medieval

16th Annual Tolkien at the UVM Conference: Tolkien and Horror

Saturday, April 6th 2019

Our theme this year is Tolkien and Horror. Consider submitting an abstract on this theme or on any subject. We encourage single papers or an organized session.

We are pleased to announce that our Keynote Speaker this coming year will be Professor Yvette Kisor (Ramapo College). Please consider submitting abstracts today to Christopher Vaccaro (cvaccaro@uvm.edu)! The deadline is January 15, 2019.

This session of the Comparative Drama Conference explores the ways in which this year’s conference locale—Orlando, Florida—crosses paths with the culture of medieval and early modern drama. Included among Central Florida’s most notable and popular theatrical productions are theme park stage adaptations of animated films and cinematic blockbusters (think Finding Nemo-The Musical etc.). How do medieval and early modern dramatic works similarly appropriate, convert and dramatize other types of scripted or choreographed performances (oral legends; religious rituals and practices; courtroom dramas; political spectacles etc.) —and to what practical and ideological ends?

Call For Papers for Sponsored Session

2019 MAP/ACMRS Conference;Magic, Religion, and Science in the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance 

“The Magical Mammal in Marie De France”

Mediocrity in the Middle Ages: Finding the Middle Ground11th Annual Medievalists @ Penn (M@P) Graduate ConferenceUniversity of Pennsylvania, February 22nd, 2019Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Sonja Drimmer (UMass Amherst, Art History) What makes something “mediocre” in the Middle Ages? We often assume that if a manuscript, literary text, or work of visual or performance art has survived from the medieval period, it is exceptional in some way. Modern scholarship tends to enforce this assumption by either praising a work for its beauty and importance, or arguing for the centrality and exceptionality of something that past scholarship has ignored. But what of things that have survived that are just OK?

The editors of English: the Journal of the English Association are pleased to
invite submissions to the journal’s annual essay competition exclusive to
postgraduates. The competition provides an ideal opportunity for students to
enhance their CV through the publication of their work in an excellent high-profile
journal that caters to a very wide range of genres, periods, and critical approaches.
We are looking for essays that provide new perspectives on canonical and/or noncanonical
Anglophone literatures, and therefore welcome submissions that focus on
single authors/texts or a range, and which develop original arguments beyond simple

STILL ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS

It is hard to exaggerate the novelty of English Treasurer Richard fitz Nigel’s Dialogue of the Exchequer, completed c. 1179. Often considered Europe’s first administrative manual, it required the invention of a new genre, the systematic thinking-through of collected bureaucratic knowledge and its categorization and organization. Successive generations of historians have mined this text for data about England’s taxation office and common law, but it has more to offer researchers of bureaucratic and institutional culture, medieval identity formation, and intertextuality. 

While scholars often note that Hoccleve’s and Langland’s poetic personae each make the other more understandable, rarely have these poets been analyzed together in great detail. Thus, with this session, The International Hoccleve Society and International Piers Plowman Society seek to provide an occasion to do so. The Societies invite paper submissions that examine the ways interpretive discourses around Hoccleve’s and Langland’s works overlap and intersect.

International Piers Plowman Society Conference (April 4-7, 2019).  Paper Panel: “Langland’s Library”

This panel (2 sessions) will consider the ways in which disability is represented in medieval Icelandic literature, particularly in medieval saga writing. Panellists will engage with the concept of disability beyond the traditional bio-medical understanding of the term, exploring disability as a social phenomenon embedded in social arrangements and cultural conventions. They will seek to understand what constituted disability in medieval Icelandic society, culture, and history prior to the establishment of disability as a modern legal, bureaucratic and administrative concept.

The Medieval Academy of America's Graduate Student Council is looking for a few more submissions to round out our panel for Leeds 2019 (1-4 July)

Our short abstrct is:

SPENSER AT KALAMAZOO, MAY 9-12, 2019
54th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)

This year we have two open sessions on any topic dealing with Edmund Spenser, and one roundtable session on teaching Spenser. 

Reading time for papers in the open sessions should not exceed twenty minutes. 

Panelists in the roundtable on teaching will speak for five minutes each and distribute copies of a handout.  

As always, we encourage submissions by newcomers, including graduate students, and by established scholars of all ranks. 

Thirty years ago, in her seminal book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Caroline Walker Bynum proposed that the later Middle Ages witnessed the rise of the first women’s movement in Christian history. Looking within and beyond the purview of religious devotion, this panel welcomes papers that corroborate, qualify, or critique Bynum’s claim by examining medieval representations of female agency. What constitutes female agency in late medieval literature, society and culture? To what end is it exerted? How and by whom is it celebrated and/or censured?

CFP: Shirking the Canon: “Obscure” or “Unpopular” Texts in the Survey Classroom

54th International Congress on Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 

9-12 May 2019