Author: Luisa Ostacchini

Medieval Matters: Week 2

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18/10/2021

07:41

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News

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Week 2 is here, which means that term is officially in full swing! Thank you to everyone who came to the Medieval Roadshow – we loved seeing you all and hearing about your plans for the year.

This week I’d particularly like to draw your attention to the fact that OMS Small Grants are now taking applications for Michaelmas Term. The Small Grants are a great way for postgraduates and ECRs to fund conferences, workshops etc. Further details below.

I would also like to highlight that there has been a minor correction to the booklet: the Oxford Numismatic society talk by Dr. Martin Allen on ‘Finding the Past: EMC and Early Medieval Coin Finds’ will now take place on Wednesday 27th October.

Please find below a summary of the week’s news:

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 18th October:

  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. Contact Matthew Holford, Andrew Dunning or Tuija Ainonen to be added to the Teams call.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm on Teams and in the Wharton Room. Attendance at the Wharton Room is by advance booking only as the room has a strict Covid-19 capacity limit. Bookings can be made at https://medieval-history-seminar.reservio.com. This week’s speaker is Lesley Smith (Harris Manchester) ‘The Weak, the Poor, and the Landed: reading the Sermons of William of Auvergne (d. 1249)’
  • The fourth Lyell Lecture takes place at 5pm online and at the Lecture Theatre, Weston Library. Registration is essential for in-person attendance. This lecture will be ‘Fifteenth-century Latin Bible printing and distribution’.
  • The Old Norse Reading Group meets at 5.15pm on Teams. Please email Olivia Smith (olivia.smith2@linacre.ox.ac.uk) to be added to the mailing list and Teams group.

Tuesday 19th October:

  • The CMTC Work in Progress Colloquium meets at 12:30-2pm on Zoom. Attendance is free of charge, but sign-up is mandatory: you can sign-up here. The speakers this week will be Laura Banella (Mediaeval & Modern Languages, Wolfson College, Oxford), ‘The Materiality and Textuality of Medieval Italian Lyric Poetry’ and Zhan Zhang (Oriental Studies, St Antony’s College, Oxford), ‘Form, Format, and formulae. Scribal conventions in first-millennium central Asia’.
  • The Islamicate Manuscripts and Texts Reading Colloquium 2021 meets at 3pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker is Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, ‘An Unpublished Letter from the Cairo Geniza Complaining aboutthe Hardships of Travel to India: Taylor-Schechter (T-S) 12.392’ 
  • The RaceB4Race Coffee Talk takes place at 3-4pm via livestream. Today’s talk will be ‘Presenting on Race for Public Audiences’ with Ayanna Thompson. Places are limited: please register here.
  • The Medieval Book Club meets at 3.30pm in Magdalen College, Old Law Library. This week’s topic is ‘Trials by Nature’.
  • The Early Slavonic Webinar meets at 5pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker is Aleksander Paroń (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences) How to deal with Steppe Fauna? Remarks on the Byzantine perception of the nomads and on the Byzantinepolicy towards them (10th-12th centuries)
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Old Dining Hall, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Alice Raw (St John’s), ‘The virtues of secrecy and sexual knowledge in a late medieval English dream vision‘
  • Bibitura Dantis Oxoniensis meets at 5.30pm on Zoom. This week’s focus will be Purgatorio 1. For more information email Lachlan Hughes.
  • The RaceB4Race Symposium takes place at 8-10pm via livestream. Today’s topic will be ‘Enmity at the Edge of Empire’. Places are limited: please register here.

Wednesday 20th October:

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in New Powell Room, Somerville College. If you are interested to be added to the mailing list for the seminar, write to Linus Ubl.
  • The Medieval Trade Reading Group meets at 1-2pm in Mertze Tate Room, History Faculty, and Online. To be added to the mailing list and team please email Annabel Hancock. This week’s theme will be Merchant Identities.
  • The RaceB4Race Coffee Talk takes place at 3-4pm via livestream. Today’s talk will be ‘Parenting while Researching and Teaching’ with Patricia Akhimie. Places are limited: please register here.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm on Google Meet, followed by drinks at 7pm at Corpus Christi College. This week’s speaker is Georgi Parpulov (Birmingham), ‘Catena Manuscripts of the Greek New Testament‘.
  • The fifth and final Lyell Lecture takes place at 5pm online and at the Lecture Theatre, Weston Library. Registration is essential for in-person attendance. This lecture will be ‘The Serpentine Text of the Gutenberg Bible’
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Laura Saetveit Miles (Bergen), ‘Richard Methley’s “new Manner of Writing – to the Moment”: Narrative Time and Mystical Theology in Late Fifteenth-Century England’.
  • The RaceB4Race Symposium takes place at 8-10pm via livestream. Today’s topic will be ‘Song and Silence’. Places are limited: please register here.

Thursday 21st October:

  • The first Lyell Seminar takes place at 11am-12pm, in the Horton Room, Weston Library. The topic of the seminar will be ‘The Gutenberg Bible and earlier manuscript bibles’. To register, visit: https://forms.office.com/r/iHJ0WCuTCd  or email bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
  • The second Lyell Seminar takes place at 2-3pm, in the Horton Room, Weston Library. The topic of the seminar will be ‘The Gutenberg Bible and later printed bibles’. To register, visit: https://forms.office.com/r/iHJ0WCuTCd  or email bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
  • The Early Text Cultures Seminar meets at 2.30-4pm at the Dickson Poon Building, China Centre, Oxford, and on Zoom. This week’s seminar will be led by Franco D. Rossi (John Hopkins) and Armin Selbitschka (LMU Munich), who will be speaking about scribal self-representation in Late Classical Period Maya culture and early China, and the combination of epigraphical and archaeological approaches. For Zoom links sign up in advance here.
  • The RaceB4Race Coffee Talk takes place at 3-4pm via livestream. Today’s talk will be ‘Activism in Academia’ with Carol Mejia LaPerle. Places are limited: please register here.
  • The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in St Edmund Hall. Room TBC: contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
  • The Celtic Seminar meets at 5pm on Zoom. For Zoom link, contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk. This week’s speaker is Ian Stewart (QMUL), ‘Celticism: An intellectual and cultural history’.
  • The RaceB4Race Symposium takes place at 8-10pm via livestream. Today’s topic will be ‘Exceptions: Justice, Sovereignty, Slavery’. Places are limited: please register here.

Friday 22nd October:

  • Pre-Modern Conversations meets at 11am-12pm on Teams. For more information and to be added the the PMC Teams Channel, email lena.vosding AT mod-langs.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5pm on Zoom. For texts, joining instructions, and further information, please email Stephanie Hathaway or Jane Bliss.
  • The RaceB4Race Editor Rountable takes place at 3-4pm via livestream. Places are limited: please register here
  • The RaceB4Race Symposium takes place at 8-10pm via livestream. Today’s topic will be ‘Contextual Migration’. Places are limited: please register here.



OPPORTUNITIES:

  • The Medieval Mystery Cycle is still recruiting! If you’d like to get involved, taking charge of a play, directing, acting or making costumes and props, email us: henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk, lesley.smith@hmc.ox.ac.uk.
  • OMS Small Grants Call. 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 activity should take place between November 2021 and April 2022. The closing date for applications is Friday of Week 4 of Michaelmas Term 2021. For full details, please see here or the flyer attached to this week’s email.

Finally, some medieval wisdom for those of us who teach. The Old English translation of the Disticha Catonis provides the following instruction:

Leorna a hwæthwugu æt ðam wisran, þæt þu mæge læran þone unwisran.
[Learn something from the wise, so that you might teach the ignorant]

How fortunate we are, to have so many seminars and reading groups in which to receive such wisdom!

A manuscript illumination of a partridge and its young
A medievalist introducing the joys of pre-1500 literature to some eager first year undergraduates: Merton College, MS 249, f. 8r. [view image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Perdix

OMS Small Grants MT 2021

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17/10/2021

19:45

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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 activity should take place between November 2021 and April 2022. The closing date for applications is Friday of Week 4 of Michaelmas Term 2021.

Grants are normally in the region of £100–250. Recipients will be required to supply a report after the event for the TORCH Medieval Studies blog. Recipients of awards will also be invited to present on their events at the next Medieval Roadshow.

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. Some administrative and organisational support may be available through TORCH subject to availability.

Applications should be submitted to  lesley.smith@history.ox.ac.uk  using the grant application form. Applications submitted in other formats or after the deadline will not be considered.

Informal enquiries may be directed to lesley.smith@history.ox.ac.uk

The Oxford Medieval Studies Programme is sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

NB: Given COVID-19, we will also consider applications for online or virtual projects, e.g., costs of hosting and/or designing a website, digital recording equipment, purchasing image rights and digitisation.

For more medieval matters from Oxford, have a look at the website of the Oxford Medieval Studies TORCH Programme and the OMS blog!

CMTC Work In Progress Colloquium

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13/10/2021

09:28

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Please join us for two online talks hosted by the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures at The Queen’s College in the University of Oxford. Our centre promotes inter-disciplinary discussion among scholars and students interested in manuscripts and material culture in the premodern world. So your participation is most welcome regardless of your field of specialty.

We are meeting on Zoom on Tuesday 19th October at 12,30-2,00pm (UK time).

  1. Laura Banella (Mediaeval & Modern Languages, Wolfson College, Oxford)

“The Materiality and Textuality of Medieval Italian Lyric Poetry”  
The physical act of copying, editing, printing, annotating, and circulating literature has the power to create and construct an intellectual figure as an author, an auctor and an auctoritas, that is, an author as “creator” and “cultural authority”. Through a selection of Dante’s and Petrarch’s texts in material contexts, and specific instances of the circulation and reception of their lyric poetry, this talk explores medieval and early modern authoriality; the qualities of books as “textual objects”, and the ways in which context, form, and annotation in single books may bestow cultural authority upon authors and works, at a time when lyric poetry was a key-genre in the cultural system. In the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, Dante and Petrarch were the two main authors governing the Italian cultural field, especially as regards lyric poetry, and they soon enjoyed international success. Dante and Petrarch have been appropriated, rewritten, and repurposed by various literary, political, and ideological movements across centuries, shaping a transnational European cultural identity.  What is more, the in-between space of multi-text and multi-author volumes is a repository of meaning and large cultural discourses: the significance of the order and selection of medieval lyric poems, and the meaning of lyric sequences is one of the crucial issues in literary hermeneutics, both for authorial and non-authorial collections.  

  1. Zhan Zhang (Oriental Studies, St Antony’s College, Oxford)

“Form, Format, and formulae. Scribal conventions in first-millennium central Asia”
Central Asia in the first millennium CE, for the most part, was politically fragmented, and saw the flourishing of a number of (semi-)independent city-states, which produced secular documents in a multitude of languages/scripts, including Gandhari/Kharoshthi in Loulan, Khotanese/Brahmi in Khotan, Tocharian/Brahmi in Kucha, Sogdian/Aramaic in Sogdiana, and Bactrian/Greek in Bactria. A fairly large number of these documents have come to light in the last century or so, and received philological treatments individually or as a group. A synthetic analysis across the linguistic boundaries, however, is still lacking. In my talk, I will demonstrate that these documents display a number of common features in terms of form (materiality), format (diplomatics), and formulae (wording). Examples include notches on double wooden slips, sealing practice, indentations in letters and official orders, clauses and their sequence in purchase contracts, and shared technical lexicons of administration. All of these commonalities point to a shared scribal convention, the origin of which can be traced  back to the Kushan Empire. I will further explore the implication of this attribution for our understanding of the history of first-millennium Central Asia.
Here

Attendance is free of charge but sign-up is mandatory. You can sign-up here.

We will send a Zoom link to all participants by the end of the week.

Medieval Matters: Week 1

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11/10/2021

11:54

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Week 1 is finally here, which means that it is time for our first proper Medieval Matters of the year! Contained within you’ll find details of the week’s upcoming medieval events. There is also a list of opportunities which features CFPs, essay prizes, job opportunities, and an invitation to apply for the Medieval Mystery Cycle! Of course, the most important event in the calendar this week is the Medieval Roadshow, on Tuesday, 4pm at Harris Manchester. We look forward to seeing many of you there!

Without further ado, here are the events for the week. Like Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica V.24, this is intended to be a brief account of events ‘ob memoriam conservandam’ (‘so that they might be better kept in memory’): for full details, please refer to the Medieval Booklet, a pdf copy of which is attached to this week’s email.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 11th October:

  • Script vs print vs code: the information revolution in one afternoon take places at 1 – 3.30pm in Blackwell Hall (public foyer), Weston Library. Members of the Oxford Scribes and printers from the Bodleian Bibliographical Press race to produce a page of text. Settle the 500-year-old question – which is faster?’.
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. Contact Matthew Holford, Andrew Dunning or Tuija Ainonen to be added to the Teams call.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm on Teams and in the Wharton Room. Attendance at the Wharton Room is by advance booking only as the room has a strict Covid-19 capacity limit. Bookings can be made at https://medieval-history-seminar.reservio.com. This week’s speaker is Roy Flechner (UCD/All Souls) ‘From Bible to Law in the Early Middle Ages: Adaptations of the Old Testament from the Collectio Hibernensis to King Alfred’s Law-Book’.
  • The first Lyell Lecture takes place at 5pm online and at the Lecture Theatre, Weston Library. Registration is essential for in-person attendance. This lecture will be ‘The Christian Latin Bible from its origins to the 13th-century Paris Bible’.

Tuesday 12th October:

  • The Medieval Book Club meets at 3.30pm in Magdalen College, Old Law Library. This week’s topic is ‘Witches’.
  • The Medieval Roadshow takes place at 4-5pm in Harris Manchester College,
  • The Early Slavonic Webinar meets at 5pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker is Oleksiy Tolochko (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine), ‘When were the relics of St. Clement brought to Kiev and who brought them?‘
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Old Dining Hall, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Andrew Dunning (Bodleian Library), ‘Collecting Frideswide’s miracles at Oxford in the early 1180s:  Bodleian Library, MS. Digby 177‘
  • The Islamicate Manuscripts and Texts Reading Colloquium 2021 meets at 5pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker is Adam Benkato, Department of Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley, ‘The Sogdian epistolary tradition in the early 8th century‘.
  • The Music Faculty’s colloquia series meets at 5.15pm at the Faculty of Music and via live stream. This week’s speaker will be Barbara Eichner (Oxford Brookes), ‘Infirm singers and dyslexic Dominicans: disability, liturgy and music in late-medieval and early-modern nunneries and monasteries’

Wednesday 13th October:

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in New Powell Room, Somerville College. If you are interested to be added to the mailing list for the seminar, write to Linus Ubl.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm on Google Meet, followed by drinks at 7pm at Corpus Christi College. This week’s speaker is Anne McCabe (Oxford) and Bryan Ward-Perkins (Oxford), ‘Cyril Mango and Constantinople: forthcoming works‘.
  • The second Lyell Lecture takes place at 5pm online and at the Lecture Theatre, Weston Library. Registration is essential for in-person attendance. This year’s lectures will be given by Paul Needham (Princeton). This lecture will be ‘Latin Bible-writing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the Gutenberg Bible workshop’
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Sebastian Sobecki (Groningen), ‘Hoccleve’s Community of Practice: Clerks, Scripts, and London Literature’.

Thursday 14th October:

  • The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in St Edmund Hall. Room TBC: contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
  • The Celtic Seminar meets at 5.15pm in the History of the Book Room, English Faculty and on Teams. For Teams link, contact David Willis. This week’s speaker is William Lamb (University of Edinburgh), ‘Nouns by numbers: New insights from a dialectometrical study of Gaelic nominal morphology’.
  • The Old English Reading Groups meets at 5.30-7pm. For more information and to be added to the mailing list please email Eugenia Vorobeva.

Friday 15th October:

  • The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5pm on Zoom. For texts, joining instructions, and further information, please email Stephanie Hathaway or Jane Bliss.
  • The third Lyell Lecture takes place at 5pm online and at the Lecture Theatre, Weston Library. Registration is essential for in-person attendance. This year’s lectures will be given by Paul Needham (Princeton). This lecture will be ‘The Texts of the Gutenberg Bible; the case of 4 Ezra’



OPPORTUNITIES:

  • CFP: Emotion and Exemplarity in Medieval Insular Texts, c.700-c.1400: Please send abstracts of approximately 200 words for a twenty-minute paper and a short bio to Dr Niamh Kehoe (Heinrich Heine Universität) (niamh.kehoe@hhu.de) by the 10th December 2021. If you have any queries, please email Niamh. While we currently anticipate that this will be an in-person event at Heinrich Heine University, we may decide to switch to an online event
  • Post-doc vacancy for people with skills in classical Persian reading and translation into English, and Digital Humanities. Details can be found on the Invisible East website here (application deadline: 22 October 2021 at 12 noon UK time).
  • 2022 Medium Ævum Essay prize: postgraduates and those recently graduated with a higher degree are invited to submit an essay on a topic that falls within the range of the interests of Medium Ævum in the medieval period (up to c. 1500). The winner of the Essay Prize will receive a cash prize of £500, together with £250 for any books available from Bennett & Kerr Booksellers (including any from the Society’s own catalogue) & £250 of funding towards conference attendance. The winning article will also be considered for publication in Medium Ævum, subject to the usual editorial procedures of the journal. The deadline for submissions is 1st December
  • The Medieval Mystery Cycle is back, by popular demand! We’re once again producing a mini-cycle of medieval plays, each performed by a different group.  If you’d like to get involved, taking charge of a play, directing, acting or making costumes and props, email us: henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk, lesley.smith@hmc.ox.ac.uk. Please see the flyer attached to this week’s email for futher info!



I started this email with Bede’s HE V.24 so I’ll finish with it too for our weekly wisdom:

semper aut discere, aut docere, aut scribere dulce habui
[I have always taken delight to learn, or to teach, or to write]

May your week be filled with productive learning, teaching and writing!

A senior medievalist takes some confused new postgraduates under her wing and shepherds them to a research seminar: Merton College, MS 249, f. 10r. [view image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Huppe

New Book by Oxford Medievalist Deborah Grice

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07/10/2021

16:04

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Calling all medievalists interested in the history of the early universities or the development of doctrine….

Deborah Grice’s ‘Church, Society and University: the Paris Condemnation of 1241/4’ was originally published in hardback by Routledge in August 2019. But it is now in paperback at £36.99 (available direct from them or on Amazon).

Moreover, there is a promotional code of 30% if buying it from Routledge, PBC30, valid until 31st October.

Church, Society and University: The Paris Condemnation of 1241/4 (Studies in Medieval History and Culture): Amazon.co.uk: Grice, Deborah: 9780367194383: Books

The book examines the list of condemned theological propositions issued in 1241/4 by the theology masters at the university at Paris with their chancellor, Odo of Chateauroux, mandated by their bishop, William of Auvergne. It represents the first comprehensive examination of what hitherto has been a largely ignored instrument in a crucial period of the university’s early maturation, and it provides a window through which to view the wider doctrinal, intellectual, institutional and historical developments within the emerging university. These include the advent of the Dominicans and Franciscans at the university; and the developing focus of Paris theologians on using their learning for preaching at a time of a rapid and sometimes divergent development of doctrine and concerns over the newly-translated Aristotelian and associated Arab and Jewish works, heresy, the Greek Church and the Jews.

CFP: Morality, Exemplarity and Emotion in Medieval Insular Texts

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07/10/2021

15:38

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We invite papers which explore the relationship between morality, exemplarity, and the expression of emotion in medieval Insular texts, c. 700-1500.


The behaviours, ideas, and emotions that medieval writers, translators, and authors present as (im)moral and exemplary naturally fluctuate depending on time, place, genre, and language. Similarly, the textual representation and expression of emotion is culturally, temporally, and socially determined. This conference seeks to explore the nexus of morality, exemplarity, and emotion as presented throughout the medieval Insular world (Ireland and the British Isles), c. 700-c. 1500. In an effort to bring different types of texts into conversation with each other, and to probe generic boundaries, we encourage papers on a range of genres, including religious, heroic, romantic, and historic, written in Latin or the vernacular(s). In particular, we welcome papers which explore how the expression of emotion within texts was used to signal exemplary and/or (im)moral behaviour.


Topics include, but are not limited to, the following suggestions:

  • Methodological approaches to identifying emotion(s) and/or exemplary/moral behaviour.
  • The effectiveness of genre as an interpretive frame when examining morality, exemplarity, and/or emotion.
  • The implications of time, place, language, gender, and/or race on morality, exemplarity and/or emotion(s).
  • The expression of emotion(s) to provoke an affective response to different types of behaviour within texts.
  • Explicit or implicit tensions between morality, exemplarity, and the expression of emotion(s).
  • Moral and/or emotional ambiguity.
  • Emotional and/or moral standards (or transgressions) of behaviour (for religious/lay person, saint, lover, hero, knight, etc).
  • The moral implications for the restraint of emotion.


In addition, we seek participants for a roundtable discussion on:

  • The reception of medieval morality and/or emotions in the classroom, especially issues that arise when teaching texts that include emotionally and/or morally one-dimensional figures.


Please send abstracts of approximately 200 words for a twenty-minute paper and a short bio to Dr Niamh Kehoe (Heinrich Heine Universität) (niamh.kehoe@hhu.de) by the 10th December 2021. If you have any queries, please email Niamh. While we currently anticipate that this will be an in-person event at Heinrich Heine University, we may decide to switch to an online event

Medieval Matters: Week 0 and Booklet

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04/10/2021

15:03

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Michaelmas Term is finally here, which means that our Medieval Booklet has now arrived! Inside you will find details of all of the seminars, events and reading groups happening this term, as well as some CFPs and save the dates for future events. Please do peruse and fill your calendars up!

I’d also like to take this opportunity to remind you of our blog, which not only includes an archive of the Medieval Matters newsletters, but also CFPs, posts from Oxford Medievalists, and a handy calendar so that you can always keep an eye on upcoming events and copy the details to your own online calendar. We would love to receive submissions for blog posts, whether these are events, reports on ongoing projects or conferences. If you have an idea for a blog post, please email luisa.ostacchini@ell.ox.ac.uk or lesley.smith@history.ox.ac.uk.

A new term means new faces around Oxford. If this is your first Medieval Matters email, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the Oxford Medievalist community on behalf of the OMS team! If you are a course convenor for a medieval MSt, please block-enrol your students for the newsletter (or send me names for block enrolling) so that we catch all new MSt and doctoral students in medieval subjects and ensure that everyone receives all of the latest Oxford Medieval updates. If you know of any new medievalists who have joined Oxford and wish to have them added to the mailing list, please do contact me on luisa.ostacchini@ell.ox.uk. Alternatively, anybody can subscribe themselves to the Medieval Matters newsletter via the ‘About’ section of the blog – please do share the link with your incoming students.

Onto the announcements for this week:

  • Medieval Roadshow: We are still taking submissions for this year’s Medieval Roadshow, which is a great way for all seminar/reading group/medieval event convenors to publicise their wares. Come and give a two-minute in-person advert at this term’s Roadshow: Tuesday 12th October, 5-7 pm, at Teddy Hall. Please email luisa.ostacchini@ell.ox.ac.uk so she can get an idea of who’ll be talking — but if you haven’t ‘booked’ don’t worry – turn up anyway and we’ll fit you in. The Roadshow is an excellent way re-connect with our medieval community after so many months of virtual events. We are also happy to host virtual speakers via a Teams link: if you would like to present, but would prefer to do so remotely, please just let Luisa know so that arrangements can be made.
  • Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference: We are delighted to announce that the theme of the Eighteenth annual Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference will be Medicine and Healing, and that we are looking for new committee members! Please email oxgradconf@gmail.com, if you are interested!
  • Oxford Medieval Commentary Network: The first workshop and initial meeting of the Medieval Commentary Network will take place on 9th October, Christ Church, Research Centre., 8:30-5:30pm. Please email medievalcommentarynetwork@gmail.com with any questions and for further information.

Finally, a little wisdom from Alcuin to inspire you this week:

‘o quam dulcis vita fuit, dum sedebamus quieti inter sapientis scrinia, inter librorum copias‘

[‘Oh, how sweet life was, when we sat at leasure amongst the stacks of a learned man, amongst an abundance of books’ Ep. 281 ]

May your Michaelmas term be filled with such joys as these!

A manuscript illumination of a coot making its nest on water and on a rock
A coot kindly delivers the Michaelmas Term booklet to the email inbox of Oxford’s Medievalists: Merton College, MS 249, f. 10v. [view image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Fullica

Workshop on the Murbach Hymns and MS. Junius 25

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30/09/2021

15:55

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When?        17th/18th February 2022 (week 5, HT)

What?         In this workshop, the fascinating Murbach hymns – a Latin hymnal with Old High German interlinear glosses from the 8th/9th century – and their manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Junius 25) will be carefully examined regarding their translation technique, use and function, cultural background and transmission. Expect two days full of presentations and discussions, a consultation of this and other manuscripts and a live recitation of the hymns.

Updates and official registration on this page!

Convenor: Luise Morawetz (luise.morawetz@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk)

Image: fol. 122v, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Junius 25

Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race® Symposium

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29/09/2021

12:03

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The symposium is being held virtually from October 19-22, 2021 and will include panels, informal coffee talks, an editor roundtable, and 1-on-1 sessions with invited editors. 

Enmity is a sustaining force for systemic racism, a fervent antipathy toward a category of people. Enmity exists at the nexus of individual and group identity and produces difference by desiring opposition and supremacy, imagining separation by force, and willing conflict. Enmity unfolds in different ways in different places, according to local logics of territory, population, language, or culture, even as these geographical divisions are subject to constant change.

This interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Rutgers University, focuses on how premodern racial discourses are tied to cartographical markers and ambitions. The notions of enmity and region provide a dual dynamic lens for tracing the racial repertoires that developed in response to increasingly hostile contention between premodern cultural and political forces. The symposium will invite scholars to take up this intersection between region and enmity, and to examine how belief in difference, or the emergence of polarizing structures and violent practices, configured race thinking and racial practices in ways that are both unique to different territories and that transcend them.

Register for the event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/region-and-enmity-a-raceb4race-symposium-tickets-165791636247

Learn more about RaceB4Race: https://acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race

Medieval Matters: Is It Term Yet?

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27/09/2021

16:54

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The days are getting colder, the leaves are getting crisper and Bodleian is getting busier… Michaelmas term is almost here! 0th week is just on the horizon, and I’m sure you can’t wait for the medieval events that lie in store. The Durham proverbs advise us that ‘geþyld byþ middes eades’ (‘patience is half of happiness’), so we must wait patiently for all of our seminars, reading groups and opportunities, but today I bring you some pre-term announcements to tide you over:

  • Network for new postdoctoral researchers: New postdoctoral Medievalists and Early Modernists from all disciplines are warmly invited to join a friendly network of new postdocs to help support the transition from doctoral to postdoctoral research. If you would like to get involved, please email Rebecca Menmuir at r.menmuir@qmul.ac.uk

  • ​Call for Papers: Spirits and Spirituality in Medieval Britain and Ireland C. 600-1400. The organisers invite papers which explore representations of spirits and spirituality in the medieval period from c. 600-1400 in Britain and Ireland, including, but not limited to the influence of Eastern and / or Western patristics; representations of spirits and demons; approaches to spirituality; how spirits and spirituality are represented in medieval texts, artefacts, art and material culture; or alternative spiritualities. Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to eleni.ponirakis3@nottingham.ac.uk by the 30th November 2021.

  • Job opportunity: The BnF are recruiting an Editorial content editor for The Art of Reading in the Middle-Ages, on a six-month contract starting 1/11/2011. For further information, see the job posting here

  • Medieval Roadshow: a great way for all seminar/reading group/medieval event convenors to publicise their wares. Come and give a two-minute in-person advert at this term’s Roadshow: Tuesday 12th October, 5-7 pm, at Teddy Hall. Please email luisa.ostacchini@ell.ox.ac.uk so she can get an idea of who’ll be talking — but if you haven’t ‘booked’ don’t worry – turn up anyway and we’ll fit you in. The Roadshow is an excellent way re-connect with our medieval community after so many months of virtual events.

  • Future Philology: Digitization and Beyond: A two-day online symposium organised by the Invisible East Programme. This is a fantasic opportunity for scholars working on digital corpora of documents from the ancient and medieval world to share their experiences and insights. Thursday 30th September – Friday, October 1st 2021. To register, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/future-philology-digitization-and-beyond-tickets-170156072393

Finally, I’d like to remind you to make sure to send your submissions for the Medieval Booklet to luisa.ostacchini@ell.ox.ac.uk before October 1st. Many thanks to everyone who has already sent me their entries. The Booklet will arrive in the first Monday email of 0th Week! Until then, I hope everyone is patiently but excitedly looking forward to the start of term.

A medievalist, eager for seminars and sick of waiting for the start of term, is visited by a caladrius and advised to be patient: Merton College, MS 249, f. 8v. [view image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Caladrius]