identities.
Sites of Tension (2): Islands and Interconnectivity
Contact Person: Shannah Rose
Contact Person: Gabriela Chitwood ; gchitwoo@uoregon.edu
Contact Person: Brittany Forniotis
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) Student Committee
Bordone’s Isolario describes islands of the known world, detailing their folklore, cultures, and histories. Bordone presents the first separate printed map of Cuba which, in earlier representations, was linked conceptually to the Asian mainland. Looking beyond issues of physical, geographic isolation, this session examines the imagined or metaphorical island as a locus of inquiry in the medieval world. Bearing in mind the complex political, economic, and cultural significance of overseas exchange and maritime exploration in the formation of islands, this session seeks papers that explore the vital roles played by cross-cultural exchange and colonization in the formation of islands.
Slavery and Servitude in Ancient and Medieval Europe
Contact Person: Anise Strong
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for Ancient Historians
What do historians of ancient and medieval servitude have to learn from each other? This session seeks to unite debates and analysis about ancient Mediterranean and European slavery with those of the global Middle Ages. Too often ancient slavery is viewed in isolation as fundamentally distinct from Norse thralldom, slavery in al-Andalus, or European serfdom. The reception of ancient slavery in medieval literature and art, especially comic receptions, is also welcome, as are analyses of the intersectional aspects of gender, ethnicity, class, and race. Comparisons between ancient and medieval enslavement in Southwest Asia or North Africa might also be fruitful.
Social Networks in Medieval Iberia
Contact Person: Jamie Wood ; jwood@lincoln.ac.uk
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval People
Song in the Middle Ages
Contact Person: Alison Altstatt
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Contact Person: Rebecca Maloy
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo
Song in the Middle Ages was both a varied and individual practice. Because Latin was the language of the church, education, and civic administration, Latin served as a language shared by clerical, monastic, and intellectual communities, creating pathways through which non-liturgical Latin song could travel. As well, vernacular songs circulated within those linguistic communities and beyond. This panel explores song as it sits between the local and the trans-regional, the personal, and the shared, locating ways in which songs could become markers of personal and corporate identity, regardless of language.
Spatial Confinement and Virtual Peregrinations of Women in Late Medieval Italy
Contact Person: Michael Harless
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Art Society
Women's movement during the Middle Ages was often controlled within domestic life, the church, and the convent. Variations of enclosure permeate the secular and sacred lives of women throughout the Middle Ages. This session welcomes papers exploring women's spatial confinement within domestic and cloistered environments, and their visual responses to representations of sacred topography. We seek papers exploring examples of how devotional art within manuscript illuminations, wall paintings, altarpieces, and private tabernacles functioned as a conduit for virtual pilgrimage within the restricted lives of laywomen and female religious in late medieval Italy.
Spenser at Kalamazoo (1)
Contact Person: David Wilson-Okamura ; david@virgil.org
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Spenser at Kalamazoo
Spenser at Kalamazoo invites paper abstracts for two sessions 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.
Spenser at Kalamazoo (3): The Kathleen Williams Lecture
Contact Person: David Wilson-Okamura ; david@virgil.org
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Spenser at Kalamazoo
Students at Play: Gamifying the Medieval with Reacting to the Past
Contact Person: Nickolas Dupras
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Reacting Consortium
Studies in the Hêliand
Contact Person: David Clark ; clarkd@sunysuffolk.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Talk of the Round Table: Performativity and Chivalric Discourse in Arthuriana
Contact Person: Eric Bryan ; bryane@mst.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Speech Act Society
This session invites papers that explore the ability of discourse in Arthurian texts to perform as well as interrogate medieval value systems of (for example) chivalry, courtly love, socio-political power structures, and identities. This performativity might include verbal exchanges within a text, but it might also address the prospects and implications of performing Arthurian texts within a medieval context. Papers are welcome on Arthuriana from any medieval language or region.
Teaching Christine/Christine as Teacher
Contact Person: Geri Smith ; Geri.Smith@ucf.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Christine de Pizan Society, North American Branch
This panel will welcome reflections on the didactic and instructional nature of Christine’s writing as well as papers on what it means to teach Christine and her works in today’s classroom. How did Christine depict herself as a teacher, or even as a recipient of teaching? How might our approaches to teaching Christine be informed by Christine’s own concepts of teaching and learning?
Teaching the Middle Ages in Prison
Contact Person: Jennifer Awes Freeman
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval Studies, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities
Temporal Anomalies: Locating the Medieval in a Global Context and the Global in a Middle Ages
Contact Person: Stephen Yandell ; yandell@xavier.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)
This session highlights resources for and approaches to teaching and studying the global Middle Ages. Sierra Lomuto’s “Becoming Postmedieval: The Stakes of the Global Middle Ages” celebrates global medieval studies building a more inclusive field. Reflecting on the temporal anomaly of a “Middle Ages” defined ex post facto as a gap or absence in white, European history provides one answer to Lomuto’s call. Papers might recommend theories that facilitate global medieval scholarship and pedagogy; explore tensions between local and global; delineate alternative timelines for medieval and modern; or share ongoing work that diversifies medieval studies.
Textual Adaptation and the Creation of Culture in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Medievalisms
Contact Person: Daniel Najork
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Papers might address how 19th-and 20th-century writers adapted medieval texts to their own ideologies, or, how medieval texts informed and helped to create those ideologies. Presentations might also discuss how adaptations contributed to contemporary discourse and the spread of cultural ideas and values, how writers dealt with adapting materials from different ages, places, and cultural contexts, and finally how and to what extent 19th- and 20th-century writers thought about faithfulness to the original texts.
The Brut Across Disciplinary, Generic, and Territorial Borders
Contact Person: Kenneth Tiller ; kjt9t@uvawise.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for International Brut Studies
The legendary history of the Britons known as the Brut has been read, translated, amplified, and transformed through many languages, genres, and art media. This session welcomes papers that take an interdisciplinary, multilingual, and/or inter-generic approach to the Brut and its lasting influence on history, poetry, and art. Topics might include: the relationship between text and manuscript illuminations, multilingualism of Brut texts, the Brut tradition in history and poetry, the Brut in art and architecture, and Brut texts transmitted and read in border areas. We will also consider studies of post-medieval authorship, reception, and transmission of Brut texts.
The Brut: Texts and Traditions
Contact Person: Kenneth Tiller ; kjt9t@uvawise.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for International Brut Studies
The set of historical texts known as the Brut, based on the legendary history of Britain introduced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, survives in multiple prose and poetic versions. During the past two decades, new discoveries and digitalization of known manuscripts have added to our growing knowledge of the dissemination of the Brut tradition. This session invites papers that share findings about the Brut manuscripts, including new evidence in individual manuscripts, comparisons of variant texts, and examination of paleographic and codicological features, such as different scribal hands, illustration, rubrication, marginal notes, and the genealogy of the Brut manuscripts.
The Abbey of Saint-Victor, Paris (1): Life at the Abbey of Saint-Victor
Contact Person: Grover Zinn ; grover.zinn@oberlin.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
This session brings attention to Victorine developments in the training of novices, liturgical life, education, and 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.
The Abbey of Saint-Victor, Paris (2): Spirituality and Theology in the Abbey of Saint-Victor
Contact Person: Grover Zinn ; grover.zinn@oberlin.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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, Richard, and Achard were masters in these two areas. Richard and Hugh, in particular, combine texts and (“structural”) images (especially Biblical, e.g. Ark of Noah, Ark of Moses, 12 stones in crossing the Jordan) in powerful narrative and transformative ways.
The Abbey of Saint-Victor, Paris (3): Reading and Interpretation: Learning, Knowledge, and Wisdom at the Abbey of Saint-Victor
Contact Person: Grover Zinn ; grover.zinn@oberlin.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.”
The Afterlives of Medieval Pageantry and Processional Cultures
Contact Person: Harrison Meadows ; hmeadow1@utk.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
The Bible and Translation
Contact Person: Frans van Liere ; fvliere@calvin.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (SSBMA)
The common myth that vernacular medieval Bible translations did not exist has been debunked fairly thoroughly. Yet a complete image of the intended users for such translations, the role that medieval bible translations played in the formation of medieval spirituality, and even the very technique of translation, are all still topic that remain relatively virgin territory for research. This session invites scholars of various disciplines (literature, linguistics, history, and theology) to offer new perspectives on questions such as these.
The Cistercian World of Work
Contact Person: Jean Truax
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
This session will explore the many different industries in which the first Cistercians acquired an interest. Papers can focus on the industries themselves and the means by which the Cistercians became involved. Other aspects might include the specialized tasks that the monks had to undertake, both in producing goods for sale and in transporting them to market and the effect this had on their observance of the Rule and the development of the grange system.
The Cultures of Armenia and Georgia
Contact Person: Bert Beynen ; kesaphela@aol.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia
Papers are invited on any Georgian or Armenian medieval topic for a session on the cultures of Armenia and Georgia at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies.
The Fourteenth-Century Middle English Alliterative Tradition
Contact Person: Stephen Yandell ; yandell@xavier.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)
This session will examine works from the fourteenth-century flourishing of rhymed and unrhymed alliterative poetry in England up to, but not beyond, William Langland’s Piers Plowman. These works form a cluster of socially critical poems written in a geographically circumscribed area of some thirty miles, tending to look both inward to the region in which they were written and outward to the nation. This session will give particular interest to papers addressing political satire and social complaint in the early Middle English alliterative tradition, and ones that comment upon the connections one finds in the works of this period.
The Future of Legal History: Papers from the Johnson First Book Mentorship Program in Early Medieval Law
Contact Person: Andrew Rabin
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: The Wallace Johnson First Book Mentorship Program in Early Medieval Law
The Glossa Ordinaria: An Evolving Text
Contact Person: Mark Zier ; markzier@sbcglobal.net
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (SSBMA)
The Glossa Ordinaria was the starting point for much of biblical studies in the twelfth century. Recent research is beginning to paint a clearer picture as to how this text grew and changed, with all roads leading (mostly) back to Paris. The session on the Glossa ordinaria at Kalamazoo in 2023 left so many questions unanswered, and raised so many more questions, that a follow-up was seen as highly desirable by all participants. Attention will be given especially to the evolving and varying text formatting of this text, contrasting the Rusch 1485 reprint of this important text.
The Influence of Victorine Authors on the Cistercians of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
Contact Person: Elias Dietz
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
This session welcomes papers that trace the influence of one or more Victorine authors on works by Cistercians. It will be desirable to have a historical overview of the interrelations between the two orders and their key figures. There is also room for a comparison-contrast study of themes common to writers of both orders.
The Ismaʿili Conspiracy
Contact Person: Noah Gardiner
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica
The Junius Manuscript
Contact Person: Nicole Discenza ; ndiscenza@usf.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center
Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 remains one of the best-known and most fascinating early medieval English manuscripts. We invite paper proposals on any aspect of the manuscript or its contents, including but not limited to: Where, when, how, why, or for whom was Junius 11 constructed? To what extent do the poems, the illustrations, and the initials enact a unified program? How do two or more of its poems speak to each other? Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome, and the session is open to scholars at any stage and from any affiliation, including independent scholars.
The Landscape of Medieval Cities in the Iberian Peninsula
Contact Person: Yasmine Beale-Rivaya
Contact Person: Rodrigo Cortés Gómez
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Texas Medieval Association (TEMA)
We invite contributors to look at how geography affected and contributed to the structure of the different types of medieval cities spread across the Iberian Peninsula.
The Littoral Zone: Coastal Cities and Settlements of Early Medieval Southern Italy and Their Written and Material Sources (1)
Contact Person: Andrew Irving ; a.j.m.irving@rug.nl
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Beneventan Studies
Since Lowe's The Beneventan Script, the study of medieval southern Italian sources has tended to focus primarily on two inland poles: the Abbey of Montecassino, and the city of Benevento. On both east and west coasts of the Peninsula, however, the script was produced in diverse towns, ports, and settlements, with varying political structures, which were themselves part of wider networks of trade, and cultural and linguistic and intellectual exchange. These sessions extend recent calls to recalibrate our understanding of local diversity not only of Beneventan script forms but also of overlapping material, and cultural expressions in medieval southern Italy.
The Medieval City Lament
Contact Person: Christoph Pretzer ; christoph.pretzer@unibe.ch
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
This session seeks to bring together researchers from all backgrounds working on all aspects of city-fall-narratives in general and city laments in particular. There is a focus on medieval texts but the topic lends itself equally to classical and early modern examples.Possible topics may include but are not limited: 1) The distinct traditions or individual sources focussed on (city) lament and/or fall-of-city-narratives.2) The anthropological roots, techniques, and purposes of the lamentation of cities.3) The fall of cities as experiences of collective trauma and its reflections, i.e. the narrative rationalisation of city falls as coping mechanisms through lamentation.
The Medieval Legacy of Modern Monastic Libraries
Contact Person: Jay Butler
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies
Modern monastic libraries often contain untapped treasures for scholars of monastic history and spirituality. This panel seeks to explore some of those holdings, their medieval legacy, their evident purposes, and include a discussion on how they may be made available to scholars as well as regarding the barriers to making the holdings available beyond the monastery. Papers would be welcome on individual or collective monastic library collections, purposes of the collections, cataloging issues and barriers or opportunities for making the collections available to scholars under the conditions modern monasteries face.
The Medieval Tradition of Natural Law (1): Natural Law and Moral Philosophy
Contact Person: Harvey Brown ; hbrown2@uwo.ca
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
These sessions focus on both the thinkers writing on Natural Law in the Middle Ages as well as exploring the tradition as it was interpreted and used in subsequent ages in moral, legal and political philosophy.
The Medieval Tradition of Natural Law (2): Natural Law and Political Thought
Contact Person: Harvey Brown ; hbrown2@uwo.ca
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
These sessions focus on both the thinkers writing on Natural Law in the Middle Ages as well as exploring the tradition as it was interpreted and used in subsequent ages in moral, legal and political philosophy.
The Modern Independent Scholar in the Medieval Research World: Issues of Investigation, Resources, and Collaboration
Contact Person: Barbara Prescott ; bprescott125@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
A Call for Papers regarding issues of independent research in the world of medieval scholarship. We are looking for papers dealing with the challenges or opportunities of being an independent (without university affiliation) medieval researcher. We encourage papers dealing with successful negotiation of access to medieval materials, resources, and publication of work. We also encourage papers on collaboration techniques and available peer networks within the independent medieval research community. This is an online only session.
The Neopagan and the Medieval: A Crooked Path in Scholarship
Contact Person: Alice Fulmer
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Dragons, gods, and goddesses, oh my! Certain medieval literature and material cultures have often been associated with the "pre-Christian" past -- Beowulf, the Mabinogi, and Sir Gawain & the Green Knight just to name a few. With the rebirth of this past's importance and precedence with the rise of neopaganism across the world, medieval scholars have a chance to enter in unique interfaith dialogues, revolutionary readings and close examinations, and generally uncharted territory with the inclusion of neopagan praxis, rituals, and their cultures into conversation with the medieval. It is the way to a crooked path -- incongruent and beautiful.
The Not-So-Minor Poems: Patience, Cleanness, and St. Erkenwald
Contact Person: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)
While Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have been the primary focus of numerous essays, monographs, translations, and other scholarly projects (not to mention adaptations across various media), the other three poems associated with the Pearl-Poet – Patience, Cleanness, and St. Erkenwald – have enjoyed considerably less popularity and attention. This session seeks to celebrate these three frequently-overlooked poems by inviting proposals exploring them from any number of scholarly perspectives. Papers might focus on a single “not-so-minor” poem, explore them in conversation with one another, or place them in conversation with other manuscript poems or relevant texts.
The Past and Future of Digital Editions: A Session in Honor of Russell A. Peck
Contact Person: Anna Siebach-Larsen ; annasiebachlarsen@rochester.edu
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)
Digital scholarship, digital editions, and digital training have increasingly been held up as a cornerstone of the future of medieval studies. However, hidden below the clamor for is an epidemic of technical debt, exhausted and overlooked practitioners, and unstable funding. This panel invites participants to chart the hidden labor and costs of digital editions, and to chart a more just and sustainable path forward. We welcome papers that explore the realities of digital edition projects across disciplines and professions, best practices and workflows, and visions of the future for creators, users, and communities. We particularly invite papers from practitioners.
The Prologue Prior to Cervantes
Contact Person: Helen Tarp ; tarphele@isu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
The Science behind Manuscript Making
Contact Person: Estelle Guéville ; estelle.gueville@yale.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.
The panel aims to discuss ongoing conservation and scientific research into medieval manuscripts and their production. It aims to explore how conservation science and other cutting-edge methodologies and techniques are essential to gaining a better understanding of manuscript production throughout the Middle Ages. We welcome presentations on interdisciplinary research between scholars, curators, conservators, and scientists. Possible subjects include but are not limited to: non-invasive analysis, multispectral imaging, ultraviolet reflection, fluorescence photography, infrared reflectography, microscopy, X-ray fluorescence (XRF), raman spectroscopy and discussions on the integration of traditional methods with digital techniques, such as data visualization and computational analysis.
The Sea and Sea-Creatures in the Early Middle Ages
Contact Person: Angus Warren ; angus.warren@yale.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.
In the last decade, an ‘Oceanic Turn’ has promoted water to the forefront of humanistic studies. No longer peripheral, seas and rivers have proven constant, unescapable presences in the lives and thought of people across medieval Europe. Yet the inhabitants of the sea and shores—fish and fishermen, mariners and monsters—remain shadowy figures, even though they feature prominently in early medieval literature, both in vernaculars and in Latin. This panel seeks to put life back in the seas, garnering perspectives from scholars of all medieval languages and cultures working on any aspect of human engagement with the sea.
The Sense of an Ending: Finispieces in Medieval Codices
Contact Person: Julie Harris ; marfiles@comcast.net
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)
While much has been written about the opening folios of medieval illuminated codices, the final pages of these books have been little studied. Speakers are asked to address the following questions: what does one expect to find at the end of a precious codex? Can these final folios be seen as expressing notions of protection, closure, or identity? How do the designs at the end of a book reconcile ideation about its contents with the material requirements of the codex and the needs of its patron/user? Is the decorative Finispiece a viable, meaningful, and expected entity in medieval book culture?
The Societal and Economic Impact of War in Late Medieval Italy
Contact Person: Peter Sposato
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
The Tristan Tale as Text: Aspects of Pragmatic and Poetic Language Use in the Verse Translation by Dorothy L. Sayers of Thomas of Britain's Le Roman de Tristan
Contact Person: Barbara Prescott ; bprescott125@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
A Call for Papers regarding Le Roman de Tristan by Thomas of Britain and Tristan in Brittany by Dorothy L. Sayers at the 59th annual International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) at Western Michigan University in May 2024. We are accepting proposals for papers on any aspect of Thomas's written Tristan legend (ca. AD 1160), particularly as translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (1929). We will also consider proposals of research on the transition of vernacular oral to written language use, particularly as it pertains to the Tristan legend written in Anglo-Norman by Thomas. This session is online only.
The Women of Le Roman de Tristan: Considering the Narrative and Metaphorical Significance of Female Protagonists in the Tristan Legend from Twelfth-Century Literature to Modern Media
Contact Person: Barbara Prescott ; bprescott125@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Call for Papers regarding feminist issues and literary analysis of the women characters in the medieval Tristan legend, i.e., Le Roman de Tristan. We are looking for new and exciting insights into women's roles in medieval romance and their significance to current women's roles in modern media. We will consider any and all approaches to the literary and pragmatic links between medieval and modern women in romance literature. This is an online session only.
Theorizing Comparative Animalities
Contact Person: Jessica Rosenfeld ; jrosenfe@wustl.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Exemplaria: Medieval / Early Modern / Theory
While many approaches to animals in the Middle Ages share sources and subjects, there are also great variations in traditions produced by such factors as location, genre, discipline, or culture. This panel seeks to bring scholars focused on animal studies from a range of disciplines, locations, and methodologies into conversation, generating a sense of the state of medieval animal studies as a comparative field.
Thomas Aquinas (1): Commentary on the Gospel of St. John
Contact Person: Robert Barry ; rbarry@providence.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Thomas Aquinas Society
A total of three sessions will be devoted to Medieval philosophical and theological thought, especially that of Aquinas. One session in particular will be devoted to Aquinas’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. John. The sessions are sponsored by: The Thomas Aquinas Society, Robert Barry, Providence College (rbarry@providence.edu). For these sessions, proposals on any topic dealing with Aquinas are welcome, with one session devoted to Commentary on the Gospel of St. John
.All papers will be delivered face-to-face; online format is unavailable.
Thomas Aquinas (2)
Contact Person: Robert Barry ; rbarry@providence.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Thomas Aquinas Society
A total of three sessions will be devoted to Medieval philosophical and theological thought, especially that of Aquinas. One session in particular will be devoted to Aquinas’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. John. The sessions are sponsored by: The Thomas Aquinas Society, RobertBarry, Providence College (rbarry@providence.edu). For these sessions, proposals on any topic dealing with Aquinas are welcome, with one session devoted to Commentary on the Gospel of St. John. All papers will be delivered face-to-face; online format is unavailable.
Thomistic Philosophy (1)
Contact Person: Steven Jensen
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
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.
Tolkien and "The Battle of Maldon"
Contact Person: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
The publication of The Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, edited by Peter Grybauskas (HarperCollins), in 2023 provides an opportunity to consider Tolkien’s relationship to this Old English poem. His hitherto unpublished prose translation alongside his essay “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” also unpublished before now, allows us to interrogate his translation practice, while his play Homecoming of Beorhtnoth shows him interacting with the Old English poem imaginatively. This session welcomes papers that consider Tolkien’s engagement with “The Battle of Maldon,” his translation practice, and his engagement with Old English verse more broadly.
Tolkien's Leeds Legacy: A Reconsideration of His Work as a Medievalist
Contact Person: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
Tolkien’s first academic post was at University of Leeds from 1920-1925; 2024 is the centennial of his appointment as professor there. His best-known academic work from this time period is his scholarly edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon, but his A Middle English Vocabulary and his engagement with the Yorkshire Dialect Society too date from this time. Tolkien also penned the first of the Father Christmas letters at Leeds and published several early poems. This session welcomes papers that consider the legacy of Tolkien’s academic and creative works associated with his time at Leeds.
Trans Magic: Reimagining Gender and Sexuality in Theory and Practice
Contact Person: Marla Segol
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica
This panel dives deeply into the transformative function of magic, examining both what it does and how it works. It is a given that instructions for magic describe the actions one must take to effect change, but we have paid less attention to how magic first transforms the practitioner. This re-imagination of gender and sexuality can be understood as a mode of queering and transing, as operators and even their objects move through different categories of gender and sexuality. This panel then addresses the long-neglected aspect of magical instruction to transform the self in order to change that outside it.
Transgressive Boccaccio
Contact Person: Akash Kumar
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo
This panel seeks to interrogate Giovanni Boccaccio as one who transgresses boundaries in his work, whether they be boundaries of gender, social status, literary convention, or religious stricture. We welcome proposals that focus on the Decameron
from a multitude of perspectives, and are especially interested in highlighting queer and global medieval approaches to the 14th century author.Transition to the Vernacular: Language and Medieval Culture
Contact Person: Carolyn Scott ; cscott@mail.ncku.edu.tw
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies (TACMRS)
Medieval culture can be seen as the result of various transitions in political systems, religious beliefs, social structures, demographic trends, and national identities. Language provides a key resource for managing, motivating, reflecting, advancing, or hindering these transitions. Philosophers, theologians, writers, lawyers, artists, and musicians can all contribute to the process. This session will consider papers that explore the ways that the advent, development, influence, and/or spread of vernacular languages and their relationship to the languages of the past contribute to our understanding of medieval culture.
Translation, Transformation, Transmission: Global Perspectives on Medieval Music
Contact Person: Christina Kim
Contact Person: Alison Altstatt
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Delivery Mode: Hybrid
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.
Viking Studies and the Medieval North: New Approaches
Contact Person: Stephen Yandell ; yandell@xavier.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)
In a world of constant change, medievalists have adapted to new ways of uncovering the past, as with the "Secrets of the Ice" project. However, excavating ice patches is not the only new approach to unearthing the complex history of the Medieval North. This session highlights the work of postgraduates, postdoctoral, and early and career researchers to submit proposals that engage with new approaches to Viking Studies and the Medieval North. We especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies. Topics may include exploring connections with pedagogy, connections between Old Norse and other texts, and new finds in Viking archaeology.
Virgin Mary's Relics: Prestige, Rivalry, Forgery, and Reproducibility
Contact Person: Fiammetta Campagnoli ; fiammetta.campagnoli@gmail.com
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Visigothic Legacies
Contact Person: Damián Fernández ; dfernandez@niu.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS)
This session will explore long-term continuities between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages within the Iberian Peninsula. In what ways did Visigothic practices, institutions, and other legacies survive the Arab conquest and influence the mixed societies that took shape under both Muslim and Christian rule? We are especially interested in the appropriation and resignification of the past and the transmission of ancient texts and ideas and welcome proposals on papers dealing with any population(s) within the peninsula and any aspect(s) of this transition. We encourage work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries, handles non-traditional evidence, or employs novel methodologies.
Voices on the Margins
Contact Person: Christina Kim
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Stanford Univ.
This session focuses on musical objects and practices as well as musicking bodies “on the margins”—both physically, in terms of material phenomena on or missing from the page, and metaphorically, in terms of visibility in early music studies. We encourage contributions that explore, but are not limited to, understudied or fragmentary sources, marginalia, underrepresented identities in music-historical narratives, and non-notated musicking traditions.
Voicing Bodies: Song, Gender, and Embodiment
Contact Person: Cécile de Morrée
Contact Person: Carissa Harris
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Song Studies Network
As a combination of music, literature and practice, medieval song is inseparable from the performing body. . As many songs fulfilled a pedagogical function, this session seeks to critically examine how questions of gender and the body were mediated through song. We warmly invite submissions exploring the relationships between song, gender and embodiment. Most especially, however, we encourage scholars to engage in discussions related to consent, gender-based violence, coercion and power. Innovative or experimental methodologies are welcomed, as are submissions addressing alternative perspectives, such as masculinity, challenges to gender binaries, the possibilities of transgender voicing, or non-European materials.
Voicing the Other
Contact Person: Julie Singer
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
What happens when medieval writers attempt to give voice to race-, religion-, ethnicity-, disability-, or class-based perspectives that differ from their own? How can readings of lesser-known works contribute to theorizations of identity, and challenge received ideas about representations of “minority” subjects in the later Middle Ages? We seek papers that will contribute to the recovery of largely overlooked texts from continental Europe and the Mediterranean—especially those unavailable in English translations—whose idiosyncratic or against-the-grain perspectives on “others” will advance cutting-edge critical work on medieval identities.
Weird Beowulf
Contact Person: Jonathan Davis-Secord ; jwds@unm.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association
Old English studies have been in upheaval for several years now, but the field has nonetheless remained fairly conservative in its methods and approaches. There are more publications rehashing the dating of Beowulf and doubling down on traditional paradigms, for example, than there are on new critical lenses. This proposed session seeks to push in the opposite direction by gathering experimental analyses of Beowulf that retain the field's traditional rigor while asking new questions of the old poem. The field's upheaval could become a renaissance, and this panel will welcome and encourage new ideas in that pursuit.
What Proverbs Remember—And What They Remake
Contact Person: Karl Persson ; kpersson@seatofwisdom.ca
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Proverb Society (EPS)
Memory studies is an expanding critical strategy for analyzing the pre-modern world. As memory storehouses, proverbs pass on culture, define social identity, voice wise authorities like Cato or Alfred, and stockpile older metrical and verbal collocations, – even as language and culture shift. But proverbs morph, too, and the global medieval witnesses, for example, old vernacular saws cutting new proverbial teeth in higher status versions; the dynamics of proverbs both as universally translatable and as untranslatable; and proverbs as shapers of new medial and cultural alliances. Papers which interrogate the global proverb’s flux and stasis through diverse memory models welcomed.
When Borders Dissolve: Linguistic Approaches to Medieval Languages (1)
Contact Person: Andrew Troup ; atroup@csub.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Languages and Linguistics
More and more linguists in recent years have been applying the theories of Noam Chomsky, Paul Kiparsky, Roger Lass, and others to the study of medieval languages: Old and Middle English, Old French, Old Occitan, Old and Middle German, Old Norse, etc. In so doing, they have been dissolving the borders between and among traditional disciplines. The results have been exciting—and yet messy. The messiness results from the lack of native speakers to interview.
Women Leading the Liturgy
Contact Person: Alison Altstatt
Contact Person: Henry Drummond
Contact Person: Christina Kim
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo
Scholars of medieval religious history have increasingly focused attention on the officers of women’s religious communities to see what can be learned about their agencies, powers, authorities, literacies, and intellectual and artistic contributions. At the same time, scholars of medieval chant have shown how the liturgy was central to religious communities’ understanding of their histories, identities, and spiritual work. This session invites studies of those officers responsible for the planning and execution of the chanted liturgy: the abbess, prioress, cantrix, and sacristan, to better understand their work in shaping the liturgies of their communities.
Women Writing and Written About (1): Mary of Egypt
Contact Person: Judith Sutera ; jsutera@mountosb.org
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Magistra: A Journal of Women's Spirituality in History
Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Hagiography Society
This session invites papers that address any aspect of "The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt," including (but not limited to) the themes of gender, sexuality, race, translation, tradition, and reception. We also welcome discussions that focus on the many vernacular versions of this vita, such as Old and Middle English, German, French, and Spanish.
Women Writing and Written About (2)
Contact Person: Judith Sutera ; jsutera@mountosb.org
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Magistra: A Journal of Women's Spirituality in History
There are always new subjects to explore in the area of medieval women's religious writings. There are also many writings by men and women about female figures, from saint vitae to reflections on the Virgin Mary. This session invites papers across this field of interest.
Women's Books: Owners, Makers, Patrons
Contact Person: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu
Delivery Mode: Traditional in-person
Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society
Scholars are invited to explore any aspect of women’s books from women’s ownership and patronage to MSS and/or printed books written for or directed to women. Of particular interest are annotations, ownership marks, heraldic insignia and evidence of women’s reading as indicated by their writing in MSS and books.
Young Adult Medievalisms
Contact Person: Angela Weisl ; angela.weisl@shu.edu
Delivery Mode: Virtual (fully online)
Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism
Medievalisms seem to be on the rise, and one genre in which they play a significant role is in Young Adult Fiction. Medievalisms emerge in post-apocalyptic worlds, in the return of Medieval themes in futurist stories, and through works set in versions of the medieval past, fantastic or factual. Medieval romance explored the "juvens" and their coming of age into the world of chivalric society; how does this narrative find a revisioning in the YA novel, and how does inflecting medievalist themes allow for different kinds of explorations than other themes and settings?