Medieval and Early Modern Mediation: Composition and Materiality

The Medieval and Early Modern panel for the (dis)junctions 2012 conference seeks papers that address material considerations influencing studies of medieval and early modern literature. Encompassing the transition from manuscript to print books, these two periods offer unique perspectives on the relationship of narratives to the materials on which they are recorded. Of particular interest are questions of audience, authorship, manuscript production and illumination, early scholarship, spirituality, and identity construction. Provocative questions which papers might address include the following: How have the modes of meaning-making changed with the advent of print? What is the relationship between narrative and manuscript, and how does that differ from the relationship between narrative and printed text? How did medieval and early modern audiences interact with and relate to written and printed texts? How can the materiality of surviving medieval and early modern texts provide twenty-first century scholars with insight into the ways in which scholars, theologians, and laymen of those periods understood the immaterial, and how can these insights change our perspective on the ways in which we make sense of philosophical and theoretical issues? Presentations may approach these questions from a variety of critical or theoretical perspectives and/or through various media.