September 1, 2023
The Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture project (SOEALLC) is happy to announce two sponsored sessions at the ICMS at Kalamazoo in May 2024:
Educational Texts in Pre-Conquest England (Session of Papers)
The Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture (SOEALLC) project invites submissions for “Educational Texts in Pre-Conquest England” at ICMS 2024. This session will explore the role educational texts played as both sources and repositories of information in England before the Norman Conquest. Papers might consider the sources of the English ars grammatica, the reception of philosophic dialogues in Alfred’s court, or how a nugget of Patristic wisdom ended up in the poetic or hagiographic corpora. While our principal focus is Pre-Conquest England, we are delighted to consider papers that consider source relationships across conventional chronological and geographical boundaries.
The Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture (SOEALLC) project invites submissions for “Sourcing Early English Homilies (a Roundtable).” This session will gather several scholars together in a roundtable format to discuss how source criticism can enrich our understanding of early Medieval homilies. Participants might offer new arguments about sources for particular homilies, consider the methodological challenges of homiletic corpora, or discuss how manuscript circulation complicates the project of identifying source relationships in homilies. While our principle focus is pre-Conquest England, we invite participants to define the period broadly, and we welcome proposals that seek to innovate methodologically.
All submissions are due September 15th, through the Congress’s Confex system.
January 27, 2023
We’ve just published our first newsletter, with updates about recent developments and future directions for SOEALLC. We hope that these updates bring you a little bit of source-study-focused joy.
You can read the newsletter on our Humanities Commons repository here.
If you’d like to receive our newsletter and other updates about the project via email in the future, please email us at SOEALLproject@gmail.com to be added to our contacts list.
August 18, 2022
The Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture project (SOEALLC) is happy to announce two sponsored sessions at the ICMS at Kalamazoo in May 2023:
Augustine in Pre-Conquest England (Session of Papers)
This session will focus on Augustine of Hippo’s influence on Old English and Anglo-Latin literary culture. To that end, we invite papers that consider what quotations, references, translations, and manuscript circulation can tell us about how and why Augustine was being read in early England. As Augustine’s corpus is so large and varied, possibilities for papers are many: proposers might consider the influence of Augustinian themes on Old English poetry or homilies, how Augustinian the Alfredian Soliloquies truly is, or what manuscript evidence can tell us about the specifics of early English interest in Augustine. We invite contributions from scholars of all methodological bents, and, while we are focused on Augustine’s presence in pre-Conquest England, we welcome papers that cast a wider chronological net as well.
Source Study and Material Culture (Roundtable)
While source criticism is usually considered to be a textual enterprise, this session will gather several scholars together in a roundtable format to discuss the ways in which material culture (archaeology, visual art, manuscript studies, etc.) can inform the source critic’s work. Participants might reflect on the way in which art can be a “source” for literature and vice versa, the uses of material culture to help us interpret source relationships, or the ways in which source study in a manuscript culture always requires attention to the material. In putting on this roundtable, we hope for a rich session that puts different methods in dialogue with one another. Source criticism is our principle focus, but we invite paleographers, archaeologists, art historians, and others whose distinctive methods can challenge source critics to refine their own approach. While our principle focus is pre-Conquest England, we welcome papers that reach beyond those geographical and temporal boundaries to consider source relationships more broadly.
Both sessions are virtual, so please feel free to apply even if you aren’t planning to attend the conference in person. All submissions are due September 15th, through the Congress’s Confex system.
August 17, 2021
CFPs for ICMS at Kalamazoo 2022
New Directions in Source Study (Paper Session)
This session will include papers that illustrate the ongoing vitality and utility of source criticism in the study of Old English and Anglo-Latin literature and culture. The papers in this session will show how the careful examination of source relationships can inform and be informed by the diverse methods that constitute the field at present. This might include, e.g., a reading of the Old English Bede against the Historia Ecclesiasticain light of current work on race in the Old English period, or a discussion of Alfred’s use of Augustine informed by recent interest in multilingualism.
New Directions in Source Study? (Roundtable)
May 4, 2021
In Memoriam: Paul Szarmach
We were very saddened to learn of the recent passing of Paul Szarmach. Paul was one of the founders of the SASLC Project (now SOEALLC) in the early 1980s, which developed out of a conversation Paul had with Tom Hill (Cornell) and Jimmy Cross (Liverpool). Paul wrote the successful NEH grant proposals that funded the project and played the key role in the project’s organization and administration, including the annual and ongoing Kalamazoo SASLC sessions that Paul started in order to showcase the work of the project. The years that Paul led the project saw the publication of the Trial Version (1990), co-edited by Paul with Fred Biggs and Tom Hill, and of SASLC Volume One (2001), co-edited by Paul with Fred, Tom, and Gordon Whatley; of two OEN Subsidia volumes, one on The Liturgical Books of Anglo-Saxon England, edited by Richard W. Pfaff (1995), and one on Ambrose, with Pseudo-Ambrose and Ambrosiaster (1997), by Dabney Bankert, Jessica Wegmann, and Charles D. Wright; and of two publications co-sponsored by Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: Michael Lapidge’s Abbreviations for Sources and Specification of Standard Editions for Sources (1988) and Janet Bately’s Anonymous Old English Homilies: A Preliminary Bibliography of Source Studies (1993). Paul’s energy and acumen were instrumental in the project’s launch and early publications, and his good humor buoyed participants in our annual Thursday morning meetings in the Stinson Lounge at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, where “Paulus” treated us to variously colored “blitzes” (as he always called his handouts) and guided our deliberations. Paul’s tireless work facilitating research, promoting the Kalamazoo Congress and the Rawlinson Center, and sponsoring publishing venues such as OEN and its Subsidia series (not to mention the many essay collections he edited) united the field and served us all. His own scholarship and the scholarship he fostered have left a lasting legacy, not just in the SOEALLC project but in similar endeavors such as the source-studies work incorporated in the ECHOE Project in Göttingen. We are grateful to Paul for his inspiration, generosity, and leadership, and we hope that the continuing work of SOEALLC will honor his legacy and memory. We offer our condolences and affection to his wife Katherine.