The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Ohio State University is hosting a new Popular Culture and the Deep Past Event in honor of CMRS Director Emeritus Richard Firth Green, whose book, Elf Queens and Holy Friars (2016) has won the 2017 The Mythopoeic Society Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies and the 2018 Medieval Institute Otto Gründler Book Prize.
We will have panels on the topic of Fairies and the Fantastic. In the Prologue to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, the narrator reminisces about a time when the land was full of fairies and the Elf Queen danced merrily on the green. In the centuries since Chaucer, fairies, far from disappearing, have lived on in the popular imagination and its creations. This conference is especially interested in Fairies and the Fantastic in the broadly conceived Medieval and Renaissance periods, but it also looks back to earlier examples of fairy belief or that explore the uses of fairies in later popular culture. We have papers covering approaches from literary, artistic, cinematic, and gaming analyses, to historical and cultural investigations, as well as papers with broad geographical scope that examine the ‘presence’ of fairies outside Western Europe--in Scandinavia, Persia, and other parts of the world.
In keeping with the spirit of past PCDP events, the academic conference will be part of a broader ‘carnival’ of events and activities, including food- and culture-ways demonstrations; exhibits of artwork, books, and manuscripts; combat; gaming; and Cosplay. We welcome proposals for non-academic presentations and activities.
