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This issue consists of two special clusters: “Retellings of Medieval Literature in the Classroom,” edited by Eva von Contzen and Sophia Philomena Wolf, and “The Social Relevance of Medieval Studies,” edited by Gregory Sadlek.

This special cluster focuses on the role of contemporary retellings of medieval literature in classroom contexts, thereby providing a platform for a largely neglected topic of research. It features articles on a diverse range of retellings—including, for example, fanfiction and an interactive novel—and displays the various re-reading adventures students embark upon as they engage with contemporary adaptations or pen their own personal version of a medieval tale. Retellings consequently prove useful and democratic educational tools that allow for a more expansive student engagement with medieval material.

In this article, we outline the lesson plan and pedagogical approach underlying a seminar we taught in the summer term of 2023 at the University of Freiburg titled “Retelling, Rereading, Rethinking—The Afterlife of Medieval Texts in Contemporary Literature.” Using Stanley Fish’s essay “Is There a Text in This Class?” as its springboard, this essay discusses how the absence of the source material affects students’ engagement with medieval literature. We decided to make the absent source the catalyst for discussing how the meaning of the source text is filtered through and inextricably linked with reception, i.e. translations, retellings, and the readers/students themselves. Taking into special consideration the particular knowledge our students brought with them into the class and how this influenced their reading of medieval literature, we argue that the instability and absence of the source can make for a better learning outcome and a more profound understanding of medieval literature, (medieval) literary practices, and the role of reception.

This interview focuses on Caroline Bergvall’s medievalist works: Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), and Alisoun Sings (2019). Bergvall discusses interrelations between her own work and medieval (literary) practices, her handling of medieval source material, and how the term ‘retelling’ relates to her texts.

The topic for this issue’s primary cluster was inspired by The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (2021) by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan. The cluster presents four essays documenting the long-term influence of four medievalists: Aranye Fradenburg Joy, Clifford Flanigan, Joaquin Martínez Pizarro, and Derek Pearsall. This issue also includes of a recap of the longstanding undergraduate conference at Moravian University and short histories of three scholarly societies: the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, the John Gower Society, and the International Piers Plowman Society. We continue our two standard features with “How I teach…” contributions on Christina Fitzgerald’s edition of The York Corpus Christi Play (2018) and David Lawton’s edition of The Norton Chaucer (2019), and a “Conversations” response to the Medieval Studies and Secondary Education cluster in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession’s Fall 2022 issue.

This issue includes a cluster of brief essays on editing scholarly journals, three essays on teaching, and two columns: How I Teach and Conversations.

This issue includes a cluster on medieval studies and secondary education, contributions on pedagogy and teaching and learning centers, as well as contributions to two regular features: “How I Teach” and “Conversations.”

This issue explores best practices for confronting issues of sexual violence in medieval literary texts with a generation of students attuned to identifying and condemning sexual harassment and assault. Because many of our students—whatever their gender identification—have histories with many kinds of sexual harm, articles by Carissa M. Harris, Sarah Powrie, and Sara Torres and Rebecca McNamara offer thoughtful, trauma-informed pedagogical approaches to aid us as we approach these difficult texts. Our fourth article, by Holly A. Crocker, illuminates the deep-rooted systems that feed women’s vulnerability and work to silence even the strongest among us.

This issue brings together articles and essays that discuss, from different vantage points, the relevance of teaching medieval literature at a time of increasing global challenges and uncertainties. Marcel Elias and Ardis Butterfield, John Lance Griffith, Vanessa Jaeger, and Stacie Vos focus on different teaching and learning contexts by offering concrete suggestions for the classroom. Our special cluster on “Pandemic Experiences” features nine essays that reflect on what it meant (and means) to be teaching and researching amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, with contributions by Jonathan Fruoco, Kristine Larsen, David Lavinsky, Katrin Rupp, Kara Crawford, Kathy Cawsey, Suzanne Edwards, as well as Sandy Feinstein and Bryan Wang. In our new rubric “Conversations”, we continue discussions from previous issues: in her essay on the Humanities Lab, Patricia Ingham picks up on Carolyn Dinshaw’s call for experimentation, and Emma Margaret Solberg responds to our issue 2.1 on “#MeToo, Medieval Literature, and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy.”

The beginnings of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession are found in many energetic conversations about the state of our field and our profession at the New Chaucer Society’s 2018 Congress in Toronto. Concerned about the sustainability of medieval studies, the editors imagined a journal that not only addressed these pressing issues but also helped diminish the isolation many medievalists feel.  Most of all, they sought to rethink how different forms of academic labor are defined and valued. The resulting journal rests on two pillars of accessibility: open access and peer review. Available through the University of California’s eScholarship publishing platform, the journal is freely available regardless of institutional affiliation. And by encouraging a peer-review process of constructive criticism and intellectual dialogue, the journal promotes fresh perspectives. The journal’s first issue presents timely and thoughtful contributions by Anthony Bale, Andrew James Johnston, Dan Kline, and Carolyn Dinshaw.

In this article, we develop a framework for the analysis of 'movement' in literary texts. We focus on characters, translation and transmission, thereby going beyond, on the one hand, a stylistic analysis of individual passages, and, on the other hand, the linear enchainment of scenes and summaries underlying much of the narratological discussions around movement, speed and pace. We will develop this framework through a discussion of the character Camilla in Vergil's Aeneid: Book XI, Gavin Douglas's Eneados (1513) and John Dryden's Aeneis (1698). Both the version stylistically close to Vergil (Dryden) and the one that is stylistically looser (Douglas) allow for a discussion of movement that takes the principle beyond a primary concern with style. In a final step, we move to the contemporary example of Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia (2008) in order to investigate how 'movement' translates from the epic to the novel. Movement, as we shall show, can be analysed as movement of plot, movement of thought, and movement of figure in narrative. The framework that we propose allows for the principled discussion of transgeneric transfer of narratives, here between epic and novel, as well as the comparison of texts from different moments of literary history between the Middle Ages, the Early Modern period and the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]