For this open-topic issue of the journal, the editors invite articles that are both informed by historical inquiry and alert to issues raised by contemporary theoretical debate. We expect that essays will be grounded in an intimate knowledge of a particular past and that their argumentation reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation. We are particularly committed to work that seeks to overcome the polarization between history and theory in the study of premodern Western culture.

The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the publication of a substantial body of scholarship exploring the intersections and points of friction between medieval studies and postcolonial theory. Yet, over the past twenty years, the field of postcolonial studies has developed and diversified considerably, signaling the urgent need for new contributions by medievalists. This special issue seeks to expand the parameters of medieval postcolonialism. Recent critics have argued for an understanding of European political culture during the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries as deeply conflicted, consisting of writings and representations that uphold, as well as unsettle, colonial ideologies and civilizational polarities. What circumstances (historical, geopolitical, personal) prompted medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish authors to question ideas about holy war and cultural others that they inherited from previous generations? How do medieval cultural objects perpetuate, challenge, or transcend dichotomies of religion and race? Contributors might also wish to explore, in dialogue with recent postcolonial scholarship on later periods, medieval cultural forms that reveal the effects of indigenous resistance to imperial expansion, tensions between racial formations, attempts to understand differences relativistically or universally, or that reveal a commitment to values of pluralism and equality. Essays may be comparative or focus on a single text or tradition. The primary stipulation is that essays contribute innovatively to debates in postcolonialism and to our knowledge of the heterogeneity of, and multiple perspectives within, European and western Asian literatures and cultures of the high and later Middle Ages.

Whether in relation to the circulation of poetic forms across different languages and traditions globally, to the envisioning of local, national, and transnational discursive communities, or to the negotiation of poetic filiations and social positions, lyric poetry has in recent years offered a favorable site for inquiry into community formation and its politics. Community formation has been described variously in different fields, as based on reciprocal identification among individuals as members of an imaginary group; communal systems of knowledge, values, and beliefs; shared interpretive strategies and responses to culturally selected objects; joint goals or interests; a spontaneous coming together; and collective affects and moods. This special issue, however, asks more specific questions related to community formation and a use of language that may be called “lyric”: Why were a variety of social, political, religious, and intellectual relations negotiated by means of lyric poetry in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period? How did lyric poetry as a particular use of language facilitate or contribute to community formation in premodern worlds? Can lyric poetry, intended as a transhistorical and transcultural use of language, help us to conceive of forms of community not based on pre-established identities, such as group, knowledge system, interpretive strategy, interest, position, or practice? Submissions should explore such questions that are necessarily situated at the intersection of cultural and material history, on the one hand, and literary studies and theory on the other, and they should therefore adopt a transnational perspective.