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Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures
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The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures supports and promotes research into the cultures and intellectual life of the Middle Ages.
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The SSMLL Annual Day Conference 2026: Medieval Wales wants to showcase your ground-breaking research into the language and literature of medieval Wales.

Read the full CFP in both Welsh and English at mediumaevum.org.uk/events/medie...
October 25, 2025 at 1:50 PM
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🎺Calling graduate students and those who have completed a higher degree in the last three years🎺

We want to read your new ideas and fresh perspectives! Consider submitting your work to the Medium Ævum Essay Prize 2026.
October 19, 2025 at 12:58 PM
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SSMLL are delighted to announce the opening of our Call for Papers for the 2026 Day Conference, Medieval Wales, which will be held at Cardiff University 25-26 April, 2026.

Proposals should be submitted to Dr David Callander (callanderd@cardiff.ac.uk) by 30 November.
Cardiff University and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature are pleased to announce a multi-disciplinary conference on medieval Wales, to be held at Cardiff University on the 25th and 26th of April 2026. The conference will provide a space for discussion and collaboration between scholars of all disciplinary backgrounds interested in medieval Wales. The conference programme will include the Medium Ævum annual lecture, which will be delivered by Professor Helen Fulton (University of Bristol). The Henry Loyn Memorial Lecture will be held on the evening of the 24th of April, and will be delivered by Professor John Hines (Cardiff University). We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations representing any specialization that sheds light on medieval Wales. We shall particularly welcome papers that discuss encounters between different languages and traditions and their consequences. Proposals are welcome from speakers at all career stages and papers can be delivered in English or Welsh. Proposals should include a title and an abstract (100–200 words) and should be submitted to Dr David Callander (callanderd@cardiff.ac.uk) by 30 November.
October 1, 2025 at 11:27 AM
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Submissions are now open for the Medium Ævum Essay Prize 2026!

📅Deadline: 12:00 midday (GMT) 1st December 2025
📝6,500-8,000 word essay
👩‍🎓Open to graduate students and those who have graduated from a higher degree in the last 3 years
🏆£500

Read more on our website: mediumaevum.org.uk/essayprize
September 10, 2025 at 1:16 PM
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The Society was kindly gifted a replica model of 'The Monk Astride a Wyvern' from The Met Museum by Prof. Mary Carruthers. The original dates from the mid c.12th, and was made in Magdeburg, Germany.

We need your help naming our new wyvern-riding wordsmith mascot! Comment your suggestions below 👇
August 22, 2025 at 1:24 PM
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🌍Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middles Ages🌏was packed with exciting research, from Dante to digital reconstruction, and the self-commentary of John Walton to that of producing a new anthology edition.
Thank you to our speakers, graduate chairs, and audience for joining us.
July 21, 2025 at 10:54 AM
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Our final event of the day is the SSMLL Annual Lecture presented by Alastair Minnis (Yale). Minnis' lecture, ‘(Re)anthologizing Literary Theory from Medieval Commentary Tradition: New Parameters', is offering insight into the additions being made to the landmark anthology...
July 19, 2025 at 4:34 PM
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During the AGM, President Alastair Minnis congratulated the winner of the 2025 Medium Aevum Essay Prize, Chenyun Zhu (Nanjing University) for their essay 'The Curse and the Seal: Fertility Myth in the Nine Herbs Charm'. We are delighted to have Chenyun join us at the conference.
July 19, 2025 at 3:40 PM
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Lucy Turton, one of SSMLL's graduate observers and a current doctoral student at St Andrews now fields questions, comments and discussion with the audience and our Session III speakers.
July 19, 2025 at 2:18 PM
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The second paper of Session II is (Lincoln College, Oxford) 'Convincing via Commentary: The Glosses to the Pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula'. Menmuir's paper focuses on a metrical discussion of Ovidian authorship that is sometimes circulated with the de Vetula.
July 19, 2025 at 11:22 AM
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We're now underway with Session II. First is Lucie Doležalová (Charles University, Prague) and her paper ‘Nescio corrigere: Scribes' Comments in Late Medieval Bohemia’. Doležalová explains her focus on scribal comments at the end of texts, particularly those which comment on the text and scribe.
July 19, 2025 at 10:59 AM
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The Q&A for Session I is chaired by current St Andrews doctoral student Nilanjana Goswami, with lively cross-paper questioning and discussion.
July 19, 2025 at 10:19 AM
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Our second paper of Session I is Paola Nasti's (Northwestern, Illinois) paper, ‘Dante the exegete’. Nasti begins by noting the dominance of Dante to studies of commentary on classical poetry, and her desire to shift the focus to Dante's hermeneutics and exegesis of scripture.
July 19, 2025 at 10:13 AM
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The sun has risen on beautiful St Andrews, and our 🌍Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages🌏 speakers are ready to share their exciting research.

This account will be live-posting tantalising insights into their presentations throughout today.
July 19, 2025 at 8:07 AM
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This year's Medium Aevum Annual Lecture, '(Re)anthologizing Literary Theory from Medieval Commentary Tradition: New Parameters' will be given by SSMLL President, Professor Alastair Minnis, at 🌍Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages🌍

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June 30, 2025 at 9:08 AM
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Session III (2:00pm-3:30pm) of 🌍Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages🌍 will feature the papers of:

📖Cosima Gillhammer (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)
📖Raphaela Rohrhofer (St Andrews)
📖Ian Johnson (St Andrews)

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Cosima Gillhammer is Career Development Fellow in Medieval English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She completed two degrees in Medieval Literature at LMU Munich before coming to Oxford as a doctoral student and Clarendon Scholar. She has subsequently held positions as Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Postdoctoral Researcher at the English Faculty, Oxford, and Research Fellow at the Huntington Library, California. Cosima’s research focuses on textual criticism, biblical scholarship, and the liturgy in medieval England. Her publications include an edition of the Wycliffite Old Testament Lectionary (EETS), as well as an edition of a fifteenth-century history of the ancient and biblical world in Trinity College, MS 29 (Middle English Texts Series). Her new trade book Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy is forthcoming in April 2025 (Reaktion Press). Raphaela Rohrhofer is a literary scholar and art historian who specialises in the subtle expressions of divine ineffability in late medieval contemplative literature and art. Her Leverhulme-funded project at the University of St Andrews, Contemplative Nothingness in the Late Medieval British Isles and Beyond, explores the heights of rapture as expressed in the hermeneutical impasse of nothing and nothingness. It brings together texts in over a dozen languages and the visual artefacts of the global Middle Ages. A recent publication from this project appears in the newly-released volume of The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England. Before coming to St Andrews, Dr Rohrhofer held lectureships in Medieval English Literature and Medieval Art History at the University of Oxford, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on Julian of Norwich’s apophatic poetics of love and dread—currently being revised into a monograph. She is co-editor of, and a contributor to, ‘New Visions of Julian of Norwich’, a forthcoming special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum based on Oxford’s eponymous largest hybrid conference to date, which she co-organised in 2022. Her first monograph, Familial Discourses in The Book of Margery Kempe, received four prizes. Ian Johnson is Professor of Medieval Literature and a member of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of St Andrews. He co-directed the Queen’s Belfast-St Andrews AHRC-funded project Geographies of Orthodoxy (2007-11). With Alastair Minnis he edited The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume II. The Middle Ages (2005). Publications include The Middle English Life of Christ (2013); The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, ed. with Allan Westphall (2013); The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. with Alessandra Petrina (2018); Geoffrey Chaucer in Context (ed. 2019), and Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages, ed. with Ardis Butterfield and Andrew Kraebel. He was a leading member of the COST Action New Communities of Interpretation (2013-17).
June 27, 2025 at 4:17 PM
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Session II (11:45am-12:45pm) of 🌍Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages🌍 will feature the papers of Lucie Doležalová and
@rebeccamenmuir.bsky.social

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An advert for the SSMLL annual day conference 2025, 'Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages'. This advert highlights Session II: 11:45am-12:45pm, which features ‘Nescio corrigere: Scribes' Comments in Late Medieval Bohemia’ by Lucie Doležalová (Charles University, Prague) and ‘Convincing via Commentary: The Glosses to the Pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula’ by Rebecca Menmuir (Lincoln College, Oxford). Lucie Doležalová is a full professor of Medieval Latin at Charles University Prague. Focusing primarily on late medieval manuscript culture, she has edited a number of previously unknown texts and published on the art of memory, mnemonics, obscurity, and the reception of the Bible. Her most recent monograph discusses late-medieval ‘graphomania’: Passionate Copying in Late Medieval Bohemia: The Case of Crux de Telč (1434–1504) (Prague, 2021; distributed by the University of Chicago Press). Further, together with Francesco Stella and Danuta Shanzer she edited Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond: A Millennium Heritage (John Benjamins, 2024). Lucie has a major project in progress, Innovation and Inertia: The End of Medieval Scribes (THEEND), which is being supported by the Czech Ministry of Education with a view to further major funding being sought from the ERC. She and her team are developing a relationship with St Andrews, and on the Friday afternoon before the conference a ‘proof of concept’ workshop will be held to assist the team’s preparations for a major ERC bid. Rebecca Menmuir is Darby Fellow in English at Lincoln College, Oxford. She is interested in medieval classical reception, glossing and commentaries, and forgeries, primarily focusing on Ovid and Statius. Her monograph Medieval Responses to Ovid’s Exile is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and she has edited a collection on Authenticity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, forthcoming with MIP/De Gruyter. Recently she has co-published the glosses to the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, and argued for the authenticity of the pseudo-Ovidian Nux. She is currently working on medieval Ovidian forgeries and postmedieval Chaucerian forgeries.
June 23, 2025 at 9:28 AM
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Session 1 (10:15-11:15am) of 🌍Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages🌍 will feature Andrew Kraebel's paper 'Theories of Voice in Medieval Commentary', and Paola Nasti's paper 'Dante the exegete'.

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An advert for the SSMLL annual day conference 2025, 'Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages'. This advert highlights Session 1: 10:15-11:15am, 'Theories of Voice in Medieval Commentary' by Andrew Kraebel (Trinity University, Texas) and 'Dante the exegete' by Paola Nasti (Northwestern, Illinois). Andrew Kraebel joins Rice University this year as Associate Professor of English, following a decade of teaching medieval English and Latin literature at Trinity University. His monograph, Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation (Cambridge, 2020), received the Ecclesiastical History Society’s Book Prize, as well as the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. With Ardis Butterfield and Ian Johnson, he edited Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages: Interpretation, Invention, Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2023). His essays have appeared in Speculum, Traditio, Mediaeval Studies, The Library, and other journals, as well as in various collections. With Andrew Albin he edited the essay cluster, ‘The Textual Cult of Richard Rolle: Writing Contemplation in Later Medieval England’, published in Speculum 99.4 (2024). Paola Nasti is an Associate Professor of Italian at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on medieval Italian literature, religious culture, and textual and intellectual history. Her first book, Favole d'amore e "saver profondo": la tradizione salomonica in Dante (Longo Editore, 2007), examines Dante’s engagement with the biblical books attributed to King Solomon. Her most recent monograph, I morsi della carità: Dante e la Bibbia (Pozzi, 2024), explores key aspects of Dante’s biblical and religious thought, including Christ-mimesis and sainthood, salvation, soteriology and ecclesiology, prophecy, knowledge, biblical interpretation, and the charisma of poetry. She also co-edited Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary (Notre Dame University Press, 2013), contributing to scholarly discussions on early interpretations of the Divine Comedy. Her current research includes a forthcoming monograph on Dante’s exegetical poetry.
June 21, 2025 at 1:45 PM
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Registration for 🌍Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages🌍 closes in 10 days on June 30th.

In the lead up to the deadline, we will be featuring our fantastic speakers. Our first speaker is Bess Rhodes, who will be sharing a 'Virtual Walkthrough of Medieval St Andrews'.
An advertisement for the upcoming Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages, highlighting the 9:45-10:15am session 'Virtual Walkthrough of Medieval St Andrews' by Bess Rhodes. Registration deadline: June 30th. Bess Rhodes is an honorary research fellow in history at the University of St Andrews as well as working with the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on an archaeology strategy for South-East Scotland. Bess completed her MA, MLitt, and PhD in history at St Andrews, and subsequently lectured at this university. Her first book, Riches and Reform, considered sixteenth-century St Andrews and the economic crisis which accompanied the religious revolution of 1560. She has also published on military history and on digital heritage, and has an emerging interest Scottish environmental history with a particular focus on perceptions of landscapes in the period between 1400 and 1700. Bess has previously contributed to radio and TV programmes on Scottish history for the BBC and the American broadcaster NBC - including appearing in the documentary 'St Andrews: The Greatest Golf Story Ever Told'.
June 20, 2025 at 7:37 PM
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NOW LAUNCHED: The Nigel F. Palmer Travel Fund Appeal

The Nigel F. Palmer Travel Fund was established by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature in 2025, and honours the contribution made to the Society by Nigel F. Palmer, executive editor of Medium Ævum 1990-2022.

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A poster for the Nigel F. Travel Fund Appeal. The text states: The Nigel F. Palmer Travel Fund was established by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature in 2025, and honours the contribution made to the Society by Nigel F. Palmer, executive editor of Medium Ævum 1990-2022. The Travel Fund will support graduate students whose research in medieval languages and literature necessitates travel. The Fund will support: - Travel to visit libraries and archives to consult manuscripts or other archival material - Travel to visit archaeological sites and/or monuments of direct relevance to the student’s research The Society welcomes donations of any size. To donate to the Nigel F. Palmer Travel Fund please scan the QR code in the post, or visit mediumaevum.org.uk/donate/palmerfund
June 9, 2025 at 9:23 AM
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A final reminder that accommodation booking at Agnes Blackadder Hall, St Andrews University is available at the discounted rate for those attending the 🌍Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages🌍 conference!

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May 29, 2025 at 12:55 PM
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If your medieval studies project has been impacted by the NEH cuts and you would like your fundraising project amplified by SSMLL, please contact us at ssmll[AT]history.ox.ac.uk.

SSMLL stands in solidarity with our colleagues.

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May 23, 2025 at 11:05 AM
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We encourage all SSMLL members to be aware of what’s going on – here we are facing a major threat to humanities research. Two medieval studies enterprises which have had their grants cut are now appealing for donations to help maintain their work.

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May 23, 2025 at 11:05 AM
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Since 1965, the NEH has awarded over $6 billion to support museums, historic sites, universities, teachers, libraries, documentary filmmakers, public TV and radio stations, research institutions, scholars, and local humanities programming. Now its funding is under threat.

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May 23, 2025 at 11:05 AM
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👉Extended deadline for discounted accommodation – book by 31st of May

We are delighted to have secured an extension for discounted accommodation booking at St Andrews University for the SSMLL Annual Day Conference: ‘Global Glossing: Transnational Commentary in the Later Middle Ages’.

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May 18, 2025 at 1:57 PM