The 62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies
Thursday, May 13 through Saturday, May 15, 2027.
You are cordially invited to propose a contribution to one of the sessions sponsored by the Société Guilhem IX at the 2027 International Congress on Medieval Studies.
Deadline for Proposals: 15 September 2026
Please submit your proposal via the Congress website
The Société Guilhem IX is pleased to be able to offer financial support to colleagues coming to the conference from abroad, as well as to graduate students (both domestic and international). To apply, please send a letter of interest explaining the importance of attending the conference to your research/professional development, a recent CV, and an itemized budget justifying the amount requested. All awards will be contingent on the applicant’s abstract being accepted. Requests for financial assistance will be due by September 15 and should be sent to Vice President of the Société Guilhem IX, Courtney Joseph Wells (vice-president@guilhem-ix.org). All requests received by that time will be read and evaluated by the Société’s Board.
Session 1: Tyrants, Despots, Cads, and Bullies in Old Occitan texts (A session of papers)
Modality: In-person
From Ezzelino’s mission to have Sordello kidnap Cunizza from her husband against her will to Bertran de Born’s and Guillem de Berguedà’s diatribes against Alfons I the Troubadour, Occitan texts boast their share of despotic and insolent rulers. For this panel, we invite contributions that engage with the politics of Old Occitan texts and demonstrate how they can be spaces of resistance. While the lyric provides a plurality of perspectives (for Bertran and Guillem, Alfons is a tyrant; for Giraut de Bornelh and Peire Vidal, he is a great ruler/patron), narrative texts often set up historical rulers as despots to be dethroned. But lyric texts can also be written from the perspective of the despot: take, for example, Charles of Anjou’s own foray into lyric, or even Guilhem IX himself, whose self-representation as a philandering ruler who leverages his power to take the wives of his vassals with impunity could certainly be characterized as sexual misconduct of a ruler. All of these leaders and more could be said to be invoking a sort of stato di eccezione to satisfy their own ends. Papers of this panel will explore the Old Occitan text as the discursive space in which despots consolidate their positions and their critics speak truth to power.
Session 2: Spotlight on Guihem IX (A Roundtable)
Modality: In-person
For this roundtable, we solicit short presentations on the first recorded troubadour, Guilhem IX, to be followed by a lively open conversation afterwards. While Guilhem has received perhaps the lion’s share of critical attention in troubadour studies, fundamental questions remain unanswered: where (or from who) did he learn to compose vers in Occitan? Who precisely was his intended audience? To what extent was his audience in on the joke? What do the current tools of manuscript studies (and especially of the new philological concentration on individual manuscripts) reveal to us about the transmission of his corpus? While answers have been proposed to these questions, it is time for these answers to be reexamined in light of new critical perspectives on troubadour lyric and medieval transmission.
The Société Guilhem IX continues to offer:
- A complimentary one-year membership in the Société (currently $15.00 US), including a subscription to the journal TENSO, to any graduate student, regardless of country of residence, whose abstract is accepted for inclusion in sessions sponsored by the Société Guilhem IX at ICMS Kalamazoo;
- Payment of the registration fee for the International Congress on Medieval Studies to any individual not residing in North America whose abstract is accepted for inclusion in a session sponsored by the Société Guilhem IX.