Sexuality and Literacy in Early Medieval England

Dear Colleagues,

In what ways are gender and sexuality implicit in expressions of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts, and in the culture of early medieval English literacy more generally? How can we use sexuality as a category to think with and through (as well as about) in pre- and immediately post-Conquest literature? How can we explore and interrogate beyond the presence or absence of gender(ed) and/or sexual(ized) subjects and objects of texts in order to engage more fully with the investment of multiple and fluid genders and sexualities intrinsic in the very nature of texts as texts, as the encounters, processes, and/or material artifacts?

Contributions are sought for a gathering of articles that will speak to these critical questions, addressing such topics as, for example:

• Confusions and collisions of gender (natural and/or grammatical) and genre;
• Sexualities as implicit in narrative structure;
• Dissonances and consonances of natural and grammatical gender, especially in translations between Anglo-Latin and Old English;
• Queer or errant grammatical forms, including “mistakes” that reveal underlying tensions and anxieties, untimely linguistic ghosts of obsolete linguistic features, or paradoxical and fluid expressions of agency in grammatical forms;
• Instances of the transmission of manuscripts that disrupt privileged and normalized patriarchal, and (hetero)sexualized metaphors of lineage and propagation;
• Disruptions of gender(ed) authorship/authority in instances of the appropriation of gendered (oral) voices in (written) texts, whether female to male or male to female, especially in translations (explicit or implicit);
• Relationship(s) of sources and analogues beyond normalized patrilineal metaphors;
• The erotics of literacy, that is, the consideration of reading as a sensual experience mediated through the sensual interface and corporeality of the manuscript, or as an intimate encounter between readers and authors/scribes.

Prof. Dr. Lisa Weston
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.