Medievalists from the School of English were well represented at this year’s IMC, one of the world’s largest international conferences for medieval studies (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/). On Monday, research findings arising from the AHRC-funded project ‘Spreading the Light: Mapping the Vernacular Elucidarium in Medieval England’ were the subject of one session. Dr Sarah James and Dr Huw Grange sought to tease out the likely readers of the text in English and French respectively; they were joined by Dr Sarah Bowden of King’s College, London, who discussed the evidence for the reception of the text in medieval Germany.
A series of four sessions on Tuesday, co-organised by Dr Ryan Perry, were held in memory of the great manuscript scholar Professor Lister Matheson of Michigan State University. Dr Perry’s paper explored early production contexts for the Middle English prose Brut, while Professor Tony Edwards gave a moving eulogy before discussing the sale of Brut manuscripts during the twentieth century.
On Wednesday two of the School’s PhD students, Rhiannon Maskell and Tom Lawrence, joined with Anne Paton of the University of Glasgow for a session on disease in vernacular literature. Rhiannon’s paper proposed the existence of a particular series of cultural constructions of leprosy in late-medieval England, while Tom challenged the scholarly view that the Middle Ages conceptualised disease superstitiously, in terms of divine punishment for sin. On Thursday a third PhD student, Jenny Harmer, gave a paper exploring the function of acoustic borders in the great medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The presence of so many of the School’s staff and postgraduate students at this major conference attests to the continuing strength of teaching and research in the medieval period, and plans are already taking shape for next year’s IMC.