We hope that you can join us for the 36th annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium: Mirror Worlds on Saturday, February 21, 2026. It will be held all day in the A.D. White House.
Keynote address at 2:30pm
Dr. Emma Campbell– Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Studies, George Washington University
“Specular Humanity and the Mirror Worlds of Medieval Bestiaries”
Mirrors had a range of associations in medieval culture that reflect the ambiguous nature of human knowledge, contemplation, and representation. At one end of the spectrum, mirrors could be positively associated with knowledge and self-improvement; at the other, less positive end, they were instruments of vanity, sensory deception, and misrecognition.
These qualities of mirrors and mirroring in medieval culture echo the ambivalent roles that mirrors sometimes play in human subjecthood and identity-construction as conceptualized in modern and contemporary thought (Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminist critiques thereof; queer studies, trans studies, posthumanism etc.). Yet there is also a distinctiveness to the conceptual work that mirrors perform in medieval understandings of human self-construction. This talk will explore how that specificity manifests itself in a range of textual and visual sources from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on the courtly tradition (e.g. medieval tales of Narcissus) and its intersection with medieval bestiaries, including Richard de Fournival’s Bestiary of Love. In these works, human and nonhuman creatures hold up a mirror to medieval readers in literal as well as figurative senses. The mirror is both a modality of texts that aim to teach their readers through example and a literalized presence in the reflective objects that feature visually and narratively in these works (e.g. the mirrors that human hunters use to deceive the tiger).
Even as they demonstrate the intimate relationship between the mirror and human subjecthood, one of the questions that bestiaries raise is how mirrors also collapse conventional distinctions between humans and other animals. This paper considers how the mirrors in these texts confuse as well as constitute humanity, and what that confusion might mean for the alternative worlds that premodern texts make imaginable today.
Program can be found in this Box Folder
Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) Mission Statement
The purpose of the Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) is to showcase the ideas and research of the medievalist community at Cornell and the wider academic world and to strengthen connectivity between these medievalists. In doing so, MSSC aims to provide a platform for underrepresented groups and disciplines. MSSC hosts an annual one-day colloquium in the spring semester organized by the graduate students of the Medieval Studies Program and its affiliated programs at Cornell. Each year, MSSC is an opportunity for all interested in the Middle Ages at Cornell—as well as visitors from other institutions—to share papers in a relaxed and friendly environment. The MSSC aims to be as diverse as possible in terms of its content and the speakers and panelists it invites to speak at the event. This means that the keynote speakers who are invited to speak will represent different disciplines and backgrounds each year. This also means that the selection of each year’s theme is done with the aim of attracting speakers and panelists from a broad range of disciplines and that the MSSC committee will be diligent in their selection of speakers and panelists in order to ensure a diverse representation of disciplines and backgrounds and people.
