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Call for Papers - International Piers Plowman SocietyMeeting Miami, April 4 - 6 , 2019 - Due Date for Submissions: September 7 , 2018&#160;7. Medicine and the Body in Piers Plowman : A RoundtableOrganizer, Laura Godfrey, University of Connecticut (la ra.godfrey@uconn.edu)Scholars have traditionally read the medical language, characters, and practices in Piers Plowman as symbolic of salvation, reducing actual medical practice to metaphor and symbolism. Recent scholarly turns to the body recenter the body in literary texts through attention to the somatic experiences described through allegory, satire, and personification. This roundtable invites papers that interrogate illness and remedy, the body and embodiment, the senses, and the theory and practice of medicine in Piers Plowman and alliterative poetry.&#160;16 . Disability in the Age of Piers PlowmanOrganizer: Rick Godden, Louisiana State University (rgodden1@lsu.edu)This session will explore the representations of disability and impairment in the fourteen th century, especially withi n Piers Plowman or related texts. Langland reveals the fourteenth century’s ambivalent and multifaceted attitude toward disability and impairment. Characters in the poe m often treat disabled figures with either love or skepticism. On one hand, those who are too infirm to work are excused from the demands of labor, and are deemed worthy of charity and God’s love. On the other, there are “faitours” who readily assume the g uise of impairment in order to deceive and evade the duty to work. Will himself is interrogated by Reason in the C - Text about his inability to work, and he cites his own embodied difference, being too tall, as a justification. This session invites papers that examine disability in medieval literature from a variety of methodological approaches. Are there different representations of disability across the versions of Piers Plowman ? How do representations of disability in the poem intersect with legal, theol ogical, or social concerns in the fourteenth century? How do writers contemporary to Langland treat disability? What is the role of physical, cognitive, or s omatic impairment in the poem? How can we put the poem into conversation with Disability Studies? How does a consideration of disability in Piers Plowman reorient or contribute to current work on Langland? To medieval Disability Studies?&#160;More info on the conference's website