The editors of  YLS are pleased to announce a special volume on “Piers Plowman and the Body”. Any essay related to this topic will be considered for publication.

Suggested topics include: bodily suffering and disease, physiology, humors, senses, and medicine; disability; gender and sexuality; celestial beings, animals, and other living organisms; law, penance, and the regulation of the body; ritual, gesture, song, and speech; personification allegory; genre, form, and the “body” of the text; materials and manuscripts; the body and literary tradition (i.e., the alliterative “corpus”).

Submissions to the special volume are due by August 1, 2014.

Authors should submit manuscripts electronically, in Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, or .rtf, to yls.submissions@gmail.com. Where electronic submission is impracticable for authors, we gladly accept hard copy; in this case please send two copies to: Emily Steiner, English Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104. As per Brepols policy, articles should conform to the Modern Humanities Research Association style guide, available as a .pdf download here. Authors should also adhere to the journal-specific guidelines available in this document. Submissions should be prepared for double-blind peer-review, with all information in notes and headers that may identify the author removed.

Accepted essays must in their final form be accompanied by a brief (60-150 word) abstract, to be published with the essay; a longer (250-400 word) abstract, for publication in the following volume’s bibliography and in the online bibliography on this website; and ten keywords, also to be published with the essay. From 2013 essays should also include a list of works cited at the end.