10th International Conference On Middle English

The University of Stavanger has agreed to organize the tenth International Conference on Middle English (ICOME) in Stavanger 30 May - 2 June 2017. ICOME is an international conference that has been arranged since 1994 at intervals of two or three years. The conference has previously been arranged in Rydzyna, Helsinki, Dublin, Vienna, Naples, Cambridge, Lviv, Murcia and Wroclaw. The conference has consistently held a very high standard, attracting the leading scholars within its field; the participants also come from a very wide range of countries. The subject area of the conference is Middle English: the English spoken and written in the period 1100-1500, between the Norman Conquest and the early modern era. ICOME covers all aspects of Middle English studies: language and linguistic variation, textual and manuscript studies and literature. It is an arena for exchanging research results and ideas between scholars who work on the same historical period but from different standpoints. UiS has an active research group working on Middle English linguistic variation and manuscript studies since 2006. In 2017, the group will publish a major text corpus of Middle English administrative-legal texts and letters, A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD), which will be presented at the conference. In planning the conference, a particular consideration has been to flag new and innovative work within Middle English studies, looking forward rather than back. The four keynote speakers are therefore all relatively young, although highly profiled and accomplished scholars. The conference will include a workshop dedicated to the study of administrative-legal texts, an area that has attracted much attention in recent years and that is also topical because of the publication of the MELD corpus as Stavanger.