The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies, telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions, laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes - which collectively form an academic "rave" - were culled, with some later additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2012 and 2013, organized by postmedieval: a journal for medieval cultural studies and the BABEL Working Group ("Burn After Reading: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies," "Fuck This: On Letting Go," and "Fuck Me: On Never Letting Go") and George Washington University's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute ("The Future We Want: A Collaboration"), respectively. Gathering together a rowdy multiplicity of voices from within medieval and early modern studies, these two volumes seek to extend and intensify a conversation about how to shape premodern studies, and also the humanities, in the years ahead. Authors in both volumes, in various ways, lay claim to the act(s) of manifesting, and also anti-manifesting, as a collective endeavor that works on behalf of the future without laying any belligerent claims upon it, where we might craft new spaces for the University-at-large, which is also a University that wanders, that is never just somewhere, dwelling in the partitive - of a particular place - but rather, seeks to be everywhere, always on the move, pandemic, uncontainable, and always to-come, while also being present/between us (manifest). This is not a book, but a blueprint. TABLE OF CONTENTS Vol. 1: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Myra Seaman Heather Bamford: INTENTIONALLY GOOD, REALLY BAD - Frank Battaglia: SEEING A FOREST AS WELL AS TREES - Bettina Bildhauer: NET WORTH - Martha Easton + Maggie Williams: OUR FEMINISM, OUR ACTIVISM - Ruth Evans: BE CRITICAL - Joshua R. Eyler: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES - Lara Farina: STICKING TOGETHER - Matthew Gabriele: WAGING GUERRILLA WARFARE AGAINST THE 19TH CENTURY - Gaelan Gilbert: MEDIEVAL STUDIES IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD - Noah D. Guynn: RADICAL RIDICULE - David Hadbawnik: BURNED BEFORE WRITING - Guy Halsall: HISTORY AND COMMITMENT - Cary Howie: ON NEVER LETTING GO - Shayne Aaron Legassie: THE GOTHIC FLY - Erin Maglaque: FUCK POSTCOLONIALISM - Material Collective: WE ARE THE MATERIAL COLLECTIVE - Thomas Mical: MEDIEVAL SURREALIST MANIFESTO - Chris Piuma: DE CATERVIS CETERIS - Daniel C. Remein: 2ND PROGRAM OF THE ORNAMENTALISTS - Christopher Roman: A MEDIEVAL: MANIFESTO - Eva von Contzen: HOMO NARRANS - Erik Wade: HISTORICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS - Lisa Weston: 'TIS MAGICK, MAGICK THAT WILL HAVE RAVISHED ME Vol. 2: The Future We Want: A Collaboration, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Anne Harris + Karen Eileen Overbey: FIELD CHANGE/DISCIPLINE CHANGE - L.O. Aranye Fradenburg + Eileen A. Joy: PARADIGM CHANGE/INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE - J. Allan Mitchell + Will Stockton: TIME CHANGE/MODE CHANGE - Lowell Duckert + Steve Mentz: WORLD CHANGE/SEA CHANGE - Chris Piuma + Jonathan Hsy: SPECTRAL VOICE CHANGE/LANGUAGE CHANGE - Julie Orlemanski + Julian Yates: COLLECTIVE CHANGE/MOOD CHANGE

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer's poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily, altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things really do go wrong. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others . . . an assortment, if you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover in the dark. Contents: Candace Barrington, "Dark Whiteness: Benjanim Brawley and Chaucer" -- Brantley L. Bryant & Alia, "Saturn's Darkness" -- Ruth Evans, "A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter" -- Gaelan Gilbert, "Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology" -- Leigh Harrison, "Black Gold: The Former (and Future) Age" -- Nicola Masciandaro, "Half Dead: Parsing Cecelia" -- J. Allan Mitchell, "In the Event of the Franklin's Tale" -- Travis Neel & Andrew Richmond, "Black as the Crow" -- Hannah Priest, "Unravelling Constance" -- Lisa Schamess, "L'O de V: A Palimpsest" -- Myra Seaman, "Disconsolate Art" -- Karl Steel, "Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye" -- Elaine Treharne, "The Physician's Tale as Hagioclasm" -- Bob Valasek, "The Light has Lifted: Pandare Trickster" -- Lisa Weston, "Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies" -- Thomas White, "The Dark Is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir Thopas." This assortment of dark morsels also features a prose-poem Preface by Gary Shipley.

Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book's pages - human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible - collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript's material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members. -- .

Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book's pages - human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible - collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript's material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members. -- .