CFP: Women's Strategies of Memory: Representations in Literature and Art

by Emma O'Loughlin Bérat

Women's Strategies of Memory: Representations in Literature and Art

Call for Papers for panel(s) proposal at Leeds IMC 2018, 2-5 July

Memory, in the middle ages as now, was widely accessible to women as means of personal and political influence. Scholarship on the strategic and technical employment of memory in the middle ages has principally explored men’s practices. This panel focuses on representations of medieval women’s deliberate and strategic uses of memory in literature, art, and historical narrative.

We invite papers from any discipline, region and medieval period, which consider any aspect of the representation of women’s memory. We are particularly interested in women who perform remembering, forgetting, or recounting past events as a means of public or political power; and who manipulate histories or identities to construct or reconstruct the past, or to influence the memories of other characters. We also hope to explore women’s less conscious strategies of memory, such as forgetting as a way of compartmentalising traumatic emotions. Reexaminations of women who are accused (by other characters or the narrator) of errors of memory, such as forgetting, deliberate ignorance or manipulation of record, are also welcome.

Please contact Lucy Allen (lucyallen505@gmail.com) and Emma Bérat (eoloughl@uni-bonn.de) with an abstract of approximately 100 words and a brief biography by 30 July 2017.