Call for Papers

Organizer: Karen Rhoad

Organizer: Susan Steuer

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Interactive Commons, Case Western Reserve Univ.

To participate in this demonstration, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Gail Borrow

Delivery Mode: Virtual

ExploreTheArch's Millennium Women: You Must Follow Another Plan project explores equality, diversity, and inclusion in heritage engagement with communities who would not otherwise connect with medieval history. Hastings contains wards among the I0% most deprived in the UK. The identity of the town and region is strongly 1066-themed. People least likely to access their heritage on the doorstep are taking part in a project co-creating creative entry points that inspire. The session explores participation formats for heritage visitors with barriers to taking part particularly those who do not feel confident or comfortable planning visits to heritage sites.

To participate in this demonstration, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: William Campbell ; whc7@pitt.edu

Organizer: Kyle Lincoln

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: The Reacting Consortium

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages

This is a workshop that demonstrates a new Reacting to the Past simulation, called "The Investiture Controversy: Church and State on the Road to Canossa, 1075-1077." No prior registration or familiarity with the Reacting to the Past method is required. Come join the fun and add a new tool to your teaching arsenal!

To participate in this demonstration, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Carol Robinson ; clrobins@kent.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: The UNICORN Castle

The UNICORN Castle Task Force has developed several virtual gaming approaches for teaching the medieval. This is a demonstration of those games, as well as an opportunity to play.

To participate in this demonstration, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Submissions to this general pool will be reviewed by the ICMS program committee and, if accepted, arranged into sessions. Do NOT submit proposals for sponsored or special sessions here.

Organizer: Richard Fahey ; rfahey@nd.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Research Blog, Univ. of Notre Dame

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe (JEMNE)

Conventional approaches define the Grendel episode as a showcase of Beowulf’s prowess, yet such approaches overlook the opponents’ perfect equivalency, the inadequacy of a single grip, and a flurry of tropes suggesting exorcism. With Grendel’s instantaneous panic at the covenant gesture of handfæsting, a mock-heroic exorcism subverts the anticipated display of physical prowess. Accordingly, Beowulf’s superhuman tenacity and Grendel’s superhuman desperation lead to a mock-heroic outcome. Like an animal trapped, the frenzied demon reverts to a beastly stratagem, ultimately tearing his body away from his arm.

To participate in this performance, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Susan Yager ; syager@iastate.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This session will be a readers' theatre-style performance of Chaucer's Shipman’s Tale (slightly abridged).

To participate in this performance, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Tamara Caudill

Organizer: Regula Evitt ; rmevitt@coloradocollege.edu

Organizer: Francis Valencia-Turco

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS)

This session will be a Global Medieval Languages collaboration, bringing together colleagues to perform medieval poetry or dramatic pieces in a spectrum of medieval languages. The focus of the session will be on responses to and readings of death. We encourage reflective as well as resistant approaches, serious as well as comic performances. We welcome presenters from medieval English, Continental European, and Mediterranean traditions (including Iberian, Hebrew, Arabic, North African, Byzantine). We seek proposals for original-language performances of texts of any form or genre. We anticipate 3-7 performances for the session with a guided discussion afterwards.

To participate in this performance, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Kathryn Wilmotte ; kmwilm520@gmail.com

Organizer: Rebecca Blok

Delivery Mode: In-Person

The purpose of Malory Aloud is to bring the Morte Darthur to life by reading portions of the text aloud in Malorian dialect. This year’s performance will conclude a three-year “cycle” recounting the love story of Sir Tristram and La Beall Isode. Previously, we have focused on the love story of Tristram and Isode, with emphasis on the choices made by the two lovers as they attempt to obey the dictates of chivalry and courtly love. This year’s performance will conclude Malory’s version of the Tristram legend and examine the ways Tristram and Isode find their “happily-ever-after.”

To participate in this performance, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Alexa Sand

Organizer: Ian MacInnes ; Imacinnes@albion.edu

Organizer: Karl Steel ; ksteel@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Real Fantastic Beasts is a podcast for a general audience in which we explore the world of medieval and Renaissance animals, real, fantastic, and fantastically real.

To participate in this performance, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Valerie Hampton ; vhampton@ufl.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Antiquarian Boardgames

Come explore medieval boardgames in our demonstrations. See the boardgames set up with a small poster on its history, rules, and how it can be used in the classroom (and if there is an online version to play, the link, for online classes). Explore how historical & historically based games can show insight into the culture of the game played that allow students to experience the society firsthand.

Organizer: 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)

The Middle English Text Series (METS) has transformed the study of medieval literature since its inception by Russell Peck. Over the decades, it has rendered over one thousand understudied texts available to students and scholars alike through its rigorous and affordable print and open access editions. Over the past four years, METS staff have built a new accessible and sustainable digital edition, with features ranging from mobile device compatibility to PDFs to full TEI markup. In this roundtable, METS staff will discuss the choices, opportunities, challenges, and lessons behind the new digital edition, launched in 2024.

Organizer: Katharine Jager ; jagerk@uhd.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Thirty years after Steven Justice’s Writing and Rebellion and Susan Crane’s “The Writing Lesson of 1381,” the time has come to reconsider the texts and events of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Speakers on this roundtable will reassess the historiography and literature of the rising, drawing on new methods in Medieval Studies -- including insights from premodern critical race studies, affect theory, feminist theory, and the New Formalism -- as well as recent histories of protest, popular revolt, and political violence.

Organizer: Scott Manning ; scottmanning13@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

A critical and box office failure, Luc Besson’s 1999 epic film The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc remains the most recent major motion picture on the Maid, 26 years later. Due to the longtail media of streaming platforms, The Messenger at the time of this CFP is available on no less than 10 online video services in the US alone. This roundtable seeks to revisit the film, its impact, and legacy more than a quarter century after its release.

Organizer: David Arbesu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Organizer: Amanda Bohne ; abohne@uic.edu

Organizer: Anna Siebach-Larsen ; annasiebachlarsen@rochester.edu

Organizer: Catherine Albers-Morris

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester

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

As the field of adaptation studies expands beyond film and television adaptations, so do the possibilities for student engagement with the medieval alongside and through other material—direct adaptations of medieval narratives, depictions in various media, and often their own creative engagement. We invite roundtable presentations on experiences of classroom use of adaptations: in which medieval texts or other creative works have been adapted, in which the medieval work itself is an adaptation, or in which students have been invited to adapt the course material. Presentations could discuss adaptations of particular works or adaptation as a more general pedagogical lens.

Organizer: Lofton Durham ; lofton.durham@wmich.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

In this talkback-style session, the performers, designers, directors, and other creators will discuss the process of adapting, rehearsing, and performing the 2025 Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival's premier of "The Book of Silence," a contemporary play adapted from the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence.

Organizer: Will Rogers

Organizer: Michelle Sauer

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

For this roundtable session, we are seeking submissions that focus on animals and their ties to anchorites. We welcome studies that center evidence of physical or literal animals, such as the allowance of a single cat by the author of Ancrene Wisse or the prohibition of animals by Goscelin in Liber confortatorius, or papers that handle metaphorical animals or treat the boundary between human and animal in discussions of the anchorite and their cell.

Organizer: Aimee Galloway

Organizer: Michelle Sauer

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

We invite proposals on any aspect relating to Margery Kempe, but especially those related to her intersections with anchorites. Topics might include anything from mysticism to holy weeping; her relationship with Julian of Norwich; her construction(s) of virginity; her roles in Christ’s life; etc. Proposals for this session may be focused on Margery’s text alone or can be paired with texts written by contemporaries and influencers, such as Julian of Norwich, St. Birgitta of Sweden, and Dorothea von Montau. Authors might consider materiality, theology, or embodiment. When we said “anything and everything Margery Kempe,” we meant it.

Organizer: Michael Torregrossa

Organizer: Joseph Sullivan

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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)

The Arthurian story is one of rise, fall, and promised return. In this panel, we’d like to focus, in part, on the end of Camelot to explore the events and interactions that caused its downfall in texts both medieval and post-medieval. Related to this, we are also interested in tales from across the ages that move Arthurian elements forwards in time, where, as once and future devices and figures, the relics and members of Arthur’s court are pitted against new threats endangering the realm and/or the world at large.

Organizer: Kelly Gibson ; kgibson@udallas.edu

Organizer: Philipp Rosemann

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations

This session aims to bring together scholars working on editing and/or translation projects for a conversation about approaches to editing and/or translation. Topics can include editorial and/or translation principles as well as challenges faced and ways of overcoming them.

Organizer: Kalani Craig

Organizer: William Campbell ; whc7@pitt.edu

Organizer: N. Kıvılcım Yavuz ; N.K.Yavuz@leeds.ac.uk

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Digital Medievalist

Episcopus and Digital Medievalist are pleased to co-sponsor a panel at the intersection of digital humanities, medieval bishops, secular clergy, and their domains of influence. We invite up to 7 scholars to present a current project with a digital element in progress that involves bishops and secular clergy in the broadest possible sense. Our aim is to provide a venue for early- and mid-stage research projects, to provide a forum for both digital and medieval-studies feedback, and to put scholars in conversation with each other.

Organizer: Alison Altstatt

Organizer: Barbara Haggh-Huglo

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session in memory of the eminent chant scholar Michel Huglo (d. 2012) recognizes his pioneering manuscript catalogs and scholarship on medieval sacred music and music theory. It complements the memorial volume, Studies of Western Chant and its Books: Traditions, Memory, Communities, introduced and edited by Barbara Haggh-Huglo. Contributions emphasize topics that particularly interested Michel Huglo: traditions of ecclesiastical worship, how and why these traditions were written down in books, and what these books reveal about the communities who used them. Specific topics include: Traditions at Charlemagne’s Court, Writing and Keeping Traditions, Rediscovering Traditions, and Traditions of Processions.

Organizer: Heather Hill ; hillhl2@udmercy.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

John’s teaching and research were characterized by an enthusiasm for new revelations with a deep respect for the fragility and beauty of the texts he studied. Professionally and personally, John embodied and exuded charisma and this roundtable seeks proposals in his honor that engage with this quality in its medieval conception—the miraculous and the beautiful—but also perhaps in Max Weber’s redefinition of it as a kind of captivating charm. Of particular interest are proposals that address charisma in medieval and early modern drama, but also welcome are proposals focused on other subjects including John’s inspirational scholarship and teaching.

Organizer: Sarah Brish

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Elementary and Secondary educators who incorporate medieval studies into your teaching - how do you do it? What strategies and approaches do you use to align medieval studies-related discussions and activities related to Common Core State Standards? Join us for this round-table discussion to share your ideas and provide feedback for others who are interested in incorporating more medieval studies-related content into their instruction.

Organizer: Lucy Barnhouse ; lbarnhouse@astate.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Feminist projects within medieval studies often occupy a paradoxical space. Even as women's and gender studies are increasingly politically endangered, particularly within the US, medievalists are often forced to make the argument that medieval studies can and should be relevant to the contemporary concerns of our students, our academic institutions, and our communities. This panel invites considerations of how medieval studies can function as a feminist space, or create spaces for feminist work. We welcome contributions from diverse methodological perspectives.

Organizer: Brooke Findley ; bhf2@psu.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Creative work of many kinds can inform and enhance our scholarship and teaching as medievalists. Creativity is a way of thinking, one that can be both rigorous and insightful. Though creative work cannot be shared via the traditional avenues of peer review, it has the potential to reach a wider audience – and to deepen our own understanding of the past. This roundtable will be a space for medievalists to share creative work related to medieval studies (for example: poetry, fiction, zines, cosplays, performances, even tattoos), and to discuss the kinds of thinking that such work allows them to do.

Organizer: Benjamin Hoover ; bhhoover@iu.edu

Organizer: Joshua Pontillo

Organizer: Benjamin Yusen

Delivery Mode: In-Person

The current climate of nationwide protests on and off college campuses and the institutional responses thereupon continue to raise pertinent questions regarding rights to civil disobedience and free discourse. The question that this roundtable seeks to address is what are the affordances that the texts of the past provide in considering protest and criminality? For instance, what do commonplace figures in premodern texts (literary or historical) such as the outlaw, the bandit, the exile, the prisoner, the wildman, or the ubiquitous marginalized ‘other’ add to our understanding of protest and constructions of criminality both then and now?

Organizer: Julie Singer

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Crowdsourcing has emerged as an important strategy for digital collaboration in medieval studies: facilitating transcription, translation, document digitization, mapping, identification and interpretation of artifacts, and more. For this roundtable, we seek colleagues with experience or new ideas for crowdsourced projects across the medieval studies disciplines. We invite reflections on the advantages, the pitfalls, and the (non-)institutional politics of collective digital projects. Independent and early-career scholars are especially welcome.

Organizer: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu

Organizer: Paul Milliman

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Central Michigan University Press

This roundtable will ask designers of medieval games for the classroom or the market (or both) to share their expertise and experiences. We welcome all approaches to game design for all kinds of games (tabletop, role-playing, computer, etc.)

Organizer: Carla Thomas ; carlathomas@fau.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Middle English Society

This roundtable invites speakers to share their experiences in learning or teaching Early Middle English literature of any kind, including those that are macaronic, play with(in) another language, and more. What was your first encounter with Early Middle English? How do you choose to introduce it to your students? If you don't include Early Middle English, why not? We’re hoping for a dynamic conversation about teaching and learning Early Middle English (c.1150-1350) in the college classroom, including but not limited to personal experience, syllabus construction, multilingual approaches, assignments, and exercises.

Organizer: Cortney Berg

Organizer: Zoey Kambour

Organizer: Asa Mittman ; asmittman@csuchico.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

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

Monsters challenge normative ontological categories, but how do we understand the intersections between monsters and their gender? Is gender fundamental to the construction of the monster constructed? We invite expositions of queer and gender studies and monstrosity that challenge the gender binary or involve monsters with no gender. Of course, trans*, gender non-conforming, and queer individuals are not themselves monstrous, though they have at times been construed as such; we seek interrogations of the ways actual monsters from medieval texts and images share conceptual space with — influenced the lives of — these identities from all medieval cultures and disciplines.

Organizer: Michael Torregrossa

Organizer: Carl Sell

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Comics Project

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)

There are thousands of comics based on or inspired by the Matter of the Greenwood, and, although Robin Hood scholars (working since the 1990s) have started to share some information about this corpus, much work still remains to be done to more fully assess the world of Sherwood Forest depicted in their panels. Therefore, in this co-sponsored session, we hope to create a deeper connection between Robin Hood Studies and Comics Studies to highlight items from this rich collective and provide ideas and reflections on how to find, access, and employ Robin-Hood-themed comics in our classrooms and research.

Organizer: Jason Crow ; Jason.crow@monash.edu

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

Gilbert of Hoyland (1110-1172), in his thirtieth sermon on the Songs, lauded the beauty of women’s work as offering insight into spiritual sensation. This roundtable seeks to better understand the contribution of cheesemaking, as an artisanal practice in the Middle Ages and as part of the material culture of medieval and contemporary monastics. In particular, the roundtable aims to interrogate the potential relationship between the production of cheese and Cistercian and monastic vocations. Papers are sought that highlight the possible spiritual, political, economic, and cultural roles of cheesemaking in medieval monastic life.

Organizer: Jan Blaschak ; eb7549@wayne.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Burning demon eyes, glittering armor and shining halos! References to tropes around gold, shining, and glimmering are used throughout Old English sources, but rarely traced directly for their impact. This roundtable will discuss the need to connect both the material application of gold and the lexical and textual uses of golden or shining tropes with the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in Old English sources. I invite anyone interested in discussing these tropes from material, lexical, textual, and spiritual considerations. Any critical approach is welcome.

Organizer: Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Machaut Society

Machaut studies have benefitted from digitized manuscripts and projects that make text and music digitally available. Initiatives explore the structure and dissemination of those works through computational means, such as text mining and network analysis. Alongside such gains, we acknowledge the ephemerality of digital resources, the emergence of the digital divide and the threat of AI. We invite roundtable contributions on using digital resources for teaching and research on Machaut, his milieu and related topics, including, but not limited to digital dissemination; computational analysis; AI; innovative teaching; accessibility; and digital approaches to the fourteenth century, or medieval French music/literature/art history.

Organizer: Courtney Wells

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Guilhem IX

Whether in the vidas and razos, the novas of Ramon Vidal, or contemporary historical texts, such as those of William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, Bernat Desclot, or Ramon Muntaner (to name only a few), the joglar is a figure of great importance in the cultural and political life of various courts in Europe. And yet, there is so much we do not know about joglars and how they differed from the troubadours. For this roundtable, we will be soliciting contributions that renew our perspective on the figure of the joglar and joglaressa in Old Occitan literature.

Organizer: Kisha Tracy ; ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lone Medievalist

Next year, the ICMS will be sixty years old. During that time, the conference experience in general has evolved logistically, responded to world events (including a pandemic), and reflected on its own practices. Also during that time, lone medievalists have become more prevalent due to demands of the job market and the changing landscape of academia. This roundtable seeks to explore the conference needs of lone medievalists and their experiences in these spaces, both in terms of fulfillment and challenge. This session also will discuss ways academic conferences can further adapt for lone medievalist participants.

Organizer: Elijah Wallace

Organizer: Stephan Knott ; knott133@umn.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Understanding the relationship of warfighters to the many (often new) religions which offered them glory, victory, and eternal life, is critical to discovering the motive force behind the success or failure of various imperial formations or uprisings throughout Afro-Eurasia during this period. In addition, it is also essential to explore the relations of soldiers to both faith and their leaders (whether secular or spiritual) and whether shared faith created more adherence to or opposition to said leadership. This discussion might also provide insight in terms of the mentalite, morale, and praxis of warfighters and/or more institutional militaries as a whole.

Organizer: Johannes Junge Ruhland ; jjungeru@nd.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval French in the Midwest

Scholarship in medieval French literature has expanded its purview to sources that are not strictly literary. Texts in genres not considered typically literary (culinary, devotional, didactic texts...) as well as archival material, visual art, and objects now often stand in conversation with "literature" more narrowly defined and enrich our understanding of medieval French culture and literature. This roundtable brings together scholars to reflect on the questions, methods, strategies, disciplinary constraints, issues, and especially, benefits of drawing on non-literary sources in their research and teaching. The focus on medieval French literature provides common ground, but comparisons of all sorts are encouraged.

Organizer: K. Whetter ; kevin.whetter@acadiau.ca

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Arthurian Literature

Despite its fame as perhaps the longest original passage in Malory's Morte Darthur, and despite the power of the magnificent Catalogue of 110 knights who attempt the Healing, there remains little agreement amongst Malory scholars as to the purpose of the Healing of Sir Urry. Arthurian Literature welcomes proposals for a roundtable on fresh insights or new approaches to reading Sir Urry.

Organizer: Joseph Johnson ; jj892@georgetown.edu

Organizer: Tamara Caudill

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society

The International Marie de France Society invites proposals for short talks (8-10 minutes) addressing approaches to teaching the works of Marie de France in the classroom. Potential topics might include the use of creative processes to make Marie more accessible to students, the pairing of Marie's works with those of her contemporaries in other cultures, and the presentation of Marie's works in ways that foreground their cross-temporal significance. We particularly encourage contributions that discuss pedagogical strategies for teaching Marie's works in a global context.

Organizer: Nina Rowe

Organizer: Eliza Garrison

Organizer: Ben Tilghman ; btilghman2@washcoll.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art

Do you have go-to objects that are little-known but which you consider to be crucial for teaching medieval art history? If you could expand the canon, is there a “sleeper” that should be a “blockbuster”? Medieval art historians are eager to overhaul course syllabi to encompass material beyond western Europe and the Byzantine heartland. And we have much to learn, especially from colleagues specializing beyond traditional bounds of medieval Christian Europe. We invite proposals for a Lightning Session in which seven speakers will make brief (4-minute) presentations on objects/sites as a means to share information and spark discussions about pedagogy.

Organizer: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu

Organizer: Christopher Vaccaro ; cvaccaro@uvm.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

The revised and expanded 2023 edition of the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien increases the total number of Tolkien’s published correspondence to 508 and offers new insights into his academic work as a scholar and professor of medieval literature and language. Papers in this session will explore Tolkien’s reflections on his translations and editions of medieval works such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his discussion of medieval languages, and his correspondence with medieval scholars such as C.S. Lewis and Gwyn Jones.

Organizer: Kisha Tracy ; ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Affect is one of the nonverbal ways humans communicate with other, particularly in how we express emotion. However, how individuals express affect can differ and even be counter to actual emotion, whether as part of the experience of disability or as a response to social constructs influencing how individuals should feel or how they should present their emotions. For instance, "people with disabilities do not experience joy" or "women should smile." This roundtable seeks to explore the experiences of disabled affect, by medieval people(s), by modern medievalists, and how each can inform the other.

Organizer: Gina Hurley

Organizer: Agnieszka Rec

Organizer: Katherine Hindley

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Bibliographical Society of America

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

No matter where we teach, medievalists are always teaching from a fragmentary archive, using that which survives to think about what might have been. While the focus of our panel will be on medieval material culture, the question of how to teach absence is fundamental to pedagogy across historical disciplines. Potential questions include: how can the history of the Middle Ages be taught from a single manuscript or from a set of fragments? How do we help students fill in the gaps and silences of our collections and textual records? How do we talk about survival, provenance, and curation?

Organizer: Tory Schendel-Vyvoda

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Mysticism can be viewed as a path toward spirituality in which one seeks a direct and personal experience with a divine presence. Enhanced by ontological phenomenology, the removal of intermediaries fosters methods of inclusion in which marginalized individuals are generally excluded from traditional venues of theological practice. This session will explore the mystic global Middle Ages and discuss their impact on contemporary audiences. For this roundtable discussion, we invite speakers to prepare a six to ten-minute presentation and approach the topic from various angles, including new research, non-traditional venues for practice or exposure, museum exhibitions, and the visual arts.

Organizer: Katherine Hindley

Organizer: Agnieszka Rec

Organizer: Gina Hurley

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Bibliographical Society of America

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

This panel focuses on how instructors have deployed a single item, whether a codex, a painting, a sculpture, a roll, a tombstone, a cathedral to open up a much broader conversation about the Middle Ages. When we encourage students to explore how a particular object was made, used, and circulated, we give them access to broader avenues of inquiry, such as labor markets, reading histories, and notions of value. We invite instructors to explore the pedagogical tensions between specificity and generality, representation versus representativeness, the local and global.

Organizer: Lauren Colwell

Organizer: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu

Organizer: Mickey Sweeney ; msweeney@dom.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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

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

We invite proposals from first-year graduate students to post-graduate researchers on conducting archival research during graduate school. We seek to hear from graduate students on how you navigate archival research, from planning and locating appropriate archival resources to best practices when consulting primary materials to how to find and apply for fellowships and grants. We are particularly interested in hearing archival success stories that display the affordances of archival research for graduate study.

Organizer: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

In the October 2023 British Library hack, Harley 2250 (which contains St. Erkenwald) was part of the digital manuscript collection rendered inaccessible for digital researchers and available nowhere else online, unlike Cotton Nero A.x. This roundtable seeks to mitigate some of the frustration caused by this and similar developments by making space for Pearl-poet researchers and teachers to share and pool resources. We invite proposals to introduce, discuss, and demonstrate online resources that others can use in their research on and teaching of the works attributed to the Pearl-poet.

Organizer: Dontay Givens

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This session encourages papers which interrogate how the black femme form, body, or flesh is employed in premodern sources as a metaphor or hermeneutic to unsettle the relation between re-presentation and a representative. Papers could explore racial blackness in visual or written sources, or black feminist approaches to sources that are not explicitly about race, such as the use of blackness as a metaphysical condition within Christian theology etc. The goal of the session is to foster dialogue, which is not bound by a single disciplinary approach, but which develops readings that de/construct normative ways of engaging with various sources.

Organizer: William Little ; little.447@osu.edu

Organizer: Rebecca Menmuir ; r.menmuir@qmul.ac.uk

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Ovidiana

The field of medieval Ovid studies has been extraordinarily productive within the past five years, with multiple new editions (both in print and digital) of medieval Ovidian commentaries, texts, and translations emerging almost yearly. These new editions make medieval Ovidiana significantly more accessible for both teaching and scholarship, and moreover represent a tremendous effort of scholarship and collaboration. We invite speakers to participate in a roundtable reflecting on these new editions of the medieval Ovid, including their inception and progress, successes and challenges, and the future of textual and Ovidian scholarship.

Organizer: Matthew Heintzelman ; mheintzelma@hmml.org

Organizer: James Walters

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML)

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) invites proposals for participation in a roundtable discussion of new opportunities to study apocryphal literature across cultural traditions, with special emphasis on Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic, Arabic, and Greek traditions. Discussions of western manifestations of apocrypha will be considered within their context in the larger transmission of apocryphal literature.

Organizer: Susanne Hafner

Organizer: Julie Human ; julie.human@uky.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Stephanie Cain Van D'Elden has not only been one of the most influential medieval germanists of the 20th century, she has also been a generous mentor to generations of students and colleagues. This roundtable will bring together some of them, inviting them to share their work as it reflects Stephanie's impact on medieval germanist research.

Organizer: Evelyn Meyer ; evelyn.meyer@slu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

In this unique roundtable session, two authors of recently published scholarly books in medieval German Studies present their work. In 2025, we focus on Lucy Barnhouse, Hospitals in Communities in Late Medieval Rhineland (2023) and Nina Rowe, The Illuminated World Chronicle: Tales from the Late Medieval City (2020). Both of these recent publications are situated in the late Middle Ages, and we hope that they enable an inspiring discussion for our current projects and help us shape the work of our future students and colleagues.

Organizer: Paul Megna ; Paul.megna@purchase.edu

Organizer: Spencer Strub ; spencer.strub@princeton.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Piers Plowman Society

We seek papers that engage Piers Plowman and/or related texts as works of political psychology. How does Langlandian allegory think through the interrelation of political and psychic dynamics? How are the intersections of individual minds and collective institutions depicted? Can we recover theories of group psychology from late-medieval satire, life-writing, or moral instruction?We welcome papers that draw on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and/or the history of emotions. But we particularly encourage participants to consider the continuities and discontinuities between modern theories of political psychology and those implicit or articulated in the Piers Plowman tradition broadly construed.

Organizer: Michael Nagy ; michael.nagy@sdstate.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Speech Act Society

Since 1969, a growing body of work has examined both Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory in an effort to codify the intricacies of the spoken word. Given that so much medieval literature contains emotionally charged and thematically significant areas of direct address, Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory provide students and scholars alike with powerful lenses through which to view the works they study. With an eye towards practical application, this roundtable seeks ten-minute papers or discursive outlines that address how to teach these theories in the medieval classroom, and how to guide students to use them in their scholarly writing.

Organizer: Johanna Kramer

Organizer: Sarah Anderson

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Proverb Society (EPS)

This roundtable discusses the challenges and opportunities of studying proverbs and other wisdom literature across disciplines and alongside medieval material culture. Although the proverb is recognized as a metaphorical genre, the cross-disciplinary and cross-media analysis of proverbs remains underused. Visual depictions of proverbs in varied media invite comparison of form and content with textual attestations of medieval proverbs but also pose methodological challenges. We invite contributions that explore practical and methodological questions of how proverbs in textual and material sources can be read together. We especially encourage contributions that discuss concrete examples of combined readings of visual and textual materials.

Organizer: Andrea Klassen

Organizer: Charles East

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Academy Graduate Student Committee

The academic publishing process can be difficult to navigate at any stage in one’s career. This roundtable is aimed at helping graduate students and early-career scholars enter the world of academic publishing by centering the voices of graduate students and recent graduates and giving them the platform to share their experiences with students who are exploring their publication options for the first time. By pairing these experiences with advice from more established scholars and publishers, this roundtable will allow students to not only get their foot in the door of academic publishing, but know what to expect throughout the process.

Organizer: Emily Francomano

Organizer: Michelle Hamilton ; hamilton@umn.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

A quarter of a century after the publication of Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the La corónica forum, “Return to Queer Iberia,” what is the state of studying the histories of sexualities in Medieval Iberian Studies? What vocabularies have developed and how are they useful? How have queer theories opened up new theoretical possibilities, including trans studies? What roles, positive or not, does or can anachronism play? This roundtable invites theoretical speculations on the uses of queer theories in the study of medieval texts and artifacts.

Organizer: Olivia Colquitt ; olivia.colquitt@hhu.de

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Post-National Reconceptions of European Literary History (Post-REALM)

This roundtable seeks to lay new foundations for how we approach Pan-European literature of the medieval and early modern periods. Our aim is to facilitate an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas about innovative methods and tools that may be productively employed to develop fresh insights into historical texts. We will also reflect on the potential challenges associated with a move away from traditional frameworks of analysis and explore ways of addressing those challenges. We welcome contributions that present proposals for and/or experiences of applying new methodologies to historical texts and text traditions.

Organizer: Erin Risch Zoutendam ; erin.zoutendam@shu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society

This roundtable will feature a discussion of Karsten Harries's most recent book, Nicholas of Cusa's "On Learned Ignorance": A Commentary on "De Docta ignorantia" (Catholic University Press, 2024). With its focus on the reconciliation of the infinite with the finite, On Learned Ignorance has long been recognized as one of the most important works of both Renaissance philosophy and late medieval theology. Prof. Harries's book is the first commentary to be written on this monumental work. The roundtable will feature participants from several disciplines, including philosophy, history, and theology.

Organizer: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

One of the fundamentals of cultural game theory, as initially outlined by Johan Huizinga in his foundational Homo Ludens, is a six-part definition of game, i.e. the rules of the game. Yet the past has found this very issue to be a continuing scholarly and theoretical controversy with scholars from multiple disciplines considering “what exactly is a game?” And even more importantly, “what are the rules of the game?” This session seeks proposals from a variety of theoretical perspectives, considering the rules of both medieval and modern games, as well as their social and cultural significance.

Organizer: Joe Ricke ; jsricke@outlook.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Shakespeare at Kalamazoo

As David Bevington taught us long ago, the morality play tradition exerted significant pressure on the drama of Marlowe, Shakepseare, and their contemporaries. Specific allusions, major characters (like Falstaff, Richard III, and Timon of Athens), and plot motifs (like Lear's Everyman-like deathbound pilgrimage) reflect not only Shakespeare's debt to his theatrical ancestors but the ongoing relevance and power of their themes, characters, plots, and stagecraft. This roundtable discussion seeks a variety of perspectives on Shakespeare's awareness and use of the morality play traditon, as well as the way the moralities were "troubled" by their insertion into new contexts.

Organizer: Sarah LaVoy-Brunette ; sfl39@cornell.edu

Organizer: Tarren Andrews

Delivery Mode: In-Person

In 2020, Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews, in discussing the medieval studies’ “Indigenous turn,” asks medievalists to “slow down” their engagement with Indigenous studies, “to be more deliberate, to be thoughtful, and to consider first the ethics of kinship and reciprocity that we owe Indigenous peoples, places, and communities who have labored to craft Indigenous studies as an academic field”. This roundtable asks medievalists to discuss their own internal work and process of slowing down–the self-reflection, self-examination, reassessment, and reorientation needed to ethically and critically engage with Indigenous studies.

Organizer: Benjamin Weber

Organizer: Brandon Hawk

Organizer: Amity Reading

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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

The Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture (SOEALLC) project invites submissions for a roundtable entitled "Sources at Sixty (a Roundtable)." The sixtieth anniversary of the Congress offers an excellent opportunity for the SOEALLC project, which began at the conference as the SASLC project decades ago, to reflect on its history, development, and aims. This roundtable will foster a conversation about the past, present, and future of the project, and of source study more generally. All with an interest in source study are invited, regardless of their affiliation with SOEALLC/SASLC.

Organizer: Skye Shirley

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

This roundtable explores methodologies, breakthroughs, and challenges in the teaching of Latin texts by women from the medieval period. While Latin texts by women have received increased attention in scholarly articles and research, students’ exposure to these texts remains limited. What strategies have been successful in the teaching of women’s medieval writings in the original language of Latin? Practitioners are invited to present lesson plans, digital tools, project-based curricula, reflective essays, student work, and other resources to reveal the various ways in which women’s medieval Latin is taught in high school and college classrooms.

Organizer: Madison Gehling

Organizer: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This roundtable will explore pedagogical and educational experiences focused on queer and trans engagements with medieval literatures, worlds, cultures, and languages through queer and trans lenses. This roundtable welcomes an array of discussants (museum curators, librarians, performing arts directors, and scholars of any kind) to share their insights in developing pedagogy that centers queer, trans, and QTPOC experiences in its analysis of medieval texts. We invite panelists to address the highs and lows of pedagogical experimentation in teaching queer and trans medieval source material, as well as those interested in centering the LGBTQIA+ identities of their student scholars.

Organizer: Matthew Davis ; matthew@matthewedavis.net

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lydgate Society

Ever since David Lawton’s “Dullness and the Fifteenth-Century” there has been a concerted effort to reassess the literary accomplishments of authors such as Lydgate and Hoccleve; these efforts have not translated to the average undergraduate British Literature Survey, where books such as the Norton anthology tend to leave these poets as a bit of an afterthought relegated to ancillary online material. To discuss strategies to assess this with instructors at all levels of the academy the Lydgate Society invites participants for a virtual roundtable regarding methods to bring fifteenth-century authors into the undergraduate classroom on their own terms.

Organizer: Laura Smoller

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

The potential canonization of Carlo Acutis, a soccer- and video game-playing teen, reminds us that sainthood is alive and well in 2024, but it can take some creativity to make medieval saints relevant in today’s classrooms and for contemporary students. We invite proposals for a roundtable focused on unique approaches that do so, such as a creative assignment, an innovative syllabus design, or a successful incorporation of AI. We seek submissions from a variety of disciplines, from those teaching at different types of institutions, and from instructors covering a variety of geographical and temporal foci.

Organizer: Julie Singer

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

How do you bring the human forward in your digital work? Digital humanists are, of course, humanists – but perceptions of digital humanities are often formed in reaction to digital humanities’ innovative computational methods and digital tools, rather than the fundamental cultural, social, and textual questions on which these methods are brought to bear. For this roundtable, we seek brief presentations (5-10 minutes) that center the human questions at the heart of digital humanities. Lightning talks, manifestoes, and nontraditional presentation formats are welcome.

Organizer: Bridget Whearty ; bwhearty@binghamton.edu

Organizer: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This roundtable seeks participants from a wide range of disciplines, languages, time periods, and geographies to share under-studied queer+trans medieval sources that they want others to know, research, teach, and love (or love to hate). Participants working with textual sources are particularly encouraged (wherever possible) to consult medieval manuscript records, digital or analog, in order to fact-check decades of homophobic, transphobic, and intersexphobic modern editorial practices.Ultimately, our goal is to pool resources—in order to collectively create a deeper, more rigorously interdisciplinary present and future for queer+trans medieval studies.

Organizer: David Coley ; david_coley@sfu.ca

Organizer: Matthew Hussey ; mhussey@sfu.ca

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: Karen Kletter ; kkletter@methodist.edu

Organizer: Carson Bay ; cbay@kennesaw.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

In recent years, aspects of Flavius Josephus’ (c. 37-100 CE) medieval reception have received renewed attention. New publications offer more focused inquiries into the Latin Josephus as well as studies that broaden the medieval reception of his works to include the transmission of a range of texts and translations associated with Josephus. The Christian De excidio Hierosolymitano, the Byzantine reception of Josephus’ Greek texts, and the (Jewish) Hebrew Sefer Yosippon have recently been analyzed seriously for the first time. Given Josephus’ ubiquity within European literature, these new studies are highly relevant to medievalists across a range of subdisciplines.

Organizer: Christopher Vaccaro ; cvaccaro@uvm.edu

Organizer: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

Given that this September will see the publication of Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond's new 3-volume Collected Poetry of J. R. R. Tolkien, this is an important moment to examine these old and new poems with a medievalist's eye. This session attempts to better understand Tolkien's reliance on the medieval poetry of the Anglo-Saxon poets, of Chaucer and Gower, of the poets of the fourteenth-century alliterative revival, and his reliance on the verse medievalisms produced by such authors as Alfred Tennyson and William Morris.

Organizer: Larisa Grollemond ; lgrollemond@getty.edu

Organizer: Laura Tillery ; ltillery@hamilton.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Interested panelists should submit an abstract that concretely conveys examples of recent changes to, or future goals for your practice as a medievalist. We are looking for short talks (ca. 8 minutes) on actionable changes to the field, recommendations for the future, and/or strategies that grapple with the changing U.S. political landscape. We especially welcome non-traditional forms of academic presentations, including personal reflections, public engagement and writing, innovative pedagogical strategies, social media and digital projects, and emerging platforms broadly speaking. Panelists from a variety of contexts/positions/career stages are strongly encouraged to apply.

Organizer: Gina Hurley

Organizer: Katherine Hindley

Organizer: Agnieszka Rec

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Bibliographical Society of America

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

Upon encountering medieval materials for the first time, students experience a range of emotions from wonder to excitement – even when they’re approaching ordinary materials. How do we retain that sense of wonder while also distinguishing between genuinely unusual manuscript and early book features and ones that are more quotidian? How do we teach the “normal” in medieval books, even as we draw attention to the extraordinary? In comparative exercises, how do we support student insights about difference and similarity across geographies and time – guiding students away from teleological narratives of progress towards considerations of local trends and choices?

Organizer: Alice Fulmer ; alicefulmer@ucsb.edu

Organizer: Maiya Xirinachs ; mxirinachs2017@fau.edu

Organizer: Joseph Sullivan

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

We invite papers for "The Other(ed) Kings: A Roundtable on Arthurian Kings (not Arthur) & Otherness” focusing on lesser-known kings, such as Mark or Pellinore. This session aims to broaden our understanding of Arthurian literature by examining these overlooked figures and their relationship to otherness. We seek contributions that explore their narratives, political dynamics, and roles within the mythos and cycle of Arthuriana. This discussion addresses a scholarly gap and aligns with important questions of inclusivity. We are hoping for new perspectives that are intersectional and even interdisciplinary in nature.

Organizer: Dorsey Armstrong ; sarmstr@purdue.edu

Organizer: Laurie Finke

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Arthuriana

Arthuriana seeks two pairs of scholars (4 total) interested in having a live conversation. The first pair will talk about the pleasures of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the second pair will explore the pleasures afforded by David Lowrey’s 2021 film The Green Knight. Then the 4 will have 15 minutes to talk about connections between the two. In the last 15 minutes the audience will be invited to respond.

Organizer: Michelle Sauer

Organizer: Liz McAvoy

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

This roundtable addresses the cultural memory of anchorites. The vocation was venerated throughout the medieval world. Though a few practitioners lasted into the Reformation, but not for long; even the Catholic and Orthodox churches no longer had participants. Yet, the presence of recluses, hermits, and anchorites haunts the post-Reformation world and its literatures. Why is reclusion so fascinating even after it stopped being popular? What do we learn about various times and places through their interaction with reclusion? Who are the post-medieval anchorites, and why do they choose it? How do various cultures shape the echoes of reclusion found within?

Organizer: Sarah Baechle

Organizer: Carissa Harris

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: English Department, Temple Univ.

“[I]t is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth,” writes Audre Lorde in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” We seek short roundtable talks thinking capaciously about Lorde’s Black feminist essay on truth-speaking and testimony along multiple axes of oppression/domination, power/inequity, and survival or considering how Lorde’s dictum illuminates the interstices between past and present or can show us creative modes of liberation.

Organizer: Joseph Van House

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

Life after death is a powerful motivator in human existence, and thought about it was powerfully cultivated in the long twelfth century. One of the significant aspects the intellectual legacy of, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux, was a deepening of theological, philosophical, psychological, and imaginative reflection on the goals of human life and on the ways that the soul’s perfection on earth is intrinsically linked to its hoped-for eternal fulfilment. This session seeks to develop collaborative insight on how thought leaders of the era conceived of Heaven. Cistercian and monastic thought is likely to be in the foreground.

Organizer: Valerie Hampton ; vhampton@ufl.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Vikings reached every corner of the known world, creating settlements, and assimilating into local cultures. They adopted local habits, languages, and religions like on the Isle of Man. Vikings assimilated into cultures much farther to the east, such as in Rus, and to the west, with interactions among the Inuit and Native Americans. These hybrid cultures should be taken a look at closer and together to explore differences and similarities and their roles in Viking history.

Organizer: Karen Pinto

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

There exist thousands of cartographic images of the world and various regions scattered throughout the medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections worldwide. These schematic, geometric, and often perfectly symmetric images of the world are iconographic representations of the way in which the medieval Muslims perceived their world. This panel seeks to reveal ways of seeing and understanding Islamic/Islamicate maps.

Organizer: Margaret McCurry ; mm9659@nyu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

The (dis)embodiment of voice describes the transformations and translations between the voice’s embodied and disembodied states, exploring the dynamic interplay between materiality and immateriality, interiority and exteriority, and presence and absence. This interdisciplinary session will explore manifestations of (dis)embodied voices in medieval literature, historical accounts, musical expressions, devotional practices, and philosophical investigations, focusing on instances where the voice is absent despite the presence of a body, as well as when the voice is present despite the absence of a body. Contributions from diverse academic disciplines are encouraged to foster a multifaceted dialogue. For additional information email margaret.e.mccurry@gmail.com.

Organizer: Dr. Claire Fanger ; claire@celestiscuria.org

Organizer: Phillip Bernhardt-House ; phillip.bernhardthouse@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

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

Across medieval religious cultures, dreams are associated with divine encounters and intervention, particularly with foretelling future events directly or symbolically. Magical operations eliciting divinatory dreams are also widely encountered. Particular sacred locations specializing in cultivating divinatory sleep for healing and other purposes, known as “dream incubation,” offered interpreters to assist those who sought such dreams. This session will explore many examples of dreams in/as divination, the outcome of spells and prayers, and through particular practices of incubation, as well as their interpretations and practices related to significant dreams in manuscripts and other sources of various periods.

Organizer: Courtney Wells

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Guilhem IX

The troubadours have come to dominate scholarly discussions about Old Occitan culture, language, and literature. Old Occitan has become almost synonymous with their lyrics. But Old Occitan was also used to write history (e.g., La chanson de la Croisade albigeoise), philosophy and theology (e.g., Breviari d’amor), holy texts (e.g., Les Quatre évangiles occitans), grammars (e.g., Razos de trobar), legal texts (see Clovis Brunel’s Les plus anciennes chartes, for example), scientific texts, etc. For this sponsored session, the Société Guilhem IX is soliciting papers that will theorize, describe, and elucidate Old Occitan as a non-fictional Romance vernacular.

Organizer: Sarah Frisbie

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Often divorced from visual studies, inaccessible beyond its support, and erased by well-meaning conservation efforts, medieval and early modern graffiti is difficult to study yet essential for understanding the Middle Ages. Scholars and students of all levels are invited to submit abstracts for papers on medieval and early modern graffiti. The session welcomes interest in graffiti among varied disciplines, such as philosophy, musicology, art history, military history, and theology, and among public-facing institutions concerned with the display and preservation of graffiti in situ and elsewhere. Papers of the “material” and “global” turns and in the digital humanities are especially encouraged.

Organizer: Maria Gonzalo-Garcia ; sr.maria@olamonastery.org

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

The Latin term, affectus, has been much-debated in the context of 12th century Cistercian thought. This is particularly the case with the writings of William of Saint-Thierry, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Aelred of Rievaulx, three of the foundational writers of early Cistercian monasticism. While affectus as a concept plays a significant role in each writer’s notion of spirituality, they do not have a shared definition of the term, nor do they necessarily use the term in consistent ways. Such ambiguity has evinced scholarly debate. This session seeks papers to bring more clarity and understanding of affectus within early Cistercian thought.

Organizer: Danuta Shanzer

Organizer: Nicole Eddy

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Platinum Latin

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, World Philology Union

The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library’s Latin Series would like to co-sponsor three panels at Kalamazoo along with Platinum Latin and the World Philology Union. We are looking for taut, well-structured, 20-minute papers in Late Antique and Medieval Latin that are argued from texts in the original. Any topics and texts are welcome for our structured and satisfying satura. Our three broad and self-explanatory areas are as follows. 1. Philologica and Ekdotica, 2. Narrativa and Historica (including Hagiographica) and 3. Curiosa and Exotica. Depending on the nature and quantity of submissions, we may include a respondent.

Organizer: Alison Perchuk ; alison.perchuk@csuci.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Art Society

Because of their unique geographic proximity to the heart of the former western Roman Empire, the relationship between the Roman past and the early medieval present was a fixture in Ostrogothic and Lombard conceptions of their own identities. The careful modulation and adaptation of historical motifs, images, and forms formed the building blocks of Ostrogothic and Lombard material and political culture. This panel invites speakers to consider the place of the historical past within the Ostrogothic and Lombard kingdoms, including studies in art and architecture, political discourse, the imagined or literal landscape of the peninsula.

Organizer: Alison Perchuk ; alison.perchuk@csuci.edu

Organizer: Liz Wells

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Art Society

This panel invites scholars to consider the "afterlife" of the Ostrogoths and Lombards. While these two kingdoms only lasted as geo-political entities for a few centuries, the art, architecture, and texts of these polities continued to impact the material and political culture of the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. Speakers for this panel can consider any aspect of the "afterlife" of the Ostrogoths and Lombards from the late eighth century onwards, including the depiction of these early medieval cultures in 20th and 21st century popular and political culture.

Organizer: Danuta Shanzer

Organizer: Nicole Eddy

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Platinum Latin

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, World Philology Union

The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library’s Latin Series would like to co-sponsor three panels at Kalamazoo along with Platinum Latin and the World Philology Union. We are looking for taut, well-structured, 20-minute papers in Late Antique and Medieval Latin that are argued from texts in the original. Any topics and texts are welcome for our structured and satisfying satura. Our three broad and self-explanatory areas are as follows. 1. Philologica and Ekdotica, 2. Narrativa and Historica (including Hagiographica) and 3. Curiosa and Exotica. Depending on the nature and quantity of submissions, we may include a respondent.

Organizer: Danuta Shanzer

Organizer: Nicole Eddy

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Platinum Latin

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, World Philology Union

The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library’s Latin Series would like to co-sponsor three panels at Kalamazoo along with Platinum Latin and the World Philology Union. We are looking for taut, well-structured, 20-minute papers in Late Antique and Medieval Latin that are argued from texts in the original. Any topics and texts are welcome for our structured and satisfying satura. Our first panel will focus on philology and editing.

Organizer: Gabrielle DaCosta-Yulsman ; gjd2111@columbia.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Scholarship on the Pearl manuscript has tended to focus on the symbolism of the pearl as well as the general significance of the poem. However, contemporary theoretical approaches to the manuscript are less frequent. The ever-timely field of environmental humanities could shed light on Pearl's rich ecological dimensions. The proposed session invites scholars interested in presenting ecocritical and environmental humanities approaches to the Pearl manuscript. This may address only a single poem from the manuscript, the manuscript in its entirety or adopt a comparative approach which draws in an outside text.

Organizer: Grover Zinn ; grover.zinn@oberlin.edu

Organizer: Andrew Salzmann ; asalzmann@benedictine.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.

Organizer: Grover Zinn ; grover.zinn@oberlin.edu

Organizer: Andrew Salzmann ; asalzmann@benedictine.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

This session brings attention to Victorine developments in spiritual teaching and theological reflection which were major contributions to twelfth-century intellectual life, leading to further developments in 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.

Organizer: Grover Zinn ; grover.zinn@oberlin.edu

Organizer: Andrew Salzmann ; asalzmann@benedictine.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This session highlights growing interest in the collaborators with, and reception of, Victorine writers. Who did the Victorines read, and how? Who read the Victorines, and what did they take from them? What was the relationship between the Victorines and other living authors—for example, contemporary and later monks, canons regular, and scholars in Paris and beyond? By attending to the influence of, and influences on, the Victorines, we can paint a fuller picture of their importance to the history and development of theological and spiritual thought.

Organizer: Amanda Bohne ; abohne@uic.edu

Organizer: Anna Siebach-Larsen ; annasiebachlarsen@rochester.edu

Organizer: Catherine Albers-Morris

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester

The discourse around the field of adaptation includes not only film and television adaptations of written works, but also creative retellings in a variety of media, including graphic novels and comics, tabletop and video games, YA literature, fanfiction, and ephemeral popular culture. Many medieval texts, sometimes adaptations of earlier narratives, are adapted into later retellings. We invite papers that engage with medieval texts and the practice and theory of adaptation, broadly conceived, in and of medieval works. We particularly welcome papers that explore how adaptations (medieval and/or modern) grapple with questions of race, class, nationalism, colonialism, sex, gender, and/or sexuality.

Organizer: Nicole Discenza ; ndiscenza@usf.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

This session invites papers from scholars at all levels, from graduate students to senior faculty. Papers may treat Alfred the Great of Wessex and his circle, productions attributed to them or influenced by them, or later developments of myths around the king. Work from all fields or a combination is welcome. Papers in previous "Alfredian Texts and Contexts" sessions have addressed topics as varied as Old Saxon connections, military history, manuscript studies, literary readings of works attributed to Alfred and his circle, linguistics, geography and place studies, and the afterlives of texts and practices associated with Alfred.

Organizer: Grace DiModugno

Organizer: Kara Rush

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium, Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

This panel seeks papers that explore representations of animals and animality in medieval and early modern literature. Papers might examine, for example, the role of animal ownership and/or acquisition in travel narratives, the relationship between animality and racemaking, or how metamorphosis is used to mediate the fluidity between human, animal, and plant hierarchies. What role does animality play in the formation of gender, national, or religious identities? How do human perceptions and representations of animals change across the medieval and early modern periods?

Organizer: Deanna Forsman

Organizer: Heather Flowers

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe (JEMNE)

This session invites contributions focused on archaeological approaches to the medieval past. We hope to broaden the conversation around the unique insights archaeological methods provide into the material culture and lived environments of medieval societies. We welcome all proposals, including updates and insights emerging from current projects, applications of innovative methodologies (both theoretical and applied), and fresh approaches to traditional methods.

Organizer: Julie Human ; julie.human@uky.edu

Organizer: Joseph Sullivan

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

"Arthurian Families" should appeal to medievalists across period and area specialties. Among conventional Arthurian families are dynasties like Arthur’s. There are unconventional families with multiple adult partners. There are families in conflict, battling over inheritance, and small noble families living on the margins of courtly society. Peasant families and magician families sometimes conflict with noble families. Some families need to discover each other. Others come from mixed race and ethnic backgrounds. For medievalists whose focus is not written texts, there are modern representations of families in Arthurian film and pictorial illustrations in visual art.

Organizer: Jonathan Martin ; jsmart5@listu.edu

Organizer: Joseph Sullivan

Organizer: Shawn Cooper

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), North American Branch

Arthurian literature has much to say about rulership: what makes a good ruler? Is rulership gendered? How do Arthurian rulers demonstrate the good and bad sides of how a ruler should behave? And what should one do about a bad ruler? Given the context of seeking “council and advice,” to what extent are Arthurian rulers imagined as leading, and to what extent as led? Participants might look at issues such as Erec’s withdrawal from his kingly duties in favor of private love, or Arthur’s handling of the trial of the Countesses of Black Thorn.

Organizer: Catherine Bloomer ; cbloomer@brandeis.edu

Organizer: Anna Dini

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo

This session looks to interrogate the body that is marked or performed as a cipher for a lack or the sign of lack, of a failure of signification or index to something beyond customary signification. We invite papers that dialogue with a material or performative understanding of the body in the medieval Mediterranean. We also invite interdisciplinary work that reframes and discusses the body outside of ethnocentric systems. By emphasizing the transgressive body through a critical material and performative approach, this panel urges new ways to read Mediterranean bodies that can extend outward to medieval literature, art, and history.

Organizer: Sharon Rowley ; srowley@cnu.edu

Organizer: Stephen Harris

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Old English Newsletter

Bede is one 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 of Bede as a source. What does he reveal, and what does he ignore? We encourage papers that explore new areas of inquiry in Bedan studies in the twenty-first century.

Organizer: Angelo Passuello ; passuello.angelo@ucy.ac.cy

Organizer: Michalis Olympios

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: , Archaeological Research Unit (ARU), Univ. of Cyprus

A number of structural elements held a fundamental importance in the formulation of the architectural language of sacred space in the Middle Ages. The most important of these, although little studied in Italy, was the creation of varied roofing systems. The aim of this session is to delve deeper into some case studies of medieval Italian churches in a multidisciplinary perspective (architecture, art history, archaeology, archaeometry, restoration). This session forms part of the activities of the CaMeRoofs (Cataloguing Medieval Roofs) project, coordinated by the University of Cyprus and funded by the European Commission under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (ID: 101104788).

Organizer: Linda Burke ; lindaebb@aol.com

Organizer: Joan McRae

Organizer: Wendy Anderson

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Alain Chartier Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Jean Gerson Society

We invite a range of approaches to the genre and discourse of consolation (or the failure of consolation) in Gerson, Chartier, and their contemporaries throughout the longer fifteenth century and in all faith communities. Textual study (including manuscript study) offers evidence on Gerson’s reception as “the consoling doctor,” Chartier’s highly personal and topical Livre de l’Esperance, and a richly intertextual tradition of comfort, addressed both to suffering in this world, and to fear of death and the hereafter. Textual study may involve iconography. Possible approaches include sermon studies, feminist/gender studies, pastoral theology, political theory, and consolation by and for women.

Organizer: Abby Kornfeld

Organizer: Julie Harris ; marfiles@comcast.net

Delivery Mode: In-Person

In 1992, the Jewish Museum presented an exhibition titled “Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain,” which sought to illuminate the intellectual, cultural, and artistic fruits that arose out of interfaith “coexistence.” Here, medieval Iberia was revisioned as an interfaith utopia, a counter-narrative to the intolerance that culminated with the Expulsion. This interdisciplinary session aims to reassess the exhibition—its premise and its claims—as a means of re-thinking convivencia. We encourage papers that approach the subject using new methodologies as well as those that re-examine its works of art, many of which may no longer be authentic witnesses to coexistence.

Organizer: Sara Petrosillo ; sp220@evansville.edu

Organizer: Lexi Toufas

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This panel interrogates how representations of birds cross all kinds of boundaries-- species, genre, gender, periodization. In medieval and early modern literature, birds flit in the background and they bring main character energy; they are human companions or human proxies; they are represented allegorically, metaphorically, and literally, sometimes all in the same text. Behind and informing birds’ textual ubiquity, medieval and early modern people interacted with birds in wild and domestic spaces. Their interactions are often explained in treatises, but what else we might do with these texts besides use them to explain esoteric birdy references?

Organizer: Neslihan Senocak

Organizer: William Campbell ; whc7@pitt.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

When it comes to bishops, Italy has been an outlier. Featuring over 200 dioceses in the Middle Ages, its bishops had to navigate a highly complex political and social terrain, dealing with factional politics and social stratification Italian city-states in physical proximity to the emperors and the papacy, who both tried to claim them as allies. Shepherding a relatively literate and religiously volatile society, the bishops in Italy faced unique challenges. Italy's episcopal archives contain some of richest surviving records. The two sessions proposed will bring to light new evidence and theories.

Organizer: Judith Sutera ; jsutera@mountosb.org

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Mary the mother of Jesus is the most important woman in the Christian tradition and has been a significant subject for many types of reflection through the centuries. Scholarship from the fields of spiritual writing, theology, literature and other arts are welcomed.

Organizer: Alison Cornish

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo

A famously profane, anticlerical and desacralizing text on the cusp of modernity, the Decameron has long been characterized as a purely naturalistic, purely “human” comedy. Yet the disaster of the Plague was not just a material, biological, and ecological catastrophe; it also provoked something like a meaning crisis which ten days of storytelling either address or aggravate. Defining the sacred as that which is most valuable, that which cannot be bought for money, and the thing for which sacrifices must be made, what might be said still to matter in the world of the Decameron, and to matter most?

Organizer: Denise Filios

Organizer: Wiktoria Bryzys

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

In line with the “cognitive turn” in humanistic inquiry, this session invites papers that analyze representations of body and mind in medieval Iberian literature and historiography. We are interested in papers that examine the ways in which medieval texts portray cognitive processes, emotional experiences, and physical sensations. How do Christian, Muslim, and Jewish authors address and represent human and non-human bodies and minds? How do medieval texts treat scientific and philosophical knowledge on the mind-body relationship? We welcome analyses of works that blend philosophy, religion, and science, as well as works of fiction that represent perceptions of bodies and minds.

Organizer: Mariusz Mayburd

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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.

Organizer: Mariusz Mayburd

Delivery Mode: Virtual

This session invites new critical inquiries into literary constructions, narrations, and depictions of otherworldly, other-than-human, and otherwise ambiguous figures associated with paranormal phenomena across Medieval Scandinavia. What did it mean to be "other" and/or "othered"? The marginal becomes auspicious for interrogating what, then, was considered normative 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 critical theory to problematize how the very methodologies chosen for analyses tend to shape the interpretative results they yield.

Organizer: Emmaleigh Huston ; eah22@fsu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Far from isolated, areas at the so-called “edges” of empires during the Middle Ages produced visual cultures that defy the historiographic norms and terminologies applied to the centers. Borderless Borderlands seeks to explore the visual cultures of these places that defy easy categorization. Submissions may consider insular communities at the “crossroads” of trade, locations associated with ongoing conquest or reconquest, or any such site that—despite being considered peripheral—was an epicenter of human movement and exchange. Papers may discuss issues of identity, agency, the effects of categorization, multiculturalism, Convivencia, etc.

Organizer: Pamela Patton ; ppatton@princeton.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Everyone wants something from medieval images: a sense of story, a corroborated argument, a witness to medieval realities. Although the methods by which scholars seek these answers have evolved considerably, their work remains dominated by the conception of the medieval image as mirror, one that reflects either explicitly or indirectly the truths of the historical past. This session challenges this tendency by asking what we can really expect to learn from medieval images. How does their potential to go beyond illustration—to aspire, deceive, and even fantasize—complicate what and how scholars can learn from them?

Organizer: Manolis Ulbricht

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Research in the field of Christian-Muslim relations has focused mainly on the engagement of Latin Christianity with Islam. Western engagement with Islam, however, began primarily with the first Latin translations in the 12th/13th century. By that time, Byzantines had already developed a century-long tradition of anti-Islamic argumentation. The session aims at examining actors and sources in Byzantium engaging with Islam and translations of the Quran, and their impact on the Western knowledge of Islam. Papers studying specific texts, argumentation, or contexts are welcome in order to shed further light on the field of Byzantino-Islamica and the Latin-Byzantine relations.

Organizer: Joe Ricke ; jsricke@outlook.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Recognized and "lionized" for his visions of hope and happy-endings, C. S. Lewis, the medievalist, maintained a tender sensitivity to and robust appreciation for the reality and problem of human grieving. In essays, both personal (like A Grief Observed) or more philosophical (like The Problem of Pain), in literary criticism, science fiction, and in children's fantasy, Lewis does not shy away either from death and suffering itself or from the multi-layered human response we call grief. This sessionsseeks papers linking Lewis's treatment of grief with his medievalist roots, demonstrating not just his own relevance but that of his medieval sources.

Organizer: Joe Ricke ; jsricke@outlook.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

In August 1940, just weeks after the beginning of the Battle of Britain, C. S. Lewis published an essay in Time and Tide about the medieval concept of "chivalry." "What," he asked, "is the relevance of this ideal to the modern world?" We propose a session which both analyzes the concept (as Lewis understood it) and its relevance to his life and work, as well as to our understanding and interpretations of his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, biography, and cultural criticism. We seek papers that interpret, apply, and/or criticize Lewisian "chivalry."

Organizer: Linda Burke ; lindaebb@aol.com

Organizer: Joan McRae

Organizer: Wendy Anderson

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Jean Gerson Society

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

We invite a range of approaches to reform in this world (or its rejection) in the works of Gerson, Chartier, and their contemporaries throughout the longer fifteenth century and in all faith communities. Textual study (including manuscript study) gives evidence on proposals for peacemaking, diplomacy, improvements to existing communities such as universities, and reform of the larger polity, the term “utopia” being only a slight anachronism. Reform by violent means, including tyrannicide and just war, were also defended. Textual study of course includes iconography. Possible studies include codicology, art history, political theory, feminist/gender studies, writings by women, and post-colonial theory.

Organizer: Anna Czarnowus ; annaczarnowus@op.pl

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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

The Robin Hood legend and the outlaw tradition have been associated mainly with violence and transgression. Various outlaws committed violence. They transgressed against accepted social norms. Yet self-care and acts of caring about others have been parts of those legends as well. Hiding yourself in the wilderness was an example of self-care. Outlaws also cared about those whom they treated as their guests. They cared about their families, as the legend of Ned Kelly and his life among his relatives shows. Kindness was something that paid, sometimes literally. The ethics of care has been inseparable from outlaw legends.

Organizer: Melanie Batoff

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session on chant in its liturgical context celebrates Joseph Dyer's exemplary scholarly contributions and mentorship of younger scholars at Kalamazoo. Given his research interests, we especially encourage submissions on Roman chant and liturgy and the formation of early chant repertories. However, submissions on any Western chant repertories from the Middle Ages and Renaissance are welcome. We also invite papers comparing Western chant with other monophonic liturgical traditions to provide a more inclusive vision of how different cultures conveyed the sacred word musically. While music should be the primary focus, we encourage interdisciplinary methodologies that contextualize chant historically and culturally.

Organizer: David Raybin ; draybin@eiu.edu

Organizer: Susanna Fein

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review

For this session, we seek papers that examine the roles played by servants and other subordinates (e.g., maids, knaves, courtiers, soldiers, tavern workers, domestic animals) and the effects of Chaucer's including such characters in his narratives. The session seeks to highlight Chaucer's keen sense of power dynamics and social interplay by making visible the various kinds of background characters and extras who exist on the margins and color the intimate worlds of the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and other poems.

Organizer: David Raybin ; draybin@eiu.edu

Organizer: Susanna Fein

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review

For this session, we seek papers that examine the roles played by artists, craftsmen, builders, poets, and other creators and the effects of Chaucer's references to creators and the inclusion of such characters in his narratives. The session seeks to highlight Chaucer's keen sense of power dynamics and social interplay by making visible the various kinds of background characters and extras who exist on the margins and color the intimate worlds of the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and other poems.

Organizer: David Raybin ; draybin@eiu.edu

Organizer: Susanna Fein

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review

For this session, we seek papers that examine the roles played by friends, comperes, relatives, dependents, revelers, and other familiars and the effects of Chaucer's including such characters in his narratives. The session seeks to highlight Chaucer's keen sense of power dynamics and social interplay by making visible the various kinds of background characters and extras who exist on the margins and color the intimate worlds of the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde , and other poems.

Organizer: David Raybin ; draybin@eiu.edu

Organizer: Susanna Fein

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Chaucer Review

For this session, we seek papers that examine the roles played by lords, wardens, gossips, governesses, and other controllers and the effects of Chaucer's including such characters in his narratives. The session weeks to highlight Chaucer's keen sense of power dynamics and social interplay by making visible the various kinds of background characters and extras who exist on the margins and color the intimate worlds of the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and other poems.

Organizer: Debra Best ; dbest@csudh.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Chaucer continues to be a source of literary inspiration well into the twenty-first century. Recent adaptations appear in a variety of genre, including children’s and young adult fiction, mystery novels, and historical fiction. This session invites both fiction authors and medieval scholars to discuss fictional adaptations of Chaucer’s life and/or works. How do authors negotiate the tension between historical and literary accuracy and the needs of the story? What can fiction uncover about the Middle Ages that academic writing doesn’t reveal? Why are Chaucer and his writings still a source of literary inspiration today?

Organizer: Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier ; cmorandm@uvm.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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

The medieval period has witnessed many crusades. Likewise, authors have led intellectual or literary 'crusades' against certain ideas. In this panel, we look for papers examining how Christine de Pizan led such crusades against or in favor of ideas like peace, the place of women, etc. and how she defended her crusading ideals. We are interested in any approach to Christine’s scholarship.

Organizer: Aage Rydstrøm-Poulsen ; aarp@uni.gl

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

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

Organizer: Marsha Dutton ; dutton@ohio.edu

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

Papers on medieval Cistercian preaching and preachers, whether focused on sermons linked by subject or by preacher, are invited for this session, aimed at providing a greater familiarity with the sources, themes, and topics of the sermons preached in Cistercian monasteries. Papers may explore exegetical and spiritual topics, their form, themes, and sources, or the relationship between the preachers and their congregations. Sermons grouped by topic or by author/preacher are equally welcome.

Organizer: Elias Dietz

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

This session welcomes papers that look beyond the supposed monastic/scholastic dichotomy when searching for the sources used by Cistercian authors. Ideally, papers in this session will provide examples of how the Cistercians welcomed the influence of their contemporaries at Laon, Saint-Victor, and the nascent universities. The period in question is from the 1120s through the mid-thirteenth century.

Organizer: Alina Shubina

Organizer: Emily Gerace

Organizer: Grant Miner

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: The Consortium Medievalists

The Consortium Medievalists invites proposals for our session of papers, “Global Medieval Cities.” Much like today, urban centers in the medieval era sat at the center of networks of trade, travel, and authority. They were sites of cooperation and cohabitation as well as conflict, often embodying anxieties of class ambiguity and moral degradation. This interdisciplinary session will explore how cities were depicted in the medieval imaginary and how the complexity of urban life (or imagined urban spaces) was mediated and thought through in literary texts, historical accounts, art objects and philosophical and theological investigations.

Organizer: Nicholas Oschman

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

AAIWG is proposing another annual session on Classical Islamic Philosophy and its Influence. From 2015-2024, our sessions have been the only sessions focused on Classical Islamic Philosophy and its influence in Latin translation. These sessions fill a lacuna in the offerings at the Congress, given that Medieval Islamic Philosophy is as rich in depth and diversity as Latin Philosophy and is a major source for Scholasticism. A continued presence at the Congress will allow our participants to explore the complexities of Islamic Philosophy and allow the Congress to further highlight Islamic Studies within the breadth of medieval scholarship.

Organizer: Jonathan Shea

Organizer: Alan Stahl

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: Laura Smoller

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

This Hagiography Society sponsored session addresses the messages contained in collections of saints’ lives, in all the various formats such compilations might take. The Lives of the Desert Fathers inspired numerous monastic reformers, including Dominican authors of collected and collective biographies. But collected Lives could take other forms as well, whether as a vernacular gathering, such as The South English Legendary, or in the guise of a single manuscript miscellany. We welcome papers by scholars from a variety of disciplines exploring the meanings inherent in such collections, produced in a rage of geographical, chronological, and cultural contexts.

Organizer: Erin Risch Zoutendam ; erin.zoutendam@shu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society

How were souls scrutinized, nurtured, constructed, and evaluated in the late Middle Ages? And how were the diverse forces and occupations of life understood to shape the human person? This panel will consider new research on traditional practices such as preaching and prayer, as well as less conventional sources of formation such as the visual arts, academic study, and community involvement. Among other things, papers might consider (or reconsider) distinctions such as the inner vs. outer person, public vs. private life, the intellect vs. affect, and/or the active vs. contemplative life.

Organizer: Susanne Hafner

Organizer: Julie Human ; julie.human@uky.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Medieval Studies has been undergoing major recalibrations in recent years, both in its geographical, chronological, and methodological range and in the definition of the authors, audiences, topics, and contexts of medievalist work. How does the traditional field of “Courtly Literature” fit into these shifts? Does its corpus have to be redefined, expanded, or purged to reflect a Global Middle Ages? And how does the concept of courtliness help us think through new questions? This session expressedly invites junior scholars to contribute to this moment of reassessment. Underfunded speakers are eligible for scholarships of $250 per person.

Organizer: Patricia McCall

Organizer: Sarah Ifft Decker

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society

The language of crusading, in both medieval and modern contexts, has worked to construct how combatants and noncombatants view their enemy and justify their actions. During the fourteenth century, the language and object of crusading turned various groups against each other, continually identifying the enemy as dangerous and unreformable. This ideology facilitated the perpetuation of violence against various perceived outsiders, especially religious others. This panel seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of papers that explore how the other was conceived and perceived through the crusading movements of the fourteenth century, across the medieval world.

Organizer: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu

Organizer: Kersti Francis

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

This panel proposes to highlight cutting-edge premodernist scholarship that may answer any of the following questions: What are the borders between Queer and Trans Studies, and are they porous? Can we discuss sex and gender without identity? What are the important caveats and/or limitations we should consider when applying modern theories to the past through productive anachronism? This session intends to spark conversation among all cross-sections of medievalists; given this aim, proposals that bridge fields will be prioritized. We encourage proposals that challenge terminology, address frequently-overlooked genders and sexualities, and proposals from graduate students and contingent scholars.

Organizer: Iona McCleery ; i.mccleery@leeds.ac.uk

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This session seeks to interrogate the concepts of daily life and lived experience. The 'every day' is often taken at face value and used to describe 'ordinary' lives. This approach is common in modern educational materials aimed at students and young people, thereby perpetuating myths. The complex levels of archaeological or sociological interpretation required to understand lived experience are often effaced. Many medieval writers, makers and artists included details that can be seen as part of daily life. This session will draw on a range of theoretical approaches to analyze possible deeper symbolic, political, or more subversive meanings.

Organizer: Susannah Crowder

Organizer: Christopher Swift ; cswift@citytech.cuny.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This session seeks papers, demonstrations, and/or performances that engage with dance and other bodily, kinesthetic practices in the medieval and early modern periods. In her award-winning monograph, Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640, Lynneth Renberg reveals that depictions of dance were closely aligned with broader cultural histories and trends. This session hopes to build upon this achievement by asking what additional forms of dance or gestural and kinesthetic practices might also be identified, and then situated, within broader cultural practice. We especially welcome proposals that advance dance and movement scholarship across a range of regions and time periods.

Organizer: Jelena Todorović ; jtodorovic@wisc.edu

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: William Little ; little.447@osu.edu

Organizer: Jelena Todorović ; jtodorovic@wisc.edu

Organizer: Rebecca Menmuir ; r.menmuir@qmul.ac.uk

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Ovidiana

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Dante Society of America

This panel invites new perspectives on the relationship between Dante and Ovid. Proposals might consider, but are not limited to: new assessments in the light of recent theoretical or methodological developments; thematic affiliations, such as love and desire, exile, mythography, gender, authority; form, such as dreams and visions, metrical form, or other aspects of poetics; the visual tradition, such as manuscript illuminations or medieval art; material studies, such as manuscript transmission or palaeography; theories of classical reception and source study; the proliferating afterlives of Dante and Ovid.

Organizer: Muhamad Abdelmageed

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Despite the growing tide of decolonization, scholars of Arabic-Islamic in the west has refrained from engaging with decolonial theories. Dimitri Gutas' most recent "paraphilosophical" thesis raises even more questions about the entrenchment of the secular in the study of philosophy in the Islamic world. Decoloniality can help scholars from falling into the traps of orientalist scholarships. Approaching the Arabic-Islamic tradition from the celebrated vantage point of critical theory is helpful for scholars from the north and south alike.

Organizer: Tory Schendel-Vyvoda

Organizer: Eric Bryan ; bryane@mst.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Queer- and gender-theoretical approaches to Viking Age literary and cultural production have undoubtedly born fruit in recent years, with publications on these topics increasing exponentially each decade since 1994. This production has provided scholars with a vocabulary and framework to explore Old Norse literature and culture in ways that were not previously possible, yet some would argue that the benefits come with the risk of imposing over-theorized and anachronistic assessments of Old Norse culture and literature. This session therefore aims to explore the boundaries, limitations, and possibilities of theoretical approaches to queer and gendered cultural phenomena in the medieval North.

Organizer: Loren Lee ; lel7qsf@virginia.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

We invite papers that examine the lives, writings, and cultural impact of the Desert Mothers. Topics may include, but are not limited to, hagiographic texts, comparative studies with Desert Fathers, the role of women in early monastic communities, and the spiritual practices of these ascetic women. Scholars from various disciplines, including theology, history, literature, and gender studies, are encouraged to submit abstracts.

Organizer: Cortney Berg

Organizer: Mildred Budny ; mildredbudny@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

Rarely do images and texts provide the same information, and rarely are images just illustrations to the text they accompany. Therefore, how can contemporary viewers understand the relationship between medieval images and the texts they purport to illuminate? This panel invites papers that explore medieval manuscript illuminations and how they conform or deviate from their text, describing the important intersections between text and image. Although this panel seeks papers that deal directly with images, any methodological approach from literature, anthropology, history, religious studies, art history, or any other approach addressing images are welcome.

Organizer: Alison Altstatt

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

Digital Humanities resources for medieval musicology run the gamut from repositories of manuscript facsimiles and databases of texts and melodies to innovative projects that allow scholars to analyze medieval music within its ritual and cultural contexts. This session invites presentations on new digital initiatives, as well as papers that examine theoretical and practical relationships between the digital humanities and medieval musicology, and how such projects impact the circulation of ideas.

Organizer: Mary Kate Hurley ; hurleym1@ohio.edu

Organizer: Jonathan Davis-Secord ; jwds@unm.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association

Traditional approaches to medievalism and medieval studies have often explored direct relationships between texts across time – comparison, source study, adaptation. Following Dimmock, who argues for a “deep time” of literary study, this session takes a different approach: we ask for literary histories that eschew chronological connection, that explore the possibilities that emerge when different systems – ecologies, languages, genders, rhetorics – are reconfigured as the basis of literary relation. Examples might include how medieval and modern writers construct the author-function; how medieval and modern stories represent similar landscapes; how environments figure as actants in literary texts across time.

Organizer: Alison Purnell

Organizer: Michael Nagy ; michael.nagy@sdstate.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Speech Act Society

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

In the rapidly-expanding field of Medieval Disability Studies, thus far little attention has been paid to the potential that discourse analysis, pragmatics, and speech act theory have for understanding medieval disabilities. These tools enable twenty-first-century scholars to address how medieval texts construct, navigate, and deconstruct disability through conversation and direct address on all social levels. Papers discussing disability in the Middle Ages using any aspect of speech act theory, pragmatics, or discourse analysis are welcomed and sources may be literary, theological, philosophical, or documentary in nature.

Organizer: Robin Netherton ; distaff.org@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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) invites paper proposals for “Dress and Textiles: Tools and Techniques.” Papers may consider any type of clothing items or textiles of the medieval and early modern periods, but the focus should be on the methods by which these were made and/or the tools involved in their creation. We especially value the use of physical examples and reconstructions. Presenters will be encouraged to supplement their formal presentations with displays or demonstrations at DISTAFF’s associated exhibition of reproduction dress and textiles.

Organizer: Robin Netherton ; distaff.org@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: 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) and MEDATS (the Medieval Dress and Textile Society) invite paper proposals for “Dress and Textiles: Textiles and Nature.” 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.

Organizer: Robin Netherton ; distaff.org@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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: The Figurative and the Functional.” This session will focus on the complementary roles of aesthetic, symbolic, and social expression versus practical factors in influencing individual clothing choices as well as broader developments in fashion. Also welcome are analyses of these elements as applied to artistic depictions and literary descriptions of clothing. Papers presented at the session will also be assessed for publication potential in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles.

Organizer: Hunter Morgan

Organizer: Emily Brown

Delivery Mode: In-Person

The importance of alcohol and drinking in medieval Icelandic and Norwegian cultures is widely accepted at this point. However, the complexities of the relation that these cultures had with alcohol have not been fully explored, particularly within the realm of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. This session will provide a space for exploring these complexities through literary analysis of Old Norse-Icelandic sagas and other literary texts wherein alcohol and/or drinking plays a significant role. We encourage papers that engage in close reading, comparative work with a broad range of texts, and linguistic analysis.

Organizer: Stephen Yeager

Organizer: Ghislaine Comeau

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Early Muslim impressions of and reactions to Christian monasticism and monasteries were undoubtedly complex, ranging from respect for monastic devotion and piety to disapproval of the monastic practices of celibacy and withdrawal from society. Similar complex ambivalences are found in early-medieval Christian monastic impressions and reactions to Early Islam. This call looks for interdisciplinary approaches that draw from fields such as literary studies, religious studies, history, and anthropology and invites contributions engaging with primary sources from both Muslim and Christian-monastic traditions, examining literary texts, historical accounts, and artifacts to uncover the nuances of these impressions and reactions.

Organizer: Rosalind Love

Organizer: Lindy Brady ; lindy.brady@edgehill.ac.uk

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Early Medieval England and its Neighbours (Cambridge University Press)

Early medieval England had a wide range of interactions with its closest neighbors, and this session seeks papers exploring these interactions. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: diplomatic exchanges and political negotiations, cultural influences, warfare and violent encounters, trade and economic relations, and religious and intellectual contact. This session welcomes papers exploring any form of interaction between early medieval England and neighboring polities, whether insular or continental.

Organizer: Maya Maskarinec ; maskarin@usc.edu

Organizer: Francesca Tinti ; francesca.tinti@ehu.eus

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Medieval Europe

The journal Early Medieval Europe is a thoroughly interdisciplinary forum, encouraging the discussion of all aspects of the Early Middle Ages with a strong focus on Europe. Given the relative paucity of representation of the earlier part of the Middle Ages at medieval conferences, EME’s sessions play an important role in providing a forum for early medievalists to present their work. We make it a policy to place talks by prominent scholars from North America and overseas alongside those of newer scholars, some giving their first papers as medievalists, thus encouraging growth of the field.

Organizer: Matthew Davis ; matthew@matthewedavis.net

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lydgate Society

The edition often holds a place of primacy in scholarship because of practicalities regarding access to manuscript texts and the desire to have a clean source to work from. Unfortunately, this makes scholarship subject to the decisions made by editors, which are not always clearly delineated in their editions and can have consequences for the scholarship built upon them. As such, the Lydgate society would like to invite papers on the topic of “Editors Behaving Badly,” speaking to any negative aspect of editorial intervention on medieval manuscripts in the construction of editions, with fifteenth-century English works as the priority.

Organizer: Amy L. Neff

Organizer: Anne Derbes

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

We invite papers on images of Elizabeth of Hungary that can be associated with a mendicant order. What does visual evidence tell us about Franciscan and Dominican interpretations of Elizabeth? How do images of Elizabeth promote mendicant values or mendicant understandings of female sanctity? What rhetorical strategies do various images of Elizabeth employ? Do images of the saint in mendicant sites allude to or depict Elizabeth’s status as a married woman and mother, and if so how? We welcome papers addressing these questions or others that enlarge our understanding of this important but understudied figure in late medieval Europe.

Organizer: Sabine Moedersheim ; smoedersheim@wisc.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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.

Organizer: June-Ann Greeley ; greeleyj@sacredheart.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

This session welcomes academic papers from scholars who work in untranslated (into English and other European languages) medieval Arabic literature. All methodologies of literary analysis will be accepted and interdisciplinarity is encouraged (but not required). Papers should be in English for audience accessibility.

Organizer: Norval Bard ; nlbard@noctrl.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Rencesvals, American-Canadian Branch

The expression of emotions in the medieval epic touches on key elements of identity--including ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality--, as well as on issues related to dynastic ambition, religious practice, and con/quest. Our awareness of these emotions may derive from interdiegetic elements, through the depictions of voice, action or more general narrative and descriptive techniques; at other times, our emotional response is driven by what happens to us as readers of these medieval texts. This session invites papers from a variety of disciplines explore the rich presence of emotional and affective states in and related to the medieval epic.

Organizer: James Ross ; James.Ross@winchester.ac.uk

Organizer: Christian Steer

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Yorkist History Trust

To mark 40 since the founding of the Yorkist History Trust, the session(s), open to scholars at any stage of their career, will focus on the politics, culture and society (broadly defined) of England during the second half of the fifteenth century.

Organizer: Rob Lutton ; rob.lutton@nottingham.ac.uk

Organizer: Benjamin Barootes ; bbarootes@mun.ca

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Heresy and Dissent Research Network, Univ. of Nottingham

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland

This session invites scholars to consider the significance of liturgical innovation, and related new devotions, for questions concerning the changing nature of orthodox religion and the development of heterodoxy in late medieval England. Papers are invited which explore the relationship between new devotional forms and responses to Lollardy, as well as the implications of the expansion of monastic and clerical modes of devotion to the laity for changes in religious practices and experiences. The session aims to challenge the binary opposition of "orthodox" and "heterodox" by considering new ways of thinking about religious change in late medieval England.

Organizer: Arwen Taylor

Organizer: Spencer Strub ; spencer.strub@princeton.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Hoccleve Society

Frederick Furnivall notoriously wished that Thomas Hoccleve were “a manlier fellow,” a sentiment more indicative of Victorian gender norms than medieval reality, but which also evokes the unsettledness of Hoccleve’s relationship to and representation of gender. This panel welcomes papers revisiting gendered topics like Hoccleve’s adaptation of Christine de Pizan, his flirtations with misogyny, or his evocation of female readers. We also seek papers that find new vantage points on Hoccleve and gender, e.g.: the intersection of class and gender; the gendering of mental illness; the homosociality of the Privy Seal; and other understudied currents of identification, embodiment, or desire.

Organizer: Anna Siebach-Larsen ; annasiebachlarsen@rochester.edu

Organizer: Gale Sigal ; sigal@wfu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester

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

Organizer: Krista Telford ; ktelford@unc.edu

Organizer: Mounawar Abbouchi

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium, Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

A polymorphous form, complaint is as easy to identify in medieval and early modern literature as it is challenging to define. This panel seeks to explore how complaint fits into medieval theories of emotion and the history of emotion; how complaint works generically, narratively, and rhetorically in premodern texts; and how it connects to our modern constructions of grief, mourning, and loss. We invite papers exploring medieval and/or early modern complaint, including broad analyses of patterns and traditions of complaint, complaint as it relates to premodern constructions of emotion, as well as closer readings of plaintive texts.

Organizer: Estelle Guéville ; estelle.gueville@yale.edu

Organizer: Imke Vet

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.

This panel examines the critical yet often unrecognized role of medieval women in manuscript copy and aims to shed light on female scribal practices. We invite multidisciplinary approaches to studying pre-modern female scribes, including codicology, paleography, prosopography, diplomatics, epigraphy, archaeology, art history, literary analysis as well as quantitative and digital approaches. We invite work on sources from all geographic regions and time periods in the "medieval world" broadly construed, including Latin, Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and vernacular languages. Topics of interest include the identification of women scribes, their work, and their training. Contributions highlighting female literacy and multilingualism are encouraged.

Organizer: Valerie Schutte

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Royal Studies Network

Historical fiction consistently demonstrates popular representations of the past, filling gaps between known facts and ideas and people we wish to know more about. This panel welcomes papers on ways in which royal people have been represented diverse fictional media, such as novels, films, television, museum studies, and historical sites. The papers accepted for this panel will interrogate how royal people have been made more accessible to the interested public, especially emphasizing kings and queens as having common experiences across time and place. This panel is particularly interested in motivations for creating fictive pasts of kings and queens.

Organizer: Jane Beal ; janebeal@gmail.com

Organizer: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu

Organizer: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Tolkien at Kalamazoo

This session focuses on “Fire, Dragons, and Jewels”: specifically, how depiction of these items in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (including adaptations of them) is in conversation with medieval poetry. We invite papers considering relevant sources, analogues, and influences from a comparative point of view, as well as reception-focused analysis of related literary and filmic texts.

Organizer: Chiara Benati ; chiara.benati@unige.it

Organizer: Marialuisa Caparrini

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dipartimento di Lingue e culture moderne, Univ. degli Studi di Genova

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

The present session aims at bringing together scholars working on the vernacular renderings of Latin medical and surgical texts in different languages and from different (philological, linguistic, terminological, comparative, medical-historical) perspectives. Possible fields of investigation include, but are not limited to: textual critical problems connected with the editions of these vernacular versions, the comparison between the Latin text and its vernacular rendering, the rendering of specialized terminology into vernacular, and the influence of these translations on later surgical works

Organizer: José Jara Fuente ; JoseAntonio.Jara@uclm.es

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Beyond the Word: Political Communication and Discourse in Trastámara Castile (1367-1504)

This session is devoted to examining the way royal, noble, and urban agencies and agents tended to produce discursive emotions to foster specific relationships or promote political programs in the Kingdom of Castile in the fifteenth century. Papers should tackle specific emotions and examine their contribution in shaping a particular political context (or output) participated by some of the agencies already mentioned.

Organizer: Lindsay Cook ; lsc5353@psu.edu

Organizer: Rebecca Smith ; rasmith7@waketech.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

The 2019 Notre-Dame fire laid bare vast quantities of a building material ubiquitous throughout the medieval world, yet sometimes concealed from view: wood. Despite their practical, structural, and even symbolic importance, the wooden elements of medieval buildings often go unheralded in scholarship or are treated in isolation from building materials like earth, brick, and stone rather than in concert with them. This session welcomes papers that take a range of approaches to the use of wood in medieval construction (e.g. as formwork or scaffolding) and/or in the finished structures themselves (e.g. as roof trusses or vaults).

Organizer: Lindsay Cook ; lsc5353@psu.edu

Organizer: Rebecca Smith ; rasmith7@waketech.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

The 2019 Notre-Dame fire laid bare vast quantities of a building material ubiquitous throughout the medieval world, yet sometimes hidden in plain sight: wood. As a pendant to our session about the place of heavy timber in medieval building(s), this session will examine works handcrafted by woodcarvers, woodturners, and joiners in the context of medieval architectural spaces. To that end, we welcome papers that take material, technical, or intermedial approaches to more intricate forms of woodwork, including but not limited to wooden altarpieces, bemas, canopies, ciboria, iconostases, lecterns, maqsuras, minbars, screens, stalls, templons, Torah arks, and beyond.

Organizer: Melissa Vise ; melissavise@gmail.com

Organizer: Fiona Griffiths ; fgriffit@stanford.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

In honor of Dyan Elliott’s influential career, this session examines questions of gender and religion in medieval Europe, focusing on topics elucidated by Dyan's wide-ranging scholarship. How did medieval understandings of sexuality and spirituality intersect, undermine, or complicate each other? What kinds of power structures animated the relationships between the Body of Christ and the individual bodies of its members? How did ideas about purity and sanctity so often lead to their inverse? Above all, what effects did spiritual ideas and trends have on the lives of women and men, as well as children, in communities across medieval western Europe?

Organizer: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

This session will examine the role(s) that gender plays in medieval games, including both historical games from the Middle Ages and present-day games with medieval subject matter (medievalism). We welcome multidisciplinary approaches to investigate the relationship between gender and play, including philology, material culture, critical theory, sociolinguistics, and game theory.

Organizer: Martha Rampton ; ramptonm@pacificu.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

This session examines multiple dimensions of aggression, coercion, intimidation, and repression, whether incidental, subversive, structural, or hegemonic. Inevitably, stories of suppression end up being stories of transformative coping or transgressive survival. Studies will be entertained of individuals whose identities or segments of their lives were significantly defined by violence. The notion of gender is broad. We welcome works that explore the gendering of institutions, social groups, concepts, biology, the natural world, and so forth. Each submission must be theory-based and explicit about how the authors understand both violence and gender. Papers may deal with any period of medieval history.

Organizer: Matthew Davis ; matthew@matthewedavis.net

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Lydgate Society

Lydgate and other fifteenth-century authors are often experienced solely through the codex and the editions built on those codicies. This includes instances, such as Henry Noble MacCraken’s relegation of Lydgate’s mummings and disguisings to “occasional poems,” where the genre of Lydgate’s works may be incompletely understood because of editorial decisions, with implications for our scholarship. To push back against this, the Lydgate society invites papers on the topic of “Genre and the Fifteenth Century.” Topics such as the multimodal manuscript, genre and nuance, the conversation between fifteenth-century authors, and fifteenth century authors outside of the codex are encouraged.

Organizer: Violet Ingeborg

Organizer: CJ Jones

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Saints’ lives were popular among medieval audiences, both lay and religious. Often translated into the vernacular, hagiography refracted an imagined Christian past through the lens of contemporary culture, and thus was integral to the formation of both a cultural and a religious identity. For this session, we invite papers concerning German legends of popular saints, as well as German constructions of saintliness. Proposals may focus on a specific legend, an individual saint's cult, hagiographic collections, constructions of sainthood, etc. We welcome a variety of theoretical approaches.

Organizer: Kyle Moore ; kyle.robert.moore@und.edu

Organizer: Alicia Smith

Organizer: Michelle Sauer

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Anchoritic Society

Discussions regarding premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) are not only important for diversifying medieval studies but more accurately representing the Global Middle Ages, and anchoritic/eremitic studies is no exception. With this in mind, we invite papers that take a global approach for comparatively examining anchoritism and/or eremitism, especially including PCRS discussions within their analysis. For this session, we are looking for papers that take advantage of a global perspective on the interconnected world of the Middle Ages and which adopt a comparative approach, whether intra-religious (e.g. between Eastern and Western forms of Christianity) or inter-religious.

Organizer: Robert Sirabian ; rsirabia@uwsp.edu

Organizer: Daniel Najork

Delivery Mode: In-Person

In Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, Tom Shippey observes that “Medievalism is self-evidently a modern invention. One cannot have a middle without two ends, and the very phrase “the Middle Ages” implies a prior and later period to frame those ages” (149). For this session, we encourage proposals that explore how the meanings of Medievalism are a product of the tension between the middle and modern and how the middle is understood, imagined, and shaped in the context of the present, particularly for authors and their implied and actual readers.

Organizer: William Little ; little.447@osu.edu

Organizer: Rebecca Menmuir ; r.menmuir@qmul.ac.uk

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Ovidiana

Given medieval studies’ global turn, it is important to reconsider the place of ancient authors within an extra-European reception field. Ovid’s mythographic oeuvre has been adapted in the fields of literature, art, drama, and music. But classical reception has analysed the author’s impact primarily within a Western European and English context. This panel invites new global perspectives on Ovid. Proposals might consider, but are not limited to: theoretical, methodological or cultural assessments; topics such as exile, migration, translation, language; (de-)colonisation; digitisation and global mapping of Ovid’s myths, texts, and manuscripts; reception in central Europe, Russia, or Asia, or other regions.

Organizer: Alani Hicks-Bartlett ; alani_hicks-bartlett@brown.edu

Organizer: Akash Kumar

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo

This panel invites innovative approaches to Petrarch’s oeuvre that consider the global reach and expanse of Petrarch and/or Petrarchism as reflected in: Petrarch's work itself; his intertextual engagement with other literary and linguistic traditions; and Petrarchan critique and intertextual responses to his work. Interrogating longstanding perceptions of an “insular” Petrarch, this panel considers the sociopolitical, transhistorical, comparative, intertextual, interlinguistic, and plurilinguistic frameworks that help lend to an understanding of a more capacious Petrarch—a Petrarch who can be understood “globally,” in both his Latin and vernacular writings. Critical approaches engaging with contemporary theory and papers considering non-western texts/frameworks are especially welcome.

Organizer: Matthew Melvin-Koushki

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

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

Manuals of magic have perennially been bestsellers in Western scholarly cultures, whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian. By the Early Modern period, this promiscuously crosspollinating textual tradition spanned from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific predominantly under the aegis of Islam, making Hellenic-Abrahamic dialectics normative for two-thirds of the human race: the Greater West. For basic Eurocentric reasons, however, the vast production of grimoires in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Latin and their many associated vernaculars has never yet been studied in tandem. This double panel pivots on the popular French coinage grimoire to reunite this larger occult-grammatical genre across language boundaries.

Organizer: Vajra Regan ; vajra.regan@mail.utoronto.ca

Organizer: Matthew Melvin-Koushki

Organizer: Gal Sofer

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

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

The Almandal of Solomon was among the most influential books of ritual magic in the late Middle Ages. Although the Latin text was first adapted from Arabic in the twelfth century, scholarship has focused largely on its later Christian redaction, the Almadel. This imbalance was due partly to a gap in the manuscript tradition. However, the recent discovery of several Latin and Hebrew manuscripts has helped to clarify the textual tradition of the Almandal/Almadel while also complicating previous assumptions about its origins and reception. This session seeks to reevaluate the history of the Almandal in light of these discoveries.

Organizer: Sara Gardner

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Flavors, like people, were well-known to travel in medieval Iberia. Whether as ingredients carried along far-reaching trade routes, recipes in cooking manuals, or dishes shared across communal tables, these tastes reveal much about the formation and expression of religious identity and the intercultural exchange of material and intellectual artifacts across time and space. Thus, “tracing tastes” – as specific flavors or as broader foodways – can offer fruitful means of exploring the transformation of specific communities and their diaspora(s). This panel seeks contributions that center food/foodways in the consideration of diasporic movement of people and cultural products in premodern Iberia.

Organizer: Margaret McCurry ; mm9659@nyu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

We invite proposals for “Hagio-Harmonics: A Duet of Sainthood and Music.” This panel aims to explore the intersection of music and sanctity during the medieval period. We welcome papers that investigate how music is depicted in the lives of saints, the literal and symbolic roles of song in hagiographical narratives, and the cultural and theological implications of musical elements. Potential topics include the portrayal of saints as musicians, the use of hymns and chants in hagiographical literature, and the significance of musical miracles. Contributions from diverse academic disciplines are encouraged to foster a multifaceted dialogue.

Organizer: Lisa Evans

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Pseudo Society

The Pseudo Society encourages submissions from all disciplines, periods, locations, and affiliations (or lack thereof). Ridiculous marginalia, silly slides, and as many in-jokes as possible are strongly encouraged.

Organizer: Brian Cook ; bsc0028@auburn.edu

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: Carolyn Cargile

Organizer: Rachel Wilson

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society

Despite V.H. Galbraith’s assertion that “the serious study of history for its own sake was nobody’s business in the Middle Ages,” medieval historians frequently tie their work to themselves and consider it vocation. This session invites papers that examine historians’ comments on the work of writing history, broadly conceived. How do identifications of historical authorship influence our approaches to history writing? How do the contexts of authorship (within the cloister or the court, for example) impact authorial self-imagining? We encourage submissions that further recent scholarly conversations on history writing and bring innovative methodological approaches to it.

Organizer: Thomas Devaney

Organizer: Marika Räsänen ; marras@utu.fi

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Recent scholarship has continued to clarify the role of the senses in medieval understandings of religious experience. Though seen to function in various ways, the senses permitted access to the immanent presence of the divine in the world, revealing the spiritual significance of material reality. Everything in the physical universe had divine potential—all was part of creation—and so the lived sensory experience of religion was broad indeed. Even vicarious sensory experience, through visualization or dreams, might lead to spiritual insights. This panel welcomes papers on any topics related to religious experience, physical objects (broadly defined), and the senses.

Organizer: Kyle Lincoln

Organizer: Miguel Gómez

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East

This is a traditional paper session, which is thematically centered on holy war and religious bellicosity in the Medieval Western Mediterranean, especially Iberia and the Maghreb. Papers from early career scholars and those new to Kalamazoo are warmly encouraged.

Organizer: Nicole Eddy

Organizer: Daniel Donoghue

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

This session explores the challenges and benefits of making original-language editions, facsimiles, and manuscripts accessible to those without specialized training. How are instructors incorporating editions and manuscripts into their teaching? We invite papers exploring the advantages and setbacks posed by the inclusion of these tools in the university classroom, whether in place of a student-friendly translation or as a supplement to the main reading. We invite speakers to share experiences they have had with their own teaching, as well as to reflect on new methods or tools that could support them.

Organizer: Anna Czarnowus ; annaczarnowus@op.pl

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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

Medievalism in music has become an increasingly researched phenomenon. In popular music there appear medievalist elements. They often refer to humans, for example they include knights and ladies or refer to chivalry and courtliness indirectly, they can refer to animals that are considered to be ‘’medieval”, such as unicorns, or they present humans and animals in a medievalist context, as it happens with a knight and his horse. This part of music medievalism remains to be understudied. What could be of interest in studying humans, animals, and human-animal relationships, are music videos, soundtracks, and lyrics.

Organizer: Gregory Hutcheson

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

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

Michel Foucault proposed the term heterotopia to describe spaces that function as “counter-sites” within which “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture [...] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (“Of Other Spaces”). This session will explore those heterotopias, whether physical or conceptual, that emerge within the complex cultural landscape of medieval Iberia and ultimately disturb the social order even as they reflect it. Possible topics include urban spaces, architecture, gardens, prisons, libraries, baths, brothels, festivals, pilgrimage, crusades, legal codes, encyclopedias, historical narrative, hagiography, epic, romance, etc.

Organizer: Tiago Queimada e Silva ; tiasil@utu.fi

Delivery Mode: In-Person

The session welcomes papers from historians and literary scholars dealing with identity and otherness in the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. Self-identification and processes of othering have recently been at the forefront of historical research. Papers submitted to this session should problematise the role of otherness in identity-building and may deal with diverse forms of identity: from religious, ethnic, or socioeconomical identities to incipient manifestations of national identities. Particular attention is given to political phenomena surrounding identity-building: for example, the role of political structures in the construction of identities or, inversely, the influence these subjective processes have on sociopolitical developments.

Organizer: Licia Buttà ; licia.butta@urv.cat

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This session focuses on the close relationship that has been established since antiquity between the female body and choreographic movements. The iconography of dance has gained increasing ground in studies on the Middle Ages since the pioneering work of Tilman Seebass and Jonathan J.G. Alexander. Dance images are an exceptional means to deal with the history of the body and the centrality of religious and secular rituals, as well as a vehicle for interpreting exegetical approaches to sacred texts. Literary, allegorical, and historical dancing women embody the dichotomy joy/sorrow, which is expressed in the narrative capacity of gestures.

Organizer: Sarah Ifft Decker

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society

Marie Kelleher (1970-2024) was particularly well-known for her groundbreaking 2010 book The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon. In her honor, this session brings together papers on the intersection between gender and legal culture in the fourteenth century. Although Dr. Kelleher’s work focused on the Iberian Peninsula, her work inspired scholars of law and gender in other regions; this session therefore welcomes papers that focus on any part of the medieval world. Topics may include the role of gender in navigating medieval legal systems, as well as the gendered dynamics of crime and punishment.

Organizer: Sarah Ifft Decker

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Marie Kelleher (1970-2024) was the author of groundbreaking work in medieval Iberian studies, on topics including women and gender, law, urban history, and famine. She was also dedicated to supporting the work of junior scholars, and an indefatigable advocate for exciting scholarship on medieval Iberian studies. In her honor, this session brings together a wide range of scholarship that celebrates the new directions being taken within medieval Iberian studies. In honor of the breadth and depth of Dr. Kelleher’s work, the session welcomes papers on any part of the Iberian Peninsula and any aspect of medieval Iberian history or culture.

Organizer: Tina Boyer

Organizer: Adam Oberlin

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

In memoriam of our colleague Heiko Wiggers, 1968-2024, Associate Professor of German at Wake Forest University, the Society for Medieval Germanic Studies proposes a session on research in the wider Low German dialect area, including Old Saxon, Middle Low German, Old Frisian, and Old and Middle Dutch, from linguistic and literary perspectives.

Organizer: Joseph Johnson ; jj892@georgetown.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society

Who was Marie de France – and perhaps more importantly, who has she become in the eyes of scholars today? The International Marie de France Society welcomes papers that address any of the following questions/themes: aspects of Marie's works that seem to hint at the author's voice and personality; the fraught question of Marie's actual historical identity; modern speculative/imaginative approaches to Marie's identity such as Lauren Groff's Matrix; the question of the "politics" or ideological stances that crystallize within these works.

Organizer: David Yoon ; dyoon@numismatics.org

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Numismatic Society

This session welcomes papers that consider the transmission or reception of information and knowledge through the medium of coins and related numismatic objects. These objects are typically very information-rich, but the information embedded or read in them may range widely, from subtle typological details to overt propaganda. Topics to be considered may include internal administrative information as well as messages to the coin-using public and may include reception as well as design. They may also include misinformation or misunderstanding, as well as the informational problems posed by coins in modern research.

Organizer: Benjamin Pykare

Organizer: John Reilly ; jreill22@nd.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Institute, Univ. of Notre Dame

This panel will provide a space for thoughtful reflection on the usefulness, or lack thereof, of the terms mysticism and mystic when discussing certain religious experiences, practices, individuals, and/or communities. Originating as a category within the Christian tradition, “mysticism” has since been applied to trends within Judaism and Islam, and many scholars have deemed “mystic” a potentially unhelpful label for medieval Jewish kabbalists or Muslim Sufis, for example. Papers are encouraged to evaluate the usefulness of this term in varied cases and propose language, categories, and concepts that would better capture the phenomena under investigation.

Organizer: Jason Crow ; Jason.crow@monash.edu

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

Cistercian contributions to science are known to have occurred in the writings of authors, such as Paolo Boccone, Jacobus Seger, and Caramuel y Lobkowitz. How science and faith intersected in the writings of these authors is less understood. Connections between the disciples might be conserved across the multiple treatises on art, science, and theology of Lobkowitz. However, even within his writings the interrelationship between the disciplines remains obscure. To fill this lacuna in our understanding of Cistercian and monastic thought, this panel seeks papers exploring the roles of art and science, broadly within late medieval and early modern Cistercian thought.

Organizer: Christopher Vaccaro ; cvaccaro@uvm.edu

Organizer: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

This session invites papers on the specific medieval conceptions of the sea that inspired Tolkien's legendarium. Early medieval texts such as The Sea-farer, The Wanderer, and Beowulf might combine with Tolkien's narratives on the Fall of Numenor, the story of Aldarion and Erendis, and The Sea-bell. Some topics might include sea-longing, gendering of the sea, the homo-amory of those who share ships to Valinor, the sea as threshold, as space of divinity, of the medieval sublime, and medieval mysticism.

Organizer: Reed O'Mara ; rao44@case.edu

Organizer: Laura Feigen

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This session aims to highlight the active role of Jewish women in the Middle Ages. We welcome 20-minute papers that use methodologies and explore topics that have not been commonly considered in the study of Jewish women in the medieval period. These include, but are not limited to, studies focused on Jewish women as patrons, merchants, collectors, readers, scribes, authors, and artisans. This session is accepting original papers addressing any aspect of the lives of Jewish women in Ashkenaz, Sepharad, or Italy. Papers dealing with understudied topics, such as Jewish women in pre-expulsion England, are encouraged.

Organizer: Steven McMichael ; sjmcmichael@stthomas.edu

Organizer: Birgit Wiedl ; birgit.wiedl@injoest.ac.at

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Institut für Geschichte der Juden in Österreich

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Academy of Jewish-Christian Studies

We are soliciting papers concerning medieval Jewish-Christian relations in all areas of study: theology, spiritual literature, preaching, social relations, and art. We are hoping to have a balanced picture of this relationship, that is, not only negative relationships that led to anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism but also positive relationships in which Jews and Christian interacted in peace. Proposals for both in-person and virtual presentations are welcome (we hope to add a virtual session to complement this in-person one). Presenters should indicate whether they would like their papers to be considered for in-person or virtual sessions.

Organizer: Matthew Melvin-Koushki

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

From jinn marriages to fairy encounters to alien abductions, recorded human interactions with the Other Crowd often get hot and heavy. Sex magic is likewise a perennial staple of occult manuals, and the trip reports of medieval mystics and modern psychonauts alike frequently feature sexual imagery. This panel brings together a range of historians around the interconnected themes of sex with spirits, sex through spirits and sex in spirit, focusing on their myriad iterations in Western (Islamic, Jewish and Christian) cultures from late antiquity to early modernity.

Organizer: Karen Bollermann ; kbollermann@icloud.com

Organizer: Cary Nederman ; cary-j-nederman@tamu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

John of Salisbury (1115/1120-1180) counts among the most distinguished intellectuals who contributed to the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. An active churchman as well as author, John witnessed some of the most significant ecclesio-political events of his time and recounted them in letters, hagiographies, and historical texts as well as in more philosophical writings. The proposed panel aims to consider John in relation to the backgrounds that shaped his thought and political activity. Contributions are welcomed from across the disciplinary spectrum, including (but not confined to) history, religious studies, philosophy, medieval studies, art history, philosophy, political science, literature, and classics.

Organizer: Michail Kitsos

Delivery Mode: In-Person

How could our perception of Jewish literature written in Greek change if we acknowledge the linguistic medium as Judeo-Greek? Or, what can we say about the Greek of Jews and their literatures vis-à-vis the Greek of Christians and their respective works? These two sessions aim to explore these questions as well as questions pertaining to the production of Jewish literature in Judeo-Greek from the third century BCE to the fifteenth century CE and the literary and linguistic associations between the Judeo-Greek in the literature of the Greek-speaking Jews and the Greek in the works of Greek-speaking Christians.

Organizer: K. Whetter ; kevin.whetter@acadiau.ca

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Arthurian Literature

Arthurian Literature seeks papers for a session examining "King Arthur in (Con)texts": the contexts are deliberately open. Speakers might examine Arthurian texts in the context of medieval manuscripts that put Arthurian literature alongside religious or didactic literature; speakers might examine Arthurian texts in manuscripts that contain non-Arthurian romances and what the contexts might suggest about reading practices or medieval attitudes to literature or genre; or speakers might examine Arthurian texts -- whether medieval or modern -- alongside non-Arthurian texts that nonetheless use Arthurian or related themes or characters or concerns in new or interesting ways.

Organizer: Thomas Sawyer

Organizer: Angela Weisl ; angela.weisl@shu.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Popular tabletop board games frequently employ medieval themes: as convenient table-dressing, gothicized or romanticized; as Arthuriana, or inspired by Norse or Celtic myths; as medievalizing in a fantasy genre; and as representative of global medieval worlds. Moreover, as arts of agency and experiments in value structure, analogue games offer perspectives on medievalism distinct from those offered by video games and role playing games. This session seeks papers from any field or methodological framework that investigate medievalism, construed broadly, in tabletop board games, whether in terms of production (analysis of material representation) or reception (analysis of ludic experience).

Organizer: Kaveh Hemmat

Organizer: Cameron Cross ; kchalipa@umich.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Great Lakes Adiban Society

The Great Lakes Adiban Society invites abstracts for a session on Labor and Power in Global Context at ICMS 2025. Hunting, martial training, and academic study may have been activities fit for a prince, but was there a kingly way to mend a shirt, dig a ditch, or draft a contract? What role did labor play in medieval global imaginaries? How did travel involve labor and social class? We invite abstracts on topics including: labor and social identity; labor and travel; labor and gender; how power is exercised through different forms of labor; pious labor; among others.

Organizer: Alexander Brock ; abrock@princeton.edu

Organizer: Alyssa Granacki

Organizer: Hannah Lloyd

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Italian Studies@Kalamazoo

This panel interrogates how medieval Italian literature, art, and culture reflect critically on humans’ multifaceted relationship to the various -scapes in which they live: landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes, hellscapes, etc. From Dante’s invention of Hell and Purgatory, to Giotto’s attempts to depict bodies in three-dimensional space, medieval Italians developed new ways of conceiving and representing the subtle interactions between humans and their environments. Welcoming diverse approaches to the study of -scapes, this panel turns to medieval Italy as a site to explore the roots of our contemporary environmental loss and to identify counter-histories and visions of a different future.

Organizer: Erik Alder

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Latin played an enormous role in the development of Iberian cultures, both early in the region's development when it was the dominant language, as well as later when patronized by the elite.This session invites papers that question the hegemonic banality of Latin on the peninsula and recognize how the language was espoused by minority identities as well as how it could still be used as an artistic medium, such as in the cases of Prudentius, Egeria, and Visigothic authors, as well as consideration of issues that occur in translations such as those by Gonzalo de Berceo.

Organizer: Andrew Rabin

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

These sessions continue the on-going reevaluation of the present state of the study of early medieval British law. Recognizing the extent to which our understanding of early law has changed over the last century, the purpose of these sessions is to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss new ways of understanding pre-Conquest legal culture. The last few years have witnessed the most extensive reconsideration of law in early Britain since the work of Felix Liebermann himself, and this session offers an important opportunity to discuss the progress and publicize the research taking place in this field.

Organizer: Alexander Volokh

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: Alexander Ames

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Speech Act Society

While scholars of various medieval literatures have become increasingly interested in speech act theory as a lens through which to examine and understand diverse texts, thus far little attention has been paid to the potential of discourse analysis, pragmatics, and speech act theory to illuminate works of medieval drama. These tools enable scholars to address how medieval plays, specifically mystery cycles, employ illocutionary acts to achieve dramatic and didactic effects. Papers addressing performative speech (i.e any aspect of speech act theory, pragmatics, or discourse analysis) in any work of medieval drama, especially the plays of the mystery cycles, are welcomed.

Organizer: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

Talks may address compilations of terms, etymologies, layout and presentation of word lists, their usefulness, and their intention in manuscripts and early printed books, and in particular cases, the transmission of these from MS to print. Examples might include (but are certainly not limited to) Hildegard of Bingen’s Physica, The Book of St Albans, bilingual texts (for example, The Doctrine to Learn French and English, 1480), or glossaries added to printed Canterbury Tales. Scholars working on picture texts, in which a word might be defined by a picture, are also encouraged to submit proposals.

Organizer: Vicky McAlister ; vmcalister@towson.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

In 2024 historian of medieval Ireland, Dr. Cherie N. Peters sadly died at a young age. Her research advanced our understanding of the peasant experience in medieval Ireland, especially in foodways, farming, and the lower social statuses. She accomplished her analyses by combining interdisciplinary sources from history, philology, law, and archaeology. This panel, held in her memory, seeks papers tackling any aspect of non-elite life across the Atlantic Archipelago in any medieval time period and using any methodology or disciplinary approach. Particularly welcome are papers that connect Ireland to other parts of Europe and the world, uncovering the under-documented majority.

Organizer: Marika Räsänen ; marras@utu.fi

Organizer: Thomas Devaney

Delivery Mode: In-Person

From late Antiquity to the present day, the divine power of relics has been an inseparable part of people’s lives in the Catholic world. Much has been published on relics. Yet, as the concept of the relic and its sub-categories are a creation of modern ways to classify them, our understanding of them remains restricted. Reading medieval sources in the light of modern categorization can prevent us from understanding what medieval people regarded as relics at a practical level. This panel invites to consider medieval materiality and the blurred boundaries between everyday items and devotional objects in medieval lived religion.

Organizer: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

In 2019 and 2022, EBS member Daniel Sawyer (Oxford) published substantial articles on missing books. One wonders about the whereabouts of books mentioned in wills and inventories, for example, the “Book of Gower” cited in Elizabeth Kyngeston Findern’s will or the “Book of the Lion” listed in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Retraction (was this book real or imaginary?). Ghost copies, or fabricated citations with no correspondence to actual primary sources, might also be considered. Papers in this session will discuss non-extant books and their influence on the manuscripts and books that survive today.

Organizer: Matthew Desing ; mvdesing2@utep.edu

Organizer: Robin Bower

Organizer: Jessica Boon

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

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

Medieval emotions are frequently portrayed as residing in the heart, the soul, or the humoral body. Medieval writers also locate the expression of emotions within broader spaces, either natural or constructed. This session explores the ways that medieval writers ‘emplace’ emotion in the landscapes of medieval Iberia. From ritualized emotional expressions at court to illicit manifestations of erotic love in hidden corners, medieval authors locate feelings within the real or invented spaces of Iberia. This session welcomes abstracts that explore the intersection of spatiality and affectivity broadly defined in History, Literature, or the Arts.

Organizer: Marla Segol

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

In the Middle Ages as in the present, play, imagination, parody, and even humor are at the heart of innovation. Play is traditionally defined as non-telic, meaning that it is done for its own sake, without ulterior motive. However, in the context of magic and mysticism (both past and present), practitioners explore new ideas and practices through play, developing new cosmologies and ritual practices. This session explores the radical potential of play in close readings of medieval and modern magical sources.

Organizer: Samuel Gillis Hogan ; spgh14@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

Magic practices have long been preserved in real-world instruction manuals and included in fantasy, fairy tales, and myth. For example: the evil queen’s mirror in Snow White echoes various medieval and early modern spells to bind spirits into mirrors and crystals. Whether these are cases of life imitating art or art imitating life is not always known or knowable, but magical practices and stories about magic have clearly long mirrored each other. This panel examines to what extent surviving magic instructions and fictive representations of magic reflect each other, and what can be known about the nature of this relationship.

Organizer: Veronica Menaldi

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

In what ways do contemporary practices acknowledge and incorporate medieval theories? How does modern fantasy literature echo premodern representations? What commonalities can be found in these reflections across cultural divides? Do the linguistic crossovers invite further cross-pollination of earlier manifestations of magic? What can contemporary scholars gain when we look into the mirror? Can the present give us a renewed understanding of the past? We encourage literary and cultural studies scholars (Arabic/Hebrew studies, Hispanic/Lusophone studies, Francophone studies, English studies, etc), historians, art historians, religious studies and philosophy scholars, and sociologists to apply.

Organizer: Bruce Gilchrist

Delivery Mode: 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).

Organizer: Marsha Dutton ; dutton@ohio.edu

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

Scholars of medieval Christian spirituality with a particular interest in the Virgin Mary, and those with an interest in the roles of medieval women as exemplified by or mirrored in her various depictions—as mother of Jesus, as source of his humanity, as a refuge and protector for those in need, as an exemplar of humility and obedience, as a surrogate for readers, etc.—are invited to offer a paper to this session. Scholars of medieval expectations of the roles of women are also invited to apply.

Organizer: Bethany Donovan ; donobeth@umich.edu

Organizer: Julia LaPlaca ; jlaplaca@umich.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program (MEMS), Univ. of Michigan

This session explores how medieval artisans manipulated materials to impress and sometimes deceive viewers in the late Middle Ages. Makers employed strategies to visually transform materials, either to show a virtuosic command over the medium or to trick buyers, or both. Master tapestry weavers skillfully mimicked architecture using wool and silk, and deceitful craftsmen sold gilded trinkets as the genuine article. We invite interdisciplinary approaches to diverse illusionary craft practices, considering technical processes and reception, legal and cultural implications, and theoretical frameworks past and present that help us understand the murky world of material resemblances.

Organizer: Joseph Sullivan

Organizer: Siân Echard ; sian@mail.ubc.ca

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

A rubricated manuscript; an illuminated manuscript; a carved casket; a painted wall decoration... Arthurian narrative can be delivered in a range of material forms. This session takes account of the material turn in literary studies to invite papers on any aspect of Arthurian material culture. How might the material form affect the reception of an Arthurian text? In textual objects, how might text and form interact? What happens when an Arthurian story travels in a non-textual form? This interdisciplinary session allows for conversation between both medieval and later manifestations of Arthurian materiality.

Organizer: Katharine Scherff ; Katharine.d.scherff@ttu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Virtual platforms have become indispensable media that reconstruct human relationships, conferences, and even methods of religious ritual. However, this is not the first instance in which humans operated within a religious context where "technology" has been utilized to commune outside of themselves. Presentations will engage with concepts of virtuality, mediation, and technology and are encouraged to broach such concepts with a theoretical framework. Case studies may engage with material, performative, or literary sources that manage viewer perception/reception—simulated virtuality, telepresence, or mediation—and concepts of authenticity.

Organizer: Silvia Tita ; titasilv@msu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

As the year 2025 marks a new Jubilee for the Roman Church, this interdisciplinary session seeks papers that deal with diverse aspects of the Jubilee: artistic and urbanistic projects, treatises on the significance of the Jubilee, music, performances, and reproductive materials for large audiences (such as prints). Following the establishment of the Jubilee in 1300 by Pope Boniface VIII, later popes understood the beneficial impact of an event of such amplitude. The period under scrutiny witnessed many efforts occasioned by Jubilees. The intention of the panel is to question the consistency of a Jubilee mode of thinking and approach.

Organizer: Catherine Peters ; Catherine.Peters@lmu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

This session explores significant philosophical developments from the medieval period through the renaissance. It aims to provide a deeper appreciation of medieval philosophy by enriching our understanding not only of its immediate translation into the renaissance period but also of its lasting legacy. Given the breadth and richness of this period, papers on any philosophical topic or approach are welcome. The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive attitude in its sessions.

Organizer: Melanie Batoff

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session celebrates the centenary anniversary of Ingrid Brainard's birth (1925-2000). Brainard, a respected musicologist and dance scholar, organized the earliest Musicology at Kalamazoo sessions. To honor her work, we invite submissions about music that accompanied dance, processions, and other types of formalized movement. Presentations that seek to illuminate the relationship between music and movement through primary sources such as musical manuscripts, theoretical treatises, liturgical instructions, iconography, and literary texts are welcome. We envision that this session could accommodate a variety of formats, such as traditional papers and presentations that include performances or demonstrations.

Organizer: Kisha Tracy ; ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Next year will bring the 25th anniversary of the publication of Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis is a seminal text in disability studies and, by extension, in the study of the Middle Ages. This panel will seek papers on prosthetics and prosthesis, metaphoric and physical, especially exploring how the applications of Mitchell and Snyder’s text have evolved, changed, and/or been revised for and in the field of medieval disability studies.

Organizer: Laura Gathagan ; laura.gathagan@cortland.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Haskins Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Medieval Documentary Cultures

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

Organizer: Heide Estes ; heide.estes@gmail.com

Organizer: Ilse Schweitzer ; schwei53@msu.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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.

Organizer: Heide Estes ; heide.estes@gmail.com

Organizer: Ilse Schweitzer ; schwei53@msu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Ecocriticisms

This session will offer analyses of medieval representations of humans and the environment across the geographical and temporal range of the Middle Ages with attention to how reading our pasts can help us to understand the present and intervene with respect to our futures. 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.

Organizer: Heide Estes ; heide.estes@gmail.com

Organizer: Ilse Schweitzer ; schwei53@msu.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Ecocriticisms

This session seeks papers that explore the ways ecocriticism intersects with, informs, or is expanded by other critical approaches and orientations. We encourage analyses that merge ecocritical frameworks with studies of gender/sexuality, queer identities, race/ethnicity, religion, dis/ability status, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, sound studies, aesthetics, narratology, etc. We encourage 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.

Organizer: Kelsey Boor

Organizer: Emily O'Brock

Delivery Mode: In-Person

We are seeking papers that address the relationship between human knowledge and the elements of the natural world, both plant and animal. Papers should address questions related to the medieval incarnation of knowledge in natural resources: What do plants and animals signify for the human? What do plants and animals contribute to human understanding? How was the relationship between plants, animals, and humans understood? How can medieval understandings of these questions impact our own perceptions of the natural world, particularly in an age of many ecological crises?

Organizer: Steven McMichael ; sjmcmichael@stthomas.edu

Organizer: Jessalynn Bird ; jbird@saintmarys.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society

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

This session, co-sponsored by the Franciscan Institute, focuses on the varieties, methods, and surviving records of preaching by Franciscans throughout the medieval and early modern periods.

Organizer: Erika Loic ; eloic@fsu.edu

Organizer: Alicia Miguélez

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Instituto de Estudos Medievais, Univ. Nova de Lisboa

We invite papers for one session that might contribute to understanding medieval Iberia in a connected world by addressing the raw-materials record. Papers may delve into issues of short-, medium-, and long-distance trade; the subsequent use of these raw materials in the production of objects, artifacts, or buildings; as well as the meanings and symbolism that can be identified from them in visual and literary culture.

Organizer: Grace Greiner ; gcg49@cornell.edu

Organizer: Jennifer Rabedeau ; jbr263@cornell.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

This session welcomes papers that consider forms of intermediality in medieval art, literature, and culture, asking what it means to apply theories of intermediality to the study of the Middle Ages. To what extent can (or should) the Middle Ages be understood as an intermedial culture? In what ways do medieval people leverage intermediality in creative productions? How do contemporary forms of mediation and intermediality (digital, archival, institutional, editorial, artistic) inflect our study of the medieval? What might medievalists contribute to intermedial theory? Potential topics: objects/artworks that combine words and images; mixed-form literary productions; architectural spolia; postmedieval intermedial artefacts.

Organizer: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu

Organizer: Christopher Vaccaro ; cvaccaro@uvm.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

This session explores the interconnected role that Tolkien's language invention had in the his myth-making and world building. Papers can explore the medieval roots of Tolkien's language invention in some of the sources he used for phonetic and grammatical inspiration in his own "secret vice" of art language invention—for example the Finnish of the Kalevala and the Medieval Welsh of the Mabinogion. Papers can also explore how Tolkien used his invented languages to define and delineate the various peoples and cultures of Middle-earth.

Organizer: Pablo Pastrana-Pérez

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

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

Organizer: Sarah Noonan

Organizer: Liz Hebbard

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Peripheral Manuscripts Project

Recent digitization projects, blogs, and journal issues have increasingly drawn attention to the study of items in lesser-known collections of medieval manuscripts in North America. This session welcomes papers that: explore item(s) held at an institution that might be “off the beaten path”; reflect on the challenges / benefits of working within such collections; or think broadly about how such collections might complicate (or confirm) prior research based on collections held at larger research libraries. Papers discussing regional efforts to describe, make public use of, or otherwise raise the profile of smaller, less well-researched collections are also welcome.

Organizer: Elina Gertsman

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Material turn has come to dominate the study of medieval art history at the same time as the term "materiality" became diluted and diffuse. This session aims to reinvigorate the method by exploring the complex relationship between material and meaning-making in the Middle Ages. Its central concern will be the power of the medium to entangle the corporeal and the intangible, the concept and the object, the ontology and the epistemology. Specifically, we invite papers that will look at semiotics and iconology of the medium, thinking through the ways material works to signify and embody.

Organizer: Kristin Leaman ; leamankb@purdue.edu

Organizer: Juliane Tiemann

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies

Access to medieval manuscripts begins with accurate catalogue records, and that can be a challenge for short-staffed special collections libraries. Carefully planned student projects can contribute to the expansion of these records, while providing valuable training to students. The purpose of this session is to explore the collaborations among cataloguers, curators, archivists, librarians, and/or departmental faculty that lead to such student projects, discussing the benefits and challenges in hopes of providing insights on how to plan future student projects.

Organizer: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu

Delivery Mode: 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 Early Modern period, roughly the fourth through sixteenth centuries. Papers discussing all aspects of teaching about medieval warfare including, but not limited to, developing syllabi and selecting sources, traditional and non-traditional students, incorporating methodologies such as gender and globalism, the use of traditional table-top war-gaming and/or video gaming and other technologies, etc. are welcome.

Organizer: Valerie Eads ; veads@sva.edu

Delivery Mode: 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 the technology of medieval warfare are welcome.

Organizer: Tory Schendel-Vyvoda

Organizer: Michael Nagy ; michael.nagy@sdstate.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Medieval literature plays host to a broad spectrum of monstrous figures ranging from the more familiar dragons, monsters, dwarves, and trolls to the rather obscure. Early twentieth-century scholars often interpreted these figures, with varying degrees of conviction, as the ostracized “other” in Old Norse-Icelandic, Old English, and Middle English literature. Since 1996, however, a growing body of work argues that such interpretations form the beginning of the discourse on teratology rather than its end. The aim of this session, then, is further to explore the narrative, cultural, religious, philosophical, and political functions that monstrous figures serve in medieval literature.

Organizer: Michael Torregrossa

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association

Medieval monsters and ideas about them remain at the base of many of our modern conceptions of monsters and the monstrous, but the tracks of these ongoing traditions for representing monstrosities in the post-medieval world remain largely unexplored. Presenters will explore both continuity and change in addressing how terrors rooted in the medieval world have been portrayed beyond the Middle Ages and/or how modern monstrosities seem to draw indirectly from medieval traditions.

Organizer: Alessandra Ignesti ; alessandra.ignesti@mail.mcgill.ca

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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 in their music compositions from the Early Modern period on, and how these works have shaped and, often, misshaped 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; how ideas about the Middle Ages are embedded in certain musical genres, and how those genres are portrayed in different media.

Organizer: Logan Spencer ; medievalspencer@gmail.com

Organizer: Kylie Owens

Organizer: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This panel aims to uncover ways that chastity could have been used as a way to perform gender in the medieval world, as well as how chastity and gender are performed more generally in medieval historical and literary contexts. In looking at the intersection between the performance of chastity and gender, we embrace the vibrant tapestry of lived experiences and gender performances of the medieval world. We aim for the discussion to be as intersectional as possible and invite discourse regarding queer studies, trans and gender studies, and other theoretical studies.

Organizer: Karen Soto

Organizer: Katherine Pierpont

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

As contemporary communities grapple with issues of environmental sustainability, climate change, urbanization, land disputes, and identity, understanding how people interacted with, shaped, and were shaped by their surroundings in the past becomes increasingly relevant. This session seeks to explore how medieval communities navigated, inhabited, imagined, and ascribed meaning to their environments and how environments, in turn, created, defined, and influenced communties. By examining "place" as process (place-making) rather than simply location, we can expand our perspectives on the fluctuating relationships between medieval peoples and their environments while also gaining insights into the multiple identities and histories of individual spaces.

Organizer: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu

Organizer: Britt Mize

Delivery Mode: In-Person

At no time has intellectual culture been more committed to the notion of prior written “authority” than in the Middle Ages. Yet medieval adaptations of earlier works, including classical and scriptural ones, are often boldly inventive: a paradox due for serious consideration. Existing contributions to Adaptation studies nearly always focus on post-medieval adaptation (including modern adaptations of medieval sources). We invite papers that redirect the insights of Adaptation studies in order to build a more coherent sense of medieval ideas and practices of adaptation, including those involving radical or unintuitive changes of language, medium, genre, style, context, or audience.

Organizer: Richard Nicholas ; rnicholas@stfrancis.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

The sacraments and liturgy are central to Christian spirituality. While the Church Fathers commented on the sacraments and their liturgical celebration 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 and their liturgical celebration. The quest for answers led to the development of a highly systematic treatment of sacraments. This session will showcase papers that explore and assess the medieval systematic treatment of the sacraments and their liturgical celebration and show how what is found there can enrich contemporary theological issues.

Organizer: Jessalynn Bird ; jbird@saintmarys.edu

Organizer: Andrew Reeves

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society

The field of sermon studies has grown from being perceived as a niche specialization to a recognized discipline whose sources (sermons, pastoralia) can provide useful information to historians, practitioners of religious studies, and literary scholars. This series of sessions sponsored by the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society (and participating co-sponsors) will enable both early career and established scholars to present their work at the congress.

Organizer: Gamble Madsen

Delivery Mode: Virtual

This session welcomes proposals that consider medieval minds that explored new ideals and challenged prevailing concepts of divine agency and institutional spirituality. Topics may include: investigations of the "ineffable" or "unseen" presence of God, voices that were condemned or silenced, edited Scriptures or hagiographies, imagery that operated as a separate vehicle for education and inspiration, the persistency of "paganism," heresies and orthodoxies, medieval western and non-western contexts, and even "atheism."

Organizer: Gerhard Jaritz ; jaritzg@ceu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Dept. of Historical Studies, Central European Univ.

Medieval visual culture plays an important role with regard to offering a variety of religious and/or secular messages for the beholders. One sphere in this respect is taken by didactic images. The session aims at discussing their characteristics, significance, impact, development, and the possible patterns they follow. A particular aspect also concentrates on the comparison of didactic images with different types of didactic texts and how they could complement one another. Contributors to the session are invited to offer a paper that will follow these given parameters.

Organizer: June-Ann Greeley ; greeleyj@sacredheart.edu

Organizer: Amina Boukail ; leaminaz@yahoo.fr

Delivery Mode: Virtual

We invite papers that explore the works of medieval female mystics and religious poets from religious traditions other than Christianity: Judaism, Islam, and Eastern spiritual traditions. The writings by the female poets/ mystics may be in any language and we encourage emerging scholars who work on texts not commonly (or not at all) available in English to consider submitting a proposal in order to broaden and deepen our understanding of female mystical voices in non-Christian religions. Any methodological approach will be considered but a clear explanation of the specific methodology would be helpful.

Organizer: Leah Haught ; lhaught@westga.edu

Organizer: Angela Weisl ; angela.weisl@shu.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Popular medievalisms draw on a blend of historical and fantastical material in their worldbuilding. When it comes to the depiction of premodern cultures, this means that a variety of cultural practices and worldviews are combined to establish identities thought to be "inherently medieval," such as "Viking" or "Celtic." What do these acts of cultural appropriation tell us about the imagined audiences for these texts? Their understandings of the cultures from which they draw (without attributions)? This session investigates recent versions of medieval culture to determine how they might reflect the use and abuse of concepts like indigenousness, ownership, and progress.

Organizer: Angela Weisl ; angela.weisl@shu.edu

Organizer: Carol Robinson ; clrobins@kent.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

This session seeks investigation of disability and neurodivergence in contemporary medievalist productions. How do disability and neurodivergence function in these narratives? How are they portrayed? How do these portrayals intersect with medieval historical and literary examples of disability and neurodivergence?

Organizer: Michael Evans

Organizer: Angela Weisl ; angela.weisl@shu.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Many nations are monarchies, tracing their roots to the Middle Ages. How do these institutions relate their medieval pasts to their roles in the modern world? Some monarchies use the medieval to emphasize legitimacy and longevity; others downplay it, and seek to reinvent themselves for a modern, democratic society. Medievalism can also be used to legitimize “invented” modern monarchies, such as Napoleon’s use of the Merovingian bee symbol, and Central Africa’s emperor Bokassa’s regalia modeled on that of medieval European kings. This session seeks papers that explore these various monarchies and their use of (or disavowal of) the medieval.

Organizer: Jason Jacobs

Organizer: Julie Singer

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Medieval studies is about objects, but also about methods: philology, paleography and codicology, historicism and periodization, genre- and medium-specific approaches, and the imperative not to separate the religious and secular. We seek papers that break or ignore the rules of method, use the wrong tool for the job, or ignore something we are supposed to keep in mind. What happens when we choose to seek new interpretations by bracketing the “proper approaches” central to our training? Submissions welcomed from any field of medieval studies, early or late, but especially from literary scholars working in the full range of medieval languages.

Organizer: Michael Torregrossa

Organizer: Joseph Sullivan

Organizer: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

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

We propose this session as a counter to the flurry of attention on David Lowery’s film The Green Knight, which is merely one example of a much wider array of adaptations and appropriations of the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in post-medieval culture. Presenters will highlight aspects of this rich textual tradition of the romance's afterlives in examples in comics, drama, fiction, film, games, illustration, music, opera, picture books, radio broadcasts, or television programming.

Organizer: Lauren Wood

Organizer: Katie Despeaux

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Women in the Middle Ages lived varied lives but were typically valued by their function as wives and mothers. Though they could often exercise a degree of agency, particularly elite women were charged with the creation and education of heirs, cementing marriage alliances, and sometimes exercising de jure authority. But these are also the means by which women become objects for political maneuvering. Beliefs about reproduction and inferior spiritual states allowed medieval authors to make connections between women and political outcomes, anchoring failed alliances, the downfall of a family, or even monstrosity to the female body.

Organizer: David Sorenson

Organizer: Mildred Budny ; mildredbudny@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Postal History at Kalamazoo

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

In a world in which communication was necessarily through the written word, getting it from sender to recipient could be a complicated process. While important correspondence could be sent quickly, ordinary letters might be less speedy, and while royal letters might be sent by an efficient official system, ordinary letters between, say, merchants or clergy, might be much less so. This session is intended as a means of examining the ways in which mail moved, whether in Europe or elsewhere.

Organizer: Lindy Brady ; lindy.brady@edgehill.ac.uk

Organizer: Nicole Discenza ; ndiscenza@usf.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center

Early medieval Britain was a place where many languages were spoken, written, and studied. This session welcomes papers exploring any form of interaction between languages in pre-Norman Britain. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: bilingual or macaronic texts, multilingual stone inscriptions, linguistic evidence of interaction between speakers of different languages, legal and literary uses of multiple languages, multilingual manuscript glosses and marginalia, and studies of materials for learning and teaching languages in pre-Norman Britain. We invite proposals from people from any field and any stage of their career.

Organizer: Melanie Batoff

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session will explore the intricate relationship between politics and music in the Middle Ages, and how medieval composers reacted to political circumstances in overt and subtle ways through their music. Topics may include (but are not limited to) music about the crusades and other conflicts, music responding to crisis, music praising or satirizing sacred or secular rules, music used in civic rituals, and music commemorating historical events of political significance. Submissions that consider how political events or the patronage system affected musicians' careers and output are also welcome.

Organizer: Henry Drummond

Organizer: Melanie Batoff

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session examines musical theory of the Middle Ages, and the links between theory and practice. Medieval theoretical texts can provide valuable information on how music sounded and what it meant to its listeners. But the absence of theoretical texts does not mean that established principles cannot be deduced from common practice. This session therefore looks at theory in its broadest sense, welcoming submissions grounded in music treatises and those concerning the practical application of theoretical concepts. Topics may include (but are not limited to) musical notation, rhythm and mensuration, harmony and counterpoint, tonality, musical modes, musical ethics, and aesthetics.

Organizer: Liana Cheney ; Liana_Cheney@uml.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History (ATSAH)

This session aims to analyze, discover, and reveal the decadent, mythological, and romantic symbolism associated with the mysterious in European (French, Italian, British, and Russian) and American art and literature.

Organizer: Carla Thomas ; carlathomas@fau.edu

Organizer: Haruko Momma

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Academy of America

These sessions aim to generate a dialogue on the subject of names and naming in medieval literature and such related topics as terms and terminology in medieval studies. The first session will consider the use of names and act of naming in medieval literature to examine their role in both individual texts and in the society and culture they emerged from. The second session will consider the use of names and terms in medieval studies to address how we use proper names and terms in our work and the role we as medievalists play in academia and society at large.

Organizer: Carla Thomas ; carlathomas@fau.edu

Organizer: Haruko Momma

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Academy of America

These sessions aim to generate a dialogue on the subject of names and naming in medieval literature and such related topics as terms and terminology in medieval studies. The first session will consider the use of names and act of naming in medieval literature to examine their role in both individual texts and in the society and culture they emerged from. The second session will consider the use of names and terms in medieval studies to address how we use proper names and terms in our work and the role we as medievalists play in academia and society at large.

Organizer: Donald Wood

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This panel seeks papers that take innovative approaches to the study of Aljamiado linguistics or literary analysis. We interpret “Aljamiado” broadly to include Romance language texts composed in Hebrew, Arabic, or other characters in the Iberian Peninsula or in the post-expulsion diasporas from the Middle Ages through 1700. Of particular interest are methodologies that challenge or cross hermeneutical boundaries - such as approaches to race, postcolonial theory, history of emotions or of the senses, history of the book, and sociolinguistics - or that bring unique disciplines into productive dialogue. Papers by graduate students and early-career scholars are particularly welcome.

Organizer: Donna Beth Ellard ; donna.ellard@du.edu

Organizer: Mary Kate Hurley ; hurleym1@ohio.edu

Organizer: Tarren Andrews

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Disinventing Old English

As Old English teachers-scholars face increasing pressure to teacher higher enrollment classes than first year Old English will allow, we must draw on the long history of scholars teaching Old English in courses and indeed institutions where it might not be expected. For this paper panel, we welcome reflections on innovative teaching practices and teaching situations, especially those outside the university classroom, including Old English at the high school level; for general interest and online audiences; consulting in script writing, videogame production, and other entertainment industries; as part of the gen-ed classroom or in History of the English language.

Organizer: Jessica Barr

Organizer: Barbara Zimbalist

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (JMRC)

Following up on our ICMS 2024 roundtable on new approaches to medieval religious studies, we invite scholars who are using new, innovative, or reinvigorated methodologies to approach the study of medieval religious cultures to present their research. Such approaches might include the use of digital humanities, translation theory, comparative methodologies, expansive definitions of "the medieval," pedagogy, publicly-engaged scholarship, fictionality, or the inclusion of modern medievalisms. We especially encourage submissions by early-career researchers and advanced graduate students.

Organizer: Evelyn Meyer ; evelyn.meyer@slu.edu

Organizer: Jonathan Martin ; jsmart5@listu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

The Society for Medieval Germanic Studies (SMGS) is issuing an open call for papers showcasing new research in Germanic medieval studies.

Organizer: Matthew Heintzelman ; mheintzelma@hmml.org

Organizer: James Walters

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML)

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) invites proposals for presentations of new scholarship in apocryphal literature across cultural traditions, with special emphasis on Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic, Arabic, and Greek traditions. Discussions of Western manifestations of apocrypha will be considered within their context in the larger transmission of apocryphal literature.

Organizer: Sarah Blick ; blicks@kenyon.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

The parish church was at the heart of almost every medieval community as a place where people not only worshiped, but held village celebrations, paid taxes, organized poor relief, and more. Artists (and their patrons) sought to create works that explained complex theology, help organize the liturgy, and engage people who might visit the church several days a week. Papers on any aspect of art and architecture and the parish church are welcome.

Organizer: Jeffery Stoyanoff

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS) continues its annual tradition of welcoming new scholars 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.

Organizer: Laura Gathagan ; laura.gathagan@cortland.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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.

Organizer: Shannon Godlove ; godlove_shannon@columbusstate.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

For decades, the "New Voices" sessions sponsored by ISSEME have provided a venue for early career scholars to present their research and showcase recent advancements in this field of study. The International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) invites paper proposals from emerging scholars, including advanced (post-)graduate students or early career researchers, on any aspects of the language, literature, history, or culture of early medieval England.

Organizer: Joshua Smith ; jbs016@uark.edu

Organizer: Joey McMullen

Delivery Mode: 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 early-career scholars.

Organizer: Angela Weisl ; angela.weisl@shu.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Much recent work on political medievalisms has focused on the use of medieval imagery and references by the far right. However, political medievalism is not limited to right-wing populists and neofascists. Leftists and liberals have also used the medieval past celebrating its peasant revolts, precapitalist economy, and ethnic diversity: British members of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War invoked Wat Tyler; nineteenth-century union activists in the USA created the Knights of Labor; Joan of Arc – although claimed by the French nationalist right – became a symbol of resistance {“a female Che”) for leftists in Latin America.

Organizer: 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.

Organizer: Brian Gastle ; bgastle@wcu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: John Gower Society

Style has long captured the attention of John Gower’s readers, from analyses of his “plain” English style to detailed studies of his borrowings - linguistic, formal, narrative, and otherwise. This panel seeks to pull together and extend the existing conversations on style, broadly construed, in Gower’s works. Topics might include language and rhetoric; form, structure, and aesthetics; questions of how style shifts or remains constant across a multilingual oeuvre (treatments of French, Latin, and/or English works welcome); styles within a single work, including topics like fashion, self-fashioning, or imitation.

Organizer: Melissa Elmes ; MElmes@lindenwood.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

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

In 2023, Heather Key’s Otherworld Women in Early Irish Literature provided a fresh perspective on how the authors of five medieval Irish texts depicted women and work, prompting a new flurry of interest in how Otherworlds are used for socio-political critique and commentary, here particularly as regards gender. This session seeks to build on growing scholarly interest in Otherworlds, by featuring 20-minute papers investigating/situating the alterity of medieval Celtic Otherworlds and their denizens in socio-political, geographical, and/or theoretical contexts, either within a single tradition or through a comparison between Celtic and other traditions (for example, the medieval Japanese otogizōshi texts).

Organizer: Emily Gerace

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

We welcome submissions on a wide range of topics that bring together conversations about Palestine, intersectional feminism, and medieval studies.

Organizer: Richard Nicholas ; rnicholas@stfrancis.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This special session is reserved for undergraduate students to present the findings of their scholarly research in the various disciplines of medieval studies.

Organizer: Frans van Liere ; fvliere@calvin.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Medieval Bibles contained many materials that was not actually part of the Bible, but that was nevertheless central to understanding the Bible. One only need to think of the biblical prefaces, often excerpted from the works of Jerome or Isidore, or the Dictionary of Hebrew Names that was the standard addition to late medieval bibles. These texts are almost part of the biblical canon, yet they are neglected in traditional scholarship. This session invites papers on any genre of para-biblical texts. It is hoped that, in the juxtaposition of different papers, a new approach to medieval hermeneutics can emerge.

Organizer: Holly McArthur ; hmcarthur@wisc.edu

Organizer: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This session seeks to bring queer and trans methodologies to how we study and understand manuscripts, and thus how they impact the texts we use. Queer and trans studies have brought new elements and interpretations of medieval texts to the forefront, but what might be hiding in the manuscripts? What elements of texts may have been left on the editing room floor which could now have a place in queer and trans readings of medieval cultures? How do we reconcile these new approaches with accepted philological methods while creating accurate and accessible texts for study?

Organizer: Carol Robinson ; clrobins@kent.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: The UNICORN Castle

Interactivity with the medieval is more accessible than ever: from use of facsimiles of manuscripts, to 2D images of art and other objects, to 360º museum tours, to online video games and other virtual environments. This call is for ideas and/or experiences in approaches to teaching medieval literature, medieval language(s), medieval history, and/or medievalism(s) in online/digital format(s). Applications of pedagogical theory is encouraged.

Organizer: Sarah Barringer

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

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

Le Roman de Silence has become increasingly exciting as a site of exploration for gender and sex, with recent scholarship focusing on its trans possibilities. With the theatrical adaptation, The Book of Silence, premiering at ICMS 2025, this session seeks to be in conversation with the premiere. Questions about how we understand Silence's gender within both the medieval and the modern take the forefront, as well as an exploration of binaries, as put forward by the director, Lofty Durham, of “nature vs. nurture, male vs. female, truth vs. lies, noble vs. common.” This session will not require viewing the premier.

Organizer: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

How does personal narrative intertwine with the history of production or reception of a particular work or several works? Examples might include The Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Travels, or the recording of family events in the calendars of Books of Hours. Papers may consider portraits or visual narratives in manuscripts and/or printed books, as in the Beauchamp Pageant, or even scribal responses to the work of copying in colophons to gain insight into the recording of personal histories.

Organizer: Jessalynn Bird ; jbird@saintmarys.edu

Organizer: Frans van Liere ; fvliere@calvin.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Medieval Sermon Studies Society

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

Through drawing together scholars of the history of the university, of biblical exegesis, and of preaching, this session aims to explore the importance of Peter Lombard's works and consider his contributions to multiple genres.

Organizer: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

This session will explore ludic qualities of medieval manuscript culture, such as elements of play or representation of games in the production, consumption, preservation, or collection of manuscripts. Any approach that actively engages with manuscript culture is welcome, including art history, textual criticism, material culture, or other critical fields addressing the ludic.

Organizer: Maeve Callan

Organizer: Kartik Maini

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS), Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)

Saints have long demonstrated that 'gender' and 'sex' are a spectrum, not a binary. They have consciously cultivated characteristics of the ‘opposite’ sex, miraculously transformed their and others’ bodies, and in myriad other ways rejected the sex/gender they were assigned at birth. Although some today seek to erase such histories in an effort to force queer/trans* communities to abide by the binary, science and humanistic research have established the inalienable fluidity of both gender and sex. Attuned to present-day challenges and global in its spatial aspirations, this session seeks papers that explore the history of gender-fluidity in association with sanctity.

Organizer: Lindsay Pereira

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

In a world of reduced funding for and interest in the humanities, podcasting allows scholars to collaborate in new ways, discuss research in progress, and publish findings in a publicly accessible way. Our sessions brings together scholars interested in thinking about and experimenting with this innovative medium as a form of scholarly publication. We invite papers to consider: Why bring podcasting into the field of medieval studies and scholarship? What new forms of assessment does it present? How can we produce rigorous scholarship in an audio format and use it in our teaching? We encourage submissions of various experimental formats.

Organizer: Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier ; cmorandm@uvm.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Christine de Pizan was one of the most important figures at the court of Charles VI. A close adviser to the king, she is at the core of some of the most important discussions of the reign. Besides her feminist writings, she produced crucial reflections on knighthood, the Civil War, the body politic, Joan of Arc, amongst many other topics. This panel proposes to examine the "political" Christine and how her writing interacted with and discussed the period's important political and religious issues. We welcome approaches from various fields of study.

Organizer: Julie Singer

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Medieval studies disciplines have never been apolitical, but academics have granted greater and more urgent attention to the public uses and abuses of the Middle Ages in recent years. What is the medievalist’s responsibility to contribute to public discourses around identity, heritage, justice? For this panel, we seek interventions that envision and illustrate the political engagements medieval studies needs *now* and in the near future.

Organizer: Lorenz Hindrichsen ; lorenz.hindrichsen@cis.dk

Delivery Mode: Virtual

The Second Plague Pandemic not only inflicted unimaginable hurt but also triggered crises (demographic, spiritual, political, socio-economic), whose impact informed new artistic and literary modes of expression such as the carnivalesque. This panel examines how writers and artists processed pandemic experience, both in relation to outbreaks and to long-term repercussions (such as peasant revolts or multi-generational trauma). Where do we find traces of ‘long plague’ (analogous to ‘long Covid’), and what form do they take? How do pandemic experiences affect collective memory and shared narratives? And what theoretical frameworks might be helpful for studying (post)pandemic writing in literature and art?

Organizer: Seán Vrieland ; sean.vrieland@hum.ku.dk

Organizer: Anna Dlabačová ; a.dlabacova@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: When Danes Prayed in German

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Pages of Prayer: The Ecosystem of Vernacular Prayer Books in the Late Medieval Low Countries, ca. 1380–1550

Contrary to popular belief, religious devotion in Medieval Latin Christianity was not limited to the Latin language. Prayers, canonical hours, hymns, hagiographies and homilies were also produced and distributed in English, French, Dutch, German, the Scandinavian languages and other vernacular languages in manuscript and print form. For this special session we invite contributions on the use of one or more vernacular languages in prayer practice. Topics may include the reception of prayers, translation practices, codicology of prayer books, the role of devotional texts in early printing and the role of translation in proto-Protestantism, among others.

Organizer: Fiammetta Campagnoli ; fiammetta.campagnoli@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: Virtual

This session analyze the representations of souls in Purgatory and their iter salvationis. In medieval visual art, how are purification and the possibility of salvation portrayed? Additionally, what is the significance of depicting souls as naked? How this symbolism can convey theological truths about redemption and renewal? Liturgy, sermons, and visual arts will be examined in relation to pilgrimages and indulgences to understand the dramatization of the afterlife. Moreover, case studies will not only aim to highlight specific aspects and general phenomena, but also to define identities and devotees’ experiences during their spiritual purification journeys.

Organizer: Amy Livingstone

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval People

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

Conceptualization of boundaries and frontiers has recently undergone something of a revision in Medieval Studies. ‘Boundaries’ can be widely interpreted as political, cultural or intellectual, but also physical such as the walls of a monastery. This session seeks to foster discussion of how analysis of boundaries and frontiers can add fruitful new insights into the study of the medieval world or challenge previous notions of ‘boundaries’ or ‘frontiers’. The session welcomes submissions of papers from all periods of the middle ages, but especially those using digital humanities to explore the theme of boundaries and frontiers.

Organizer: Felipe Rojas ; felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu

Organizer: William Rogers-MacDonald

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

RPGs (role-playing games) include opportunities to approach sexuality and gender through a medieval or medieval-ish lens. Video games are often the first or only exposure people may have of the Middle Ages. What do these games teach us about perceptions of medieval sexuality and gender? How does the self-insert aspect of RPGs affect these perceptions? What affect does the fan culture surrounding these games have in medieval studies? This panel will attempt to answer some of these questions while centering on gender and sexuality within video games themselves along with the cultural reception of these games and their queer narratives.

Organizer: Alex Matthews ; acmatthews@uchicago.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Societas Magica

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

This panel explores and celebrates the ways medieval actors engaged the occult sciences to transgress authority and the status quo in order to imagine new worlds and create better futures. How have the occult sciences been a method of resistance among marginalized populations? In what ways do such occult practices appropriate, reimagine, and challenge the paradigm of the occult sciences as science? How can queer theory help us better understand the diverse landscape of medieval occult and magical practices?

Organizer: Maeve Doyle ; doylemae@easternct.edu

Organizer: Christopher Richards ; crichard@colby.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

How does medieval art define queerness and transness, and how do gendered performances of bodies and images shape one another? How do medieval sexualities and genders, fluid and porous, explicate and trouble modern ones? We invite papers that explore queer methodologies and medieval art, including visual cultures of animals, the humoral body, and the non-human. After the success of 2024’s Queer(ing) Medieval Art panels, this new panel seeks to expand our scope: we especially encourage papers examining secular, Jewish, or Islamic perspectives, architecture, non-elite archives, and/or queer intersections with race, religion, and ethnicity as visual/material expressions.

Organizer: Hannah Jones ; hjones3@binghamton.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

This panel explores how race and religious identity were represented in hagiographic literature and art. Building on the work of Geraldine Heng, David Nirenberg, and Pamela Patton, we will use the lives of saints as a window into the social and political hierarchies that informed evolving conceptions of race and religious identity. What physical characteristics, cultural values, and/or religious practices are used to signify racial differences, communal identity, and alternity? What can we learn about systems of oppression by studying literary and artistic representations of sanctity? We encourage proposals from a variety of disciplines, geographical areas, and time periods.

Organizer: Michelle Hamilton ; hamilton@umn.edu

Organizer: Karen Soto

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

The global video game market is set to be an almost $200 billion industry in 2024, and recent years have seen increasing popularity of games adapting classical and medieval mythologies. Exploring how these mythologies are reinterpreted and adapted into interactive gaming narratives such as God of War, Hades, Nioh, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, amongst many others, can offer insights into contemporary engagement with classical and medieval sources, shed light on the ways in which these mythologies continue to resonate, and allow us to better understand how video games shape current perceptions and misconceptions of the past.

Organizer: Carla Thomas ; carlathomas@fau.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Middle English Society

From hagiographies featuring women saints to texts written for women, like the Ancrene Wisse and Sawles Warde, the Early Middle English period contains rich evidence of women readership and, more importantly, shifting manuscript contexts that end up with women ownership, such as a couple cases of the manuscript witnesses of Poema Morale. The French of England and Early Middle English often commingled in manuscripts that attest to a rich vernacular devotional tradition and more. This panel invites papers on this tradition as it pertains to women and vernacular reading practices.

Organizer: Olivia Colquitt ; olivia.colquitt@hhu.de

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Post-National Reconceptions of European Literary History (Post-REALM)

Medieval and early-modern narratives travelled across languages, cultures, and material contexts, creating rich networks of textual transmission only fragments of which survive to the present day. This session calls for a reassessment of the methodologies by which historical texts are studied. Speakers are invited to explore new interdisciplinary approaches to Pan-European literature of the medieval and early modern periods. We are especially interested in contributions addressing widespread text traditions and/or the movement of narratives across linguistic and cultural borders. Examples include but are not limited to romances, chronicles, and hagiographies.

Organizer: Sarah LaVoy-Brunette ; sfl39@cornell.edu

Organizer: Brenna Duperron

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

"Red Reading the Premodern" takes up Cherokee scholar Scott Andrews' challenge to read non-Indigenous texts from an Indigenous perspective, as a “useful exercise of non-natives reading [non-native] texts as a native mock reader, using a native perspective to defamiliarize their own cultural texts.” Our session takes a global approach to Indigeneity, and we welcome approaches and methods that extend from Indigenous groups inside and outside of Turtle Island (examples of the latter includes Sami, Asante, Okinawan, or Zapotec, to name but a few).

Organizer: Christopher Riedel

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

This panel examines the idea of reform in the Middle Ages as an impulse to recreate an imagined, useful past. Reform has primarily been used, controversially, to describe religious movements and impulses across the medieval centuries, but the idea of a better future inspired by a nostalgic view of a past "golden age" is one found in many aspects of the Middle Ages. Any paper on the idea of medieval reform inspired by a nostalgic view of the past is welcome, as are discussions of the idea of reform and/or nostalgia as a tool for understanding the medieval mindset.

Organizer: Maureen Thum ; mthum@umich.edu

Organizer: Kristin Bezio

Organizer: Edward Boyden

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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.

Organizer: Maureen Thum ; mthum@umich.edu

Organizer: Kristin Bezio

Organizer: Edward Boyden

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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.

Organizer: Maureen Thum ; mthum@umich.edu

Organizer: Kristin Bezio

Organizer: Edward Boyden

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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.

Organizer: Maureen Thum ; mthum@umich.edu

Organizer: Kristin Bezio

Organizer: Edward Boyden

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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.

Organizer: Sarah LaVoy-Brunette ; sfl39@cornell.edu

Organizer: Jordan Chauncy

Delivery Mode: In-Person

In 2020, Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews coined the term “Indigenous turn” when describing the recent medievalist engagement with Indigenous studies. Recent scholarship (e.g., Akbari 2023; Price 2024) demonstrates the potentials for an Indigenous turn that is relational when combined with other critical approaches such as trans theory, gender and sexuality studies, premodern critical race theory, the Global Middle Ages, and others. This panel asks for critical contributions that take up relational approaches to the Indigenous turn that ultimately challenge and depart from white, heteronormative subjectivities by accounting for complexity, nuance, liminality, and/or queerness in their analyses.

Organizer: Tara Smithson ; tsmithson@saintmarys.edu

Organizer: Scott Manning ; scottmanning13@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Recognized by UNESCO in 2018 as part of France’s intangible cultural heritage, the long-running Joan of Arc Festival in Orléans is one of the many sites where Joan of Arc’s memory is codified and communicated. As one of the few historical figures cataloged in Pierre Nora’s three-tomed Lieux de Mémoire alongside Napoleon and Louis XIV, Joan of Arc and the complexities of her historical trajectory can appear both knowable and known. This panel proposed to focus on what still goes unknown despite the abundance of historical documents that give us glimpses into the existence of Joan of Arc.

Organizer: Mildred Budny ; mildredbudny@gmail.com

Organizer: Vajra Regan ; vajra.regan@mail.utoronto.ca

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

This session seeks to explore illustrated Apocalypse commentaries from the Middle Ages through an interdisciplinary lens; therefore, we are open to the methodologies of diverse disciplines including, but not limited to, art history/iconography, manuscript studies, religious studies, and digital humanities. By embracing a wide array of perspectives and analytical frameworks, we hope to foster a holistic understanding of medieval apocalyptic imagery and its multifaceted interpretations.

Organizer: Rachel Sikorski

Organizer: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tales after Tolkien Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Tolkien at Kalamazoo

Seventy years after the release of J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, his work continues to circulate and inspire. However, the franchise built around his work has also expanded recently. Whether looking at the upcoming movies, "The War of the Rohirrim" and "Hunt for Gollum," the imminent second season of the "Rings of Power" show, or soon-to-be-released video games like "Tales of the Shire," we have seen a marked increase of licensed Middle-earth media over the last few years. This panel will discuss the proliferation, new iterations, and additions to the LOTR franchise and Tolkienian works.

Organizer: Melissa Elmes ; MElmes@lindenwood.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): American Society of Irish Medieval Studies (ASIMS)

How are popular folk and mythic monsters transmitted and translated (“romanced” in the literal sense of being turned into literary figures) in/through medieval romance and other genres? How are relationships between humans and monsters, and monsters and monsters, particularly those intimate and physical in nature, depicted in various medieval tale-types and media? How did medieval natural philosophers and other thinkers understand and/or theorize cryptophilia? How did authors like Gerald of Wales and “John Mandeville” write monster relationships? How are medieval monsters romanticized in modern literary retellings and media? This session seeks 20-minute papers addressing these and related concerns and questions.

Organizer: Valerie Schutte

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Royal Studies Network

Portrait medals can act as a tangible token of commemoration of a royal person or event. This panel will interrogate medieval and early modern portrait medals, especially focusing on how they created royal images of power. Successful papers can explore how portrait medals were made, the artists who designed or physically created them, later reproductions, and circulation, as well as how medals, coins, and seals were often derivative of one another. As commemorative medals are still actively created and used for modern monarchies, this panel will also investigate their timeliness, reception, and differences among medals made for kings and queens.

Organizer: Gaby Waxenberger ; gaby.waxenberger@adwgoe.de

Organizer: Kerstin Kazzazi ; kerstin.kazzazi@ku.de

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: RuneS

Runology has a long tradition in Germany. The long-term project RuneS (Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages) ends on 31 December 2025. We will report some research results. Additionally, we would like to share with the community the new research questions resulting from our work. These questions require a wider research frame. Our research questions are: what did early West Germanic cultures write in their emerging epigraphies? Is it culture- or language dependent? Does European cultural heritage include a kind of epigraphical lexicon? Initially, our corpus encompasses the North Italic scripts (ca. BC 700-400) and runic writing (ca. AD 150-650).

Organizer: Antonia DiNardo

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS), Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Critical Game Studies Initiative, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This panel is focused on the form and function of the first-person perspective in medievalist games, broadly construed, and the potentials and pitfalls of games as sites of imaginative participation in the medieval. We invite submissions from any field or methodological framework, as long as they are concerned, in some way, with games which situate the player, either linguistically or visually, as a first-person participant in the action of the game.

Organizer: Leila Al-Shibibi ; la23h@fsu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Food studies have been a subject of significant scholarly attention. While the internal aspects of dietary consumption and its external behaviors have been identified as unique markers of identity, the intersection of food and religion in this context has been, until recently, overlooked. We invite papers from faculty, graduate students, and others that delve into any and all aspects of food as a site of religious identity in the Middle Ages. Paper topics may include commensality, food restrictions, and cooking and eating practices as a means of addressing religious identity and larger issues of social and cultural expression.

Organizer: Kyle Lincoln

Organizer: Maeve Callan

Delivery Mode: 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 Western Mediterranean, 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.

Organizer: Margaret McCurry ; mm9659@nyu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

We invite proposals for our conference panel, “Saints in the Making: Exploring Medieval Autohagiography.” This panel seeks to examine the self-portrayal of sanctity in medieval texts. We welcome papers that explore themes of identity, authorship, and the construction of sainthood in autohagiographical works. Potential topics may include but are not limited to the interplay between historical context and self-narrative, miracles and authentication, and generic conventions and literary form. We welcome contributions from diverse academic disciplines to foster a multifaceted dialogue.

Organizer: Cecily Hughes ; ceh145@case.edu

Organizer: Rebekkah Hart

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Today, faced with our collective impact upon—and individual limitations within—the anthropocene, we are increasingly sensitive to notions of human and inhuman scale. Channeling this contemporary awareness, this session seeks papers exploring medieval perspectives on scale as a means of mediating the world through religious practice. From the miniature to the monumental, consideration of the relative sizes of objects and their users is key to understanding embodied devotional experience. For example, pilgrim badges—petite and portable—can be read as possessing apotropaic powers disproportionate to their stature, while depictions of giants, like St. Christopher, bridge the gap between public piety and private prayer.

Organizer: David Hosaflook ; protestantinstitute@gmail.com

Organizer: Etleva Lala

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

We welcome scholars working with medieval sources to shed more light on the use and transformation of heroes in the Western Balkans. Using medieval sources, we wish to explore to whom Scanderbeg was a hero, where, and why. What was his meaning and significance as a hero? What medieval and early modern networks enhanced Scanderbeg’s status as a hero, and how did those networks function? These should be explored within a medieval context and not projected from present worldviews, in order to lay foundations for how Scanderbeg was used in later time periods.

Organizer: Shaun Hughes ; sfdh@purdue.edu

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: Robin Bower

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

That medieval Iberian cultural production provides a home for the learned patrimony of pagan and patristic antiquity in accordance with a didactic mission that encompasses devotional as well as literary and artistic instruction is a commonplace of the field inherited from the nineteenth-century ‘inventors’ of the middle ages, and is still operative today. This session invites papers examining the popular traditions that supply demons, devils, ghosts, and monsters to a cultural inheritance known for its supremely learned content, to excavate the philosophies couched in the mester de clerecía’s horror shows and to push against the received limits of learnedness itself.

Organizer: Kenneth Tiller ; kjt9t@uvawise.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for International Brut Studies

This session engages scholarship on magic and science, or natural philosophy, including work on astronomy and on the Merlinian prophecies. We invite proposals on topics related to science and magic –broadly conceived– in Lawman and other Brut texts in English, French, and Latin. The session welcomes a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to, prophecy, demonology, astronomy, medicine, alchemy, the bestiary, dream theory, the miraculous, Welsh magical traditions, and other references to the natural and preternatural worlds in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Lawman and other Brut texts from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

Organizer: Andrew Troup ; atroup@csub.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for Medieval Languages and Linguistics

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

Organizer: Kenneth Tiller ; kjt9t@uvawise.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Society for International Brut Studies

This session calls for papers that expand the work of our colleague, mentor, and friend, Elizabeth J. Bryan into the collaborative processes that produced the Brut manuscripts. The session seeks papers focusing on paleographic and codicological matters related to Brut manuscripts, including Layamon and the English prose Brut. We especially welcome proposals that examine collaborative textuality, problems with fixing a “standard” preprint text, the role of extratextual features such as illuminations and historiated letters, concerns with digitalizing medieval manuscripts, and also works that address the theme of collaboration, such as the textual communities that read and respond to the texts.

Organizer: Sarah Waters ; sarah.waters@buckingham.ac.uk

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Shakespeare at Kalamazoo

This session will explore Shakespeare’s medieval monarchs and his use, abuse, or reuse of medieval royals as central characters in his plays. It invites papers which consider Shakespeare’s depictions of royal families, the ways these have slanted people’s impressions of these monarchs and periods, his use of “historical” sources (accurate and inaccurate), his patriotic or unpatriotic framings of these rulers, how his medieval monarchs differ from those dramatized in plays by contemporary playwrights, his use (or ignoring) of medieval (con)texts, or other responses to and explorations of Shakespeare’s medieval royals in the tetralogies, King John, Hamlet, and Macbeth.

Organizer: David Wilson-Okamura ; david@virgil.org

Organizer: Brad Tuggle ; bdtuggle@ua.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Spenser at Kalamazoo

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Sidney Society

We invite paper abstracts on any topic dealing with Philip Sidney or 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. Per 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.

Organizer: Christopher Callahan

Organizer: Julie Human ; julie.human@uky.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This session seeks to showcase recent scholarship in lyric composition, performance, and patronage that focuses on women, religious as well as secular, and on cultural minorities in Christian Europe. It welcomes proposals that cross borders, genders, languages, and cultural traditions.

Organizer: Henry Drummond

Organizer: Melanie Batoff

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session will broach the acoustic world of the Middle Ages. Since Michael Southworth’s coining of the term in ‘The Sonic Environment of Cities’ (1969), the concept of the soundscape has broadened to encompass a variety of disciplines and methodologies. Emergent in the field is a need to understand sound’s impact on people, as both creators and receivers of an acoustic environment. We encourage papers that address sound’s function in a variety of contexts, from the bustling medieval city to the peace of a monastic cloister. A variety of analytical methodologies are also welcome, from text-critical approaches, to digital reconstructions.

Organizer: Thomas Bredehoft ; tabrede@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Richard Rawlinson Center

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Chancery Hill Books and Antiques

Runesticks/runestaves; letters (= OE 'stafas' = 'staves, staffs') as sticks; runes named after trees; stone monuments designed to look like trees (crosses); runes on stones. This panel will feature papers that explore trees and stones as features of the textual landscapes of medieval England and/or the productive tensions or curious ironies that link textual tree-metaphors (such as those listed here) and monumental stonework. Papers on the theme that address Ogham or Norse runes are also of interest.

Organizer: David Clark ; clarkd@sunysuffolk.edu

Organizer: Perry Harrison ; PNHarrison@fhsu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Old Saxon at Kalamazoo

This session seeks abstracts examining any aspect of Old Saxon literature or language. We are especially interested in 1) the relationship between Old Saxon and Old English literature; 2) the rhetorical choices in the texts as reflected in the relationships between them and their sources; 3) the aesthetics of the texts as reflected in how the poet’s metrical and stylistic choices compare with those of contemporary Old Germanic writers; 4) the evidence for cultural exchange represented in the linguistic data.

Organizer: Sarah Blick ; blicks@kenyon.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

In medieval art history, there has long been a hierarchy of media where materials, such as wood, are overlooked or rarely commented upon in mainstream studies. Into this void, Charles Tracy (1938-2024) stepped and published studies on church furniture which could either celebrate or challenge theological ideas, follow changing liturgical practice, and helped mold the day-to-day experience of the worshiper. In his memory, papers on any aspect of medieval woodwork are welcome including church roofs and their carvings, altarpieces, choir stalls, misericords, rood screens, benches, font covers, bishops' thrones and more.

Organizer: Emily Jay

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This panel seeks papers that explore how teachers have introduced students to medieval (and early modern) understandings of the body, gender, and sexuality, in the hopes of fostering dynamic teaching to come. Unorthodox and intersectional teaching methods encouraged!

Organizer: Iona McCleery ; i.mccleery@leeds.ac.uk

Organizer: Axel Müller

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

In 2026 the special thematic strand of the International Medieval Congress at Leeds will be Temporalities. This session explores this strand in anticipation of wide-ranging future debates. The session looks at temporalities from two perspectives: medieval lived time, and modern approaches to 'medieval' times. The first approach focuses on medieval perceptions of the passing of time, metaphors and practices of time, interconnections between past, present and future, memorialization, and future planning. The second approach explores the conceptualization and use of ‘medieval’ time by modern peoples: periodization, stratigraphy, dating methods, learning from and re-enacting the past, and commemoration.

Organizer: Henry Drummond

Organizer: Alison Altstatt

Organizer: Melanie Batoff

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Musicology at Kalamazoo

This session will focus on textual and visual indicators of music, shedding light on how music of the Middle Ages was experienced and envisaged. A key focus in the session will be the perception of such indicators through seeing and reading. A broad selection of textual and visual media are relevant here, and this session welcomes submissions that analyze letters, textual accounts, chronicles, liturgical ordinals, and artistic representations through art and architecture. Given the diversity of sources relevant to the session, we welcome a variety of disciplinary approaches that intersect musicology, art history, architecture, and textual criticism.

Organizer: Heidi Zmick

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Hagiography Society

Premodern audiences frequently encountered hagiography through an embodied process of viewing visual and material representations of the saints. In keeping with recent calls to broaden the defined body of hagiographical works, this session explores material and extra-textual iconography of saints in manuscripts, images, and objects, including materials associated with saints’ cults and relics. Potential topics might include material objects themselves, perceptions and receptions of material representations of saints, comparative examinations of textual and material hagiographies, objects associated with saints' cults, and the remains of saints and associated reliquaries. Proposals from any discipline, geographical area, and century/period are welcome.

Organizer: Benjamin Barootes ; bbarootes@mun.ca

Organizer: Rob Lutton ; rob.lutton@nottingham.ac.uk

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Institute for Medieval Research, University of Nottingham

This session invites scholars to explore the ways in which the nova festa—e.g., the Five Wounds, the Holy Name, the Transfiguration, and the Visitation—manifested in English cultural productions, both public and private, in the later Middle Ages. Papers might examine such topics as: continental influences and exchanges; networks of patronage of the new devotions; the nova festa and the religious orders; the material culture of liturgical elaboration; the interaction between popular observance and official promulgation; and the impact of print. This session invites scholars of history, literature, religion, art history, liturgy, archaeology, gender studies, musicology, and manuscript studies.

Organizer: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

While Pearl and SGGK have been the focus of numerous essays, monographs, translations, editions, and adaptations, the other three poems associated with the Pearl-Poet – Patience, Cleanness, and St. Erkenwald – have traditionally enjoyed less popularity and attention. Responding to growing interest in these often-neglected texts, this session seeks to celebrate these “not-so-minor” – indeed, “almost-major” – poems by inviting proposals exploring them from any number of scholarly perspectives. Papers might focus on a single “almost-major” poem, explore them in conversation with one another, or place them in conversation with other manuscript poems or relevant texts.

Organizer: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Book Society

Subjects for consideration might include censored texts and/or illustrations one finds in both manuscripts and printed books. These might be considered obscene, heretical or otherwise inappropriate by their readers. What might such emendations suggest about social and religious attitudes of the time? About the original writers or scribes or printers and the later reception by audiences and readers of “bad” books? Or scholars might discuss (perhaps surprisingly) uncensored works that we might think of as "bad" (bad prose? naughty content?). In cases where potentially inflammatory material is untouched, how did it escape the censors?

Organizer: Brian Gastle ; bgastle@wcu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: John Gower Society

Bringing the works of John Gower into conversation with “modern” expectations of busy-ness, this panel seeks papers that offer fresh insights on how Gower’s poetry both performs and reflects busy-ness: work, labor, and the imperative to stay busy. We hope potential submitters conceive of busy-ness broadly in senses including but not limited to economic, spiritual, personal, political, and societal, and that such explorations help us understand both Gower’s work and what his work may have to say to a modern world driven corporate and capitalistic imperatives for productivity and profit.

Organizer: Allison McCormack ; allie.mccormack@utah.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Society of Medievalist Librarians

Cultural heritage professionals at libraries, museums, and other institutions play an active role in ensuring that medieval documents are accessible for researchers and other patrons, but many of these processes remain obscured. People working with medieval manuscripts, incunabula, fragments, and similar items at cultural heritage institutions are invited to shed a light on their behind-the-scenes work. The organizers solicit papers exploring ethical acquisition, metadata issues, conservation concerns, and other topics for this multidisciplinary panel. Case studies highlighting collaborative efforts to research and care for documents are especially encouraged.

Organizer: Burton Westermeier

Organizer: Jessica Boon

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS)

We seek papers that will answer one or more of the following questions: What was the nature of reform (or resistance) in medieval Iberia? How did the nature of reform change over time? How did earlier reforms influence later ones? How were reform initiatives on the part of the clergy promoted or confounded by secular figures including monarchs, nobles, and/or townspeople? How was Catholic reform influenced by individual, church, or state interactions with other religious traditions on the peninsula? What new methodologies or resources have emerged that shed light on reform, such as digital humanities, cultural theories, or interdisciplinary work?

Organizer: Kyle Lincoln

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages

This session seeks papers about the institutional church in medieval Iberia, including Portugal and al-Andalus. Papers from early career scholars are especially welcome, as are those new to the field.

Organizer: Sarah Ifft Decker

Organizer: Kyle Lincoln

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: 14th Century Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Episcopus: Society for the Study of Bishops and Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages

The fourteenth century was a pivotal moment in the history of the medieval Church. There is a long and rich tradition of scholarship on this topic, which has been further invigorated by the recent publication of work on the Church during the Black Death pandemic. This session seeks to draw together a wide array of papers on topics related to the history and culture of the Church during the fourteenth century. Submissions are welcome on topics including ecclesiastical and other religious responses to the Black Death, the Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism, and Church responses to heresy.

Organizer: Angus Warren ; angus.warren@yale.edu

Organizer: Kamila Kaminska-Palarczyk ; kamila.kaminska-palarczyk@yale.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.

The specter of classical Rome left its mark on virtually all literature of medieval England. Some authors spurned the pagan Muses, even as they wrote in elegant, classicizing style. Others imagined themselves as successors to Vergil and Ovid, composing epics littered with allusions. Attention to this self-conscious canonicity unveils deeper political and artistic stakes in the turn towards vernacularity. This panel foregrounds the medium of language as an entry-point into exploration of literary identities. How could English serve as a marker of allegiance to, or rebellion against, the classics? Topics addressed may include literary borrowing, imitation, inheritance, translation, and transmission.

Organizer: Bert Beynen ; kesaphela@aol.com

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Rare Book Dept., The Free Library of Philadelphia

Papers are invited on any Armenian, Georgian or Caucasian Medieval subject in the Humanities or Social Sciences for the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies.

Organizer: Richard Fahey ; rfahey@nd.edu

Organizer: Chris Vinsonhaler

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Studies Research Blog, Univ. of Notre Dame

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe (JEMNE)

This session seeks to continue this ongoing analysis, particularly in regard to the interplay of irony, ambiguity, equivocation and contradiction that recurs throughout the poem. In particular, this session seeks analysis that locates Beowulf's possible relationship to the riddling genre of enigmata. Thus, this session welcomes any submission that explores the potential for irony, ambiguity or enigmatic design as it pertains to word use, imagery, or tableau. This session also invites a close analysis of various conundrums, juxtapositions, contradictions, and subversions that complicate the presentation of monstrosity and heroic identity in the poem.

Organizer: Julie Human ; julie.human@uky.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), North American Branch

Lavish displays of magnificence, whether adorning persons or the spaces that they inhabited, were an undeniable feature of aristocratic courts. Poets celebrated physical attributes of men and women; painters captured their subjects in flattering light; architects, artists, and landscape designers furnished suitably noble settings for courtly activities. Clothing, jewelry, objects and furnishings served to enhance the importance of their possessors by surrounding them with material beauty. The added dimensions of music and dance accompanied and elevated these visual statements. This interdisciplinary panel will explore the ways in which beauty was the aesthetic handmaiden of political power and rank.

Organizer: Andrew Rabin

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: The Wallace Johnson First Book Mentorship Program in Early Medieval Law

Over the past four years, the Wallace Johnson First Book Program in Early Medieval Law has grown into one of the premiere mentorship programs for early career scholars in legal history and related fields. Not only has the fellowship provided a springboard for those seeking to publish their first books, but it has also aided fellows in winning grants, gaining professional connections, and landing their first tenure-track jobs. The purpose of this session is to showcase the program and celebrate the accomplishments of its participants by hosting a panel of papers featuring research by past and present fellows.

Organizer: Tory Schendel-Vyvoda

Organizer: Mickey Sweeney ; msweeney@dom.edu

Organizer: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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

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

A glance at the Chronicle will convince any sceptic that AI & the Digital Humanities are necessary for medievalists to secure the rare unicorn of a job & to be best prepared for the classroom. Students & businesses incorporate AI into their work practices and yet many faculty have not intentionally engaged with what they make possible. We need to educate students on how to work with AI and be ethical in their use of it. This round table seeks faculty/graduate students who incorporate AI & DH into their classroom practices to share the best of what they do.

Organizer: Michelle Karnes

Organizer: Misty Schieberle

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Since Geraldine Heng began discussion of the global Middle Ages twenty years ago, there has been a steady stream of scholarship about its content and methods. However, Europeanists have dominated the discussion, and so this panel invites perspectives specifically from non-Europeanists. Is the Global Middle Ages a useful rubric? What is its promise and what are its pitfalls? Is it slanted toward Europe and those who study it? What are the best methods for comparative scholarship on premodern texts?

Organizer: Francisco de Paula de Mendonça ; kirijy@gmail.com

Organizer: Augusto Rocha ; Augusto.Rocha@colorado.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Univ. Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM)

This will be a singular table for scholars who dialogue with an age of changes, situated in the period between 1400-1600. The importance of this session is to evaluate the connections and impacts between the Late Medieval and the Early Modern Period through the uses of cultural representation and ideas. This session offers a place for deep discussions around concepts as identity and representation, exploring different arguments and images. We invite papers discussing how politics, religion, gender, magic, arts and other topics reflected upon how cultural practices were shaped in favor of ideas and against communities and individuals.

Organizer: Joseph Johnson ; jj892@georgetown.edu

Organizer: Karen Casebier

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Marie de France Society

Across the range of her literary output, Marie de France interrogates the limits of human identity. From the metamorphosing beings of the Lais to the ambiguously human/non-human animals of the Fables, Marie's corpus invites reflection into what life looks like at the boundary of humanity – as well as what lies beyond. The International Marie de France Society welcomes proposals for papers addressing these questions in any of the works traditionally attributed to Marie de France (the Lais, the Fables, the Espurgatoire seint Patriz, and/or La Vie Seinte Audree).

Organizer: Michelle Karnes

Organizer: Misty Schieberle

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Studies in the Age of Chaucer

When Euan Rogers and Sebastian Sobecki revealed previously unknown documents from the National Archives about Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne in the fall of 2022, the discovery shed light on some questions while raising new ones. An issue of special contention is the topic of this panel: what is the meaning of "raptus" in late-medieval England? We invite proposals for papers that consider literary, documentary, legal, and/or interdisciplinary perspectives as we continue to grapple with the new documents and their implications for Chaucer, women, laboring servants, legal history, and more.

Organizer: Tory Schendel-Vyvoda

Organizer: Amity Reading

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Medieval literature overflows with representations of “the end”—apocalypses, visions of the afterlife, descriptions of wars and natural disasters. But today we also face changes in the field of medieval studies itself: waning enrollments, erasure from curricular requirements, and loss of faculty in programs world-wide. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of medieval studies? This session invites papers from all disciplines that address any aspect of “the end” in medieval art and culture or in medieval studies more broadly. Papers might consider eschatological theology, ecological or environmental ends, millenarianism, social change, medievalism, or the future of academia.

Organizer: Harvey Brown ; hbrown2@uwo.ca

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

The Medieval Tradition of Natural sessions invite faculty scholars and graduate students to present research on natural law in political thought, or in ethics and moral philosophy. These special sessions have a long history at the Congress, and we invite participants to celebrate the 60th Annual Congress in 2025.

Organizer: Barbara Prescott ; bprescott125@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Society of Dorothy L. Sayers Studies

Call for Papers to All Medieval Digital Detectives! Join us as participant in our paper session at the 60th ICMS conference in 2025 to share ways that you, as a modern independent scholar, have found to explore online digitized medieval manuscripts housed in traditional research libraries that are now being made available through open-access online gateways. We encourage papers dealing with successful strategies to negotiate access to important collections housed in strong institutions such as the Bodleian libraries and the Biblioteca Vaticana. We also encourage papers on collaboration techniques and peer networks. This is an online only session.

Organizer: Ernst Hintz ; ehintz@truman.edu

Organizer: Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand ; hellenbranda@appstate.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Attuned to the impermanence of life and the certainty of death, storytellers adapted well-worn, ageless motifs to suit changing literary tastes and societal concerns. This session examines the process of adapting narratives in various genres that speak of death, especially, in its anthropomorphic image. Death plays many roles such as a comforter and consoler, a liberator to the sick and suffering, a refuge for the reviled and outcast, and an agent of perdition or salvation. We welcome abstracts that aim to illuminate why a given work was deemed worthy of adaptation and how it was adapted.

Organizer: Tory Schendel-Vyvoda

Organizer: Rosanne Gasse ; gasse@brandonu.ca

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

In the fifteenth-century encyclopedia Sidrak and Bokkus, a translation into English from the popular thirteenth-century French Livre de la fontaine de toutes sciences, questions are asked as to why God created stinging, biting animals and why Noah allowed on board the ark poisonous snakes and scorpions. Clearly then, medieval people thought about the natural world and how it related to them in terms that were not always positive or economic. This session centers on how global medieval people perceived the natural world. Papers can vary, and include animal studies, art/architecture, comparative source studies, ecocriticism, environmental studies, history, literature, and philosophy.

Organizer: Samuel Dubbelman ; Samuel.dubbelman@lts.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Cusanus Society

The analytic philosopher Jc Beal argues that the incarnation and the trinity entail true contradictions. When predicates are attributed to the two natures of Christ, contradictory statements emerge. The incarnation appears contradictory because the reality is contradictory. Consequently, the principle of noncontradiction should not unilaterally govern all theology. In light of recent philosophical and theological explorations of true contradictions, historians are prompted to reconsider the role of contradictions in the past pursuit of knowledge. This panel invites papers that delve into the potential history of contradictory truth in medieval theology, philosophy, and logic.

Organizer: Shawn Cooper

Organizer: Joseph Sullivan

Organizer: Julie Human ; julie.human@uky.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

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

Love and power have always offered both delight and danger to those who pursue them, especially when they are intertwined. Perhaps at no other time have these primal drives collided so broadly and enduringly as in the high mediæval court, with its culture of chivalry and its ideal of amour courtois, expressed in word and deed. To better understand these concepts is to better understand the mediæval world more generally.Panelists should prepare a paper of 10-15 minutes in length, and connect their research to texts related to the mediæval court and its associated settings, broadly understood.

Organizer: Deanna Forsman

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe (JEMNE)

This session seeks contributions that propose novel methodologies or demonstrate responsible implementations of Generative AI (GAI) in research projects related to medieval studies. Methodologies may include text-based or non-text-based use of GAI and proposals can span a wide range of scholarly activities, from traditional academic works that challenge our understanding of the past to digital humanities projects to public-facing scholarship. All methods and implementations should address both the ethical and practical dimensions of using GAI for a wide range of scholars with different levels of access to (and comfort with) GAI.

Organizer: Gale Sigal ; sigal@wfu.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Bonnie Wheeler, in "The Seductions of Chivalry," made the case that including "chivalry" or "King Arthur" in a course title attracts students with a rich diversity of interests. How advantageous is this variety for teaching an Arthurian Legends course? How much foundational knowledge do you offer or expect your students to know? How important is it to undergird your approach with basic historical or literary contexts? Which theoretical approaches work best? Do you remains squarely in the Middle Ages or do you draw on medievalism as well? Do you bring an interdisciplinary approach to the material?

Organizer: Hugh Feiss ; hughf@idahomonks.org

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Benedictine Academy

Hospitality is a key value in the Rule of Benedict, in Benedictine life throughout the Middle Ages and today. This session welcomes presentations on the sources of the Rule of Benedict's prescriptions on the treatment of guests, the theology that informs them, and how those prescriptions were or were not observed during the subsequent 1000 years. Studies of cartularies, commentaries on the Rule, constitutions, visitation reports, sermons and exhortations to monks and nuns, and architectural plans can provide insight into the meaning and practice of monastic hospitality then and now.

Organizer: Barbara Prescott ; bprescott125@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Society of Dorothy L. Sayers Studies

We are accepting all proposals for papers on any aspect of study regarding the Tristan legend in written form. We are interested particularly in papers focusing on the transition from oral storytelling to written text of this legend. Independent research is highly encouraged. This session is online only.

Organizer: Frans van Liere ; fvliere@calvin.edu

Organizer: Jeanette Patterson

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Vernacular text cultures of the European Middle Ages have always granted the Bible a central place and recent work in the study of vernacular Bibles has opened new avenues for understanding them in their cultural contexts. From translations of Psalters to verse adaptations and translations drawing upon the "Historia scolastica," the Bible was a source and the object of continuous adaptations. This panel explores how authors, compilers, and translators made the Bible accessible and impactful beyond Latinate audiences, what the Bible meant and did for those vernacular audiences, and how these rewritings made the Bible speak to their time.

Organizer: Barbara Prescott ; bprescott125@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: American Society of Dorothy L. Sayers Studies

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. Independent research is highly encouraged. This is an online session only.

Organizer: Charles Samuelson

Organizer: Carissa Harris

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Both in popular and academic writing, the history of sexual consent is often (mis-)understood as a story of linear progress. These narratives consequently ignore the sophisticated ways that medieval texts both reflect on and avoid the notion of sexual consent. This panel partakes in recent efforts to historicize consent. It also asks what historicizing it means for theorizing the concept: How can medieval literature help us tackle in new ways the question at the heart of modern consent theory: that of the relationship of the concept of sexual consent to feminist politics and gender equity?

Organizer: Robert Barry ; rbarry@providence.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Thomas Aquinas Society

This session will be devoted to medieval philosophical and theological thought, especially that of Aquinas, his sources, or contemporary applications of his thought. All papers will be delivered face-to-face; online format is unavailable.

Organizer: Steven Jensen

Delivery Mode: 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.

Organizer: Mairin MacCarron ; mairin.maccarron@ucc.ie

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: GENCHRON Research Project

This session will present on the findings of the Irish Research Council Consolidator Laureate research project 'Time for Women? Gender, Chronology and Historiography before AD 900' (GENCHRON) led by Dr Máirín MacCarron. The project integrates gender into a re-evaluation of the concept of time in late antique and early medieval sources through, firstly, combining traditional textual analysis with digital humanities approaches and conceptual frameworks to advance our understanding of gender representation on a large-scale in the early medieval period, and, secondly, introducing a gender paradigm into analyses of medieval chronology.

Organizer: Yaniv Fox

Organizer: Michaela Selway

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This session examines the use of narrative time in Merovingian historiography. The three papers examine how sixth- and seventh-century authors manipulated temporal elements to convey ideas about the past, present, and future. The presenters investigate themes of narrative time in Merovingian texts, such as the use of temporal ambiguity and biblical models, adaptation of earlier historical works, and appropriation of epistolary text, revealing the sophisticated ways in which Merovingian authors reoriented their sources to comment on an evolving reality. By examining diverse textual strategies, the session offers new perspectives on early medieval conceptions of time in narrative contexts.

Organizer: Carolyn Scott ; cscott@mail.ncku.edu.tw

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

While times of crisis can cause a temporary cessation of cultural activity in the face of threats (apparent or real) to existence, times of crisis can also provide an impetus for creative responses. Responses can include looking to historical, social, cultural, religious, and political elements for answers, as well as creating new paradigms. This session will examine the variety of ways medieval individuals and communities respond to the unexpected or the disastrous. History, literature, law, cultural studies, visual arts, music, philosophy, and theology, as well as other perspectives, are all welcome approaches to this topic.

Organizer: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu

Organizer: Christopher Vaccaro ; cvaccaro@uvm.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

This session invites submissions on the complex and evolving relationship between the medievalisms of J.R.R. Tolkien and feminist theory. We welcome papers that explore Tolkien's representations of gender, race, sexuality, and power. Possible topics include: medieval representations of women in Tolkien's legendarium, masculinity and femininity in Middle-earth, gender and power dynamics in Tolkien's work, feminist critiques of Tolkien, re-imagining Tolkien through a feminist lens. We are particularly interested in papers that: offer original and insightful readings of Tolkien's medievalisms, engage with recent scholarship on Tolkien and gender, and explore the intersection of Tolkien studies with other critical approaches.

Organizer: Yvette Kisor ; ykisor@ramapo.edu

Organizer: Christopher Vaccaro ; cvaccaro@uvm.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Tolkien at Kalamazoo

At Leeds University, professors J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon together founded The Viking Club in the early-mid 1920s. This session invites papers on Old Icelandic, Old Norse, the sagas and eddas and their place in what Tolkien called his "Cauldron of Story." All methods are welcome from source criticism to theoretical perspectives examining class, gender, race, and sexuality.

Organizer: Shawn Cooper

Organizer: Julie Human ; julie.human@uky.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

To be aware of current events is to be aware of the violence of the modern world, a theme present in contemporary poetry and lyric. Medieval authors were similarly confronted by violence both in stories and experience. Addressing both the relationship between violence in verse, and the use of verse to depict and subvert violence, can help us to understand our connection to the past, and critique our own approaches to writing about and around violence. Panelists should prepare a paper of 10-15 minutes in length, and connect their research to texts within the sphere of courtly literature, broadly understood.

Organizer: Jenna Soleo-Shanks ; jsoleosh@d.umn.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

More than 25 years ago, Robert LA Clark and Claire Sponsler argued in "Queer Play: the Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama" that "transgender and transstatus representations cannot be reduced to one simple meaning but rather perform a variety of...cultural work." We seek contributions to explore, expand and complicate the idea of transgender identities, trans bodies, transgressive practices, or other kinds of transformations or translations in medieval drama and performance. In 2025, how do we understand the shapeshifting nature of "trans"? What are the emerging questions and where do they lead us?

Organizer: Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Machaut Society

Poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut's innovations in form and genre revolutionized musical and literary landscapes. Known for his experiments with musical notation, his concern for how his works would be circulated, and his influence on subsequent poets, Machaut's oeuvre embodies the qualities of translation, transmission, and transformation. The International Machaut Society invites proposals that address these qualities in the works of Machaut or his contemporaries, such as: manuscript transmission, Machaut's role in transmitting the ars nova notation style , the influence of other authors/composers on Machaut's works or vice versa, discussions of intermediality, the challenges of translating Machaut.

Organizer: Cynthia Rostankowski ; cynthia.rostankowski@sjsu.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

The 2020s mark the hundredth anniversaries of the publications of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (1920-1922) and her Master of Hestviken/Olav Audunssøn tetralogy (1925-1927), as well as the anniversary of her Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. Over time, Undset’s medievalist writings inspired extremes of enthusiasm as well as varieties of cultural critique, but the early twenty-first century marked the beginning of a re-examination of her characters' relationships and values as a kind of realist medievalism. This session invites insightful contemporary, perhaps also revisionist, perspectives on Sigrid Undset's medievalist novels.

Organizer: Mary Flannery

Organizer: Annette Kern-Stähler

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Whether one is speaking of grand passions like anger, fear, or shame, or of what Sianne Ngai has described as "minor and generally unprestigious feelings" like envy, anxiety, or disgust, negative affect has received increasing scholarly attention over the past two decades. The proposed session on "Ugly Feelings in Medieval English Literature" invites scholars to use studies such as Ngai’s 2005 book Ugly Feelings as a starting point for re-examining negative affect in Old and Middle English texts, with a view to gaining a better understanding of its aesthetics and expression during the medieval period.

Organizer: Mary Valante

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This session will be dedicated to "Viking" (following Judith Jesch's inclusive definition) towns and town-dwellers. We seek scholars who work across disciplines, especially in archaeology and history, to discuss the everyday lives of everyday people in these towns. This could include but is not limited to, studies such as economic, gender, social, or sensory history.

Organizer: Chase Padusniak ; chasejp@princeton.edu

Organizer: Stephen Surh ; ss138@wellesley.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Comparative social historical work on the high and late medieval urban explosion in the Low Countries and Italy exists but remains limited. This session invites scholars to explore an even less frequently discussed aspect of this growth: how the flowering of mysticism, vernacular theology, and spiritual writing participates in the socio-political discourses of these cities and their surroundings.

Organizer: Anne-Helene Miller

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville

Crusading literature and images are more important than ever in our global era of trans-sectarian ethnic interaction and conflict. This panel will cover medieval and early modern origins and rhetorical legacies of the crusades; such legacies explore key intersections between participants that fostered narratives and images of violence and alienation that speak to us today. The panel will focus in particular on interdisciplinary approaches to the topic that combine study of history, art history, literature and religious studies. It will establish an important dialogue between the medieval and early modern periods on the topic that is unique to the field.

Organizer: Ioanna Christoforaki

Organizer: Brandie Ratliff ; mjcbac@hchc.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Taking as a starting point the primarily visual quality of Byzantine images, this session aims is to explore their non-visual impact in experiencing the divine. It will seek illustrative examples of a multi-sensory nature to place frescoes, icons, relics and inscriptions in the center of a synesthetic religious experience and evaluate the multi-sensory effect of religious artefacts across a range of non-visual experiences. Participants are expected to address visual perception in a holistic way and reveal the intersection of the bodily and spiritual, the physical and intellectual, and ultimately the human and divine aspect of Byzantine religiosity.

Organizer: Julie Singer

Organizer: Jason Jacobs

Delivery Mode: In-Person

What happens when medieval texts give voice to race-, religion-, ethnicity-, disability-, or class-based perspectives other than the dominant ones? How can readings of lesser-known works contribute to theorizations of identity, and challenge received ideas about representations of ‘minority’ subjects in the 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 aginst-the-grain perspectives on ‘others’ will advance cutting-edge critical work on the full range of medieval identities, selves, or subjectivities.

Organizer: Isabel Howard ; ihoward@unc.edu

Organizer: Alexander Brock ; abrock@princeton.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS), Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

This panel will explore the productive dialogue between Scholastic theories of appetite and will, and medieval literature and art. In particular, it will interrogate how the legacy of Aristotle’s orexis (appetitus) allows writers and artists to problematize conceptual divides between the animal and the human. How might theories of appetite, a faculty belonging to animals and humans, indicate the presence of the animal in the human and vice versa? Topics could range from Will’s feast with allegorical psychological faculties in Piers Plowman, to Marie de France’s Bisclavret and Dante’s sinners, to images of Mary of Egypt covered in hair.

Organizer: Macie Sweet ; msweet2@nd.edu

Organizer: Anne Crafton ; acrafto2@nd.edu

Organizer: Kristina Kummerer ; kkummere@nd.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

It has often been assumed that the idea of a “woman” remained largely static throughout the Middle Ages. Yet, even within the medieval patriarchal hegemony, ideas around womanhood and women’s role in society changed dramatically – and these changes garnered strong responses. This panel intends to highlight responses to changing perceptions of womanhood and gender in the medieval world. How do the lived experiences of medieval women and the reactions of their contemporaries inform our understanding of women’s agency, gendered societal roles, and the definition of womanhood in the Middle Ages?

Organizer: Johanna Kramer

Organizer: Sarah Anderson

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Proverb Society (EPS)

Proverbs instruct in part by creating a space in a discourse for analysis and reflection, both inside and outside of the text. Though a proverb is authorized when declared by a figure like Alfred or Solomon, its wisdom may also be attributed to shared commonsense, more the property of populus, than of an auctor standing apart. This panel welcomes papers that probe how the rhetorical practices of proverb citation make a discursive space for a word-cloud of problems from class, sovereignty, and agency, to the very power to speak in medieval texts. How is “proverbiality” perceived? How performed and translated?

Organizer: Johanna Kramer

Organizer: Sarah Anderson

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Early Proverb Society (EPS)

When Gandalf declares, "He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom," we spot the markers Tolkien uses to point at a proverb-like saying. Tolkien's worldbuilding uses many forms from the wisdom tradition. Post-Tolkien, speculative fiction has developed new readings of medieval sources as it builds spaces no longer based solely on fantasies of a white Eurocentric past and traditional gendered relationships. As non-linear links restructure a medieval past, how do forms of wisdoms morph in the queer alterity of fantasy genres? How are the essential ties between wisdom and fantasy renegotiated?

Organizer: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

This session will examine the many relationships between women and games, including how women interact with games, especially those with medieval content or flavor. This can include analyses of how women are represented in games, especially those with medieval or historical themes, as well as studies of what games women choose to play, create, or teach, or discussions of how women prefer to interact with games (e.g., online, board game, rpg, etc.). We welcome various methodological approaches including, but not limited to, game theory, feminist criticism, gender theory, critical theory, and cultural studies.

Organizer: Jaclyn Reed

Organizer: Mildred Budny ; mildredbudny@gmail.com

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

This session will examine women’s relationships with and representations in manuscripts and other evidence, especially those that they personally authored or created. Authorship has sometimes been limited in scope to literary or narrative texts, which can leave out the types of manuscripts that women were more likely to produce such as commonplace books or other collections of receipts, medical treatments, or a variety of other household notations. We welcome methodological approaches that consider manuscripts or other evidence authored by women including, but not limited to, philology, manuscript studies, material culture, and history of the book.

Organizer: Elizabeth Harper ; ejh5sp@virginia.edu

Organizer: Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Machaut Society

This session concentrates the role(s) of women within the historical, textual, musical, and material environments of Guillaume de Machaut’s corpus. We welcome contributions that explore any aspect of these roles, including but not limited to Machaut’s women patrons (both real and fictional); gendered approaches to power, desire, and agency within the poetic process; corporality and sexuality; the perception and expression of gender through voice and song; and the materialization of these issues on the manuscript page.

Organizer: Martha Driver ; mdriver@pace.edu

Delivery Mode: 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 those written for, by, 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.

Organizer: Karen Carr

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

Too often, ancient and medieval historians understand women and girls to have been involved mainly in cooking, care work, cleaning, or simply reproductive work. Does your work show that women also did productive work, perhaps processing food, stringing beads, weaving baskets and mats, or—especially—spinning and weaving? This session seeks to bring together different ways of approaching this question, to clarify the role women played in the production of consumer goods. Slavery is, of course, a major factor in this discussion; geographical distinctions highlighting differences in women's productive work between, for example, Cairo, Antioch, Sicily, and London are also welcome.

Organizer: Jason Crow ; Jason.crow@monash.edu

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

In Gilbert of Hoyland’s (1110-1172) thirtieth sermon on the Song, the twelfth-century Cistercian advises his reader that they should pay close attention to the study, industry, and work of women, if they are to learn about the role of the beautiful in spiritual experience. Gilbert’s assessment of opera mulibria is atypical and unexpected in the text of a twelfth-century monastic. This panel seeks papers filling the lacuna in Cistercian and monastic scholarship on how the material culture of women—broadly defined as operative in politics, economics, and culture—influenced monastic life in the in the Middle Ages.

Organizer: Amy Livingstone

Organizer: Laura Gathagan ; laura.gathagan@cortland.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval People

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Haskins Society

With the recent ‘material turn’ in Medieval Studies, scholars have come to realize what useful tools analysis of space and objects can be for recovering the medieval past. This approach has been particularly fruitful for the study of medieval women, who may go undocumented in texts and who themselves were not always authors of texts. This session aims to highlight how the use of objects and space can reveal new insights into the lives of medieval women. The use of digital humanities in investigating women, objects and space would be particularly welcome.

Organizer: Kimberly Anderson ; andersonkt@vmi.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This panel welcomes scholarship that examines the ways lay-people’s interactions with reading and visual materials encouraged the act of world-building. How were medieval lay-people, with more limited literacies and less access to textual and visual materials, building imaginary worlds? Among many possibilities, potential topics include the ways a lay reader might align hagiographic narratives with sermons they’ve heard, how maps might limit of expand a reader or writer’s interfaces with textual materials, or how encounters with various narratives of a literary universe (e.g. Arthurian) might impact a reader’s experience of those texts. Geographical broadness is welcome.

Organizer: Daniel Berardino ; daniel_berardino@berkeley.edu

Organizer: Massimiliano Dalmasso ; md9214@princeton.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

After the Fall of Constantinople to the forces of the Fourth Crusade, the two successor states of Anatolia led the Byzantine revival that would have lead to the recapture of Constantinople in 1261 and the longest-surviving Byzantine state. In addition to these political achievements, the Byzantine re-conquerors of Constantinople came to see themselves as Hellenes and not just Christian Romans. This panel will bring together graduate students and early-career scholars working on the Byzantine successor states of Nicaea and Trebizond to bring attention to how Nicaean and Trapezuntine Byzantines evolved, persisted and grew stronger in a quickly changing world.

Organizer: Ella Johnson

Organizer: Anna Harrison ; annaharrison@lmu.edu

Organizer: Tyler Sergent ; sergentf@berea.edu

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Cistercian and Monastic Studies

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Hagiography Society, Magistra: A Journal of Women's Spirituality in History

This panel considers the writing practices that occurred in the thirteenth-century Cistercian convent of Helfta. Producing the largest body of women’s writing in the period (over 1000 pages of manuscripts), the nuns collaboratively wrote the Book of Special Grace, attributed to Mechthild of Hackeborn, and the Herald of Divine Love and Spiritual Exercises, attributed to Gertrude the Great. The session welcomes papers attending to themes relating to the work of writing in these texts—e.g., writing as transformative, sacramental, relic-making, imitatio Christi, performance, etc.

Organizer: Matthew Davis ; matthew@matthewedavis.net

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

In celebration of the staging of the full cycle of the York Corpus Christi plays in June 2025, the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society invites papers on the topic of “York Plays Now!” The panel will speak to issues staging the York Plays, with a particular interest in the practicalities of creating a lived experience from incomplete medieval texts. Topics might include (but are not limited to): new archival evidence for staging; dance, music, or other non-verbal aspects of the plays; keeping a mobile performance organized between stations; or bridging the gap between medieval and modern through performance.

Organizer: Kristin Burr

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Gawain, Galahad, and... Gliglois? Clearly, not all Arthurian heroes have made it to legendary status; but these lesser known protagonists enrich and expand the Round Table, filling in the spaces between their more famous peers. A number of these characters have entire romances devoted to their stories, and this panel aims to bring these works to light, encouraging their recovery or even discovery by a wider audience of scholars and inviting further study of this unjustly neglected corpus. We welcome paper proposals using any scholarly approach to literary analysis on lesser-studied medieval romances in all languages.

Organizer: 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)

In 2024, the Middle English Texts Series (METS) will launch its new digital edition, marking a new era for this seminal and field-changing publishing series. In this workshop, METS staff will demonstrate the features of the new digital edition and how they can be utilized effectively in the classroom and for research. Attendees will be encouraged to bring laptops so that they can follow along and explore the website. The workshop will include an overview of the new reader interface, how to access and utilize TEI markup, the project's GitHub repositories, how to utilize external annotation tools, and more.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Gina Hurley

Organizer: Katherine Hindley

Organizer: Agnieszka Rec

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Bibliographical Society of America

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

How can instructors improve their object-based teaching or learn to teach with objects for the first time? This 90-minute workshop will take participants from an experiential exercise to an examination of broader course goals, touching on key pedagogical theories including Kolb’s experiential learning cycle and inquiry-led learning. Prioritizing intellectual exchange and participant interaction, this session will convene a community of practice, seizing on the rare opportunity to bring multiple medievalists from multiple institutions together to talk about their teaching. Through this workshop, instructors will deepen their understanding of how close engagement with objects can help students develop key disciplinary skills.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Debra Lacoste

Organizer: Alison Altstatt

Organizer: Lucia Denk

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Musicology at Kalamazoo

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Vicky McAlister ; vmcalister@towson.edu

Organizer: Margaret Smith

Organizer: Deanna Forsman

Delivery Mode: Hybrid

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

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Committee, Medieval Academy of America

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Ethan MacDonald

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: The American Heraldry Society

Heraldry has a vibrant history with origins in the Middle Ages. It is found in both military and civil contexts, is encountered in manuscripts, and impacted a wide array of material goods. In short, heraldry was one of the widest reaching art forms in the period. Often heraldic resources are inaccessible via the standard channels of academia, as they have often been kept in either government archives or genealogical collections. This workshop will teach researchers the basics of the subject, as well as how to get connected with resources they may need to decipher heraldry in their studies.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Lindsay Cook ; lsc5353@psu.edu

Organizer: Rebecca Smith ; rasmith7@waketech.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

The 2019 Notre-Dame fire laid bare vast quantities of a building material ubiquitous throughout the medieval world, yet often concealed from view or hidden in plain sight: wood. In this workshop, participants will learn about historic tools and carpentry techniques and work together to assemble and analyze a 1:10 scale model of the medieval roof trusses that stood above the Notre-Dame choir for nearly 800 years. Handcrafted at trade schools, colleges, and universities across the United States since 2021, the white oak model is an outcome of the educational non-profit Handshouse Studio’s ongoing Notre-Dame Project.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Sarah Sprouse ; ssprouse@wtamu.edu

Organizer: Glenn Kumhera ; gjk19@psu.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Game Cultures Society

This session will explore the role(s) that games play in the classroom, including both historical games from the Middle Ages, such as Qeek and Nine Men’s Morris, and present-day games with medieval subject matter (medievalism), including Pax Dei, Carcassonne, etc. Multidisciplinary approaches to investigating the relationships among play, game, education, and the medieval are welcome.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Jennifer Fast ; jennifer.fast@newman.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

This session continues a tradition established by the late Alan Gaylord - reading Chaucer aloud at Kalamazoo. Reading Chaucer aloud can aid readers’ understanding of, and insight on, the poet's work. Reading in small groups has proven to be extremely valuable in developing camaraderie and positive feedback. This workshop will engage one or more small groups (depending on attendance) working in a single location for a 90-minute period.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Nina Rowe

Organizer: Eliza Garrison

Organizer: Ben Tilghman ; btilghman2@washcoll.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art

In this brainstorming session, three Workshop Leaders each will give a short (4-5 minute) presentation on a critical text from outside the field of art history and an object or site, making the case for how these materials can steer and energize the field of medieval art history going forward. Following the presentations, Workshop Leaders will orchestrate break-out small group discussions on themes of their presentations. We are especially interested in presentations that address theoretical texts from the discourses of anti-racist practice, postcolonialism, environmental studies, queer theory, and other fields that can steer ethically-informed scholarship.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Alison Purnell

Delivery Mode: Virtual

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

Since the late 1970s, disability scholars have worked under a framework known as the "social model" to discuss disability beyond the medical. Scholars of modern disability have begun questioning and expanding this framework into other models to account for a broader experience of disability. Medievalist scholars can likewise expand the scope of their research by considering these new perspectives. This workshop offers an opportunity for medievalists to get "up to date" on the question of models and to explore an alternate framework to the extant models: an interrogatory tool-kit approach to disability.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Maeve Doyle ; doylemae@easternct.edu

Organizer: Christopher Richards ; crichard@colby.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

What might looking through a queer lens reveal or shift in your research? In your teaching? Workshop facilitators lead small discussion groups in close-looking sessions, in order to generate new queer readings of medieval material culture from many methodological and disciplinary perspectives. Queer(ing) Medieval Art panelists and authors will work in pairs to lead breakout discussions on images they have selected. Our aim is to shift norms, make canonical objects strange, and bring marginalized objects into the conversation, continuing the movement of queer genders and sexualities into the discourse and pedagogy of medieval art history.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Tamara Caudill

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Expert readers will present their notes on pronunciation, model the pronunciation using a period-appropriate text of their choosing, and then guide participants on their own readings. This is an interactive workshop.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Courtney Wells

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Société Guilhem IX

For this workshop, we are seeking leaders in the field to explain, demonstrate, and guide participants in the reading of a variety of texts selected according to their expertise and in order to demonstrate various unique aspects of the language and of the texts themselves. Expert readers will present the fundamental guidelines of Old Occitan pronunciation, model appropriate pronunciation according to a period-appropriate text of their choosing, and guide workshop participants through the reading of selected texts.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Benjamin Weber

Organizer: Brandon Hawk

Organizer: Amity Reading

Delivery Mode: 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 is excited to sponsor a workshop that will help medievalists—especially early-career scholars or those without access to extensive language education—to read medieval texts aloud with confidence and pleasure. This workshop will offer medievalists an additional set of tools to encounter medieval texts, and encourage attention to details of sound and style that are most obvious when texts are heard rather than seen. We intend for the workshop to be very participatory, emphasizing exercises for reading aloud accompanied by bibliographic handouts giving information relevant to reading texts aloud.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Christopher Vaccaro ; cvaccaro@uvm.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

In this session we will each be given many opportunities to read passages from Beowulf and other Old English texts.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Amber Dunai ; adunai@tamuct.edu

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: International Pearl-Poet Society

The poems attributed to the Pearl-poet are frequently taught at undergraduate and graduate levels, yet their North-West Midlands dialect can prove challenging. This workshop aims to demystify the Pearl-poet’s language by providing guidance on reading the poems aloud. Of interest to instructors of literature and historical linguistics alike, this workshop takes its lead from recent pedagogical publications such Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (ed. Beal and Busbee, 2018) and Becoming the Pearl-Poet: Perceptions, Connections, Receptions (ed. Beal, 2022) by providing a resource for teacher-scholars: one which advocates for performative approaches to Middle English texts in the classroom.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Nora Corrigan

Delivery Mode: In-Person

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Shakespeare at Kalamazoo

Games and gaming in medieval and early modern culture have become a major focus for scholarship in recent years, the subject of several monographs and edited collections, such as Gina Bloom’s Gaming the Stage and Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature (ed. Serina Patterson). This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to some of the games referenced by Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and his predecessors, and to the physical materials and cultural politics surrounding these games. Participants will learn how to play the popular dicing game of hazard and the card game primero.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.

Organizer: Pablo Pastrana-Pérez

Delivery Mode: In-Person

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

This workshop is devoted to the application of the paleographic standards of the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies to transcribe early texts from the Iberian peninsula, with emphasis on the medieval and early-modern periods. Mention to both manuscript and early printed documents, be they in textual, paratextual or iconographic form, will be made to illustrate best practices. Special attention will be paid to challenging issues in transcribing Ibero-Romance documents and the different approaches to their resolution. The workshop intends to include ample time for paleographic transcription practice.

To participate in this workshop, please contact the organizer(s) directly.