These are proposed sessions for Kalamazoo next year. Fiona Somerset is interested in hearing from people with comments or suggestions, or who might be interested in giving a paper, so please get in touch.
1) Lollard Geographies — This session invites papers on lollard writings, manuscripts bearing some relation to lollardy, or trial defendants tied to specific regions, especially when it might be possible to link those together. Papers might focus on an individual work or manuscript as it moves between locales, or on a cluster of works or ideas found in a specific area. In addition to papers focused within England, the session would explicitly invite comparative international study, or else study focused on international dissemination and exchange, perhaps tied to specific events.
2) Lollard Orthodoxies — This session continues discussion at the 2010 “Shifting Paradigms” session about how “orthodoxy” as a concept needs rethinking, especially if we view it in opposition to “heresy.” It invites papers on new ways to think about the relationship between lollard defendants or writings and “orthodoxy,” as well as papers on new ways to think about the concept of orthodoxy itself (praxis as opposed to belief, or as a reflex of belief, for example?). More broadly, papers might address any received idea (or, “orthodoxy”) in the study of lollardy that could use some rethinking.
3) Versions of the Bible — This session would invite papers on any aspect of biblical writing in late medieval England and its neighbours — we would be eager to have a paper on biblical versions in varieties of French or in germanic languages, for example. This would most centrally include the Wycliffite bible, any of its manuscripts or groups of its manuscripts, its production, use of its content in other works, other Wycliffite translations of the bible piecemeal in other writings, apparatus included with this bible, etc. But it would also invite papers on other renderings of the bible in Middle English, and on parabiblical writings and biblical scholarship.