Invitation to the 136th Annual Conference of the Association for Low German Language Research with a focus on “Middle Low German Language and Literature” in Ghent, May 20 – May 23, 2024
Research on Middle Low German has a long tradition in the Association for Low German Language Research. Recently, the field of research has received a new boost with the completion of major projects. These include, for example, the Atlas of Late Medieval Written Languages of the Low German Lowlands and Adjacent Areas (ASnA), the Reference Corpus of Middle Low German and Low Rhenish (ReN), the Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which builds on this, as well as projects with a research and infrastructure focus such as Interactive Grammar Analysis of Historical Texts (InterGramm).
In addition, various projects on the edition of Middle Low German manuscripts (e.g. as part of the Middle Low German Library series) and digital humanities projects such as the Wiedererzählen im Norden project, which deals with the digital analysis of secular narratives in early Low German prints, are being pursued. In recent years, several dissertation and habilitation projects on Middle Low German texts have been completed in the field of literary studies.
These and other projects have led to numerous new publications on Middle Low German linguistics and literature. Conferences on medieval and early modern literature in northern Germany and the resulting anthologies have been added. Digitally supported textbooks on the Middle Low German language level are in the process of being created.
The call for papers for the 136th annual meeting of the VndS takes this dynamic development into account and asks for proposals for papers on the topic of “Middle Low German Language and Literature”, which highlight selected issues from the spectrum – linguistic and literary history, system linguistics, literary studies, edition studies or cultural studies.