Journal of Northwestern Medieval Europe (JEMNE)

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Last-Minute Call for Papers: Leeds IMC sessions ‘Early English Life Cycles’ (IMC Leeds, 2-5 July 2018)

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have a vacant slot in our session on ‘Early English Life Cycles’ at the upcoming IMC in Leeds and we now welcome last-minute abstracts for papers. Since the IMC registration deadline is 22 June, the deadline for this last-minute CFP is 18 June, 2018.

Following three successful sessions on ‘Anglo-Saxon Life Cycles’ at Leeds IMC 2017, we welcome abstracts for papers on the theme of ‘Early English Life Cycles’ at Leeds IMC 2018. This session is intended to build upon the insights of the 2017 sessions, expanding the temporal focus, while also bringing to bear the general congress theme 'Memory', possibly understood in such ways as: individual remembrance of early life, inherited cultural patterns for structuring experience, constructions of narratives and expectations for past, present and future life.

We hope to bring together papers that deal with the human life cycle in Early English language and literature [c.500-c.1350] and show how this complex concept (with all of its biological, social and cultural aspects) influenced the lives, writings and artwork of the inhabitants of medieval England.

Possible topics/themes include but are not limited to:

- Definitions, concepts, and constructions of the life cycle

- The life course in literature and language

- Individual remembrance of early life

- Inherited cultural patterns for structuring experience

- Constructions of narratives and expectations for past, present and future life.

- Age and alterity

- Age and gender

- Intergenerational relations and/or conflicts

- The life cycle and the Church

- Saints in various stages of life

- Care for the young, care for the elderly

- Semantic field studies of (the various stages of) the human life course

Subsequent to the sessions we hope to publish the contributions as a volume of essays, with the goal of furthering interest in the topic.

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to Thijs Porck (Leiden University; m.h.porck@hum.leidenuniv.nl ) or Hattie Soper (Cambridge University; hcs56@cam.ac.uk).