Medieval studies is a discipline that often privileges the exceptional – whether by centring study on certain influential individuals or particular historical moments or by stressing the extraordinary significance of surviving medieval artefacts, manuscripts, texts, and works. Yet, how might attending to the everyday, the middling, or the quotidian further nuance our understandings of the Scandinavian middle ages? How might underlying assumptions about the premodern North be unsettled by a scholarly practice that foregrounds the common or the seemingly unremarkable?
TOPICS OF INTEREST INCLUDE
(BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO)
- Noncanonical Texts and Objects
- Local Politics
- Microhistories
- Everyday Life and Practices
- Non-elite Manuscripts
- Marginal and Marginalised People
- Historical and Contemporary Reception of the Scandinavian Middle Ages
As this conference aims to offer mundanity and mediocrity as frameworks for critical reflection, we warmly welcome papers that consider medieval Scandinavia from an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and global perspective. We also encourage papers that engage thoughtfully with disability theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and other allied frameworks in their approach to the premodern North.