Just a quick one to say Women at Sea will be making a reappearance (hopefully not the last) at Leeds International Medieval Congress 2017 – we have had our two sessions approved. Here is what you can expect:

Women at Sea, I and II

Tales of women at sea populate the realms of  literature and history, as well as the shadowy space  between fact and fiction. They call our attention to  questions of agency and otherness. The sea can seem  to be dominated by men in economic and martial terms,  and the woman at sea is often set adrift by men who  on land have ultimate power over her. But perhaps at  sea, a woman enters a more generative and  transformative space. The woman at sea is frequently  unmoored, lost, vulnerable, her direction chosen by  wind and fate. Yet the sea may also open up a more  feminine, queer, imaginative space: the woman adrift  in a place of transformation, negotiation and  transition in which she can re-cast her sense of  self. For women the sea is a space of otherness, but  also a space where their identity can be imagined and  performed. While the edge of the ocean is a boundary,  the open sea seems boundless. It defies linearity.  Thus, women in oceanic narratives can inhabit a  different temporality than is available in narratives  defined by land. They enter an exceptional space, a  place where bodies need not be territories.

Session 1505:

Paper -a          Black Andromeda: Manuscripts, Seascapes, and Race in

Medieval France (Language: English)

Speaker:          Anna Klosowska, Department of French & Italian, Miami

University, Ohio

Paper -b          Queer Seas, Stranger Tides: Sea-Changing Bodies in

the Digby _Mary Magdalen_ Play (Language: English)

Speaker:          Daisy Black, Department of English Language, TESOL &

Applied Linguistics, Swansea University

Paper -c          Chaucer’s Watery Bodies and Bodies of Water

(Language: English)

Speaker:          Roberta Magnani

Paper -d          ‘That swerde ys myne’: Queer Identity and Malory’s

Ladies of the Lake (Language: English)

Speaker:          Amy Louise Morgan, School of English & Languages,

University of Surrey

Session Time:     Thu. 06 July – 09.00-10.30

Session 1605:

Paper -a          A Sea-Faring Woman: Gudrid and the Journeys to

Vinland (Language: English)

Speaker:          Elizabeth Cox, Department of English Language, TESOL

& Applied Linguistics, Swansea University

Paper -b          Shipbuilders, Settlers, and Sailors: Viking Women at

Sea (Language: English)

Speaker:          April Harper, Department of History, State University

of New York, Oneonta

Paper -c          Maritime Protectresses in the Mediterranean: From

Artemis and Victoria to Lucia and Mary (Language:

English)

Speaker:          Jessica Tearney-Pearce, Woolf Institute, Cambridge /

St John’s College, University of Cambridge

Paper -d          A Promise of a Safe Journey: Margery Kempe as a

Talisman (Language: English)

Speaker:          Einat Klafter, Foundation for Interreligious &

Intercultural Research & Dialogue, Université de

Genève

Session Time:     Thu. 06 July – 11.15-12.45

Meanwhile, I will be speaking at Session 705, “Homosocialibility and Male Bonding in Medieval and Early Modern Europe”, with the paper “‘Of meyrth the causse’: Male Bonding and Rape Culture in Late Medieval England”, and will be moderating Session 620, “Gender, Sexuality, and Medieval ‘Otherness’ in Medieval and Modern Literature”. It will be a busy few days! Hope to see you there.