The English Department is pleased to announce the "Imagining Medieval English" conference, organized by Tim Machan, September 15-17, 2014. This three-day conference will bring together twelve distinguished scholars who are collaborating on a book entitled “Imagining Medieval English.” The participants will present papers that form the chapters of the book, and join in a general discussion of the topic. Most sessions will be open to the public.
Paper topics will include: contact among English, Norse, French, Latin, and Welsh; the linguistic reasons for positing coherence in the linguistic record of 500-1500 and for drawing distinctions between an Old and Middle English period; the kinds of coherence and difference that can be posited among medieval English regional dialects; the discursive specialization of English in literature; the role of historical grammars and dictionaries in the construction of medieval English; the characteristics of manuscripts as sources of all medieval linguistic evidence; the nature of historical linguistic evidence; the relations between literary language and linguistic history; the role of medieval English in linguistic history; the historical factors influencing modern notions of periodization; the relations among English and European linguistic practices; and the evidence for colloquial medieval English in the extant manuscripts.
Participants: Cynthia Allen, Christopher Cain, Helen Cooper, Andrew Galloway, Simon Horobin, Seth Lerer, Tim Machan, David Matthews, Colette Moore, Ad Putter, Jeremy Smith, Merja Stenroos
The conference opens on Monday, Sept. 15 at 3:15 p.m., and the first session will be followed by a reception at 5:30 p.m. at the Medieval Institute (715 Hesburgh Library). See the conference program for more details.
The conference is made possible by grants from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters, the Henkels Lecture Series, the Medieval Institute, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Department of English.
For more information, contact Tim Machan at tmachan@nd.edu