cfp.english.upenn.edu

Following successful panels at the Medieval Association of the Pacific 2007 and at Kalamazoo '07, '08 and '09, the Early Middle English Society, which seeks to promote the study and scholarly discussion of English literary and cultural production from the late twelfth century to the mid-fourteenth century, is sponsoring two sessions at the seventeenth International Medieval Congress in Leeds, 12-15 July 2010.

Session one: Travel and Exploration in Early Middle English Texts

Abstracts are invited for papers dealing with descriptions of travel, exploration, migration and/or conquest in Early Middle English texts, and with relations between such texts and travel accounts in other texts.

Possible subjects may include, but are not limited to:
• Descriptions of travel, origins, discovery, conquest
• Relations between texts and maps
• Relations between narrative texts and travel accounts
• Geography and ethnography
• Utopian and/or dystopian narrative
• Texts written by travellers or migrants
• Texts as sources of information for travellers
• Awareness of linguistic consequences of travel

Session two: The Travelling Manuscript in Early Middle English

Abstracts are invited for papers dealing with the idea of travel in relation to the study of manuscripts of the Early Middle English period.

Possible subjects may include, but are not limited to:
• Manuscripts which bring together texts with an interest in travel, geography, ethnography and/or conquest
• Texts which "travel together", appearing as a corpus in various manuscript contexts
• Travel (e.g., geographically, socially) of manuscripts
• Travel (e.g., geographically, socially) of individual texts in the manuscript tradition
• Conversely, manuscripts which in their presentation of texts preclude the possibility of a text's travel between different environments
• Diachronic travel of texts: OE texts into the Early Middle English period, and Early Middle English texts after ca. 1350
• Multilingual contexts of the reception of Early Middle English, and the exploration of linguistic differences

We particularly, but by no means exclusively, welcome papers with interdisciplinary and/or diachronic approaches, papers that deal with several texts in relation to each other, and papers that reach beyond the conventional chronological, linguistic and geographical borders of Early Middle English studies.

Please send proposals for twenty-minute papers (title and an abstract of about 250-300 words, with a short bibliography) by e-mail to Sjoerd Levelt (s.levelt {at} seh.oxon.org) by September 6, 2009. Inquiries are welcome.