Call For Papers: Medieval Weather and the Natural Order
New Chaucer Society Congress, Portland OR July 23-26, 2012

Organizer: Robert Stanton
(robert.stanton@bc.edu)
Paul Dutton has written that “‘weather’ is properly historical and stubbornly
subjective, since it involves humans in time thinking about it and how it
affects their lives.” How were meteorological phenomena in the late Middle Ages
observed, described, and interpreted? Recent work in ecocriticism has signaled
the endlessly fluid and negotiable character of nature; can we reconfigure the
notion of “natural phenomena” as a negotiated interaction among divine, human,
and physical orders? Submissions to this panel might address the reception of
storms, floods, earthquakes, or droughts across genres; a comparison of
representations of weather in textual and visual sources; or the relationship
between generalized and archetypal descriptions of weather events and their
strategic deployment as narrative and rhetorical elements.

Please send a one-paragraph abstract by June 1, 2011 to Robert Stanton,
Department of English, Boston College