What are “leavings,” anyway? The MED tells us that in Middle English, the term referred to leftovers, a remainder, something left behind. At times it carried a more forceful connotation, of something rejected, even vomited. Yet other occurrences blend sorrow with hope, and refer to bequests in wills.
That’s a powerful lot of ambiguity for one word to carry, and it well conveys the complex histories of the articles we publish here in Medieval Leavings. Some of these articles have been rejected. Others have been left behind more or less violently. Here we take these leavings, and, like bequests, send them into a future where they may find use in the next generation of scholarship.
(“Leavings” does not, however, appear to refer to shit, either in the medieval or modern periods. Yet, the OED stumbles especially hard on twentieth-century Americanisms, and so we might pause and reflect on the complexities of global Englishes and the challenges of naming things. Even the name of our field’s journal of record can be confused for a gynecological tool, we must accept.)
In the end, Medieval Leavings will never be a normal academic journal–the entire reason it exists is to publish material that has been left, cast off, by other journals. We’re even making use of the old reports, including reading negative reports against the grain! We want to highlight the quality of work that can get lost in a traditional journal system under so much strain that it’s breaking down. That’s not traditional, and that’s okay. To some, that might even be a little dirty, and those of us who want to do this work will be okay with that too.
