With Carrie Griffin of Queen Mary, University of London, I’ll be co-organising sessions at the 2013 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo on ‘Reading in Medieval England’. In these sessions we seek to pose a number of questions both concerning the ways in which people read in the Middle Ages, but also about how we write the history of their reading. What strategies do authors, scribes, and illuminators use to engage their readers? What affective responses to texts seek to inspire, and how? How does the form and function of books shape and reflect their use? What impact does the materiality of books have on the idea of the book?
READING IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND I: Spaces and Communities
The first session will explore both the physical spaces for reading (physical, textual and architectural) and the ways in which individual and communal reading anticipated and created networks and communities in the medieval period. Papers may examine reading in codices and manuscripts; evidence of reading acts and sites of engagement; illustrations and descriptions of reading; and text and book exchange as evidence for intellectual links across space and time.
READING IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND II: Profit, Comfort, and Delight
The second session investigates ‘ways of reading’ — in other words, how texts and textual traditions invite and imaginatively respond to individual and communal reading, as well as why readers were attracted to particular texts. We anticipate that papers may discuss: prologues and mediated reading; guides to reading; illicit and shameful reading; devotional reading; morality and instruction; readers in literature.
Please send a 300 word abstract, along with a title, by 31 July, to Dr Mary Flannery, University of Lausanne (m_flan@hotmail.com), or Dr Carrie Griffin, Queen Mary, University of London (c.griffin@qmul.ac.uk).