YMJ Style Guide

Presentation and Formatting

Referencing

York Medieval Journal uses MHRA referencing style for ease of referencing regardless of discipline. MHRA references should adhere to the Fourth Edition (2024) which is available to consult online here: https://www.mhra.org.uk/style/.

Use footnotes rather than endnotes when referencing primary and secondary sources. If your article repeatedly references a particular source (especially if said source is primary), you may follow your initial footnote of said source by clarifying that all subsequent references followed by a page or line number in parentheses are from this edition. Please limit the usage of this to a maximum of three sources. 

Footnotes must feature full stops.

Any references to one’s own work should read as if it were a reference to the work of another scholar. Excessive references to one’s own work are not recommended. 

When citing a series of primary sources or a dictionary, please give the full title (e.g. Oxford English Dictionary rather than OED) when initially referencing. 

Examples:

1. A monograph

Lisa H. Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 226.

2. An essay or chapter in an edited volume, or a single poem in an anthology

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Postscript: The Promise of Monsters’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Routledge, 2017), pp. 449-64 (p. 463).

3. An article published in a journal

Michael Lapidge, ‘The Archetype of Beowulf’, Anglo-Saxon England, 29 (2000), pp. 5-41 (p. 39), doi:10.1017/S0263675100002398.

Bibliography

Your bibliography must be titled ‘Bibliography’, and must include all cited material alphabetically. Bibliographies do not use full stops at the end. The first attributed author listed for a piece of bibliographical material must be listed surname-forname (e.g. Hughes, Langston). 

Bibliographies must use single-line spacing, but there must be a double-spaced line between each entry.

Word count

Articles must fall between 1500-2500 words in length. Articles must not exceed or fall short of the word count. Word counts include footnotes but exclude bibliographies and translations in square parentheses. 

Format

Articles must use Times New Roman font in twelve point size. 

Lines must be double spaced, with a blank line between paragraphs. 

Use exclusively justified alignment. 

All paragraphs following the first paragraph must be indented. 

Pages must be numbered. 

Articles must be in English. Authors are welcome to discuss non-Anglophone material, however modern English translations must be provided. 

Parenthetical line references must follow translations, never the reverse.

Quotations

Use single quotation marks, only using double when quoting something that uses double quotation marks within it. All verse quotations longer than three lines and prose quotations longer than forty words must be indented without quotation marks. Indented quotations must end with a full stop. 

If verse quotations include a line division, mark this division using a single spaced forward slash ( /). 

Punctuation should go inside quotation marks if they come from the quoted source. Punctuation should go outside of the quotation mark if it doesn’t come from the quoted source.

URL Formatting

Web addresses should be written in angle brackets. Inside those brackets, URLs almost always begin ‘https://’; this is part of the URL and must be included. For example: <https://www.mhra.org.uk/style/contents.html> [accessed 17 November 2023].

Translation

All quoted texts that are not in modern English must receive a translation (either your own, or a correctly-cited published translation) in square brackets following the reference. Translations of indented quotations must also be indented and must also be in square brackets. The only exceptions to this rule are instances where discussion of the very act of translating the quotation immediately follows said quotation. 

Standardised Spelling

Articles must adhere to conventions of British spelling (e.g. ‘humour’ not ‘humor’). Wherever possible, where verbs can end in ‘ize’ or ‘ise’ (e.g. ‘standardize’ or ‘standardise’), opt for the ‘ise’ suffix. 

Pronouns

Authors must opt to use the most recent pronoun choice of a referent. 

Default to the third person ‘they’ or ‘them’ pronoun when referring to an individual whose gender is unknown. 

Permission to Use

Authors must not use third-party material (illustrations, tables, photographs, etc) for the sake of copyright reasons. 

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General Style

Titles

Italics are used for the titles of all works individually published under their own titles: books, journals, plays, longer poems, pamphlets, and any other entire published work.

Titles of works that exist within a larger publication or body of work should be in single inverted commas. 

Musical titles that are descriptive or numerical do not take italics or quotation marks e.g. Beethoven’s Third Symphony.  

Numbers

Numbers up to and including one hundred (including ordinals) must be written in words unless the context is statistical. Figures must be used for numbers over one hundred and large numbers must be separated with commas.  

Figures must be used for volume, part, chapter, and page numbers. Figures must also be used for years, including those below one hundred. 

Numbers at the beginnings of sentences must be written in words, as should ‘hundred’, ‘thousand’, ‘million’, ‘billion’, etc., if they appear as whole numbers. 

Dates

Follow dd/mm/yyyy style. Mark spans of years with an en-dash and do not elide numbers between 11 and 19, e.g. 1410-15, not 1410-5. 

Do not use apostrophes after decades, e.g. 1410s not 1410’s. 

BCE date spans must be expressed in full in case of confusion e.g. The First Punic War (264-241 BCE) not (264-41 BCE). 

Punctuation

Brackets

Punctuation that ends a sentence belongs outside of brackets. 

Square brackets should be used to indicate modifications to a quote. They can also be used for clarifications. 

Colons

Colons show a direct connection between two clauses, and are usually explanatory. They can also introduce lists.

Capitalisation

‘Middle’ is capitalized in such fixed expressions as Middle East(ern), Middle Ages, Middle English.

Commas

Follow Oxford comma usage when listing. Commas should not be used in sentences if their omission leaves the meaning of the sentence unaffected. 

Semicolons

Semicolons can connect two related main clauses, or separate a complex list.

Dashes

The em-dash can be used in place of brackets, commas, and colons.

Hyphens

Use hyphens in: double-barrel names; compound adjectives before a noun (e.g. tight-fitting jumper); with prefixes before a proper noun (e.g. pre-1400).

The prefix ‘mid-’ always requires a hyphen (except where it forms part of a single word, as in midnight). 

Hyphens are not used to connect ‘century’ to a number (e.g. ‘fourteenth century’, not ‘fourteenth-century’). 

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Acronyms

Acronyms should be written as a single string of capital letters. With lesser-known acronyms, the first use of the word should be spelled out with the acronym following in brackets e.g. Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (JMRC). 

Ampersands

Ampersands (&) should only be used if they are within a reference. 

Initials

Initials should be separated by a full stop but not a space e.g. C.S. Lewis. 

For further clarification on the style guide, please consult the MHRA referencing guide.