Choices are Enemies, Weather, Colour, Destruction, and Intertextualities–vote now!

With many thanks to Dr. William Christopher Brown for his kind words in a recent article published in In Progress, a peer-reviewed online journal for graduate students. Dr. Brown wrote about his experiences publishing with graduate journals during his doctoral studies and had some kind words to share about Hortulus. Please feel free to click over and have a look!

Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is a refereed, peer-reviewed, and born-digital journal devoted to the culture, literature, history, and society of the medieval past. Published semi-annually, the journal collects exceptional examples of work by graduate students on a number of themes, disciplines, subjects, and periods of medieval studies. We also welcome book reviews of monographs published or re-released in the past five years that are of interest to medievalists. For the spring issue we are highly interested in reviews of books which fall under the current special topic.

Our upcoming issue will be published in the spring of 2013, and concerns itself with the theme: wounds, torture, and the grotesque. These subjects have become increasingly popular in medieval scholarship. Ideas of the grotesque are being reconsidered in relation to concepts of race and racial theory, a discussion which has contemporary impacts far beyond the academic world. Concurrent to these developments in medieval studies has been an increase in scholarly attention paid to these subject areas in the field of medical humanities, which has further energized academic discussion of corporeality and the body. Such explorations include the analysis of suffering, personhood, and our responsibility to one another as human beings.

Hortulus invites full-length articles which consider these themes either individually or in tandem. We particularly encourage the submission of proposals that take a strongly theoretical and/or interdisciplinary approach, and that examine new and previously unconsidered aspects of these subjects. Possible topics may be drawn from any discipline: history, art history, archaeology, literature, linguistics, music, theology, etc. Work from every interpretive angle is encouraged – memory, gender, historiography, medievalism, consilience, etc. Most importantly, we seek engaging, original work that contributes to our collective understanding of the medieval era.

Contributions should be in English and roughly 6,000 – 12,000 words, including all documentation and citational apparatus; book reviews are typically between 500-1,000 words but cannot exceed 2,000. All notes must be endnotes, and a bibliography must be included; submission guidelines can be found here. Contributions may be submitted to hortulus@hortulus-journal.com and are due February 15, 2013. If you are interested in submitting a paper but feel you would need additional time, please send a query email and details about an expected time-scale for your submission. Queries about submissions or the journal more generally can also be sent to this address.