Early Middle English Society

Poor Manuscripts, Rich Manuscripts:
Early Middle English Manuscript Production

Many of the earliest Middle English texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are found in relatively “shabby” manuscripts. We would like to take up the complex manuscript milieu that could often produce both “poor,” or shabby, manuscripts, and “rich,” or deluxe, manuscripts. We are broadly interested in papers that may consider regional differences, patronage, multilingual contents, diverse audiences, codicological concerns, etc. Methods of engagement with the topic might include, but are not limited to, comparing different “looking” early Middle English manuscripts that contain the same (i.e., redactions, variants, copies of) texts; investigating how early Middle English manuscripts use even older manuscripts circulating in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; considering how early Middle English editors, scribes, writers, etc., engage, regard, nostalgize the archive of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; exploring how early Middle English manuscripts are received in the early modern period by collectors; considering whether or not the relationships between texts in early Middle English manuscripts change in later manuscripts, and how manuscript contexts change around early Middle English texts throughout the medieval period.

Please send proposals by September 25, 2010, to Dorothy Kim (dokim@vassar.edu).

The Early Middle English Society is sponsoring one session and co-sponsoring another, both pertaining to law and literature, for the 46th International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan:

Early Middle English and the Law

We are interested in papers that will address any aspect of the law broadly defined in early Middle English texts. This could include legal language, the influence of the Magna Carta, legal procedure and literary production, outlaws, disputatio, law as a separate language, canon law and religious texts, Lateran IV, royal law and court production, law and historiography, law and hagiography, legal documents, contracts, Jews and the law, law and visual iconography.

Proposals should be sent to Dorothy Kim (dokim@vassar.edu) by September 25th.

The International Lawman’s Brut Society and the Early Middle English Society are accepting proposals for the next International Medieval Congress on “The Law in Early Middle English Literature.” As the first element of Lawman’s name is “Law,” laws and legal proceedings are understandably an important part of the Brut and other major texts of the Early Middle English corpus. This session will allow for a discussion of various ways laws and legal proceedings inform these texts and will promote discussions of the interconnections between the Brut and other texts of the period. Possible topics for presentation could include: pre-Conquest and post-Conquest law, relationship of kings and rulers to the law, landowning and land inheritance sessions, etc. Please direct inquiries and/or submissions by September 15, 2010 to

Kenneth J. Tiller
Professor of English and Chair
Department of Language and Literature
University of Virginia’s College at Wise
Wise, VA 24293
jt9t@uvawise.edu 

or

Scott Kleinman
Department of English
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff St
Northridge, CA 91330-8248
scott.kleinman@csun.edu

Travel and Exploration in Early Middle English Texts will take place on Thursday, 13 May 2010, at 1:30 p.m. in 2303 Sangren (session 105):

Presider: Dorothy Kim, Vassar College

“Ful nobelelike upon a stede” or “Overþwert upon an asse”: Portrayal of Travel and Traveling in the Middle English “Matter of England” Verse Romances
    John Ford, Univ. Champollion
Monstrosities in English Mappae Mundi and Grayson Perry Map of Nowhere
    Andrea Jones, Univ. of California–Los Angeles
Familiar Foreigners: The Non-monstrous Other in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville
    Sarah Andyshak, Florida State Univ.

We are co-sponsors of Lawman in His Early Middle English Context, to take place as session 123 immediately afterwards (3:30 p.m.) in 105 Valley I:

Presider: Kenneth J. Tiller, Univ. of Virginia’s College at Wise

The Friendship of God and of Kings in Lawman’s Brut
    Joseph D. Parry, Brigham Young Univ.
Morality and the Monstrous in Lawman’s Brut
    Carla M. Thomas, New York Univ.
Unfettering the Welsh in Lawman’s Brut and the South English Legendary
    Dorothy Kim, Vassar College
“Þon lawen þe stoden a þon ilke dawen”: The Divisions of the Past in Lawman’s Brut
    Scott Kleinman
Respondent: Elizabeth J. Bryan, Brown Univ.

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. Please send abstracts to Dorothy Kim by September 15, 2009.

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 travelers or migrants
• Texts as sources of information for travelers
• Awareness of linguistic consequences of travel
• 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

Session Two: Lawman in his Early Middle English Context

Co-sponsored by The International Lawman’s Brut Society and the Early Middle English Society

The International Lawman’s Brut Society and the Early Middle English Society propose a co-sponsored session for the next International Medieval Congress, which seeks to open bring together the interests of these two societies. Lawman is one of the earliest of early Middle English writers, but he is often read in isolation from other early Middle English texts. By encouraging conference participants to re-examine Lawman’s Brut in the light of other work in the literary community of England from twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we hope to advance our understanding of both.

Please send abstracts to Kenneth Tiller.

Textual Travel and Early Middle English, session 1311, is scheduled for Wednesday, 14 July 2010, at 4:30 p.m.:

Moderator: Sjoerd Levelt, Warburg Institute, University of London

Feminine Morality in Cross-Cultural Depictions of Olympias
    Jena Abdullah Al-Fuhaid, North Carolina State University
Who Was Karl Brunner?: The Cultural Implications of the Pre-World War I Publications of his Edition of Richard Löwenherz
    Sarah De Haas, Independent Scholar, London
Visual translatio and the Circulation of Bodley 34
    Dorothy Kim, Department of English, Vassar College, New York

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.

Please send abstracts to Dorothy Kim at dorothyk@humnet.ucla.edu by September 15, 2007.

Early Middle English Society I: Speaking Across Boundaries in Early Middle English Texts ca. 1100-1300

We invite abstracts that consider the ways in which early Middle English texts negotiate boundaries, as well as the implications of those negotiations, from the early twelfth century through the early fourteenth century. Broadly conceived, the term “boundaries” includes lines of demarcation perceived, inferred, or actualized contemporaneously with early Middle English texts, as well as those boundaries that scholarship has subsequently superimposed on individual texts, or on the larger early Middle English field. Areas of investigation might include texts that defy, cross, neglect, or abide by boundaries; texts that inscribe or prescribe boundaries; as well as the relationship between text and boundary with regard to the political, linguistic, geographic, temporal, or codicological, including manuscript mise-en-page.

Early Middle English Society II: Canon-Formation and the Early Middle English Period

We invite abstracts that consider the problem of early Middle English texts as “extra-canonical”: falling outside the standard canon of medieval English literature because of a history of English nationalism that binds English identity as inseparable from English language. We are interested in what a “canon” of early Middle English, materials between the Conquest and Chaucer, would include and why. How might a canon be formed from this period without merely “back”-forming it from its period-based and linguistic neighbors? Was there a way to make texts “look” worthy of canonization? Or reproduction? Is reproduction a form of what we would call canonization? Do texts do particular things to keep themselves in circulation?

Medieval Association of the Pacific, University of California at Los Angeles, 2-3 March 2007

Inventio
Organizer: Dorothy Kim, UCLA

Chair: Christopher Baswell, UCLA
Andrea Jones, UCLA: The Gesta Herewardi as Outlaw Reliquary
Michael Hanly, Washington State University: Langland, Gower, and War

Translatio
Organizer: Dorothy Kim, UCLA

Chair: Matthew Fisher, UCLA
Sharon K. Goetz, UC Berkeley: Textual Assemblies: The Historiographical Veneer of Harvard Law MS 1
Dorothy Kim, UCLA: Women, Music, and Multilingualism in the Nuneaton Book

42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 10-13 May 2007

Early Middle English Society I: Women and Devotion
Coordinator: Dorothy Kim

Description: We invite paper abstracts that consider the topic of women and devotion from the twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century, in relation to the period’s multilingual, multicultural, and multidisciplinary range of texts. With this in mind, the committee will consider papers that focus on any of the following areas: psalters, books of hours, liturgy, hagiography, guides, music, iconography, etc. We are open to works that consider texts in any of the following languages: Latin, Greek, Anglo-Norman and French, Middle Welsh, Old Irish, Middle English, Old English, Hebrew.

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Early Middle English Society II: Relations, Companions, Derivatives
Coordinator: Sharon Goetz

Description: This panel sets as its frame the non-early Middle English contexts of early Middle English texts. Given the relatively small tally of English texts written before 1300, it is important to recognize that they do not occur in isolation. Instead, they exist (frequently) in company with texts written in other languages, and they show evidence of arising from multilingual moments of reading, writing, and construing. We invite abstracts that investigate concerns pertaining to any of the following interactions: possible antecedents and models for EME texts (or models rejected), such as the pre- and post-Conquest English vitae of Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana; accompaniments to EME texts, such as occur in Digby 86, Jesus 29, Caligula A.ix, etc.; texts reliant upon EME relatives, such as the Ancrene Riwle texts that exist in Anglo-Norman and Latin.

The Early Middle English Society (emesoc.org) is sponsoring two panels at the 44th International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 7-10 May 2009.

Please send abstracts and any questions to Dorothy Kim.
Abstracts are due 25 September 2008.

Early Middle English Society I: Editing Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108
Roundtable

This manuscript contains the earliest version of the South English Legendary and several early romance texts (Havelok the Dane and King Horn). The roundtable will bring together a group of scholars to discuss various issues that have surfaced in editing Laud MS 108 as a whole book for a scholarly and a student audience. Some of the topics that may be discussed includes general editorial practices in relation to a single-manuscript edition; the possibilities of an electronic edition; resources available in mounting this project; and the issues surrounding accessibility to both scholars and beginning students.

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Early Middle English Society II: Speaking Across Disciplines in British Library MS Harley 978
Paper session

British Library, MS Harley 978 is a thirteenth-century manuscript that famously contains some of the earliest editions of Marie de France’s Lais and Fables, the summer canon, the cuckoo song, and an array of Latin verse. The divisions in modern academia have tended to result in commentary that has carved up this manuscript along disciplinary lines: musicology, medieval French poetry, Middle English poetry, and Latin. Given that the manuscript requires such diverse skills in interpreting its contents, milieu, and reading practices, how can scholars speak across disciplines in order to gain a more comprehensive approach to this manuscript? This session is interested in papers that address any of the works in MS Harley 978, and / or that consider these disciplinary divisions and how we might begin to bridge them.