Call for Submissions

Abstract

The editors invite your submissions to the following issues scheduled to appear in 2023. Send one hard copy of the manuscript double-spaced, including endnotes, along with an electronic copy (by e-mail attachment or in a shared folder online), following the style guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed., chap. 14 on documentation). More specific contributor guidelines may be consulted on the journal website. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words inclusive of notes. Illustrations accompanying a manuscript should be submitted ideally in the form of TIFF digital files, and permissions for their reproduction must be provided before publication. Submissions pass through anonymous specialist review before publication. We do not consider articles that have been published elsewhere or are under simultaneous consideration with another publisher. Send to: Michael Cornett, Managing EditorJournal of Medieval and Early Modern StudiesDuke University340B Trent HallBox 90656Durham, NC 27708JMEMS@duke.eduhttps://jmems.trinity.duke.eduVolume 53 / Number 2 / May 2023For this open-topic issue of the journal, the editors invite articles that are both informed by historical inquiry and alert to issues raised by contemporary theoretical debate. We expect that essays will be grounded in an intimate knowledge of a particular past and that their argumentation reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation. We are particularly committed to work that seeks to overcome the polarization between history and theory in the study of premodern Western culture.Submissions may be sent starting September 1, 2021Deadline for submission of manuscripts: March 1, 2022Edited by James SimpsonVolume 53 / Number 3 / September 2023The truth wreckage inflicted by Trumpism might deliver a salutary jolt to literary scholars. Trumpistas may celebrate the forever-constructed nature of truth, but that is precisely what literary scholarship had been doing for decades. Long before Roland Barthes pronounced his fatwa on authors and authorship in 1968, in fact, the “intentionalist fallacy” had long excised the author and his or her intentions from serious interpretation. Defenses of intentionalism are routinely dismissed as “conservative.” The self-inflicted disciplinary damage caused by this proscription has been considerable: other practitioners in the human sciences (notably in law and ethics) place intention at the center of their heuristic practice; they remain baffled by the claim that interpretative study of any kind can be conducted without some appeal to intention.A journal devoted to medieval and early modern studies has a special, further role to play in any reevaluation of how intention might function interpretatively. Our notion of intention is historically grounded: intention rose dramatically from the early twelfth century as a heuristic device in legal and penitential discourse especially. We invite submissions from late medievalists and early modernists in a range of disciplines (penitential theology, law, biblical hermeneutics, and literature especially) that draw on their historical vantage point to elucidate and refresh the interpretative role of intention.Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2022