Skip to main content

IMC 2016: Sessions

Session 1409: The Learned Clerk, II: A Round Table Discussion

Wednesday 6 July 2016, 19.00-20.00

Sponsor:Learned Clerk Working Group
Organisers:James G. Clark, Department of History, University of Exeter
Sylvia A. Federico, Department of English, Bates College, Lewiston
Moderator/Chair:W. Mark Ormrod, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York
Abstract

This is the second of two panels organised by the Learned Clerk Working Group. We seek to further the conversation started at the Learned Clerk Symposium in July 2015 at Bates on how we might re-envision late medieval textual structures and strategies through a focus on the manuscript practices of the learned clerk in 14th-century England. Rather than a study of historiographical versus literary narrative, the panel aims to bring back into contact these discursive modes (and subsequent fields of inquiry) through an examination of their convergence in the work of clerks in several crucial aspects of late medieval life. How did clerks structure themselves and their topics through narrative? How did clerical narrative shape events and thought?

Participants include Katharine Breen (Northwestern University), Sylvia A. Federico (Bates College, Lewiston), Andrew Galloway (Cornell University), Esther Liberman Cuenca (Fordham University), and Andrew Prescott (University of Glasgow).