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New Publisher: Punctum Books offers outlet for non-conventional medievalists

A pair of medieval scholars have teamed to create a new publishing company that promises to offer interesting new insights into the Middle Ages.

punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand publisher created by Eileen A. Joy of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Nicola Masciandaro of Brooklyn College, CUNY. They explain that they will “specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms, with an emphasis on books that fall length-wise between the article and the monograph—id est, novellas, in one sense or another. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.”

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punctum books will be seeking out a wide variety of projects, including ones that are not attractive to more mainstream publishers. One of their first publications will be Wlite: i englisc boc be missenlicum þingum wrætlicum. Vol. 1: Translations from the MS. QV i with Introduction and Paleographical Essay, edited and translated by Daniel Remein. The volume will offer a translation of a tenth-century book discovered in Newfoundland in 2009, which contains previously unknown Anglo-Saxon poetry and a micro-chronicle of an alternate history of Norse/Anglo-Saxon relations in pre-Conquest England.

The publisher will also be working on books related to Speculative Medievalisms and a series from George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute that will be called Oliphaunt. According to their press release, “punctum books seeks to curate the open spaces of writing or writing-as-opening, the crucial tiny portals on whose capacious thresholds all writing properly and improperly takes place. Pricking, puncturing, perforating = publishing in the mode of a unconditional hospitality and friendship, making space for what Eve Sedgwick called “queer little gods” – the “ontologically intermediate [and teratological] figures” of y/our thought.”

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Please visit their website more information about punctum books

See also our article Witan Publishing offers epublishing service for medieval scholars

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