medieval

William Shakespeare’s oeuvre is comprised of multiple forms, including the play, the sonnet, and the narrative poem and spans a wide variety of genres, including comedy, tragedy, history, epic, and romance. Because of his contributions to the western canon, modern scholarship tends to focus on Shakespeare the writer. Yet, we often forget another aspect of his literary life: Shakespeare the reader. In crafting his work, Shakespeare borrows heavily from Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance literature of all genres, including poetry, epic, drama, and prose fiction, and incorporates references to mythological, religious, rhetorical and philosophical texts throughout his works.

Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXI
Undergraduate Sessions
The University of Virginia’s College at Wise
September 21-23, 2017

Keynote Address:  “Historiated Bruts: How Manuscript Illustration Twisted History in the fifteenth-Century English Chronicle”—Elizabeth J. Bryan, Brown University

From Jones and Stallybrass's Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000) to art historian Cordelia Warr's Dressing for Heaven (2010), to Patricia Lennox and Bella Mirabella's edited collection, Shakespeare and Costume (2015), the power of clothing on medieval and early modern subjects is being more thoroughly explored. This interdisciplinary panel is interested in the ways clothing, costume, and other articles, including wigs, false beards, and jewelry, had power to shape, transform, or otherwise exert material effects on the bodies who wore them. How do such "wearables" and/or their material effects relate to issues of (mis)recognition or identity creation, successful or otherwise?

Proposals on any aspect of Middle English literature, including possibly on Chaucer, his works, or his contemporaries, would be most welcome, as would proposals making use of the conference theme "The Sense of Sight: Visuality, Visibility, and Ways of Seeing" to explore literature of the period. 

Individual paper presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals via the online system by May 21, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12.

Paper proposals must be made via our online system found here:

The 2017 PAMLA Conference is being held over the November 10-12 weekend at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu, with complimentary bus transportation to and from our official PAMLA Conference hotel, the Ala Moana Resort: http://pamla.org/2017

Our CFP list of over 120 approved sessions includes many sessions on British Literature and Culture, from a number of Medieval sessions to sessions on contemporary British film and literature, with everything in betweenll. Our online paper proposal system are now available: http://pamla.org/2017/topic-areas