Call for Submissions

The editors invite your submissions to the following issues scheduled to appear in 2026. Send one hard copy of the manuscript double-spaced, including endnotes, along with an electronic copy (by email attachment or in a shared folder online), following the style guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed., chap. 14 on documentation). More specific contributor guidelines may be consulted on the journal website. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words inclusive of notes. Illustrations accompanying a manuscript should be submitted ideally in the form of TIFF digital files, and permissions for their reproduction must be provided before publication. Submissions pass through anonymous specialist review before publication. We do not consider articles that have been published elsewhere or are under simultaneous consideration with another publisher. Send to: Michael Cornett, Managing EditorJournal of Medieval and Early Modern StudiesDuke University340B Trent HallBox 90656Durham, NC [email protected]://jmems.trinity.duke.eduWhether in relation to the circulation of poetic forms across different languages and traditions globally, to the envisioning of local, national, and transnational discursive communities, or to the negotiation of poetic filiations and social positions, lyric poetry has in recent years offered a favorable site for inquiry into community formation and its politics. Community formation has been described variously in different fields, as based on reciprocal identification among individuals as members of an imaginary group; communal systems of knowledge, values, and beliefs; shared interpretive strategies and responses to culturally selected objects; joint goals or interests; a spontaneous coming together; and collective affects and moods. This special issue, however, asks more specific questions related to community formation and a use of language that may be called “lyric”: Why were a variety of social, political, religious, and intellectual relations negotiated by means of lyric poetry in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period? How did lyric poetry as a particular use of language facilitate or contribute to community formation in premodern worlds? Can lyric poetry, intended as a transhistorical and transcultural use of language, help us to conceive of forms of community not based on pre-established identities, such as group, knowledge system, interpretive strategy, interest, position, or practice? Submissions should explore such questions that are necessarily situated at the intersection of cultural and material history, on the one hand, and literary studies and theory on the other, and they should therefore adopt a transnational perspective.Deadline for submission of manuscripts: November 1, 2024For this open-topic issue of the journal, the editors invite articles that are both informed by historical inquiry and alert to issues raised by contemporary theoretical debate. We expect that essays will be grounded in an intimate knowledge of a particular past and that their argumentation reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation. We are particularly committed to work that seeks to overcome the polarization between history and theory in the study of premodern Western culture.Deadline for submission of manuscripts: March 1, 2025