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Professor Lorraine Stock
University of Houston

Throughout the medieval and Early Modern periods in continental Europe and Britain, the Wild Man both signified elite humans’ personal identity through their function as heraldic bearers and functioned as emblems of the professional identity of early modern printers in their Printers’ Marks. Wild People, typically classified as “monsters,” epitomized primitivism and represented a life in Nature unadulterated by the intrusions of technology and other negative aspects of the civilizing process. Medieval illuminators often incorporated Wild People in hand-painted marginalia, historiated initials, and miniatures illustrating manuscript texts. The professional identification of early printers with the Wild People paradoxically inserted these primitive figures into a context showcasing the intrusion of mechanization into a human activity that for centuries had been dominated by the labor-intensive employment of human hands, not machines. The retrograde Wild People’s service as signifiers of professional identity in the printing trade is particularly unexpected, therefore, since moveable-type printing, the most important technological change of the Renaissance, was a hallmark of the civilizing process, progress, and modernity. In this workshop at the Newberry Library, we shall examine manuscripts and especially incunabula featuring the Printers’ Marks of continental and British early printers, who employed the Wild People as their professional trademarks, but modified the figures’ original wildness or monstrosity by civilizing them visually. This counterintuitive trend of printers employing Wild People in their professional Marks participates in the trans-European recalibration of the traditional medieval Homme Sauvage into the Renaissance’s Noble Savage. A PowerPoint slide show and a selection of books and manuscripts from the Newberry’s collection will illustrate the argument.

Assistant Professor Kristin Leaman  
Libraries and School of Information Studies
Assistant Professor, (by courtesy) Department of English
Purdue University

This workshop will teach participants how to effectively examine medieval texts through the lens of Critical Disinformation Studies, an under-explored and exciting new area in Medieval Studies. It is vastly productive to employ critical disinformation theories from the discipline of Information Science and apply them to medieval history and texts. By doing so, it highlights how information, knowledge, and history are often created by social and political people in power to legitimize and validate racial and cultural divisions and structural inequality (Rachel Kuo & Alice Marwick’s Critical Disinformation Studies, 2021). Disinformation in the Middle Ages was a tool to create division and “other” individuals or entire communities, and marginalized communities were disproportionately harmed by disinformation during the Middle Ages. A selection of rare books from the Newberry Library’s incredible collection will serve as case studies on how disinformation was created and disseminated during the Middle Ages. Participants will leave this workshop with the skills they need to apply a critical disinformation framework to their own area of study. 

Cost to register for the conference: 

• $100.00 for faculty & working professionals (includes membership to MAM for 2025)
• $75.00 retired/independent scholar (includes 2025 MAM Membership)
• Students: no charge
• Payment options coming  �Ă�Ă

Conference Sessions will be at Dominican University (River Forest, IL), the Newberry Library (Chicago, IL), and online. More to follow.

Please consider donating to the Tom Shippey Graduate Student Fund. Donations can be made online when you purchase your conference ticket, and will help graduate students attend our conference. Thank you!

Register for the Conference 

The Tom Shippey and CARA Graduate Student Travel Grants are available for up to $300 each. Please give a brief description of the costs for travel for consideration. We will support as many graduate students as we can, so distributed as needed on a first-come, first-serve basis. Registration fees for graduate students are waived.

Dominican University & the Newberry Library are within reach of both O'Hare International airport and Midway National airport. There are hotels at every price-point available in downtown Chicago and in River Forest/Oak Park near Dominican University (Dominican is closer to O'Hare airport for traveling convenience, Newberry Library is downtown). Ubers are possible from O'Hare airport or Midway airport to Dominican and downtown but count on 30 minutes; the "L" is recommended for the more economy-minded from O'Hare/Midway to downtown Chicago. More information to follow.

Members of MAM and MAMA are encouraged to submit a version of your conference presentation to Enarratio, the peer-reviewed journal of the Medieval Association of the Midwest. To learn more, please visit . You can also reach out to its current editor, Alex Kaufman, with any questions: alkaufman@bsu.edu.

Members of the IMA are encouraged to submit a version of your conference presentation to Essays in Medieval Studies, the peer-reviewed journal of the Illinois Medieval Association. To learn more, please visit . You can also reach out to the IMA's Executive Director, Michael W. Hollis-George, with any questions: mwgeorge.51@gmail.com.