Medieval Matters: Week 2

May is here, and with it, the long-awaited return of May Day celebrations in Oxford. Whether you managed to attend the May Morning revelries or not, here is some celebratory wisdom for the occasion, from the Durham Proverbs:

Hwilum æfter medo menn mæst geþyrsteð.
[Sometimes people are thirstiest after drinking mead]

What the anonymous poet forgot to mention, of course, is the accompanying Proverb: ‘sometimes people are happiest after drinking tea‘. You may put this theory to the test at our newly reinstated Medievalist Coffee morning, which takes place on Friday at the Weston Library – all are welcome!

It is only second week, but we have already had many wonderful events – so many, in fact, that you may have missed some! Luckily, you can catch up with how things went on our blog. We kicked term off, of course, with the Mystery Plays – read here Dr Alison Ray’s post about how the plays went, and here Prof. David Wiles’ reflections on the experience of directing a medieval play in French. Last week we enjoyed Caroline Danforth’s fabulous OMS Lecture on Paper, Linen, Silk, and Parchment – Material Fragments from an Extinguished Convent : many thanks to all who tuned in! For those who missed it, you can now watch the recording on the OMS Youtube channel. As for future events, we have a wonderful schedule this week:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Save the date: The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce a public lecture by Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davies on Thursday 9th June 2022. Dr Cooper-Davies will speak on the topic of “Christine de Pizan: Guilty Feminist?”. The lecture will take place in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College, 13:00-14.30.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 2nd May:

• The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Yan Zaripov (Oxford), ‘Literary Imitation (mimesis) in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Case of Theodore Prodromos’. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
• The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. Sign up here for the mailing list to receive details of each week’s sessions: Contact Matthew Holford, Andrew Dunning or Tuija Ainonen for further details.
• The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Rebecca Rist (Reading), ‘When is a Pope an Anti-Pope? The Medieval Papacy and the Concept of Schism’. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.

Tuesday 3rd May:

• The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Lucia Akard (Linacre), ‘Cultures of Rape and Resistance in 15th Century Dijon‘
• The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 1: Sound and its Capture in Anglo-Saxon England. Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.
• The Medieval French Research Seminar will take place at 5.15pm at Maison Francaise, MFO Auditorium and Online. This week’s speaker is Emma Campbell (University of Warwick): ‘Translanguaging and Multimediality in Philippe de Thaon’s Medieval “French” Bestiaire‘. Please email helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk for video-conference link for remote joining.

Wednesday 4th May:

• The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in St Edmund Hall, Old Library. We are going to discuss Seuse’s ‘Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit’. For more information, please email henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk.
• The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker is Marie-France Auzépy (emerita, Université Paris 8), ‘The siege of Constantinople in 717-718: the embarrassing memory of a triumph‘.
• The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Emily Corran (UCL), ‘Polemicising doubt in late medieval England: adaptations of Latin casuistry in Wyclif, Dives and Pauper and Margery Kempe’ (chaired by Kantik Ghosh). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.

Thursday 5th May:

• The Middle High German Reading Group meets at 10am at Somerville College Productivity Room (Margery Fry). This term’s topic is ‘Maeren’. If you have any questions or want to participate, please send an e-mail to melina.schmidt@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
• The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College – meet at Jesus lodge. This week’s text is Aristophanes, Clouds, 223-75. Contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
• The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place at Trinity College (Levine Auditorium) at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Thomas Benfey (Oxford), ‘The Qom Documents and Their Post-Sasanian Context: Change and Continuity in Early Islamic Iran’. Zoom meeting link.
• The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 2: A Community of Scribes at Worcester. Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.

Friday 6th May:

• The Medievalists Coffee Morning makes its triumphant return! Meet at 10.30-11.30am at Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!). The coffee mornings feature the opportunity to meet other Medievalists as well as a) coffee, tea, and biscuits, b) access to the roof terrace, c) sneak previews of new acquisitions. Here a link to the last week’s presentation of newly acquired Artists Books. All welcome!

OPPORTUNITIES:

• Conference: Orosius Through The Ages: 25th-27th May. Booking is essential and will be open until 4 May. The conference will take place in person at Senate House, London, and on Zoom. If you will be attending partly in person and partly online please email valerie.james@sas.ac.uk with the dates when you will be attending in person. If no in person places remain, please book to attend online instead.
• Call for participants. Revoicing Medieval Poetry will offer a workshop-conversation space for researchers, artists and practitioners who are engaged in exploring how, why, and to what effects medieval poetry is translated, reused, and resourced in twentieth- and twenty-first-century creative practices. Confirmed speakers include Caroline Bergvall, Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Becca Drake, and Clare A. Lees. We hope you will join us at one or more of our four workshops! Read the full CPF here and register your interest here.
• Doctoral Funding Opportunity: an ARHC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship between the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Kent and the Bodleian in Oxford to work on manuscript fragments. Full details are here. Deadline is 26^th May.

Finally, some further wisdom from the Durham Proverbs regarding coffee mornings:

Eall on muðe þæt on mode.
[All in the mouth that’s in the mind.]

I take this to mean: great biscuits promote great scholarship. May your week be filled with both!