Subtheme:
Medieval Practices of Adaptation

Organizers: Britt Mize (Texas A&M) and Amber Dunai (Texas A&M, Central Texas)

At no time has intellectual culture been more committed to honoring the authority and authorities of the past than in the Middle Ages. Yet medieval adaptations of earlier works and media objects are often profoundly inventive. Indeed, adaptation is a central and lively mode of medieval creativity: a phenomenon due for systematic investigation, both in its very fact and in its processes and forms.

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  While it is possible in any era for creative adaptation to take a deliberately violent or iconoclastic approach to sources, most often it does not. Adapters usually see their creative interventions—however radical—as advancing or building upon an older production; making it freshly relevant again; bringing something prior, good, and useful to new audiences, for new situations, in new contexts, through new channels of expression. The desire to adapt is an urge to appropriate, freely reimagine, repurpose, and perhaps even improve, but simultaneously, at a notional level, to preserve, celebrate, and reassert the value of something received from the past. The field of Adaptation Studies has developed to address this paradox.

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Existing contributions to Adaptation Studies nearly always focus on modern adaptation (even if the sources are medieval). In contrast, for this topical thread we invite papers that redirect the insights of Adaptation Studies to build a more coherent sense of medieval ideas and practices, especially in cases involving bold or unintuitive changes of language, genre, style, context, or medium. We are interested in studies of any kind of adaptational engagement, including excerption, selection, combination, recontextualization, and movement into multi-media realization or from one media form to another (e.g., unadorned to illustrated text, scripture to drama, story to painting, music to architectural decoration). We encourage consideration of questions like these:

• Are there characteristically, or uniquely, medieval modes and techniques of adaptation? Does adaptational ingenuity find expression differently in medieval culture than in the present?

• How do features of a prior work provoke creative response for the adapter? How do the chosen axes of change (e.g., language, context, medium) constitute reimagining?

• Does adaptation reveal features of the source not previously apparent? Does it change the source-as-perceived?

• What is the likelihood or nature of audience sensitivity to a new work’s adaptational character, and what are the implications of this? Does the later work announce, and how does it characterize, its relationship to the prior work? What effect does that have on conceptual authority?