About This Journal
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality (MFF) was born in 1984, the result of a serendipitous encounter at Kalamazoo airport between three feminist medievalists in the aftermath of the annually convened International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. Bearing the title Medieval Feminist Newsletter (MFN), its founders and foremothers, E. Jane Burns, Roberta (Bonnie) Krueger, Elizabeth Robertson, and, a little later, Thelma Fenster, established it primarily as a forum for facilitating for communication and intellectual exchange between feminist medievalists in the academy who had been feeling disconnected from one another. Its first issue, distributed primarily by hand and by mail, appeared in May 1986. MFN included short research papers and papers from Kalamazoo sessions focusing on gender, discussions surrounding the teaching of medieval studies, summaries of current research into medieval gender and sexuality, and issues surrounding feminist publications. As such, MFN began as a precursor to the now fully international Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS), which was launched in its wake in 1992 to provide a more formal framework for communication and mutual support, and as a primary forum for research into medieval sexuality and gender across the world.
In 1999, MFN morphed into Medieval Feminist Forum to better reflect its newly established status as a fully peer-reviewed academic journal, responding further in 2014 to additional important epistemological shifts by adding the qualifier A Journal of Gender and Sexuality to its primary title. Under that aegis, it continues to offer a forum promoting scholarship and interdisciplinary exchange, especially in the context of medieval gender and sexuality studies across the globe. MFF went fully online in 2009 and, in its evolved format, continues the ethos of the original Newsletter in its committed support of a diverse and fully inclusive medieval studies.
Aims and Scopes
As the journal of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS), Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality (MFF) publishes articles and book reviews promoting interdisciplinary scholarship on medieval women, gender, and sexuality. We invite submissions from scholars at any stage in their careers, but suggest that graduate and advanced undergraduate students review our recommendations for student writers. Manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review. Submissions that have a focused argument supported by primary-source evidence, contextualized in current scholarly literature, and written in a clear style that engages an audience versed in feminist theory are most successful in the review process. MFF publishes articles of original research (preferably under 10,000 words including footnotes) as well as state-of-the-field historiographies or literature reviews; we will consider work on the medieval period as well as on medievalism. Scholars interested in reviewing books for MFF should contact the Book Review Editor.
MFF was originally published under the title Medieval Feminist Newsletter (ISSN: 1054-1004 (Print) 2154-4042 (Online), ISSN-L 1054-1004). In 1999 (no. 28) the journal title changed to Medieval Feminist Forum.
Issues are available freely online beginning two years after publication. Access to full text of recently published issues is by subscription only. For more information on subscribing to MFF, please visit http://smfsweb.org/join-smfs/.
Beginning with the Winter 2009 issue, vol. 45, no. 2, Medieval Feminist Forum is published in electronic format only.
MFF is indexed by MLA Bibliography (2005+), Feminist Periodicals (1996+), and Feminae.
MFF follows the SERU guidelines as published on the NISO SERU website: http://www.niso.org/committees/SERU/.
Authors will receive monthly emails providing the count of downloads of their articles. Download counts are displayed for each article. There are no article submission charges nor article processing charges (APC) to publish. COUNTER usage statistics are not available.
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality is preserved in the Global LOCKSS Network.
Complete metadata for all articles in Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality is available via OAI /do/oai/?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=dcq&set=publication:mff">https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/do/oai/?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=dcq&set=publication:mff.
