An extra large offering of medieval events for sixth week, and a particularly busy Monday! As always, you can find a complete copy of the Oxford Medieval Studies Booklet here. Any last-minuted changes will be updated in the weekly blogpost and in the calendar, both accessible via https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/.
Monday
- French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10:30, Weston Library (Horton Room)
- Introduction to Arabic Palaeography – 2:00, Khalili Research Centre
- Medieval Archaeology Seminar – 3.00, Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. Roberta Gilchrist will be speaking on ‘The medieval ritual landscape: Persistence and place-making in later medieval England’
- Historical and Systematic Theology Research Seminar – 3:30, Campion Hall. Professor Thomas Joseph White (Rector of the Angelicum, Rome) will be speaking on ‘‘How can one say that God has become human? John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas on the Semantics of the Incarnation’
- Carmina Burana: Graduate Text Seminar – 5:00, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College.
- Medieval History Seminar – 5:00 with drinks reception to follow, All Souls College. Angus Russell (King’s College, Cambridge) will be speaking on “Between truth and justice: towards an intellectual history of post-Mongol Rus”.
- History of Liturgy Seminar (IHR) – 5:30, Balliol College and online. Cosima Gillhammer will be speaking on ‘Writing about liturgy for a general audience: some reflections’; Molly Bray will be speaking on ‘Statue Dresses, Rituals and Kinship at Kloster Wienhausen c. 1469-1530’. The poster for the event can be viewed here.
- Thomistic Institute Lecture – 7:30, Balckfriars. Sr. Catherine Joseph Droste, O.P. (Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas) will be speaking on ‘Virtue and Self-Knowledge in St. Catherine of Siena’
Tuesday
- Medieval English Research Seminar – 12:15, Margaret Thatcher Centre, Somerville. Caroline Batten (U of Pennsylvania) will be speaking on ‘Vulnerable Bodies: The Old English Verse Charms, Again’
- Latin Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room)
- Medieval Church and Culture Seminar: 5:15pm, Harris Manchester College (tea & coffee from 5.00). In a change of topic, Alice Rio (All Souls) will be speaking on ‘Otherworldly Tribunals and the State (9-10th c): Wetti, Theodora, Mulien’.
Wednesday
- Medieval German Graduate Seminar – 11:15, Somerville College. The topic for this term is Ulrich von Richental, Chronik des Konzils zu Konstanz (1414-1438).
- Older Scots Reading Group – 2:30, Room 30.401 in the Schwarzman Centre.
- Medieval Latin Documentary Palaeography Reading Group – 4:00, online.
- Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5:00, Ioannou Centre. Peter Frankopan and Jonathan Shepard (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘Revisiting the Byzantine Commonwealth: A Discussion’.
Thursday
- Middle English Reading Group – 11:00, Beckington Room (Lincoln College).
- Medieval Women’s Writing Research Seminar – 4:00, Somerville College. Including extracts from the letters of Hildegard von Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Violant de Bar and María de Castilla
- Medieval Visual Culture Seminar – 5:00, Khalili Research Center (NB. change of location). Mariam Rosser-Owen (V&A) & Ashley Coutu (Pitt Rivers) will be speaking on “New directions in the study of ivories from the Islamic world: A talk and handling session” Co-sponsored with the Khalili Research Center.
- Celtic Seminar – 5:00, hybrid. Roan Runge (Glasgow) will be speaking on ‘‘Turn and face the strange’: Analysing animal species present in medieval Irish narratives of transformation’
- Multilingual Medieval Compline in the Crypt – 9:30pm, in the crypt below St-Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund Hall (see below).
Friday
- Medievalist Coffee Morning – 10:30, Visiting Scholars Centre (Weston Library). All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.
- Exploring Medieval Oxford through Surviving Archives – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room).
- Oxford Medieval Mansucript Group ‘Reading Group’ – 5:00, online. J. E. Murdoch and and Laure Miolo will both present; the deadline for attendance has passed.
Opportunities
- CfP: Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2026 – ‘Sounds and Silence’. Deadline 8th December 2025.
- Call for readers: For a Multilingual Medieval Compline in the Crypt on 20 Nov, 9.30pm, Henrike Lähnemann is looking for versions of the Our Father in as many medieval languages as possible. Old High German, Middle High German, Old English, Middle English, Gothic, Anglo-Norman, Old High German, Middle High German, Church Slavonic, Byzantine Greek, and Hungarian have been assigned but any further languages are welcome! Contact her if you have a version and are willing to read it.
- CfP: Shaping the Word – the Form and Use of Biblical Manuscripts in the Early Medieval West. Deadline 17th Nov 2025.
- Colloquium: ‘Journals, Past, Present and Future’, hosted by The Review of English Studies. More info and registration here.
- Register before 30 November for Ars Inquirendi – Querying the Pre-Modern in the Age of Large Multimodal Models
- Register for MEMRN Winter Conference 2025 13-16 November via Eventbrite HERE.
- Call for Committee Members for the Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference.
- Medium Ævum Essay Prize welcomes applications. Deadline 1 December 2025.
- Data Visualization in the Humanities: Nodegoat Open Workshop.
- CfP: Locational Lives: Medieval Experience in Town and Country. Deadline 5th Jan 2026.
- CfP: Character Groupings in Classical and Medieval Art and Literature at the University. Deadline 5th Jan 2026.
- Mortimer History Society Essay Prize. Deadline: 15th February 2026.