Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Fellow at St Edmund Hall, and Co-Director of Oxford Medieval Studies.
The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford.
The scheme has a rolling deadline. Closing date for applications: Friday of Week 4 each term for activities taking place during that or the following term. An additional deadline for summer activities and Michaelmas Term is last Friday of July.
Grants are normally in the region of £100–250 and can either be for expenses or for administrative and organisational support such as publicity, filming or zoom hosting. They can also be used to support staging a play for the Medieval Mystery Cycle, e.g. for buying props or material for costumes. Recipients will be required to supply a report after the event for the Oxford Medieval Studies blog and will be invited to present on their award at an OMS event.
Applicants will be responsible for all administrative aspects of the activity, including formulating the theme and intellectual rationale, devising the format, and, depending on the type of event, inviting speakers and/or issuing a Call for Papers, organising the schedule, and managing the budget, promotion and advertising.
3–4 July 2025 / St John’s College, Cambridge. Deadline for paper submissions 9 January 2025
This two-day, in-person conference will explore developing traditions of silence in dramatic texts from antiquity to the Renaissance. Papers are sought from scholars across a range of fields, including classical reception, comparative literature, and medieval and/or early modern English literature. Topics may include:
mute characters and/or characters who never appear on stage;
characters who gain or lose the power of speech (welcoming perspectives e.g. from disability studies);
dramatic silence as represented on page and/or stage (e.g. bookhistory approaches and/or performance studies);
the history and/or function of animals on stage;
the relationship of dramatic silence to music and/orinarticulacy;
representations of dramatic silence in contemporary discursivetexts;
dumb shows;
silence in neo-Latin drama.
Speakers will include Elisabeth Dutton (Fribourg), Barbara Ravelhofer (Durham), and Julie Stone Peters (Columbia). Please submit a 250-word abstract for a 20-minute paper to John Colley (stagingsilence@gmail.com) by noon on Thursday 9 January 2025. Preference will be given to papers with an interdisciplinary and/or comparative focus. It’s anticipated that early career speakers will be able to apply for travel bursaries.
During the Medievalist Coffee Morning on Friday, 21 June 2024, Henrike Lähnemann launched her new book The Life of Nuns. Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers 2024, open access: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0397 To purchase a paper copy with a 20% discount, use the code LONHL_24 at checkout
Medingen O1: Bodleian Library, MS. Lat. liturg. f. 4: Prayer book: Easter (end 15th to early 16th cent.), fol. 174v: the community of nuns; fol. 288r: Music notation
Medingen O2: Bodleian Library, MS. Lat. liturg. e. 18: Manual for the Medingen Provost (1472/1479), fol. 36v/37r: liturgical drawings; fol. 47vb: Harrowing of Hell initial
Medingen O4: Bodleian Library, MS. Don. e. 248: Psalter by Margarete Hopes (early 16th cent.), fol. 173r: Harrowing of Hell; fol. 196r: Resurrection
Rule of St Clare: Bodleian Library, MS. Lyell 68, 1457
Following this, there was a presentation by Stacie Vos (Ann Ball Bodley Visiting Fellow in Women’s History) talk about Women doing medieval studies in the early 20th century. Stacie reflected on the legacies of several early-20th-century women medievalists who pursued academic and extra-academic careers. She started the group ‘Enclosure’ which January 2021 to February 2024 was hosted at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages under enclosure.mml.ox.ac.uk, now archived at the Bodleian Library Web Archive.
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It all started with a mistake: ‘Der Spiegel’, a widely read news magazine in Germany, ran a double-spread article on the big research project which Eva Schlotheuber and I direct, the edition of 1.200 letters from the Benedictine convent Lüne in North Germany. In the interview for it, we had talked about how important education by the nuns was for the ‘Lehrkinder’, children educated at the convent. The girls would come into the community, aged 7 to 9, and then get a thorough grounding in a wide range of discipline such as music, as pictured in the scene from a text book from Kloster Ebstorf.
Teaching Music in the Convents (Ebstorf, Klosterarchiv V 3, 15th century, fols 200v–201r)
Der Spiegel’ turned our phrase of ‘Lehrkinder’ into ‘die Kinder der Nonnen’ (the children of the nuns) – hinting at sex and scandal behind convent walls (in 2/2020 ‘So colourful was the life of nuns in the Middle Ages’).
This sparked further media interest and the Ullstein publishing house approached us because it had piqued their interest. When we explained that the attention-grabbing headline about “the nuns had children” was based on a misunderstanding, they were slightly disappointed – but then offered us the opportunity to set the record straight. And, arguably, what we could offer was much more exciting: the colourful and detailed accounts of lively, intellectual, strategic, argumentative, powerful women, shaping religion and politics of their times, looking after the girls (despite or even because they were their spiritual and not biological daughters!), negotiating business deals, writing, painting, composing and influencing the way we live today through their books, songs, and art.
‘The Life of Nuns’ tries to capture the richness of the life of these medieval nuns by incorporating as much primary source material as possible. Each of the big topics – such as Education, Music, and yes: Love and Friendship – starts with an account taken from the diary of a nun who lived at the end of the 15th century in the convent St Crucis in Braunschweig. The anonymous author covers the high feasts – celebrating the entry of new nuns, welcoming illustrious visitors – and the everyday mundane events – lice, Lebkuchen (gingerbread), laundry. And we end every of our chapters with the presentation of a significant art work from the convents: the impressive wall paintings done in the 14th century by “three nuns all called Gertrud” in Wienhausen, the largest medieval world map in Ebstorf (30 goatskins sewn together), tapestries, statues, stained glass, the oldest spectacles in the world (fallen through the floorboard cracks in the nuns’ choir) – an embarrassment of riches from a world that few people even know existed. That is particularly true for an Anglophone audience since so much of the evidence is lost due mainly to the dissolution of the monasteries but also a repurposing of surviving architecture and treasures. Compare Kloster Wienhausen and Godstow Abbey: in Wienhausen we have got the full set of monastic buildings, cloisters, huge grain stores, cells, corridors, imposing Gothic nuns choir and more – and everything that furnished it: stained glass, wall paintings, sculptures, down to the different set of dresses for the statues.
The Cistercian Convent of Wienhausen from the South: Magazine (left) and Nuns’ Choir. Photograph: Henrike Lähnemann
Filming at the ruins of one Godstow Abbey near Oxford
In Godstow, on the other hand, we can sense the dimensions of its former power by looking at the impressively long surrounding wall of enclosure and glimpse some of its stylish beauty from the ruined chapel at the back – the rest is only possible to reconstruct from scant archival evidence. Looking at the German counterparts, who shapeshifted through the Reformation, transforming into Protestant female communities who still look after the rich tapestry of medieval life, offers the chance to rectify this in part – and encounter the Life of Nuns at their fullest, mystical, worldly, polyphonous and very much relevant still today.
Call for Actors, Directors, Costume Makers, and Musicians!
Would you like to take part in a medieval dramatic experiment? Directors, actors, costume makers and musicians wanted!
The next cycle is going to take place on 26 April 2025 at St Edmund Hall
These plays were a very popular form of drama in the Middle Ages – with different groups performing short plays telling stories from the Bible. To take part in the next performance, email Professor Henrike Lähnemann, Fellow at St Edmund Hall Fellow and Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics, and Professor Lesley Smith, Fellow and Tutor in Politics and Senior Tutor at Harris Manchester College, Co-Directors of the Oxford Medieval Studies Programme at TORCH, under the address medieval@torch.ox.ac.uk.
CAT is back! After a successful run in June 2023, artist in residence at the Physics Department Pam Davis has developed a second art-piece ‘Conversations Across Time’. Free tickets for the performances moving from the Ashmolean to a second secret hidden location are available via the website https://www.citizensai.com/
Dates: June 15th (preview at 11am – 1:20pm) | June 15th | June 16th
Schedule: 15:20 Meet on the steps at the Ashmolean Museum 15:30 Prequel 16:00 Departure for Scene Two 16:15 Scene II is in a Quantum Anomaly [hidden location] 17:40 End | Conversation to Follow
Players: Giovanni De Felice, Sirui Ning and, Juliette Imbert, PDK, Costi Levy, Directors:PDK and Costi Levy Composer: Cheryl Frances-Hoad
From the announcement in 2023: What do horses, medievalists, black hole orbits, boardrooms, and quantum computers have in common? Inspired by the Medieval Mystery Plays, artist in residence at the Physics Department Pam Davis has developed an art-piece ‘Conversations Across Time’ which links medieval theatre, women in science, and Quantum future.
Wednesday, 29 May 2024, 5.15-6.45 UK time Memorial Room: The Queen’s College, Oxford
Dr Peter Tóth (Cornelia Stark Curator of Greek Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford) will speak on “In Quest of a Medieval Best-Seller: The Authorship of the Meditationes Vitae Christi” as term lecture for the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures
The Meditationes Vitae Christi, an anonymous medieval retelling of the life of Christ, appended with a number of extra and emotional details, has been described as the single most influential Franciscan text of the Middle Ages. A real best-seller that has come down to us in hundreds of manuscripts and versions in Latin and almost all the vernaculars of Medieval Europe. The text is known to have exercised an immense influence on Western spirituality and devotion and had decisive impact on Renaissance art and played pivotal role in the evolution of medieval Passion Plays and European theatre in general. Despite this enormous significance, the origin, date and authorship of the work has remained obscure and been in the focus of heated scholarly debates. After a brief survey of the problems of the text and the current scholarly consensus about its origins, the present paper will make an attempt to identify the author of the text and reconstruct its adventurous early history to explain its subsequent anonymity.
Image: Meditationes vitae Christi. English translation by Nicholas Love. Bodleian Library MS. Hatton 31, fol. 28v, mid-15th century. On medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Where: Wolfson College Buttery When: Friday, April 26 2024 at 1.15.
David Wiles (Emeritus Professor of Drama, University of Exeter) is performing the pseudo-Senecan Roman history play Octavia in the exuberant rhetorical language of the 1561 translation by Thomas Nuce with a group of players from Iffley and the University of Oxford.
Octavia, daughter of Claudius, wife of Nero – Imogen Lewis
Agrippina, wife and killer of Claudius, now dead – Laurence Nagy
Nero, son of Agrippina, now Emperor, killed his mother – Abigail Pole
Poppaea, mistress of Nero – Priya Toberman
Octavia’s nurse – Laura Laubeova
Seneca – Alex Marshall
Prefect – Andrew Stilborn
Messenger– Ivana Kuric
Chorus of Roman citizens – members of the company
Violin – Jessica Qiao
Director – David Wiles
Production sponsored by the Ancient World Research Cluster, Wolfson College Oxford.
Performance filmed by Henrike Lähnemann at Iffley Church Hall on April 21st.
The tragedy of Octavia is a unique example of the Roman history play, and survives because it was bound up with the tragedies of Seneca. The chorus, unlike those of Seneca, is engaged in the action as it rises up in rebellion against Nero. We are performing the play in the student translation of c.1561. Elizabeth had recently come to the throne, and in a polarised world the performance of religious plays seemed increasingly problematic. It was logical to turn to the classics, but the question arose, how to render Seneca in an equivalent English. It was not a matter of searching out what the words meant, but rather of forging a language with an equivalent rhetorical force, which in the Erasmus age meant a more copious language. The translator, Thomas Nuce, had an ear for performance, and did not attempt to find any pedantic metrical equivalence for the Latin. We have stripped the text down to a half-hour version, and have relished playing with the rhythms, rhymes and alliteration. Parsing the Latinate grammar was often a challenge.
The story was scarcely a safe choice in 1561. It tells how Nero cast off his first wife, Octavia, whom he had married for domestic reasons, and contracted a love match. Henry VIII had likewise terminated a dynastic marriage, to the great displeasure of his people, and the fruit of that love match had just come to the throne.
We are a mixed cast of students and community players, and on four occasions have worked on mediaeval plays for the festival at St Edmund Hall. The present production was put together for the annual conference of the Classical Association in Warwick on 24 March. If you are interested in participating in a production at St Edmund Hall in 2025, please contact David Wiles d.wiles@exeter.ac.uk.
Where: Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library How to get there: via the Readers Entrance on Parks Road, 2nd floor via the staircase/elevator just straight ahead from the readers entrance (stick to the concrete part, do not use the ornamental staircase or you will land in the Conservation Department which is also nice but where no coffee is allowed)
All medievalists working in Oxford are welcome! Join us for coffee, conversations, and many insights into the Bodleian collections, cf. the playlist ‘Weston Library Coffee Mornings’:
Shofar player opening Psalm 80, with the caption ‘Sing a new song unto the Lord’ in a Psalter manuscript from the German convent of Medingen, ca. 1500, Bodleian Library, MS. Don. e. 248, fol. 145v
This event will begin with music from medieval manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. The performance will also feature songs in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, and English for all to join, and will be interspersed with the sound of shofar and shell horn.
Music list: Shofar: Call to celebrating unity; ‘Cantate domino’ (Bodleian, MS. Don. e. 248, 247v); ‘Cantate domino’ (Giuseppe Pitoni); ‘Lumen ad revelacionem’ (MS. Lat. liturg. e. 18, 8r); Shell horn: Call to preserving nature; ‘Every part of this earth shall holy be for us’ (round by Stephan Vesper); Sea weed horn: Call to peace; ‘Hinema tov’ (round, orally transmitted); Horn: ‘Üsküdar’a gider iken’; ‘Victime paschali’ & ‘Christ ist erstanden’ (Bodleian, MS. Lat. liturg. f. 4); ‘Dona nobis pacem’ (round, orally transmitted).
This follows on from previous events organised by Henrike Lähnemann and Andrew Dunning ‘Singing from Manuscripts’. Click here to learn more about singing from Medieval Sources in the Bodleian Library.
In association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
We are delighted to announce the finalised programme (and opening of advance registration for online attendance) for the Oxford University Byzantine Society’s 26th Annual International Graduate Conference ‘Transgression in Late Antiquity and Byzantium’, taking place on the 24th-25th February, 2024 at the Faculty of History, George Street, OX1 2BE.
The programme and abstracts of papers can be found on the dedicated conference website and below. The costs for attendance are as follows: In person attendance: £15 for OUBS members / £20 for non-members Online attendance: £5 for students / £6 for non students
Papers will be delivered in-person, with the proceedings broadcast on a Zoom link which will circulate via email to those purchasing online attendance tickets via Eventbrite (see link below). Advance registration for in person attendance is not necessary. If you plan on attending online, please purchase a ticket at our Eventbrite link.
We are grateful for the generous support of The Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR), The Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity (OCLA), Oxford Medieval Studies, in association with The Oxford Research Centre for Humanities (TORCH), and The Faculty of History of the University of Oxford, as well as the many others who have helped with the conference’s facilitation.
We look forward to welcoming you to Oxford. Best wishes, the Conference Organisers: OUBS President Alexander Sherborne OUBS Secretary Ilia Curto Pelle OUBS Treasurer Benjamin Sharkey
The OUBS Committee is grateful for the generous support of:
The Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR)
The Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity (OCLA)
Oxford Medieval Studies, in association with The Oxford Research Centre for Humanities (TORCH)
The Faculty of History of the University of Oxford
The OUBS Committee would also like to express its gratitude to Shaun Cason, Eleanore Debs, Gavriella Makri, Bryce O’Connor, Rosalie Van Dael,Sophia Miller, Alexander Johnston, Nathan Websdale and Duncan Antich for their assistance with the conference’s facilitation.
Conference Programme
Venue: Faculty of History, George Street, Oxford, OX1 2RL
Panel 1b: ‘The Political’ (Chair: Alexander Johnston)
Duncan Antich (Blackfriars College, Oxford) Compassion and Community: The Regula Pastoralis and Gregory’s Approach to Schism Alejandro Laguna López (Central European University) An Anti-Novelistic Novel: Subverting Love in Niketas Eugenianos’ Drosilla and Charicles Averkios (Dimitris) Agoris (University of Athens) Multigeneric examples in Michael Choniates’s Educational Activity
Euan Croman (Queen’s University Belfast) Transgressing the domus imperii in the fourth and fifth centuries: Treason or Family Trouble? Daniel Murphy (Independent Scholar) Usurpation Narratives as Political Commentary in Fourth-Century Historiography Merve Savas (Ohio State University) Twisting the Narrative: Textual Transgression in Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae 14
Session 2: Saturday, 14.00–15.30
Panel 2a: ‘The Sexual’ (Chair: Alexander Sherborne)
Panel 2b: ‘The Conciliar’ (Chair: Bryce O’Connor)
Maria Christian (Independent Scholar) “Look at that wood!” An Investigation into a Bizarre Sexual Practice Ascribed to the “Chaldeans” Involving Iconography in an Early Islamic Sex Manual Vid Žepič (University of Ljubljana) Legal Perspectives on Sexual Transgressions in Early-Byzantine Legal Sources Pierrick Gerval (University of Nantes) Sexual violences during wartime, a transgression of Church prohibitions regarding sexuality in Byzantium (7th -13th century)
Kathleen McCulloch (University of Cambridge) Did Dioscorus transgress, or adhere to, established conciliar procedure at Ephesus II (449)? Alexander Johnston (Kellogg College, Oxford) The Edge of Divinity: The Role of Wisdom in the Logos Prosphonetikos of the Quinisext Council Rachel Edney (University of Notre Dame) The Eucharist in John Rufus’ Plerophories: Eucharistic Theology and Christological Controversy
Session 3: Saturday, 16.00–17.30
Panel 3a: ‘On the Edges of Byzantium’ (Chair: Benjamin Sharkey)
Panel 3b: ‘In the Land of Egypt’ (Chair: Sophia Miller)
Shaun Cason (Worcester College, Oxford) The End of Transgressions? Examining the Seventh-Century Treaty Between Islamic Egypt and Medieval Nubia Dmitriy Kravets (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford) Orthodoxy and/or Empire? A Reassessment of the Career of Gregory Tsamblak (fl. 1402- 1415) Helena Davies (Linacre College, Oxford) Sitt al-Mulk: A Damsel in Distress? Challenging Art-Historical Efforts to Rescue and Vindicate an Early Islamic Princess
Apolline Gay (Université libre de Bruxelles) Looking for Eve: Figures of Female Transgression on Textiles from Byzantine Egypt Michael Dunchok (Kellogg College, Oxford) A Higher Rank of Gods: In Defense of the Greek Magical Papyri Chloé Agar (Harris Manchester College, Oxford) ‘He thrust his spear into the middle of him, and his bowels came out’: Literary violence against religious and legal transgressions in Early Christian Egypt
Session 4: Sunday, 11.30–13.00
Panel 4a: ‘The Archaeological and the Art-Architectural‘ (Chair: Gavriella Makri)
Panel 4b: ‘The Imperial and the Ecclesiastic‘ (Chair: Nathan Websdale)
Eleanore Debs (Pembroke College, Oxford) Examining the Peculiar Presence of Reliquaries Within Late Antique Baptisteries of the Limestone Massif Sophia Miller (Balliol College, Oxford) Trees ‘Pleasant to the Sight’: Tree-Meaning in Late Antique Floor Mosaics in the Northern Provinces Karolina Tomczyszyn (Lincoln College, Oxford) Transgressive Use of Holy Oils: In Search of Popular Religion in Syriac Christianity
Ziyao Zhu (King’s College London) Neither Just nor Unjust: Alexios I Komnenos and the Linguistic Politics of Byzantine Extrajudicial Confiscation. Dilara Burcu Giritlioğlu (Middle East Technical University) Sinners and Saints of Constantinople: Union of Souls and Separation of Church and State Findlay Willis (St. Stephen’s House, Oxford) Natural illness or divine punishment: the use of disability rhetoric to excuse or vilify the transgressions of Michael IV
Session 5: Sunday, 14.00–15.30
Panel 5a: ‘Defining Aspects of Deviance’ (Chair: Dimitri Kravets)
Panel 5b: ‘Transgressing Intellectual Borders‘ (Chair: Ilia Curto Pelle)
Ekaterina Rybakova (Pirogov Russian National Researcher Medical University) Illnesses of Spirit or Being: The Transgression of Pneuma in Byzantine Medicine Thibaut Auplat (Aix-Marseille University) An overview of deviance in the 7th and 8th centuries: the Heresies by John Damascene Patrick Martin (University of Winchester) Transgression in Middle Byzantine eschatological iconography
Mathijs Clement (University of Cambridge) Egeria, Traveller of Borderlands Rosalie Van Dael (St. Hilda’s College, Oxford) Seeing is believing? Imagination in Augustine’s Letter 7 to Nebridius Seyhun Kılıç (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Monk in a Mundane Realm: Exploring the Intersection of Spiritual and Secular Realms in the Middle Byzantine Period
