Colloquium Sub-Themes

The Bodies at the Limit sub-theme encourages submissions that engage with the body and embodiment, broadly conceived, as well as the use of the human body, its relationships to other bodies, and its scandalous potential for social and natural orders. Papers might explore bodies of saints, clergy, and monastics; bodies that elide or resist categories of sex, gender, and sexuality; laboring bodies and the medieval marketplace; biopower in religious or secular government; external bodily practice and the soul, senses, or interior states; the relationships between the human, the animal, or the environment; occult practices; and drama and ritual. We welcome all approaches, including performance studies, manuscript studies, art and material culture, literary criticism, and the history of medicine and law among other disciplines.

Performance continues to be viewed as scandalous by many Christian Nationalists and right-wing politicians in North America. What is a drag show other than a performance? How different is drag from early theater for which most female parts would have been played by male-gendered bodies? Obviously these performances are not exactly the same, but the past can tell us much about our present and our present can open avenues of inquiry into the past. The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society enthusiastically sponsors this sub-theme, seeking both veteran scholars of early performance studies as well as folks who seek scandal in performance—whether historical or speculative. We seek papers that attend to the various ways in which scandal may be performed (especially in imagined performances heretofore unstaged) and/or to the ways in which performance itself scandalizes.

750 years after the Condemnations, which stand as the culmination of the thirteenth-century debacle, it is worth reflecting on them. What underexplored intellectual or cultural currents might have contributed to the Condemnations? How did these restrictions on academic freedom affect the life of the average academic or layperson, and how did they impact the development of the ever-changing medieval university? And, more broadly, what do the Condemnations illuminate about the many divergent understandings of faith and reason for those living in the Middle Ages?

This thread invites panels and papers that consider moments in medieval literature and culture in which authenticity or inauthenticity becomes a site of scandal, concern, or disruption. Such moments of epistemic crisis inevitably raise foundational questions about perception, the nature of truth, and social norms and cohesion. Recent work on authenticity and inauthenticity has considered the complicated relationship between the concept of the “original” and the “forgery” respectively, emphasizing their mutually constitutive status. What can we learn about structures of meaning-making in and about the Middle Ages by considering instances disputed, ambiguous, or contested authenticity?

We have all had various revisionist relationships to the ways we understand texts. In this subtheme, we invite presenters to meditate on the idea of scandalous interpretations. What critical works from earlier years now seem tame or even dated? What rereadings and reinterpretations of modern scholarship have generated offense and why? How did medieval people reinterpret older texts or introduce new texts that scandalized received understandings? What might this tell us about the trajectory of critical thought? What is gained or lost by critical scandal? What is gained or lost by a frame that dampens it? What ways can readings across disciplines produce a kind of scandal? This subtheme is meant to be open and generative, and inclusive of medieval readings and texts that produced outrage or changed discourses in their own time.

This panel considers “scandal,” capaciously rendered, as heuristic for understanding domination and liberation in the Middle Ages, asking how scandal reveals the operations of identity-driven forms of domination, functions as a tool for articulating structural wrongs, and affirms individuals’ bodily autonomy. Papers might consider the ways that scandal, where it names reputational damage, might operate as a method of oppression, or explore how its invocation functions to disempower those who are already marginalized. They could, too, consider its citation
as a tactic of resistance to hegemonic pressures, as when, for example, women express fears of slander to repel sexual aggressors, or they could address the way scandal, as relational accusation that is inherently contagious and transmissible, reveals hidden networks of resistance and aid among the disenfranchised.

“Scandal,” for this sub-theme will take many forms, but each will be bound by an emphasis on the ways medieval women’s writing and devotional literature have redefined doctrine, bodily autonomy, literary production, vernacular writing, and more. Following Christopher Cannon’s chapter “Enclosure” – which considers the anchoress, her anchorhold, and its governing society as a series of enclosures that are each built according to the principles as the medieval body – this sub-theme will explore the elasticity of the devotional body and the worlds that it both inhabits and shapes. We invite papers that consider how medieval devotional bodies, specifically the bodies of women, subvert the doctrinal expectation of enclosure–or bend it–scandalously.

Yapping can have transformative power. But an emphasis on the overspoken stands in contrast to that which is unsaid. Omission of speech or withholding of the ‘correct’ speech until the ‘right moment’ is another verbal means of seizing power. The tension between gossip and secrecy—between what can or should not be said—is particularly relevant and the medieval world had a lot to say about—but perhaps no consensus on—speech. This panel is interested in the scandalous potential of unsanctioned speech, be they words spoken out of turn, information passed in secret, or performative conversations held in public. It scrutinizes the dichotomies between speech and silence, between public and private, and between idle and transformative. It asks who gets to speak and in what venues.

In contradistinction to medieval literary men, whose sovereignty and boundedness have been rendered as permanent and secure, depictions of medieval literary femininity frequently call into question the very definition of sovereignty—and whether female boundedness is possible. Many female characters are represented as having often scandalously permeable bounds; yet as Holly Crocker has recently argued, this permeability must be understood as a source of ethical strength This subtheme considers questions of the gendered nature of selfhood and what happens when we consider that selfhood as constituted not as a bounded, separate, distinct category but instead as a relational, vulnerable, and sustained one.

The purpose of this sub-theme will be to place medieval supersessionism in direct conversation with modern Replacement Theory. I am particularly keen to see proposals that push beyond medieval efforts to conceive of Christian communities as participants in Jewish identity, focusing instead on the ways that medieval Christian communities essentialized their own dynastic, racial, geographical, etc. distinctives as indicative of an exclusive claim to the status of the New Israel.

Suspended between reconciliation and punishment and between religious ritual and state violence, the many manifestations of punitive shaming in medieval Europe provide an entry point into larger issues: the meanings and functions of judicial ritual, rising state power in the Middle Ages, the acceptability of bodily exposure in public spheres, the role of reputation in the law, understandings of shame in medieval culture, and gendered experiences of medieval justice. This sub-theme would welcome papers from any field or methodological approach and is interested in finding connections across different manifestations of punitive shaming and bodily display in medieval culture.