After the kazoo? Anyway, I went to the International Congress on Medieval Studies held at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, in person this year! It was a zoo.
First things first, if you looked me up because you want to know more about my presentation, here’s a PDF of the slides.
But if you’re a new reader or a longtime fan who isn’t the sort of person to hear about scholarly medievalism conferences… what is this Kalamazoo thing?
The 2023 conference was made up of over 400 sessions (2-5 presenters each) packed into 3 days, plus an exhibitor’s hall and a bunch of social events and also you have to eat, sleep, and walk all over campus. Apparently the conference used to be larger but got out of hand ten or so years ago, and has been strategically re-focused since then. In case the size of this event wasn’t clear already, the program is a book about the size of a standard manga volume, as thick as my finger and a little bigger than a mass-market paperback– and the program only contains session and presentation names and presenters, no descriptions about anything. One of the things I learned this year is, I should try to come up with catchier titles that have the key terms closer to the front so they’re easier to skim.
I’m really glad I only started going in the era of recorded virtual talks, because being able to say “I can watch that one later when the recording is published” was the only thing that kept me from completely breaking down every time I read the schedule. Even then, only some of the virtual and hybrid talks are recorded, and the recordings are only available from the end of the conference to the end of the month.
In case I sound like I’m complaining, I should add, if you’re interested in the ICMS, you should totally look into the virtual attendance option, because everything is super interesting and a lot of it is unpublished, in-progress research that you can’t get anywhere else even if you know where to look. Last year when it was all virtual, I suggested catching evening sessions as a date activity more than once. It is absolutely worth going. But I want to be very clear, when making that recommendation, that it is awesome and it is also a lot.
Despite being more or less constantly overwhelmed by how much cool stuff was going on (and whether my presentation was ready) I managed to attend sessions related to my main interests and also push myself outside of that comfort zone a little. Hearing awesome passionate people sharing their research on topics I know nothing about that sounded pretty interesting is definitely one of the joys of an event like this.
So, my presentation! I presented about one of my long-running translation projects, the Latin Lew text in Paulus Hektor Mayr’s manuscript compendiums. More specifically, I talked about what we can learn from this contemporary German to Latin translation by investigating unexpected word choices and trying to guess what motivated them. I was also super nervous, because I knew I was going to be, partly, talking about German to professional Germanists.
At ICMS Kalamazoo, presentations (or “papers”) are grouped into themed sessions, which are often sponsored by one or two of the many subject area specific organizations of scholars involved in the conference. When you propose a paper to the conference, you choose a specific session you think it fits the theme for, and the session organizer (on behalf of their sponsoring organization) decides whether you fit and they like your proposal.
So, last year, when I proposed my talk about mer-armor to a session about unusual wearers of armor, the organizer wrote back and said it looked great, but could I also relate my topic to medieval romances? The session was sponsored by the Medieval Romance Society, after all. This year (well, in Fall 2022) I didn’t check who the sponsor was before contacting the session organizer to see if my idea seemed vaguely on-topic. I initially pitched something about the Florius manuscript, since that’s what I was already planning to work on over the winter, and I got a very polite “Well, that is interesting, but since this session is sponsored by the Society for Medieval German Studies, something about German would be better…”
And that’s how I ended up doing two different manuscript research projects due in mid-May 2023.
I’ll write more about this, but for now, I think I’ll post this rather than making you wait.
Here’s the slides again, if you want to flip through them.
Darth Kendra Research 