Sexuality and Literacy in Early Medieval England

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 14 February 2025 | Viewed by 817

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
English Department, Fresno State University, Fresno, CA 93740, USA
Interests: Old English and Anglo-Latin poetry and poetics; translation; queer and feminist theory

Special Issue Information

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

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