Subtheme:
Bodies at the Limit
Organizers: CJ Jones (University of Notre Dame) and Ezra G.T. Howard (UNC Chapel Hill)
This sub-theme solicits papers that address different modes of medieval scandal as it relates to the body. Bodies create scandal when they exceed the limits of their physical containers or subvert the limitations of social order. Scandals arise surrounding uncontrolled or permeable bodies, or through contact and exchanges precipitated by bodies. Scandalous bodies reveal flows of power, as they mediate, redirect, resist, or succumb to them, by violating hegemonic norms and boundaries or reifying them. Visionaries and prophets possess scandalous bodies that mediate the divine and supernatural; monastic practices train and regulate bodies in order to avoid scandal; and scandalous bodies inhabit the discourses of monstrousness used to describe, e.g., female or racialized bodies. Scandal is also produced by friction between bodies and the language available to describe them. This relation between the body, language, and scandal operates both in the Middle Ages and in historiography about the Middle Ages, where euphemistic language, partial accounts, or avoidance of topics altogether has circumscribed or circumvented bodies and bodily practices deemed unsavory, unmentionable, or inconceivable.
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.
