Subtheme:
Sovereignty and Selfhood

Following Holly Crocker’s “Enchanted Subjects” plenary at NCS 2026 Freiburg, exciting new questions arise concerning sovereignty, boundedness, and the seeming scandal of the relational medieval feminine subject. 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 Crocker has argued, this permeability must be understood as a source of ethical strength (cf., The Matter of Virtue, 2019.) 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. What critical possibilities might be available to us when we reconfigure our notions of selfhood, turning away from our privileging of the separate (all too often stereotypically masculine) self and towards new notions of the self as embodied, mediated, and reciprocal? How do we interpret and historicize late medieval sovereignty within this gendered context? How can we consider new forms of relation in terms of mediated selfhood? What are the ethical constraints around questions of consent, when we consider the embodied and permeable self? Long-form narrative poetry, romance, lyrics, anonymous conduct literature, and canonical texts all lend themselves to close examination of how the bounded versus the permeable self is gendered—and what the ethical questions are that arise when we consider these dilemmas? Such questions may be considered via a variety of critical postures, from Black feminist theory to psychoanalytic theory to queer theory and beyond.