Two weeks left to submit abstracts to Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis. Attendance, accommodation, and conference meal fully funded, travel bursaries available, and publication opportunity. What's not to love #medievalsky #medieval #historians
Sat down with the wonderful Dr Stef Conner for a festive chat about sex in a medieval Christmas story. Have a listen here!
#histmed #medievalsky #skystorians
youtu.be/NjPoqewOtDw?...
Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis 17-18 September 2026 Pembroke College, University of Cambridge Gendered work on medieval popular politics has tended to revolve around the exceptional. This workshop explores how studies of gender can reconfigure discourses of medieval political community. We ask how attending to gendered bodies and identities might help us better understand the fissures in political culture in medieval Europe. Marking, for example, women’s participation as either absent or rare confines their involvement to the historical margins. How did literary as well as non-literary texts from various genres, ranging from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, engage with gendered political action? How did ideas of gender stabilise or destabilise political performances? We invite abstracts for 25-minute papers, as well as expressions of interest for participation. We welcome papers with a historical, literary, or interdisciplinary focus. Potential topics could include but are not limited to: • Frameworks for understanding non-normative gender expressions in political spaces. • Studies of politics at the intersection of gendered, queer, or trans methodologies. • Histories of masculinities in political community. • Emotion and/or Affect • Weaponized/defensive gender • Manoeuvring bodies through political crisis • Inclusion and exclusion • Different sites of political discourse, such as domestic and non-violent conflict. Collectively, the papers will interrogate the role of gender in political discourse. Selected papers may be considered for inclusion in an edited volume. Means-based bursaries for speakers may be available by further application. Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 200 words to Alice Raw (ar889@cam.ac.uk) and Abbie Fray (abigail.fray@unibe.ch) by 16 January 2026.
Call for Papers! Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis #medievalsky #Fissures2026
Couldn’t be happier with this
@elenarossi.bsky.social makes the best gifts!
I am thinking here of Timothy Gould’s interpretation (in a personal communication, 1994) of Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins ‘‘ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—/ That perches in the soul—’’ (116, poem no. 254). Gould suggests that the symptoms of fluttering hope are rather like those of posttraumatic stress disorder, with the difference that the apparently absent cause of perturbation lies in the future, rather than in the past.
Good morning to this footnote and no one else
(From E. Kosofsky Sedgewick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C., 2004), 123-151.)
Looking at the 15th century visitations of Norwich, and I'm utterly enchanted by Sister Anna Marten, a nun of the priory of Carrow, who complains that the Psalms are being sung too fast, and without proper observation of breaths and pauses. It was not like that when she was young!
Jessopp ed. (1888)
Just thinking about this delightful ghost hand imprinted in CUL EDR D/2/2. Only visible as you turn the page in the light.
