IMC 2026: Sessions

This session explores how several types of liminality – conceptually understood as being at the border in-between spaces, times, categories – can be read in English literature across the Middle Ages. All the papers focus on texts featuring waterscapes, fundamental features of both the geographical and cultural landscape of the British Isles. These medieval literary waterscapes are imbued with liminality, conducive to meetings with altered states and fluidity, not only of water itself, but of identities and categories.

Angélica Varandas’s paper thus delves into the liminalities and uncertainties latent in the enigmatic poem Wulf and Eadwacer, from the Exeter Book. Its fluid spaces of ambiguity and the narrator’s persistent in-betweenness all contribute to the elegiac tone of the poem.

In her paper, Ana Rita Martins shows how moments of entering and exiting the sea enable transformation/affirmation of identities in the Middle English King Horn. The inherent fluidity of this border with water provides a space for subjectivity itself to be contested and for the hero to affirm his social/narrative legitimacy.

Miguel Andrade takes us back to the Exeter Book, for a transcorporeal exploration of contacts between bodies and bodies of water, and how they may be illustrative of Anglo-Saxon relationships with watery environments.