New Chaucer Society Congress 

July 27-30, 2026

Freiburg, Germany

Thread: Open Topic

Panel: Narrating Uncertainty

This panel invites proposals for 15-20 minute papers that take up literary representations of self-doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity in the Middle Ages. In a time of socio-political change, religious conflict, ecological disruption, and apocalyptic energy, how did medieval writers use literature to narrate experiences of instability? How do medieval narrative forms experiment with the limitations of capturing subjectivity through the voice of a narrator? Do certain figurative and representational modes lend themselves to interpretive uncertainty? What does it mean to have an “unreliable narrator” in a medieval text, and can we locate this paradigm in the longer literary history of fiction?

Papers might consider uncertainty in the contexts of life-writing, devotional instruction, and self-reflexive narrators. We especially welcome submissions that explore how medieval literature helps us understand the experience of uncertainty as unevenly distributed across the boundaries of class, gender, and race in the Middle Ages.

Email 200-word abstracts to Kashaf Qureshi (kashaf@uchicago.edu) and Shea McCollough (shea.mccollough@wustl.edu) by April 27, 2025.