As the new editor of Speculum I would like first to thank Kate Jansen and her staff and introduce our new team. Managing Editor Taylor McCall and Associate Editor Carol Anderson have worked with painstaking care to train their successors, and we owe them enormous thanks. Our new Associate Editor, Lily Stewart, earned her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Northwestern in 2022 and taught for three years as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She has a book manuscript under submission, titled A Sacred Disease: Leprosy, Salvation, and Christian Identity in Medieval Literature. Lily will be handling all book reviews for the journal. Managing Editor Ben Weil, who is in charge of production, will defend his NU dissertation in Art History on November 10: “Representing the City in Fourteenth-Century Italy: Art, Politics, and Civic Identities.” We are all nervously hoping we can keep up the excellent work of Taylor and Carol, and of course, outgoing editor Kate Jansen. I also want to thank interns Yunji Li and Ruby Barenberg for their work on the back matter and Books Received.
Because of a series of article clusters and special issues, among them the exciting “Speculations” to appear in January as we observe our centennial, we have a long backlog at the moment. Articles now being accepted will be published in January or April of 2027. But as the run of special issues comes to an end, we aim to reduce the time from acceptance to publication to no more than a year, and to make editorial decisions in no more than four months. I warmly encourage independent scholars, as well as junior and senior faculty and advanced graduate students, to consider submitting work to Speculum. You’ll find Guidelines for Submissions, as well as our new AI policy and Open Access policy, on the Medieval Academy website.
Along with our traditional fields, we are happy to publish articles on underrepresented areas such as medieval Ireland, Byzantium, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. And although terms such as “global Middle Ages” need to be used with care, it is also important to cover the manifold connections linking medieval Europe with Africa and Asia. For example, we welcome studies of the Mongol Empire (like the one in the October issue) and research on the Silk Roads as a Eurasian trading and cultural network. Comparative articles, including co-authored pieces, are also welcome. Regardless of topic, of course, all submissions will undergo our rigorous double-blind peer review process. I look forward to working with medievalists of all sorts and conditions in the years to come!
