This year's Colloquium invites you to consider the following sub-themes, organized by collaborators from across Medieval Studies. To submit to a sub-theme, simply indicate this on the abstract submission form, and your work will be submitted to the theme organizers for consideration. Any paper not selected by organizers will be returned to the General Call, unless otherwise indicated.
Scandalous Bodies: Relation, Reputation, Resistance
Sarah Baechle (U of Mississippi) and Carissa Harris (Temple U)
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 in the Anchorhold
Madeline Fox (U of Michigan) and Stacie Vos (Central Connecticut State U)
“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.
‘Gan to Jangle’: Rumor, Gossip, and the Power of Speech
Brooke Thomas (CUNY)
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.
Sovereignty and Selfhood
Katharine Jager (U of Houston-Downtown)
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.
Scandalous Supersessionism: The Hypocrisy of Replacement Theory
David G. Pedersen (College of the Ozarks)
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.