IMC 2025: Sessions

Scholarship of Old and Middle English Texts has, over the last decade, been slowly pushing towards the digital. Digital tools and resources have the capacity to extend research beyond the established boundaries of traditional methods; aiding in the development of new ways of storing, displaying and studying vast amounts of textual data, and in better getting to grips with the details of a texts materiality, context, and usage. Through these new developments, the distance between the worlds of the Medieval England and our own is made all the narrower, as scholars can reassess old assumptions, tackle modern problems, and pose new questions.

However, this leaves modern scholarship on the brink of its own new world of learning. Literacy and competency with digital tools is a more pressing need than ever, as is spotlighting and sharing the existence of these tools. This session seeks to identify these modern worlds of learning and explore how they might help us understand the old; how novel digital skills, methodologies, and resources can help scholars untangle the complex, interconnected materiality and practices of Medieval English learning, knowledge exchange, and communication.