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).
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
Original CFP:
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.