IMC 2013: Sessions
Session 524: Science and Fiction in the Middle Ages
Tuesday 2 July 2013, 09.00-10.30
| Sponsor: | Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, King's College London |
|---|---|
| Organisers: | Carl Kears, Department of English, King's College London James Antonio Paz, School of English, University of Leeds |
| Moderator/Chair: | Clare A. Lees, Department of English Language & Literature, King's College London |
| Paper 524-a | Is Beowulf Science Fiction? (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Old English, Science |
| Paper 524-b | Dreams of War, Dreams of Dragon's Fire: Conrad Kyeser's Bellifortis (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Other, Science |
| Paper 524-c | The Future is a Foreign Country: The Legend of the Seven Sleepers and the Anglo-Saxon Sense of the Past (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Old English, Language and Literature - Latin, Science |
| Abstract | The terms 'Medieval' and 'Science Fiction' are, at first glance, incompatible. These two categories of definition seem light years apart, one in the 'historical' past the other in the imagined future. But does the medieval period deserve to be left out of histories of Science Fiction, as it so often is? This session asks speakers to consider the possibility of a 'Medieval Science Fiction'. Did medieval authors engage with the 'scientific' potentialities of their time? Are there medieval narratives that speculate about technological advances or disasters? How were these imagined to alter corporeal or temporal boundaries? Would such narratives be designed to offer pleasure, entertainment, or warning? Did anxieties concerning alien races and their more advanced technologies exist in the medieval period? Might modern Science Fiction be used as an interpretive tool with which to explore medieval texts? And can such a comparative approach be pleasurable - or even plausible - when the Middle Ages is without many of the principles that define modern science? |