Early Middle English Society

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.