New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, newsletter

9 March 2025

by Candace Barrington

The committees responsible for organizing the Middle English and the Chaucer panels at the 2026 MLA Conference request your proposals for these five calls.

1. The Premodern Anthropocene: The Middle English Forum proposes a panel considering human impacts upon the natural world in Medieval English literature. Potential topics include experiences of famine, the Little Ice Age, land reclamation and geoengineering projects, the natural vs. supernatural, motifs of productivity and human value, the memory or prediction of civilizational decay, human/textual embodiment and materiality, and/or mutability of life. We are especially interested in papers that explore medieval literary depictions of the effects of human intervention on the natural world.

The idea of the “Anthropocene,” an age of dramatic ecological transformation driven by human activity, is usually tied to the Industrial Revolution and modernity’s embrace of automation, capitalism, imperial expansion, and environmental exploitation, a fact that is reflected in its many alternative names (Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Cthulucene). Yet, as paleoclimatologists and historians alike increasingly argue, ideologies of the Anthropocene must also grapple with the deep medieval past, for it is the historical continuities of human activity that shape our contemporary engagements with the natural world, and human impacts on the environment are of much longer duration than this more abbreviated history suggests. Please send proposals (~200 words) to Tekla Bude at tekla.bude@oregonstate.eduby Friday, March 21.

2. Theorizing Institutions in Middle English Literature. How does Middle English literature engage frameworks of institutional power and authority? Beyond representations of institutions and institutional authorities, how do Middle English texts reflect, refract, and theorize those institutions—the Church, the guilds, and the aristocracy—that condition their modes of production and circulation? From the widespread use of exempla in didactic texts, to sociopolitical commentary in Piers Plowman, to the vivid (and bruising) encounters with institutional authorities in the Book of Margery Kempe, we find in the Middle English corpus many examples of the shaping force of institutions and those who wield their powers.

Furthermore, how might these concerns resonate with challenges found in higher education today? We often deal with widespread frustrations as a result of institutional actions—including, but not limited to, challenges concerning Israel/Palestine, funding reductions at universities, governance of scholarly organizations, adversarial positions of state and federal governments. How do we, as scholars of Middle English, address on-going pressures from institutions like universities and professional associations that condition and support our own work, whether on or off campus? Or, even with these pressures, how do we keep building our field and supporting our colleagues and students? Please send proposals (~200 words) to Ruen-chuan Ma (rma@uvu.edu) and Shoshana Adler (shoshana.adler@vanderbilt.edu) by Friday, March 21.

3. Chaucerian Attention Economies. This roundtable seeks to explore premodern attention economies through short papers addressing the literature and art of Chaucer, his contemporaries, and later authors influenced by his work . Presentations might consider questions such as: Where do we find representations of attention and distraction economies in these works? What premodern models of attention and distraction in philosophical or theological sources influence later medieval literature and the arts? How do premodern or modern concepts of mediacy and immediation, sensology, or idleness inflect medieval aesthetics of attention and/or distraction? What kind of work might inattention perform on individual subjectivity or social relation? What modes of perception emerge thematically and/or formally from these texts and how do they prefigure or put pressure on contemporary paradigms of attention? How might recent works on slow studies and post-critique reading be put in dialogue with medieval literature and arts?  Please send abstracts of 250 words to Ingrid Nelson (inelson@amherst.edu) and Adin E. Lears (alears@vcu.edu) by March 10, 2025.

4. Chaucer and Lydgate. This roundtable invites papers that reassess the relationship between the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. What can we learn by applying new theoretical and methodological paradigms to both author’s works? What insights are gained from a comparative approach that are not offered by a study of these authors in isolation? What assumptions that have guided past work on these authors should be revisited?

Chaucer and Lydgate are, arguably, the two most prolific named Middle English poets. They have much in common: they draw on similar sources like the legends of Troy and Thebes, they make use of similar poetic forms such as rhyme royal, and both are deeply in dialogue with Continental literature and late medieval cultures of translation. Their writings circulate together widely in fifteenth-century manuscripts and early printed copies, often without explicit attribution to either author.

Both poets made foundational contributions to a nascent English literary tradition. They are widely praised by later admirers, but by the sixteenth century, their paths diverged: Chaucer’s reputation remained steady while Lydgate’s reputation entered a precipitous decline. Today, Lydgate is best known for being Chaucer’s greatest admirer, for being very prolific, and for producing poems that are both boring and of dubious literary merit. As a result of his exceptional status, Chaucer’s works have benefitted from sustained critical and editorial attention from a range of theoretical and methodological approaches; studies in Lydgate’s works are fewer, and largely restricted to a narrow portion of his capacious output.

We welcome papers that address issues of authorship and canonization as well as those that offer comparative analysis of their works. We especially welcome papers that engage with new and emerging critical paradigms.

Please send paper proposals to Megan Cook (mlcook@colby.edu) and Clint Morrison (clinton.morrison@austin.utexas.edu) by 15 March 2025.

5. The Poetics and Performance of Middle English Drama. Research on Middle English drama over the last several decades has thought extensively about the genre’s theological commitments, performance auspices, and historical implications, and such work is essential for scholars considering the plays’ language as it appears on the manuscript leaf or printed page. This panel asks, though, what happens if we begin from the other direction, paying particular attention to what is literary in Middle English drama, without losing sight of its performance aspects. How do the formal qualities of Middle English drama engage with, resist, undermine, or enhance their theological or performance effects?
Recent studies by scholars of drama, including Tamara Atkin, Rebecca Davis, and Emma Lipton, and formalist scholars of multimedia performance, such as Seeta Chaganti, Mariana Lopez, and Jesse Rodin, have shown what compelling readings can emerge from combining sensitivity to questions of form and poetics with attention to conditions of performance. A deeper examination of the language of Middle English drama can enrich the study of these texts and give fuller credit to their metrical and stanzaic complexity, their wordplay, and their connections to kindred literary forms. How do we bring such questions of form fully into dialogue with questions about reception, historical situation, and community formation that these plays also raise? And what happens if we think of ME drama in connection with non-dramatic forms that may share aspects of its poetic commitments? This is a jointly-sponsored panel with the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, please send proposals (~200 words) to Nicole Rice (ricen@stjohns.edu) and Maggie Solberg (esolberg@bowdoin.edu) by Friday, March 21.