This CfP contains two individual sessions grouped under the rubric 'Rethinking Ecotheory' for the 62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies. Please see information for both sessions and separate links to apply below! Both sessions are sponsored by Medieval Ecocriticisms. Abstracts for both sessions are due by September 15th, 2026. Please contact the organizers Hunter (hap48@cornell.edu) and Basil (basil.price@oneonta.edu) with any questions.

Overview

This pair of sessions questions ‘entanglement’ as the predominant idiom of ecocritical thinking, arguing that the medieval past both yields and necessitates alternative ways of thinking about our ecological investments, both affective and ontological. Drawing upon recent critiques (Swarbick and Tremblay 2024), this pair of sessions interrrogates the limits of 'enmeshment' as the predominant idion for ecocritical approaches to the premodern past. Although the (specifically European) premodern past is often identified as the 'Green Middle Ages' (e.g. Chavannes-Mazel 2023, Kehnel 2024), these sessions question the recuperation of this period as one of ethical, reciprocal, and harmonious relations between humans and the natural world. 

Rethinking Ecotheory (1): Disentangling Ecocriticisms

How can ecocritical discourse benefit from attuning to bodies and environments in the Middle Ages for whom entanglement is either a problem or an impossibility? We welcome papers that "rethink nature as a limit" (Swarbick and Tremblay, 2024), considering how the natural world or "Nature" in the Middle Ages makes demands on precarious bodies in a precarious world where uncofmortable boundaries trouble or refuse entangled thinking. 

Apply here: tinyurl.com/icms2027-s1

Rethinking Ecotheory (2): Dissapointing Ecocritcisms 

We invite papers which grapple with the dissapointing, dissatisfying, and disconcerting relationalities embedded within medieval ecological imaginaries or practices, or the ways in which the premodern past eludes our desire for eco-motional rescue. We welcome papers from any area of medieval studies that explore the bad feelings that attend medieval relations with the environment, and problemetize contemporary theorisations of a harmonious, recirpocal mesh. 

Apply here: tinyurl.com/icms2027-s2