William Arguelles examines the ways in which The Clerk’s Tale and Emaré use lavish clothing as a means for constraining and controlling women, contributing to a larger understanding of class and gender in the Middle Ages. In both Emaré and The Clerk's Tale, the women protagonists are purposely marked and constrained by their clothing - and this purposeful emphasis on their garments is tied directly into a larger textile language of feminine control that would have been physically obvious in its constraints and discomfort. By reading their garments with a “period eye” and the accompanying discomfort inflicted by their weight and design, a better understanding of the tensions and turmoil of both The Clerk’s Tale and Emaré can be understood.

Elisabeth Joyce analyzes how and why Susan Howe explicitly works with lace throughout her poetry book, The Midnight. She will focus on how lacework becomes the form of the poem, and how using lace as its motivating image and extended metaphor raises the text to become perceptible to touch, a laced and enlaced touching experience.

Nicholas Hoffman explores the tactile poetics and theology of the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). Dickinson’s compact verses and fragmented biography offer a case study in medievalism and the literary power of touch. Dickinson’s reclusion has been the source of an enduring critical conversation that has largely established her role as a (medieval) mystic within the popular imagination. Here Hoffman attends to the medievalism of Dickinson’s craft. He argues that her investment in the manuscript, the hand, and the wider material world made her simultaneously medieval and avant-garde among her peers.

Amy Elkins reflects on an archival experience with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)’s forgotten needlecraft archive, connecting modernist tactility (and its limits) to her scholarship on women writers and craft. Elkins’s project weaves and stitches together literary analysis, autoethnography, queer theory, and art history. Elkins argues that textile craft transcends metaphor. This constellation of ideas is about the intimacy of text and textiles—how the embodied gestures of craftwork connect feminist praxis to a global, intergenerational community of makers.

This panel reflects the challenges that tactility presents readers. The four presentations highlight the compelling and variable approach to tactility as metaphor, material, and textile. Each of the four presentations will be limited to twelve minutes to ensure more than fifteen minutes of discussion.