Women’s Words: Female Instruction in the Medieval British Isles
51st International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
May 12¬15, 2016

We invite you to participate in our session “Women’s Words: Female Instruction in the Medieval British Isles” at the 2016 meeting of the International Congress of Medieval Studies, May 12 – 16, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI.

Our session invites papers which explore the relationship between teaching texts and learning women in conjunction with the language, locations, and spaces of female education. Submissions may include discussions of vernacular and Latin learning, spiritual and non-religious feminine instruction, the iconography and depiction of female learning, and the presentation and exchange of educational materials in a manuscript culture.

We hope to address gaps in current research and to explore the dynamics of female pedagogical literature, the creation of gendered instructional voices, and the forms and genres of women’s educational material, including explicitly didactic texts as well as books of manners, romances, and hagiography. We also invite papers examining the societal significance and influence of medieval women’s instructional literature especially in relation to works written and produced by women writers. In order to facilitate a dialogue between individual presentations, we will limit topics to the British Isles, but will leave the time period open to all medieval texts (500-1500).

Please submit a one-page abstract and a completed Participant Information Form (found at http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html) to session organizers Jenny C. Bledsoe (Emory University) and Lainie Pomerleau (University of Georgia) at womenswritingmedievalinstitute@gmail.com by September 15, 2015.