New Journal of Medieval Studies!

MEDIEVAL WORLDS

Publisher

Institute for Medieval Research

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Wohllebengasse 12-14

1040 Vienna, Austria

Information

Medieval worlds provides a new forum for interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Specifically it encourages and links comparative research between different regions and fields and promotes methodological innovation in transdisciplinary studies. Focusing on the Middle Ages (c. 400 - 1500 CE, but can be extended whenever thematically fruitful or appropriate), medieval worlds takes a global approach to studying history in a comparative setting.

Building upon studies of transcultural relations and processes of cultural hybridization between cultures, both of which have seen dynamic developments in recent years, the main approach chosen by medieval worlds is comparative. Taking such a comparative approach will not only allow researchers to highlight the global interaction within, or hybrid nature of particular cultural spheres, but also shed new light on more specific fields of interest. Moreover, medieval worlds will encourage a critical debate between the disciplines concerning approaches and methods, and thus will help to enrich the methodological frameworks of comparative history.

As the chosen online, open-access format allows for a flexible, to-the-point collaboration between different fields, medieval worlds proposes an innovative way to achieve a new dynamic of wide-ranging comparative studies. In addition to solliciting articles from leading scholars in their respective fields, we also strive to enable the systematic production of complementary studies across fields and disciplinary boundaries. medieval worlds is a forum, a marketplace where partners for comparison can be found, and articles dealing with a topic from different angles may be published in pairs, small clusters or thematic issues. Thus, it will explore ways to bring together scholars from different disiplines interested in comparable topics, and encourage interdisciplinary groups to publish focused sets of articles.
Medieval worlds is open to regular submissions on comparative topics, but also offers the possibility to propose or advertise subjects that lend themselves to comparison. With a view to putting people working on related topics in different academic environments in touch with one another, we will publish calls for matching articles and for contributions to thematic issues, and encourage small interdisciplinary workshops – online or on location – which will address promising topics and yield materials for publication. In short, medieval worlds aims at creating a well-moderated forum for comparative studies, and at organising a process of exchange and debate that should become a dynamic extension of our views of the global past beyond regional and disciplinary boundaries.

New Journal!

Interface. A Journal of Medieval European Literatures    

Promotes connective and interdisciplinary views of the literatures of medieval Europe and explores their place and significance in a world of global literature.
An open-access peer-reviewed journal that invites scholarly papers in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish.

No 1 (2015): Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation

Scope

The Journal Interfaces opens an interdisciplinary and multilingual forum for the study of medieval European literatures. These literatures are broadly conceived as the products of the interconnected textual cultures which flourished between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance in a region extending from the North Atlantic to the Eastern Mediterranean. Interfaces envisages the study of the textual culture of medieval Europe as situated at the intersection of a number of modern disciplines, including history, literature, philology, codicology, philosophy, sociolinguistics, and theology.

Contributions are invited which cross linguistic or disciplinary boundaries in the recognition that the vitality of medieval texts in present-day scholarship and culture demands a space not confined by single philologies, national research traditions, confessions, or disciplinary canons. Interfaces strives to combine methodological questioning of hermeneutic and didactic practices with the opening up of new common themes, new connections between literatures, and new transdisciplinary conceptualisations of the modern understanding of medieval literatures, including regional and global challenges to claims of European unity.

It is the ambition of Interfaces to publish the best new scholarship which will contribute to a redefining of how the medieval textual heritage Europe is read, researched, taught and disseminated in the 21st century. European medieval civilization – of which Greek, Hebrew, Slavonic, and Arabic textual cultures form an integral but often neglected part – will continue to be an important source of cultural identity in a globalised world and the global perspectives of the 21st century impel us to ask new questions of the medieval past. The changing forms and technologies of literature and historical writing in the present also urges us to engage with pre-modern writing in new ways. The texts transmitted to us from the Middle Ages and how we read them are a crucial site for negotiating the relationship between modernity and the past.

Interfaces will promote new types of high quality scholarship as well as make the case for the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic value of the literatures of a broadly conceived medieval Europe.

As a peer-reviewed, non-profit, multilingual, open access journal, Interfaces will also form part of a new democratic and efficient research culture within the Humanities. The journal will regularly feature thematic issues but usually with space for other articles as well. In order to promote multilingualism in the choice of topics as well as in the interaction between scholars, Interfaces invites papers and debate comments in the five main scholarly languages of the field (English, German, Spanish, Italian, French), all with abstracts in English.