Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference – Oxford Medieval Studies

Reliquary Pendants, Past and Present

25/11/2024

17:23

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By Caroline Croasdaile in conversation with Mickey Alice Kwapis, Contemporary Artist and Jeweller of Meaningful Material

Medieval Material

A small piece of stone, a snippet of fabric, a tiny lock of hair. All of these materials would be just as at home within a hollow late medieval pendant, as in a sentimental locket made weeks ago. What is it about these things, detritus in any other context, that makes them more precious than their gold or jewelled containers? Why have people throughout time collected and enclosed these materials as special, religious, magical, or memorial in containers that they wear close to their bodies?

These are some of the questions that are explored in my D.Phil. dissertation entitled, Wearable Containers of Meaningful Things: English Late Medieval and Early Modern Jewellery to Enclose, Conceal, and Enshrine. It is in this project that I examine artefacts like pendants and rings, and the changes this unique type of object undergoes, particularly in light of the Reformation. While medieval examples of these objects have widely been labelled ‘reliquaries’, the startling variety of their contents includes coins, hair, plant matter, textile, stone, or textual amulets. The diversity of their contents has opened the door for a wider consideration of what exactly is a ‘relic’, and what ‘relic-making’ or memory-making practices medieval people engaged in. Not everyone had access to the body parts or materials of saints in the late medieval period, which were often closely guarded in the treasuries of churches. However, medieval people could draw on the blessings of priests, tokens obtained through pilgrimage, or the ritual of prayer to create or enhance special materials to be worn in aid of devotion or to protect the body. During my research, I was struck by the stark similarities that present-day sentimental jewellery holds with these medieval artefacts. While their contexts of belief may be different, many of the types of materials contained are the same, and are similarly capable of capturing big ideas, world-views, and emotions, within tiny interior spaces.

Pendant containing a drop of blood caught on a tiny piece of tissue paper. By Mickey Alice Kwapis. Photo courtesy of Mickey Alice Kwapis.

The Hockley Pendant, British Museum: 2012,8046.1, English, c.1500-1550, gold, 3x25mm. Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS): ESS-2C4836. The engravings on this hollow pendant depict devotion to the bleeding wounds of Christ. Its edges are inscribed with the names of the three magi, which were recited or used in magical charms. This pendant was found to contain unprocessed flax stem pieces. It was recovered near Hockley, Essex.

Rights Holder: The British Museum https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.

Mickey Alice Kwapis: Contemporary Material

Mickey Alice Kwapis is an American artist living in Chicago who specialises in the creation of jewellery, stained glass, taxidermy, and cyanotypes. Her work explores aspects of death, grief, and the natural world. As part of her practice she makes tiny precious lockets, which can be used to contain almost any kind of meaningful material for her clients, who send or provide her with these fragments from their lives. She has kindly agreed to answer some questions I have posed to her in Q&A format regarding her locket pendants. While we cannot query the original makers of medieval objects, her thoughts on her own work provide a useful point of entry for thinking about the enduring and very human act of curating meaningful material, and the desire to carry and wear these things on the body within objects of jewellery.

Q&A:

What first inspired you to begin making pendants that serve as containers for meaningful material(s)?

When I was 22 my Aunt Beth passed away unexpectedly. I had already been making jewellery using glass vessels containing things like squirrel teeth, mouse tails, and dandelion seeds so as the funeral services were wrapping up it just felt natural to grab a few different flowers to dry for eventual use in my work. I ended up making a locket for each of the women in our family so they could have something to hold onto.

Are you interested in, or have you looked to historical examples for inspiration for making this kind of object? If so, do you have a favourite historical piece, period, or influence?

I really enjoy looking at Edwardian and Victorian-era mourning jewellery, mostly containing hair, on eBay. They aren’t hugely historically significant pieces on their own, but each one was handcrafted to celebrate someone’s love, life, or both and I think that’s incredibly beautiful. I grew up Catholic so I’m fascinated by stationary and wearable reliquaries. As a kid I loved learning about the Ancient Egyptians’ mourning and burial rituals including canopic jars. The influence of Egyptian art on the Victorians especially, and now the revival of the Victorian mourning tradition in modern times, follow a thread through human history of wanting to remember those we have lost through preserving them in some tangible way.

What are some of the materials, common or unusual, that people have sent you to be included in pendants?

Most commonly I receive orders for memorial jewellery made with cremated remains, pet hair, and human hair — after all, they’re literally parts of our loved ones so they are obvious choices when it comes to honouring their lives. Some of the less traditional materials I have gotten to use in mourning lockets include broken Fiestaware, a drop of blood on tissue, dyed eggshells from Easter eggs, the bristles of a paintbrush, pottery glaze powder, and a plethora of other incredible materials truly unique to those being remembered. I have helped women celebrate their friendship with a matching set of lockets with sugar from their favourite diner, made pieces for brides containing pieces of their bouquets and lost sequins from their dresses, and honoured hardships with soil reliquaries from sold family homes and pieces of brick from a house fire. Getting to make each one is an honour beyond words.

What are the key steps that go into crafting these lockets, and what are some challenges that this medium presents? What skills as an artist do you draw on?

The hardware for each locket is made using the lost wax casting process and once finished, the materials are secured beneath precision-fit watch crystals that I had specially manufactured to fit my lockets. I took my first metalsmithing class at 14 and have just been building on that skill set ever since so it feels like second nature at this point. When it comes to handling each client’s materials, some require special PPE — especially powdered materials like pigments.

Do you have a memorable or surprising background story or narrative that someone has shared with you about why they have chosen a certain material for inclusion in a locket?

I love the stories behind every single request I get, because the stories are just as personal as the materials being used. Many of them are bittersweet so I’ll share one that’s not: I received an order for a locket containing sand, for an Egyptologist who had recently returned from an archaeological dig. She didn’t bring the sand home on purpose (as it’s highly frowned upon to take materials from dig sites) but it’s impossible to live in a tent in the desert for weeks at a time and not track at least a little bit of sand everywhere you go. Once she was back home in the US, she found sand inside the lining of her suitcase while unpacking and decided to send it my way.

Have you made lockets for your personal use and ownership, and are you comfortable sharing what these are and what they mean to you?

The first ones I made were in memory of my Aunt Beth, with flowers from her funeral. After my Great-Grandma Mickey passed in 2020 I made myself a locket containing soil and sand from three different places on Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit where we spent lots of time in our respective formative years as well as time together. Not too long after, I dropped a mug that had belonged to my Uncle John, who died by suicide but is still listed as a missing person — there was no funeral, no body to say goodbye to. I had the mug repaired using traditional kintsugi practices but the artist did not need the smallest shards of ceramic that broke off and I couldn’t bear to throw them away so I kept them and made a locket with that. I also have lockets containing a fossil my mom found on the beach, and one with a tiny gummy bear that reminds me of my dad, fishing flies and raw sapphires from a trip to Montana I took with a friend. My beloved cat Phil just passed away and I plan to make a locket with his soft orange fur under one lens and his white fur under the other. When you see me in public, I make jingling noises from my jewellery. I’m basically a walking advertisement for my work at this point.

The lockets that you produce are visually accessible, but intended to remain sealed. This is in contrast to the other forms of lockets both contemporary and historical. What led to this choice?

Many modern jewellery makers utilize epoxy resin to contain materials like hair or ash, but it is a relatively new technology. This material can begin to yellow quite quickly and it also permanently alters the sentimental material, making it unrecoverable. My lockets, through sealed closed, function as containers for the free-moving materials inside and in theory could be smashed or cut open to recover the materials should the owner ever wish to do something else with them.

Ash and tooth in sterling silver. By Mickey Alice Kwapis. Photo Courtesy of Mickey Alice Kwapis

How do you understand the role of memory and its connection to material in your work?

Our memories of the past are a big part of what informs who we become in the present day, and the people or things we have lost or experienced along the way are also part of us. Having a piece of memorial jewelry that can be worn day-to-day helps remove our lost memories from the abstract and brings them into the present in a tangible form.

Hundreds of years from now if an archaeologist, museum, or curious collector were to find one of your lockets what is something you would want to tell them about your work to help them understand it?

Humans across millennia have collected and saved sentimental things, and I would hope that centuries or millennia from now we are not so disconnected from each other and ourselves that we can’t recognize the merit of a sentimental object. I think if anyone knew the back story of any single one of my pieces, from the history of the material itself to its meaning and impact on the person who commissioned it, the archaeologist would have the same feeling that I get making my work and looking at it now. After all, memory is something that ties all of us together.

Agnus Dei Pendant, English, c.1400-1540, gilt silver, PAS: GLO-43B24A. This pendant was found to contain, ‘fragments of a woven fabric’ and ‘thick layers of fine white strands that are most likely hair’. There is evidence for a broken-off attachment loop on the upper edge. Recovered in Gloucestershire. Rights Holder: Bristol City Council, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.

Links to the website and work of Mickey Alice Kwapis:

https://www.mickeyalicekwapis.com/about

https://www.instagram.com/kwapkwapkwap

Croasdaile, Caroline, 2025, Wearable Containers of Meaningful Things: English Late Medieval and Early Modern Jewellery to Enclose, Conceal, and Enshrine, Oxford: University of Oxford (D.Phil. Thesis, forthcoming)

The OMS Beowulf Study Day

by Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference

05/11/2024

11:00

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On the 18^th October, a Beowulf Study Day was organised by Francis Leneghan in honour of the publication of Heather O’Donoghue’s book entitled Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero, which was released earlier this year. Heather’s book is an ode to the mastery of Beowulf, ‘imperfect and fraying around the edges as it is’. A roundtrip tour of the poem’s narrative, its poetic makeup, and its modern reception, Heather guides us through this extensive, close reading of Beowulf and its ‘Storyworld’. New readers are warmly welcomed to the landscape of the poem, and readers familiar with the poem meet afresh its setting and society and the inhabitants that populate its landscape, human and otherwise. We are reminded of the poem’s innate and ornate artistry, and the immensity of the poetic skill worked into every half-line. The book offers not just a grand overview of the very stuff of the poem, but speaks to Heather’s nuanced appreciation of the fine threads that string it together, weaving together the voices of poet, narrator and scop, as well as the voices (and voicelessness) of its characters.

Scholars on the Study Day presented on a range of topics on the epic Old English poem, extolling and echoing Heather’s research, which has reinvigorated Beowulf criticism and reminded us all exactly why Beowulf’s afterlife continues to be so long-lived.

Just as Heather notes that Beowulf begins ‘with a bang’, the day began, appropriately, with an enthusiastic ‘Hwæt!’ from the room as Laura Varnam asked the audience to participate in her creative responses to Beowulf, which take the form of feminist poetry and give a voice to Grendel’s mother. Alison Killilea followed and read excerpts from her own translation of the poem, a Corkonian take which reimagined Heorot along the crenelations of Carrigrohane Castle.

Helen Appleton and Rachel Burns shared their exciting research later in the morning. Helen suggested that with the dragon fight, the Beowulfpresents us with a hagiographical setting wherein the Geats need a saint but have only a hero. Rachel’s research focused on Wealhtheow’s neck-ring, and its extraordinary ‘thing power’. Her analysis showed us just how loquacious inanimate objects can be, reifying myth, history and historiography.

In the afternoon, Mark Atherton transformed Seminar Room K into Heorot, encouraging us to think about deictic placement and spatial blocking in the Danish hall, while Edward Gill explored the intricacies of the poem’s microstructure and examined how the poet flits between past, present and future with palindromic syntax.

Francis Leneghan then took us through a myriad of textual parallels that situate Beowulf in the company of other Old English texts. His talk aspired to change the persistent narrative that Beowulf is the ‘odd one out’ in the corpus, suggesting rather that its intertextuality places it at the very centre of Old English literature. Simon Heller followed with a discussion of adaptations of Beowulf, revealing –– to everyone’s surprise –– the poem’s marked narratological similarities with Jaws.

Fittingly, the final speaker of the day was Heather’s husband, Bernard, who read from his own poetic works inspired by Old English literature. His translation of The Wanderer, uttered softly to the rapt room, brought the day to its close with images poignant not just to the tenth century or to the time at which Bernard composed his translation, but which spoke eerily to the here and now.

Following the series of talks, Heather expressed how galvanising the day had been, motivating her to pursue research on Beowulf. The Study Day brought together students and scholars from Oxford and other institutions, as well as local schoolteachers. Over seventy people in total attended, with some in an overflow room, all united by around 3000 lines of Old English poetry which continue to yield new interpretations and creative responses. As the day ended, Francis reminded us that we are not at the end but the beginning of Beowulf scholarship.

Grace O’Duffy (St John’s College)

The inaugural ADAM workshop (Addressing Difficult Aspects of the Medieval)

by Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference

01/11/2024

17:26

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The inaugural ADAM (Addressing Difficult Aspects of the Medieval) workshop took place from the 23^rd–24^th September 2024 at St. John’s College, University of Oxford.

The programme on Monday 23^rd began with a 90-minute discussion of the ‘Möndull-Ingibjörg’ episode from Göngu-Hrólfs saga. The committee selected this episode as it contains references to sexual assault, physical disability, and race.

We distributed the text in an English translation several weeks before the workshop. In the session we discussed: the ‘sanitisation’ of sexual violence and racial insensitivity through translation; the difficulty in mapping contemporary understandings of rape, race, and disability onto the past; the scholar’s positionality in their approach to these topics. The conversation soon moved beyond the text to consider these issues in academia at large. Positionality was particularly controversial, with delegates discussing their discomfort in studying topics without lived experience – ‘am I the right person to be speaking about this?’ – and the potential advantages and disadvantages to foregrounding one’s own experience in academic work. The conversation led us to consider how research grounded in lived experience might complement that which is not, and how scholars of different positionalities might collaborate.

This opening discussion was followed by two paper sessions, the first of which was on ‘Facing the public: What do people want from history?’ and the second on ‘Ethnic identities: interrogating nationhood and colonialism’. Among the papers, we heard considerations of: the risk of harassment faced by women scholars; museological representations of slavery; racial erasure in the interpretation of a Middle English lyric; and the miscategorisation of the ‘Ruthanian’ language along contemporary national lines.

These sessions were followed by a keynote presentation from Professor Corinne Saunders (University of Durham). Professor Saunders gave an instructive account of her movement from her doctoral thesis, to her seminal monograph on ‘Rape and Ravishment’; an academic path she did not anticipate as a postgraduate. She was aware of the pressure upon scholars who ‘fall into’ the study of topics such as these to equip themselves both academically and psychologically. She also noted that a project can become more ‘difficult’ due to external factors, such as when COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd coincided with the final stage of a project on ‘breathlessness’.

The following day began with a group tour with the Uncomfortable Oxford social enterprise. In our scheduled discussion afterwards, delegates were especially taken by the tour’s engagement with the history of antisemitism in the city and the location of a number of University landmarks atop significant Jewish sites. We discussed the University’s reticence when addressing difficult histories and the insufficiency of the ‘plaque response’, whereby a commemorative plaque is erected in a way that might be easily overlooked or dismissed. Delegates debated the best way to supplement such a response so that these aspects of institutional history sit alongside prevailing, comfortable narratives.

Two sessions followed under the banner of ‘Sexual interactions’, the first considering ‘Power structures and interpersonal relationships’ and the second ‘Violence, affect, and audience’. Dividing this topic into two allowed delegates to engage with medieval representations of sexual material that frustrate contemporary categories. We heard papers on the study of: conjugal violence in court reports of 15^th-century Freising; how best to teach the phenomenon of the ‘raping hero’; and ‘compassion fatigue’ in scholars dealing with artistic representations of Lucretia’s rape by Tarquinius.

The workshop concluded with a panel on ‘Redefinitions: Moving beyond structures’, which dovetailed with our recurrent discussions of terminology and the lack of overlap between contemporary language and historical concepts. Papers were presented on the inadequacy of contemporary disability theory in appraising medieval medical text, and the applicability of queer theory to the interpretation of cross-dressing in a monastic context. The workshop concluded with an hour-long discussion, in which we restated our need to wrangle with contemporary language and its misalignment with the categories of the past, as well as to continuously re-evaluate ‘best practice’ in addressing these difficult topics, both in the classroom and in scholarship.

We canvassed for anonymous feedback from our delegates following the workshop and the response has been uniformly positive, with comments emphasising the value of the workshop environment for rigorous and respectful debate. Our delegates have offered a number of suggestions for the network’s development and we now look towards implementing a mailing list and website to provide resources for scholars, organising an edited collection of papers from the workshop, and arranging an open conference at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. We have also been invited to collaborate with Corinne Saunders in her work at The Affective Experience Lab, University of Durham.

We are most grateful to OMS for the financial support.

Adam Kelly (University of Oxford), Grace O’Duffy (University of Oxford), Elliot Worrall (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)