There’s a call for Submissions for the C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan). This is sponsored by The Inkling Folk Fellowship and organized by Joe Ricke.
Please submit an abstract (no longer than 250 words) for one of the sessions by September 15th.
Two Sessions for May 11-13, 2023 are:
Session One: “Narnian Medievalism: A Reappraisal”
Sometimes the most obvious examples of medievalism are right under our noses. C. S. Lewis obviously invested his imaginary world of Narnia with all sorts of medieval images, plots, themes, and characters. Not to mention costumes, props, and, sometimes, the awful language of tongue-in-cheek medievalism. We seek scholarly papers not so much reminding us of what we know, but reappraising what we thought we knew, about Narnian medievalism, with special emphases on cultural difference, race, gender, visionary experience, as well as topics we have not yet imagined.
Session Two: “Renaissance? What Renaissance? Lewis’s Bold Challenge to Thomas More, Erasmus, and Everyone Else”
At a Stratford Shakespeare conference the day before World War Two began, C. S. Lewis argued that Shakespeare was not a Renaissance author and, besides, the Renaissance was a fiction. Nothing could be more central to Lewis’s own Medieval scholarship (and his medievalism) than his denial of the Renaissance. Although this tagged him as a dinosaur in his time, his position looks rather much like the status quo from our perspective. We seek papers exploring, interpreting, resisting, refuting, and/or explaining Lewis’s position and its significance for both Medieval/Early Modern Studies and for his own scholarly and creative work.
