A call for papers for a Special Session at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI (May 10-13, 2018). E-mail 250-word abstracts to eric.weiskott@bc.edu by September 15, 2017.
Elections before Elections: Insular Political Prophecy
Inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Prophecies of Merlin, the tradition of political prophecy in Britain covered numerous centuries and languages, from the twelfth century to the seventeenth and from Welsh to English, French, Latin, and Scots. The genre of political prophecy combines conventionality and topicality in unfamiliar ways, presenting the recent political past as an imagined future and serving (sometimes simultaneously) as political propaganda and social protest. Relatively understudied, prophecies are often unedited and are to be found in large, incompletely catalogued manuscript collections. The publication of Victoria Flood’s Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England (2016), a major study, marks renewed interest in this strange and urgent mode of writing. Political prophecy has obvious relevance to contemporary national politics, particularly regarding the relationship between political discourse and truth (notably, in the outrage over fake news in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election) and the rhetorical use of the future for political purposes.
This session will solicit papers addressing a general scholarly audience, concerning political prophecy in Latin or any of the vernaculars of Britain, the manuscript tradition of prophecy, and medieval insular politics. Possible topics include: regnal politics and propaganda; the history and politics of individual texts; regionalism; multilingualism; the relationship between writing and medieval insular (proto-)national politics; new texts discovered in the archives; prophecy and other genres of writing; texts and manuscripts as evidence for social history; and literary form.
Eric Weiskott 