Dear Colleagues,

The SASLC project is excited to announce its session, “Alfred and His Circle,” at the 2017 ICMS in Kalamazoo. This panel will explore the textual sources and cultural contexts of Alfred and his court in anticipation of new work in the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture project. Alfred is without doubt one of the most important Anglo-Saxon writers and thinkers, and his many works—along with those of his intellectual circle including Asser, Grimbald, John the Saxon, and Werferth—had a profound and lasting impact on the intellectual cultures of the early Middle Ages. Moreover, recent work on Alfred has illustrated the profound debts Alfred and his circle owed to their Latin sources, debts which have in many cases gone unrecognized. The SASLC session on 'Alfred and his Circle' invites papers shedding new light on the important roles sources played in Alfred’s intellectual milieu as well as how the works of Alfred’s circle (such as Asser’s Vita Alfredi) became sources for later Anglo-Saxon authors like Byrhtferth or the compiler of the Annals of St. Neots. Papers can be focused on literary or documentary evidence, but we also welcome interdisciplinary projects from fields outside of history and literature, as well as papers that consider Alfredian influence on other cultures such as Carolingian Europe.

Please submit abstracts and completed participiation information forms to Ben Weber (bweber@princeton.edu) by the conference deadline of 9/15. 

Dr. Benjamin Weber

Lecturer

Princeton Writing Program

bweber@princeton.edu