Leeds Medieval Studies Journal

Leeds Medieval Studies is an international, free-access, refereed journal based in the University of Leeds Institute for Medieval Studies. It is the successor to and continuation of Leeds Studies in English (founded 1932) and The Bulletin of International Medieval Research (founded 1995).

Leeds Medieval Studies welcomes submissions reflecting the full intellectual range of the interdisciplinary Institute for Medieval Studies, including history, art, literature, and language in the period c. 500--1500 CE, and the study of modern medievalisms. We are glad to continue our long-standing commitment, unusual in academic journals, to publishing editions and translations as well as essayistic articles. For more information on our editorial policy, see our first editorial note.

As a free-access publication, Leeds Medieval Studies neither requires authors to pay to publish, nor requires readers to pay for immediate online access, conforming to the Directory of Open Access Journals Seal for best practice. We do, however, encourage readers to subscribe to our reasonably priced hard-copy publications via our printers and distributors, Abramis Academic.

Submissions

Leeds Medieval Studies accepts submissions a rolling basis. Accepted work is published online on a rolling basis and in hard copy annually. Please email all contributions to lms@leeds.ac.uk.

As well as publishing traditional articles and book reviews, Leeds Medieval Studies continues the commitment of Leeds Studies in English to publishing editions and translations, supporting the foundational work of scholars making primary texts available to wider audiences.

The usual language of publication is English and translations should normally be supplied for quotations in languages other than English, but we are open to discussing submissions in other languages. Please include an abstract and keywords with your submission.

We have no maximum or minimum word-limits: as long as the work is good and the expression efficient, we are happy for it to be whatever size it needs to be.

Contributors are requested to follow the MHRA Style Guide, 3rd edn (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013). Where possible, contributors are encouraged to include the digital object identifiers or, where a complete free access text is available, stable URLs of materials cited (see Style Guide §11.2.11).

We aim to complete peer-review of submissions within two months.

Subscriptions

To subscribe to Leeds Medieval Studies, or to our monographs series, simply email the Secretary at lms@leeds.ac.uk. You'll be added to our list of subscribers and sent each issue when it comes out, with an invoice. Prices vary slightly from year to year but are usually around £30.

For precursor publications, see past publications (for free-access digital copies, and hard copies of Leeds Texts and Monographs volumes), our publishing partner Abramis Academic Publishing (for hard copies of Leeds Studies in English), and the Leeds Studies in English archives at Leeds University Library.

Reviews

Copies of books for review should be sent to the Editor, Leeds Medieval Studies, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom.

Editorial board

Editorial Board:

History

Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages was started in 1932 as an annual philological journal by Bruce Dickins, Alan S. C. Ross and R. M. Wilson, who were all teaching in the Department of English Language at the University of Leeds. There were six issues before the outbreak of war in 1939, but publication was then suspended. Numbers 7 and 8 were published as a combined volume in 1952, but it was not until 1967, under the editorship of A. C. Cawley and R. C. Alston, that regular annual publication was resumed, in a new series under the title Leeds Studies in English. Notwithstanding its name, the journal's focus has always been on the language and literature of medieval north-west Europe, particularly English, French, and Old Norse.

Meanwhile, the Bulletin of International Medieval Research was begun in 1995 by Alan V. Murray, then assistant editor of the International Medieval Bibliography. Originally a means to keep in touch with the Bibliography’s widely dispersed contributors and to publish book reviews related to the Bibliography‘s work, the publication soon evolved to publish peer-reviewed research articles.

Though it originated in 1967, Leeds's Institute for Medieval Studies took its present form in 2003. Leeds Studies in English and the Bulletin of International Medieval Research merged in 2020 to consolidate the editorial work of Leeds medievalists and align it institutionally to the Institute for Medieval Studies. Both journals have always been published by scholars, for scholars, disseminating high-quality research at as low a cost as possible and keeping publication in-house. Leeds Medieval Studies, free-access online and low-cost in print, continues these traditions.

For a fuller history of the journal, see Alaric Hall, 'Leeds Studies in English: A History', Leeds Medieval Studies, 2 (2022), 101-39.

ISSN 2754-4575 (Print)
ISSN 2754-4583 (Online)