Term has ended, Spring is finally here, and Easter is just on the horizon! Hopefully you are enjoying the sunshine, wherever you are. To celebrate, I come to your inbox with CFPs, Save-the-dates, and, of course, some Old English wisdom! First of all, some wisdom about the importance of rest and relaxation, taken from Maxims I:
Hy twegen sceolon tæfle ymbsittan þenden him hyra torn toglide
forgietan þara geocran gesceafta
[Two must sit at a game board together until their troubles slip away, forgetting sad events.]
I hope that your Easter break is filled with such joys! Onto the Medieval offerings:
Save the Date:
- The Oxford Medieval Mystery Cycle 2022 – 23 April 2022, 12noon to 5:30pm. A cycle of medieval mystery plays performed by various groups around St Edmund Hall. A multilingual medieval experience not to be missed! All welcome (free of charge)! At 12 noon, the chapel bell will ring for Creation to commence in the Old Dining Hall. From there the story of mankind will unfold, with the Old Testament being acted out in the Front Quad and the New Testament in the churchyard around St Peter-in-the-East. For full information see https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/mystery-cycle or the flyer attached to this week’s email.
- Please send me your Trinity Term Medieval Booklet Submissions by April 13th.
Events:
- 24th-25th March: Adapting Violence in/from ‘Classic’ Texts: A 2-day free workshop hosted by the University of Bern, organised by Amy Brown (University of Bern) and Lucy Fleming (New College, Oxford). This interdisciplinary event brings together specialists in literature, retelling, and feminist practice to consider how adaptations of texts considered ‘classic’ handle, re-inscribe or re-imagine violence. Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto) will give the opening keynote, with a respondent plenary from Maria Sachiko Cecire (Bard College) and an author talk from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Last Queen. More information here. Register here.
- 26th March: FREE online lecture from the Church Monuments Society. The first of this year’s Spring online lecture series will take place at 5pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Dr Christina Faraday, ‘The Eloquent Dead: Elizabethan and Jacobean Monuments in Gonville and Caius College Chapel, Cambridge‘. To receive the Zoom link, please register here.
- 26th-27th March: Cultures of Exchange: Mercantile Mentalities Between Italy and the World (1100-1500). Attendance is free. Register here to receive access to Zoom links and conference materials.
Opportunities:
- The University of Göttingen will run a summer school in digital Latin palaeography for graduate students this summer (1-12 August). Accommodation is provided free of charge and contributions will be made to travel costs for those who require them. No prior experience in digital humanities or palaeography is required, but a basic level of Latin is essential. Applications are due by 30 April. Further information is available on the university website.
- CFP: Performing Medievalism: Tricks, Tips and Tropes from Early Artistic Practice for the Modern-Day Performer. Offerings on music, theatre, storytelling, dance or any artistic performance practice are welcome, for critical and scholarly articles of 8,000-10,000 words in length, documentations of performer training/approaches of 4,000-8,000 words (e.g., interviews, performance reviews, documentation of artistic processes), and shorter pieces of 1,500-3,000 words (e.g., artist’s notes). (These word count ranges are inclusive of notes and references.) Please send abstracts of up to 400 words along with a short (c. 100 word) biography to Ellie Chadwick and Ollie Jones at e.chadwick@bristol.ac.uk and oliver.jones@york.ac.uk. Deadline: 31st March 2022. For full details, see the blog post.
- CFP: Textual Cultures in Contact, Early Text Cultures at Oxford, Trinity Term 2022. The Early Text Cultures research group based at the University of Oxford invites papers for its Trinity Term 2022 seminar on ‘Textual Cultures in Contact’, which will bring together scholars whose research focus is the interactions between pre-modern textual cultures. If you would like to present a 20-minute paper at one of the seminars, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to earlytextcultures.ox@gmail.com by Monday 11 April. For full details, see the blog post.
And finally, in case game boards aren’t your thing, some alternative advice on how to enjoy your Easter vac, taken from the Old English Dicts of Cato:
Liorna manega bec 7 gehyr monig spell
Read many books and hear many stories
As this is my last email of the term, on behalf of all of us at OMS, I’d like to wish you all an enjoyable and restful Easter break! I look forward to seeing you next term.
A Medievalist, exhausted from Hilary Term, takes a much needed rest over the Easter break
Merton College, MS 249, f. 6r.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Sylio