This collection uncovers how medieval literature challenges dominant narratives of pregnancy through depictions of marginalized reproductive experiences. In the Middle Ages as today, pregnancy was both a private, embodied experience and a public metaphor shaped by law, morality, and politics. In a moment when U.S. courts cite medieval legal treatises to restrict reproductive rights, reexamining medieval narratives of pregnancy has never been more urgent. The chapters in this book explore marginalized reproductive experiences—such as caesarean section, nursing, generational trauma, and trans pregnancy—revealing how medieval texts offer alternative ways of thinking about gender politics, reproductive agency, and embodiment.

You Are What You (Don't) Read: Vegetarian and Vegan Characters in Literature

Dear colleagues,We are delighted to invite proposals for the Ninth International Conference on Literary Juvenilia, to be held at Valparaiso University from April 16–18, 2026. This year’s theme, Youth Writers and Their Worlds, calls on scholars to explore the various ways young people have imagined, questioned, and shaped their worlds through writing.We welcome papers that engage with youth-authored texts—published or private, written or visual—and encourage approaches that foreground the material, cultural, and imaginative contexts of juvenile literary and cultural production. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Call for Papers

Medievalisms in Time and Space

The International Society for the Study of Medievalism Annual Conference

Fully Online

November 14th and 15th, 2025

Hosted by Anita Obermeier at the University of New Mexico

We welcome submissions considering aspects of Medievalisms in Time (any temporalities or relationships between them) and Space (inner spaces, Outer Space and outer spaces, contested spaces, geographies real and imagined, trans-temporalities); Trans-medievalisms of all kinds (such as transgender medievalisms, transformative medievalisms, transgressive medievalisms).