John D. Niles, Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has long been a major voice in Old English studies. This special issue of the international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Humanities, together with a resultant book, will celebrate his achievements while promoting innovative work in the field.

The collection will focus on the legacy of Old English poetry broadly conceived and will include, for example, studies of particular poems, themes, or verse passages; of the translation or reception history of particular texts; of linguistic features of the poetry and their subsequent influence; of current historical and archaeological studies and how they illuminate the poetry or vice versa; of Old English poetry’s influence on various fields such as music or art; and of how an understanding of Old English prose or medieval Latin literature enriches appreciation of the poetry.

We welcome contributions that address fundamental issues in the Humanities from any meaningful perspective, combining past and present concerns in order to blaze a path toward the future. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. All submissions will be critically reviewed by peers, aiming for the highest possible scholarly level. Being an online journal, the published papers will reach their desired audiences faster, more reliably, and much more easily than traditional print versions, while upholding the same, if not even higher, scholarly standards.

The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2021. For more information see the attached flyer.

Piecing together the past: fragments of medieval and early modern books in Australia and New Zealand

Editors: Anna Welch (State Library Victoria) and Nicholas Sparks (The University of Sydney)

In the medieval and early modern period, old books were routinely cut up and reused to make new books: the materials involved – whether prepared animal skin or paper – were simply too valuable to discard. Manuscript and printed leaves from dismembered books were reused in the bindings of newer books, either as structural support, fly leaves, or as the outer surface of the binding itself. Parchment could be scraped back to create a new but never entirely blank writing surface. In both types of reuse, layers of palimpsest texts and provenance stories offer scholars a chance to recover otherwise unknown voices and histories. Conceptually, fragments also support new approaches to the interrelated histories of reading and authorship, and to considerations of the reception of books as material objects, both in the past and in the modern era.

The pragmatism of this practice of recycling combined with modern advances in technology and digital connectivity – and the scholarly impetus to study unique physical cultural material in the age of mass digitization – have given rise to a new field of study: fragmentology. Digital humanities initiatives have facilitated entirely new ways to reconstruct fragmentary elements of our medieval and early modern past, and have shown again the potency of collaborative, multidisciplinary research. Fragments present challenges and opportunities for study precisely because of their liminal nature: they sit between manuscript culture and the era of print, and challenge the delineation between traditional the academic categories of palaeography and codicology, conservation, the history of binding, art history, bibliography, provenance research and the history of the book trade.

We are seeking proposals for a collected volume focused on medieval and early modern fragments (both in manuscript and print) in Australian and New Zealand collections: the first volume of its kind for the region. Abstracts are welcomed for scholarly articles of up to 8000 words (including notes) that present new research on any aspect pertaining to fragments. Papers that explore fragments via novel, interesting approaches, such as book history, bibliography, palaeography and codicology, art history, literary history, digital humanities, and curatorial practice, are especially welcomed.

Please send us your expressions of interest, including a title, 250-word abstract, and short biography, by Tuesday 26 January 2021. We will be seeking a contract with an academic press that guarantees a fully refereed process for publication. We will confirm acceptance of your abstract before making our proposal to relevant presses by 28 February 2021, with a view to a publication going to print in 2022.

For more information please see the below flyer.