Medieval Institute Publications publishes a series of edited collections, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, and a sister monograph series, Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. The series were originally inspired by themes drawn from the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. From 2016 the series explicitly opened themselves up to publications that wholly or partially focus on the early modern world. Hence the series titles changed from "... in Medieval Culture" to "... in Medieval and Early Modern Culture".
Humanities research plays a vital role in contemporary civic life and offers human and humane insights into today's greatest challenges. Even so, the place of the humanities in education, in popular discourse, in politics, and in business is increasingly in question. Medieval Institute Publications is proud to take a stand for the humanities. We are committed to the expansion of humanistic study, inquiry, and discourse inside and outside of the university. We believe that humanities research should progress boldly, keeping pace with technological innovation, globalization, and democratization. We value a variety of established, new, and diverse voices in humanities research. We provide a platform for high-quality research that explores what it means and has meant to be human across cultures, continents, and eras.
Research into the premodern world offers complex understandings of how cultural ideas, traditions, and practices are constructed, transferred, and disseminated among different agents and regions. Knowledge of the premodern past, in particular, helps us to contextualize contemporary debates about identity, integration, political legitimacy, creativity, and cultural dynamics. Understanding what it meant to be human in the premodern world is essential to understanding our present moment and our future trajectories. Current innovations in humanities research, employing digital tools for preservation, representation, and analysis, require us to return again to the earliest sources of our shared past, in the media and mentalities of the premodern world.
This series provides a space for exploring what it has meant to be human through the ages, using literary, historical, and material sources and by employing innovative, popular, or interdisciplinary approaches. It can explore themes in and across the late-antique, medieval, and early modern periods on:
- Popular life - mundane, everyday, non-elite, vernacular, democratic
- Human emotions - love and hatred, beauty and disgust, etc.
- Human experience; definitions of "humanity" - strife and struggle, self-expression, personal achievement; living in community; survival in "natural" and built / engineered environments
Publications are typically interdisciplinary and "edgy", in the sense of being cutting edge, or crossing disciplinary, geographical, or chronological boundaries.
Proposals or completed projects to be considered for publication should be sent to Shannon Cunningham, acquisitions editor for the series. For other inquiries, please consult Theresa Whitaker. Since the scope of the series is so broad, the press identifies evaluators on a case by case basis before any formal commitment is made to the author. Further, all submitted manuscripts are subject to peer review from an independent expert chosen by the press.