Call for Papers

The 58th International Congress on Medieval Studies will take place in a hybrid format Thursday, May 11 through Saturday, May 13, 2022.

You are cordially invited to propose participation in a session sponsored by the Société Guilhem IX at the
2023 International Congress on Medieval Studies
Deadline for Proposals: 15 September 2022
Please submit a proposal via the Congress website 


Session 1: Speculative Philology (A session of papers)

We take “speculative philology” as a term for any moment when an editor or critic or performer is obliged to fill in a lacuna in the surviving text or melody, whether the gap has been created by damage to the manuscript, by a scribal error or oversight such as an eye skip, or by a copyist’s more intentional suppression of a passage. Faced with such a lacuna, the editor must choose between indicating a gap by an ellipsis (e.g. …) and offering an educated guess for the missing material. What are the broader implications of this choice? What have the consequences been for the understanding of particular texts? When has speculative philology gone wrong, and what were the effects? How do we know there was a lacuna? How do editors working within different traditions of textual criticism approach the problem? How do the distinct transmission histories of different Occitan texts set the terms for the kind of speculative philology those texts admit? What are the parameters within which performers should make use of borrowed melodies? How could historical performance be creative and generative? We welcome proposals that address these questions or any others that are raised by the practice of speculative philology. 


Session 2: Spotlight on Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (A Roundtable)

This roundtable, the second in the Société Guilhem IX’s “Spotlight” series, will focus on Raimbaut de Vaquieras, one of the most innovative and widely-traveled of the troubadours. Moving from his native Provence into Italy, and then, with Boniface I of Monferrat, to Constantinope and Thessalonica, Raimbaut experimented with versification, multilingual poems, and new genres. Eight of his melodies survive. We welcome proposals dealing with any aspect of Raimbaut’s work or biography. We particularly encourage participants to engage with songs that are not frequently the object of scholarly commentary.


The Société Guilhem IX is pleased to offer:

  • A complimentary one-year membership in the Société (in 2022, $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 either of the sessions sponsored in 2023 at Kalamazoo by the Société Guilhem IX;
  • Payment of the registration fee (in 2022, $95.00 US [students]; ca. $165.00 US [non-students]) for the International Congress on Medieval Studies to any individual not residing in North America whose abstract is accepted for inclusion in either of the sessions sponsored in 2021 at Kalamazoo by the Société Guilhem IX. The same individual(s) will receive a complimentary one-year membership in the Société (in 2020, $15.00), including a subscription to the journal TENSO.


Submissions:

Those interested in presenting a paper in Session 1, and those who would like to participate in the Roundtable, should, by 15 September 2022, send a proposal to Vice-President of the Société, Courtney Wells, at wells@hws.edu, or complete the proposal submission via the Congress website.