Month: January 2021

Medieval Matters: Week 2 HT21

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25/01/2021

10:58

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Dear all,

Term is officially in full swing! Before you peruse our bountiful buffet of seminar options, be sure to get the following announcements in your calendars:

  • Tomorrow, 26 January, we have a hugely exciting book presentation, hosted by Wadham at 6:30 pm on Zoom. Come learn more about Karl Kügle’s new edited volume Sounding the Past: Music as History and Memory from Karl himself and fellow speakers Antonio Chemotti, Manon Louviot and Adam Mathias. The open-access volume can be downloaded here, and you can register for the Zoom event here.
  • This Thursday and Friday (28-29 January, 4-7:30 pm), Oxford’s Iberian History research cluster will be hosting an online postgraduate and ECR conference, ‘Polyphonic Communities: Ways of Belonging in the Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World’. See full details here, and register for the conference here.
  • This year’s Aquinas Lecture will be held on Thursday 28 January at 5 pm on Zoom (register here). Prof. Mark Wynn (Nolloth Professor of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford) will be speaking on ‘Christian Narratives and the Well-Lived Life: Thomistic Reflections’.

‘Nothing is sweeter than a seminar, nothing higher, nothing stronger, nothing larger, nothing more joyful, nothing fuller, and nothing better in heaven or on earth’ – Thomas à Kempis, nearly

MONDAY 25 JANUARY

  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar meets at 12:30 pm on Teams. To join and for information, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. This week’s speaker is Chloé Agar (St Cross College), ‘Analysing Visions Experienced by Saints and Supplicants in Coptic Sources: What, How, and Why?’.
  • The Medieval Latin Reading Group meets at 1 pm on Teams. Submit your email address here to receive notices.
  • The reading group GLARE (Greek, Latin, and Reception) meets at 5 pm on Teams. Email john.colley@ell.ox.ac.uk and jenyth.evans@ell.ox.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list. This week’s text is Cicero’s In Catilinam.
  • Also on Teams at 5 pm is the Medieval History Seminar (search for the seminar in Teams with code rmppucs and then click ‘join’). This week’s speaker is Sara McDougall (City University of New York), ‘Judging Sex in Late Medieval France’.

TUESDAY 26 JANUARY

  • Remember to register for Old Irish and Middle Welsh classes! They meet at 10:15 and 11:20 respectively, on Teams.
  • The Late Medieval Seminar meets at 2 pm on Zoom (Meeting ID: 962 7053 8553, passcode: 078931). This week’s speaker is Eiren Shea (Grinnell), ‘Hammered, Gilt, and Spun: Innovations in Gold Thread Technology During the Yuan Dynasty’.
  • At 3:30 pm on Teams we have the Medieval Book Club (for more information, get in touch at oxfordmedievalbookclub@gmail.com). This week’s theme is ‘Healthy Eating’, reading the Vita Karoli Magni. Charlemagne: the secret to clean living?
  • The Early Slavonic Seminar meets at 5 pm on Zoom (link here). This week’s speaker is Emir O. Filipović (University of Sarajevo), speaking on ‘Hersekzade Ahmed Pasha (1459-1517): From Bosnian Prince to Ottoman Vizier’.
  • Also at 5 pm, but on Teams, is the meeting of the Oxford University Numismatic Society. This week’s speaker is Rebecca Darley (Birkbeck), ‘Numismatic Perspectives on the Western Indian Ocean in Late Antiquity’. Email daniel.etches@new.ox.ac.uk to receive meeting links.
  • The Oxford Pre-Modern Middle Eastern History Seminar meets at 5:30 pm on Zoom (you can register here). This week’s speaker is Christopher Melchert (Oxford), ‘Before Sufism: Early Islamic Renunciant Piety’, with respondent Michael Cooperson (UCLA).

WEDNESDAY 27 JANUARY

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11:15 am on Teams, with the graduate reading group meeting at 11, reading Arnold von Harff. Email henrike.laehnemann@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk for details.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5 pm on Google Meet (link here). This week’s speaker is Nadine Viermann (Heidelberg), ‘Imperial Piety, Warfare, and Eschatology in the age of Heraclius’.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5:15 pm on Teams. This week’s speaker is Michael Fox (University of Western Ontario), ‘Where’s the Point? Beowulf, Analogues, and Örvar-Oddr’. 
  • The Hebrew Bible in Medieval Manuscripts reading group will meet at 7 pm on Zoom; email judith.schlanger@orinst.ox.ac.uk for further information.

THURSDAY 28 JANUARY

  • The Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music will meet at 5 pm on Zoom (register here). This week’s speaker is Grantley McDonald (Oxford), ‘Emperor Frederick III as Patron of Music’, with discussants Reinhard Strohm (Oxford), Andreas Zajic (Vienna) and Catherine Saucier (Arizona State). 
  • The Celtic Seminar meets at 5:15 pm on Teams. Contact david.willis@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk for a link. This week’s speaker is Kate Leach (Harvard), ‘Vernacularity in Premodern Welsh Healing Charms’.
  • The OCHJS David Patterson lectures commence at 6 pm on Zoom (register here). This week’s speakers are Alison Salvesen (OCHJS), Sarah Pearce (Southampton) and Miriam Frankel (Hebrew University), on ‘Israel in Egypt: The Land of Egypt as Concept and Reality for Jews in Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period’.
  • The Medieval Trade Reading Group meets at 7 pm. To be added to the team and have access to the materials and meetings, email Annabel Hancock at annabel.hancock@history.ox.ac.uk.

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY

  • The work in progress workshop Pre-Modern Conversations meets at 11 am on Teams. Email lena.vosding@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk for further information.
  • The Seminar in the History of the Book will have a special session at 5 pm today (note the time change), featuring speakers Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford), Kathryn James (Beinecke Library, Yale), Matthew Shaw (Oxford), and Sarah Wheale (Bodleian Libraries, Oxford), discussing ‘Goostly Psalmes in Oxford and New Haven: The Queen’s College Sammelband with Myles Coverdale’s Goostly Psalmes’, with a showing (a shewing, even?) of the Queen’s College copy and the Bodleian and Beinecke fragments. Email bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for the link.

Enjoy the bounty!

All best wishes,

Caroline

Medieval Matters: Week 1 HT21

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17/01/2021

11:00

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Dear all,

Welcome (back?) to Hilary Term! We have a cornucopia of medieval delights for you over the next eight weeks, to brighten the winter dark and take the sting out of lockdown.

First, however, a hugely important and exciting announcement! The annual, interdisciplinary Hilary Term Oxford Medieval Studies Lecture is THIS WEEK! On Thursday 21 January at 5 pm, the OMS YouTube channel will be livestreaming Prof. William Chester Jordan (Princeton), giving a paper entitled ‘A Thirteenth Century Polymath Considers the Jews’. Watch it at this link. Questions will be moderated through the comments. This is an unmissable event and an opportunity to hear a brilliant scholar; we look forward to seeing you there.

Want to be an internet sensation? Pitch a blog post for OMS! Check out our latest posts here, and email caroline.batten@ell.ox.ac.uk and henrike.laehnemann@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk with your ideas.  

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the seminars.

‘When the words come, they are merely empty shells without [Oxford seminars]. They live as they are [presented at Oxford seminars], for the words are the body and the [seminars] the spirit.’ – Hildegard von Bingen, mostly

MONDAY 18 JANUARY

  • The Medieval Latin Reading Group meets at 1 pm today on Teams. Submit your email address here to receive updates and invitations. 
  • The Seminar in Palaography and Manuscript Studies meets at 2:15 pm on Zoom. Email bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for the link, and for this term you’ll need to email by noon on the Friday before the seminar. Mark your calendars! This week’s speaker is Julian Luxford (St Andrews), ‘The Tewkesbury Benefactors’ Book’
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets on Teams at 5 pm. This week’s speaker is Patrick Geary (Emeritus, Princeton), ‘The Challenges and Dangers of Integrating Genomic Data into Early Medieval History’.
  • Also at 5 pm on Teams is a new reading group, GLARE (Greek, Latin, and Reception). Email both john.colley@ell.ox.ac.uk and jenyth.evans@ell.ox.ac.uk to join in and read Greek and Latin texts with an eye towards their use in medieval and later literature. This week’s text is Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis.
  • The Old Norse Reading Group meets at 5:30 pm on Teams, continuing with Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks. Email bond.west@lincoln.ox.ac.uk to join.

TUESDAY 19 JANUARY

  • The Late Medieval Seminar is back, and this term’s theme is ‘Textiles in the Later Middle Ages’. The seminar meets at 2 pm on Zoom (link here, meeting ID: 962 7053 8553, passcode: 078931). This week’s speaker is Amanda Phillips (University of Virginia), ‘Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean’.
  • The Medieval Book Club meets at 3:30 on Teams. This term’s theme is Food (glorious food), and this week’s theme is ‘Feasting: Arthurian Tales’. Email oxfordmedievalbookclub@gmail.com for more details and to join.
  • The Oxford Pre-Modern Middle Eastern History Seminar meets at 5:30 pm on Zoom (link here). This week’s speaker is Lena Salaymeh (Oxford), ‘The Beginnings of Islam’, with respondent Khaled Abou el Fadl (UCLA).

WEDNESDAY 20 JANUARY

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11:15 am on Teams, with a small reading group beginning at 11. This term’s focus is Arnold von Harff’s travel accounts.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5 pm on Google Meet (link here). This week’s speaker is Marek Jankowiak, ‘P.Lond I 113.10, the Tribute of Cyrus, and the Muslim Conquest of Egypt’.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5:15 pm on Teams. This week’s speaker is Samantha Zacher (Cornell), ‘Looking beyond the Lyrical “I”: the Wife’s Lament, Psalm Intertexts and Affective Technologies’.

THURSDAY 21 JANUARY

FRIDAY 22 JANUARY

  • The Seminar in the History of the Book meets at 2:15 pm on Zoom. Register to receive a link for each meeting by emailing bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. This week’s speaker is Matthew Payne (Keeper of the Muniments, Westminster Abbey), ‘Follow the Money: Wynkyn de Worde, Jacques Ferrebouc and the Bardi’.
  • The Anglo-Norman Reading Group is continuing with the Life of Godric this term, at 5 pm on odd week Fridays. Please contact Stephanie Hathaway (stephanie.hathaway@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk) for details.

We’ve made it through the Kalends of January! All of term spreads before us, with EVEN MORE seminars starting up next week. Keep your heads up, medieval team: we’ll get through the winter yet.

All best wishes,

Caroline

Medieval Matters: Week 0 HT21

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12/01/2021

11:01

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Dear all,

Term time approaches! And at long last, the thing you’ve been waiting for all vac: get a sneak peek at all the exciting events, seminars, and reading groups you can attend in Hilary in the MEDIEVAL BOOKLET! Peruse it here! The OMS website and digital calendar will be fully updated by the end of the week.

In the meantime, a few things that merit your attention: 

*This Thursday, 14 January, at 2 pm GMT, Helsinki’s Anu Lahtinen and our own Juliana Dresvina are hosting a Zoom seminar on the History of Domestic Violence. There will be much medieval material: Hannah Skoda and Kristi DiClemente will both present on medieval France, while Kirsi Kanerva and Ilya Sverdlov will be speaking about the Icelandic family sagas, alongside other papers of general interest. For further information, contact Julie at juliana.dresvina@history.ox.ac.uk. You can join the Zoom meeting here.

*Next Monday, 18 January, 5:15 pm to 6:30 pm GMT, will be the Oxford Italian Sub-Faculty research Seminar. The speaker is Dr David Bowe (University College Cork) on ‘Meditation and/as Dialogue in Dante’. To register, contact italian.res-sem@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk to be added to the Teams channel.

*To get us all through Lockdown 3.0, Sebastian Dows-Miller has some excellent Twitter-tainment. The various beasts of Merton’s copy of Philip de Thaun’s Bestiary haved joined forces to provide you with regular updates, complete with manuscript illuminations. Follow @MertonBeasts on Twitter for some #LockdownBestiary antics!

Your regularly scheduled Medieval Matters emails will resume next week. Prepare yourselves!

All best wishes,

Caroline

How Black is Middle Dutch Moorish black?

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06/01/2021

15:25

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by Sophie Jordan

Moriaen is black, and so is his suit of armour. Like the Green Knight in the English tradition or Ither in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Moriaen’s most noticeable trait is the colour of his equipment, which matches his body. The Christian son of an Arthurian knight and a Moorish princess, Moriaen comes to Arthur’s court and surprises its members by demonstrating that he has all the qualities of an Arthurian knight, despite his unusual appearance.

But is this black knight necessarily Black? Should we understand the fearful reactions and the rejection he initially experiences as racist?

In the 13th century Middle Dutch text, Walewein, the Dutch equivalent of Gawain, encounters the eponymous hero Moriaen in full armour. Walewein’s first thought is that the fierce foreigner must be the Devil:medieval manuscript image of a black knight with Latin next to it, decorative green foliage border

Figure 1 Historiated Initial representing the black knight Walewein by Astrid Anquetin, especially commissioned for this blog post – not to be reused without permission

‘Nochtan waende Walewein bet / Dat ware die duvel dan een man / Daer si waren comen an, / Maer dat hine horde nomen Gode / Men had hem niet mogen ontstriden ode / Hine ware die duvel oft sijn geselle / Ende ware comen uter hellen, / Omdat sijn ors was so groet, / Ende hi was merre dan Lanceloet, / Ende daertoe sward, alsict seide.’ (l.480-489)

‘Nevertheless [Walewein] deemed that this was a devil rather than a man whom they had come upon! Had they not heard him call upon God no man had dared face him, deeming that he was the devil or one of his fellows out of hell, for that his steed was so great, and he was taller even than Sir Lancelot, and black withal, as I said afore.’ (translation J. Weston)

Because of the focus on Moriaen’s looks in this and other descriptions, it is hard to tell whether his black skin is perceived as one part of his identity or whether it is racialised. Walewein’s association of a physical trait with a moral judgement seems to fit the common definition of race, and being so negatively charged, his reaction might be interpreted as racist – meaning that the racial type of the large black Moor is classified and compared to others. Of course, by using the image of the Devil, black could not be ranked lower, both symbolically and morally.

Yet Moriaen, regardless of the wordplay which links him to his country, does not represent the people of Moriane overall. On the contrary, both his story of disinheritance and isolation, and the absence of other black characters in the plot single him out as a lone wolf. While his skin colour certainly stands out in Arthur’s country, it doesn’t identify him as a representative of Moorish high society. Since the inhabitants and customs of Moriane are barely sketched, there is no opportunity for a collective stereotype to form on the basis of the black knight’s portrayal, either among the white characters or the tale’s readers.

Figure 2: St Maurice as black knight, Statuette commissioned by the Abbess of Medingen in 1506 to celebrate the convent’s patron saint

On the other hand, Moriaen’s skills and his great physical strength, suggested by his tall figure in the above quotation, help him gain the other knights’ respect and the king’s praise. These chivalric qualities, inherited from his father, are more than enough to convince Walewein of Moriaen’s worth and to balance out the initial doubt provoked by the hero’s blackness. On several occasions, Moriaen is even favourably compared to Lanceloet, who is traditionally Arthur’s best knight.

Although dark skin is interpreted as hellish, the narrator insists on dissociating appearance and internal being: Moriaen’s skin colour and his more personal traits are dealt with separately, making him a supposedly ugly but no less powerful hero. Blackness is not essentialised, nor is it therefore racialised.

Where at first there seems to be a wide gap between ideal knighthood, as outlined in Arthurian romance, and Moriaen’s dark appearance, the narrator’s focus on action and courtly values fully restores the Black Knight’s potential to be accepted in Camelot. This is the tale of a knight who ultimately succeeds in his quest and receives great honour, just like any other.

***

Sophie Jordan completed the Master of Studies in German this summer, and she is now studying the anthropological aspects of the question of skin colour as difference at the University of Manchester.

Recommended reading:

Claassens, Geert H. M., and David F. Johnson. King Arthur in the Medieval Low Countries. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000. Google Books, https://books.google.be/books?id=tWslRJGdTOgC&lpg=PP1&dq=King%20Arthur%20in%20the%20Medieval%20Low%20Countries&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Devisse, Jean, trans. William Granger Ryan. ‘Christians and Black.’ The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II, Part 1, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr.. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. pp.31-72. A&AePortal, https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:3362/?id=-17117

Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. New York; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Cambridge core, https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2095/10.1017/9781108381710