Author: Tristan Alphey

Medieval Matters HT25, Week 4

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09/02/2025

17:29

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Call for Papers, events, Medieval Matters, News, opportunities

Welcome to Week 4. Please find below the events and opportunities for this week: the full booklet, as always, can be found here. A reminder: the deadline for the OMS Small Grants scheme is this friday – don’t miss out!

Events

Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
  • Seminar in Palaeography and Manuscript studies – CANCELLED
  • Medieval Archaeology Seminar – Institute of Archaeology Lecture Room, 3pm. Wendy Scott will be speaking on ‘The Lenborough hoard’.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Ian Haynes (Newcastle/All Souls) will be speaking on ‘Visualising the Lateran Patriarchium: Recent research by the Rome Transformed Project’
  • Centre for Reception History of the Bible Lecture – 5pm at Trinity College. Rachel Cresswell will be speaking on ‘Quoting Scripture with Anselm of Canterbury: Anselm’s Bible and Why it Matters’.
  • Old Norse Reading Group – 5.30, English Faculty Graduate Common Room. This term we will be reading Hrafnkels saga.

Tuesday

  • The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Europe in the Later Middle Ages – 2pm in the Dolphin Seminar Room, St John’s College. Caitlin John (UCL) will be speaking on ‘Moving Between the City and the Cemetery: Funerary Processions in Late Medieval Cairo and Paris’.
  • Medieval Church and Culture –  5.15pm (coffee from 5pm) in the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Machester College. Emily Guerry (St Peter’s) 11 will be speaking on ‘Gauthier Cornut and the Invention of the Cult of the Crown of Thorns in Paris’.

Wednesday

  • Medieval German Graduate Seminar on ‘Geistliche Spiele’ – 11.15am in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall, on the Mühlhauser St. Katharinenspiel and other topics. Contact Henrike Lähnemann if you would like to be added to the teams group
  • History and Materiality of the Book Seminar – 2pm in the Weston Library, Horton room. Martin Kauffmann will be speaking on ‘Decoration’.
  • Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm, online.
  • Brepols are running a short online webinar introducing their International Medieval Bibliography, on the 12th Feb at 4pm. This is a great chance to get to grips with this useful resource, and is especially recommended for MSt/ MPhil students.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Jonathan Shepard (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘Soft Power, Old and New: Debating the Byzantine Commonwealth’.
  • Slade Lecture Series – 5pm at St John’s College. ‘Gaps in Space’. Book a place.
  • Medieval English Research Seminar – 5.15pm, Lecture Theatre 2, St. Cross Building. James Sargan (University of Georgia) will be speaking on ‘Reading Early Middle English Books’.

Thursday

  • Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute.
  • Middle English Reading Group – 4pm, Beckington Room, Lincoln College. The text this term will be the ‘double sorwe’ of Troilus and Criseyde.
  • Ford Lecture – 5pm in the Examination Schools. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne will be giving the fourth of her lectures: ‘That each may in his own tongue … know his God’ (Grosseteste, in French, 1230s): Bible Translation in Medieval England’.
  • Medieval Visual Culture Seminar – 5pm at St Catherine’s College. Anne-Orange Poilpré (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne) will be speaking on ‘Figuring the Body of Christ inside the Word of God: Carolingian Gospel Books and their Images’.
  • The Khalili Research Centre For the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East: Research Seminar – 5.15pm in the in the Ioannou Centre/Faculty of Classics’ Lecture Theatre. Anna McSweeney (Trinity College Dublin) will be speaking on ‘Making medieval Spain: carpentry practices in Nasrid Granada and the Alhambra.
  • Celtic Seminary – 5.15pm online. Iwan Edgar will be speaking on ‘Llysieulyfr Salesbury ac enwau planhigion cysylltiedig 1400–1700’.

Friday

  • Medievalists Coffee Morning – 10.30am at the Weston Library. All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided. As a Valentine’s Day special, Niko Kontovas will present queer love in poems from Persian and other Eastern manuscripts, not to be missed!
  • Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Oxford Medieval Manuscript Group – 5pm online. Reading Group: Interpretation and Meaning.

For your Calendar

  • “The Jewish Recipes in a 13th C Andalusian Cookbook” by Hélène Jawhara Piñer will be on Zoom at 5 pm Wednesday 19 February. Event details and the link to register is here.

Opportunities

From Jean le Bon to Good Duke Humfrey: a new manuscript witness to Anglo-French cultural exchange

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09/02/2025

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events, News

Friday 21 March 2025 11am–5pm

The Bodleian Libraries have recently acquired a previously unknown manuscript from the library of Humfrey Duke of Gloucester. First written and illuminated in Paris towards the end of the 13th century, the manuscript is an early example of the translation of the New Testament into French. Owned by Jean le Bon, King of France, in the middle of the 14th century, by the early 15th it was in England and came into the hands of a series of Lancastrian royal princes. This symposium provides a first opportunity to explore this outstanding arrival and to point the way for future research. Coffee and tea will be provided. This symposium will be followed by a drinks reception in Blackwell Hall.

Speakers:

  • David Rundle, University of Kent
  • Emily Guerry, University of Oxford
  • Daron Burrows, University of Oxford
  • Laure Rioust, Bibliothèque nationale de France
  • Laure Miolo, University of Oxford
  • Jean-Patrice Boudet, Université d’Orléans

Book a place here

Title image: Bodleian Library, MS. Duke Humfrey c. 1, fols. 72v-73r.


Medieval Matters H25, Week 3

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02/02/2025

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events, Medieval Matters, News

, ,

The sun is out (for how long remains unclear), and third week is upon us. Please find below the events and opportunities for this week: the full booklet, as always, can be found here. Let me draw your particular attention to Brepols’ upcoming webinar introducing their International Medieval Bibliography (12th Feb at 4pm, see below). There is still time to sign up for the Medieval Mystery Plays on 26 April – just contact Antonia Anstatt and Sarah Ware who are finalising the list of plays this week!

Events

Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Alice Rio (KCL) will be speaking on ‘Twelve Migrant Women and the History of Early Medieval Europe’

Tuesday

  • Old Norse Seminar – 12.15 in the English Faculty’s History of the Book room. Ela Sefcikova (Berlin) will be speaking on ‘læ, lygð and slǿgð: Loki in Old Norse Literature’. The seminar will be followed by a sandwich lunch in the Graduate Common.
  • The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Medieval Church and Culture –  5pm in the Horton Room, Weston Library (NB. change of location! orginal manuscripts will be shown!) Lesley Smith (HMC) will be speaking on ‘The Repair Shop: How We Took Apart a Manuscript of Henry VIII and How We Put it Back Together’.
  • Medieval French Research Seminar – 5pm in the Maison française d’Oxford. Chimene Bateman, University of Oxford will be speaking on ‘Flight, Founding and Foreignness in the Roman d’Eneas’,

Wednesday

  • Medieval German Graduate Seminar on ‘Geistliche Spiele’ on the ‘Eisenacher Zehn-Jungfrauenspiel’ with Rebecca Schleuß – 11.15am in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. Contact Henrike Lähnemann if you would like to be added to the teams group
  • History and Materiality of the Book Seminar – 2pm in the Weston Library, Horton room. Julia Bearman and Robert Minte will be speaking on ‘Inks and Pigments’.
  • Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm, online, please contact Michael Stansfield.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Dan Gallaher (Oxford), ‘Beyond a Boundary: Armenia and Byzantium in the Ninth Century’
  • Slade Lecture Series – 5pm at St John’s College. ‘Gaps in Images’. Check this page for recordings or to check whether places have become available.
  • Medieval English Research Seminar – 5.15pm, Lecture Theatre 2, St. Cross Building. Marilina Cesario (Queen’s University, Belfast) will be speaking on ‘The windsele in Christ and Satan: Demonic Winds in Medieval Literature’.

Thursday

  • Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute.
  • Middle English Reading Group – 4pm, Beckington Room, Lincoln College. The text this term will be the ‘double sorwe’ of Troilus and Criseyde.
  • Germanic Reading Group ‒ 4pm on Teams. Speaking names in Werner’s ‘Helmbrecht’ and Hugo von Trimberg’s ‘Der Renner’ with Bradley G. Weiss (Texas). Please contact Howard Jones to request the handout and to be added to the list.
  • Ford Lecture – 5pm in the Examination Schools. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne will be giving the third of her lectures, titled ‘Expansions: ‘Everyone knows that French is better understood and more widely used than Latin’: Matthew Paris (in French, 1253×59).
  • Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music – 5pm on Zoom. James Tomlinson (University of Oslo) will be speaking on ‘A Reassessment of Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 512/543 and its Implications for the Production and Transmission of Polyphony in Late Medieval England’.
  • The Khalili Research Centre For the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East: Research Seminar – 5.15pm in the in the Ioannou Centre/Faculty of Classics’ Lecture Theatre. Tuğrul Acar (Harvard University) will be speaking on ‘Enacting the Divine Love and Remembering the Dervish-Sultan Murad II: the Inscriptions of the Muradiye Mevlevi Lodge in Edirne (1435–36)’.

Friday

  • Medievalists Coffee Morning – 10.30am at the Weston Library. All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided. This week, Alyssa Steiner (BL) will speak on the extensive Ship of Fools collection of Francis Douce.
  • Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Medieval Manuscripts Support Group – 2pm in the Horton Room. Come along or contact Matthew Holford in beforehand if you have a manuscript to discuss!
  • Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group – 3pm. This week, the group will be visiting the The Queen’s College Library.
  • Anglo-Norman Reading Group – 5pm in the Farmington Institute in Harris Manchester College and online. For more information on the texts, email Jane Bliss.

Upcoming

  • Brepols are running a short online webinar introducing their International Medieval Bibliography, on the 12th Feb at 4pm. This is a great chance to get to grips with this useful resource, and is especially recommended for MSt/ MPhil students.
  • “The Jewish Recipes in a 13th C Andalusian Cookbook” by Hélène Jawhara Piñer will be on Zoom at 5 pm Wednesday 19 February. Event details and the link to register is here.

Opportunities

Medieval Matters HT25, Week 2

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26/01/2025

15:06

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events, Medieval Matters, News, opportunities

Welcome to Week 2. As always, we have an impressive set of medieval events for you to enjoy this week. A brief outline is provided below, but the full booklet can be found here. There is still time to sign up for the Medieval Mystery Plays on 26 April – just contact Antonia Anstatt and Sarah Ware.

Of particular note: the Centre for Early Medieval Britain and Ireland are running a trip to visit the British Museum’s Silk Road exhibition (Friday 21st February, 8pm). You can find a link to sign up for the trip here.

Events

Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
  • Seminar in Palaeography and Manuscript studies – Weston Library, Horton Room, 2.15-3.45pm. Julia King will be speaking on ‘Manuscripts In and Out of Syon Abbey’.
  • Medieval Archaeology Seminar – Institute of Archaeology Lecture Room, 3pm. John Dinges will be speaking on ‘Moulding Emotions: Later Medieval Badges in England and Wales’.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Nora Berend (Cambridge) will be speaking on ‘Stephen I of Hungary: Medieval Myths and Modern Nationalism’.
  • Old Norse Reading Group – 5.30, English Faculty Graduate Common Room. This term we will be reading Hrafnkels saga.

Tuesday

  • The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Medieval Church and Culture –  5.15pm (coffee from 5pm) in the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Machester College. Bee Jones will be speaking on ‘Bernard’s Barbarians: Bernard of Clairvaux, Malachy of Armagh, and Discourses of Irish Barbarism’.
  • Early modern diplomacy, 1400-1800 seminar is CANCELLED.

Wednesday

  • Medieval German Graduate Seminar on ‘Geistliche Spiele’ – 11.15am in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. Contact Henrike Lähnemann if you would like to be added to the teams group
  • History and Materiality of the Book Seminar – 2pm in the Weston Library, Horton room. Andrew Honey will be speaking on ‘Writing supports (parchment and paper) and Bindings’.
  • Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm, online.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Phil Booth (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘John of Ephesus: Historian on the Edge’.
  • Slade Lecture Series – 5pm at St John’s College. ‘Gaps in Archives’. Book a place.
  • Medieval English Research Seminar – 5.15pm, Lecture Theatre 2, St. Cross Building. Tamara Atkin (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘On Fragments: The Material and Textual Value of Manuscript and Print Binding Waste’.

Thursday

  • Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute.
  • EMBI Lunch and Launch – 12.30pm–2pm: Massey Room, Balliol College. Sign up here.
  • Greek and Latin Reading Group – 2.30pm in the Stapledon Room, Exeter College. The theme this week is Lucian’s A True History.
  • Middle English Reading Group – 4pm, Beckington Room, Lincoln College. The text this term will be the ‘double sorwe’ of Troilus and Criseyde.
  • Ford Lecture – 5pm in the Examination Schools. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne will be giving the second of her lectures: ‘Langue des reines: The Importance of Women to French and French to Women.’
  • The Khalili Research Centre For the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East: Research Seminar – 5.15pm in the in the Ioannou Centre/Faculty of Classics’ Lecture Theatre. Beatrice Spampinato (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence) will be speaking on ‘Anatolian Language Carved in Stone: Reading the Qalls of Ani across Christian and Islamic Visual Cultures’.
  • Celtic Seminary – 5.15pm online. Abdul-Azim Ahmed (Cardiff) will be speaking on ‘The story of Islam in Wales: Findings from the Islam in Wales History Project’.

Friday

  • Medievalists Coffee Morning – 10.30am at the Weston Library. All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.
  • Magna Carta 1225: New Discoveries & Repercussions – 1pm, Blackwell Hall, Weston Library. Nicholas Vincent will be speaking on ‘Magna Carta: New Discoveries’.
  • Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.

Opportunities

  • Sign up link for Dr Daisy Black’s medieval storytelling event in week 7: Yde and Olive (Wednesday 5th March, 7pm, the chapel at University College): all welcome.
  • CfP: ‘Always Here: Non-Binary Gender, Trans Identities, and Queerness in the Global Middle Ages (c. 250–1650’ – October 24 – 25. More information can be found here.
  • For all Graduate Students (Master & DPhil): fully funded Wolfenbüttel Summer School on Late Medieval Manuscripts (in English). Apply by the end of February. Call for Papers the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel
  • The Ashmolean is looking for a University Engagement Lead. This is a parttime fixed term role to research and possibly pilot opportunities for University Engagement. This is a good role for someone that knows the students in Oxford and is looking at a parttime role – and, obviously, loves museum collections! Full job description 
  • CfP for the ‘Sorrowful Virgin’ workshop at St Hughs, 24 March 2025
  • CfP for ‘Outsiders – Insiders’ (University of Reading), 2nd April 2025
  • OMS Small Grants are open for applications – deadline Friday of 4th Week

CFP: ‘Always Here: Non-Binary Gender, Trans Identities, and Queerness in the Global Middle Ages (c. 250–1650’

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23/01/2025

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Call for Papers

October 24 – 25, 2025
Binghamton University
Binghamton, NY
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: APRIL 15, 2025

Queer, trans, intersex, non-binary, genderfluid, and gender-nonconforming people and sources
are abundant in the premodern textual, artistic, and artifactual record, and studies of gender and
sexuality in the medieval period are flourishing as never before. Yet, work on the LGBTQIA+
Middle Ages remains limited—especially in our classrooms and in sharing our work with
nonacademic queer and trans communities. Many important sources remain out of reach for
students, and an alarming amount of queer and trans medieval and early-modern history is not
available—and its existence routinely denied—to LGBTQIA+ people beyond academia. Even
researchers and teachers dedicated to pre- and early-modern gender and sexuality frequently
remain siloed according to language and region: Latinists speak primarily to Latinists, Arabists
to Arabists, and so on, while scholars of the Americas are often absent from conversations
among scholars of premodern Africa and Eurasia. Thus, despite recent growth and successes, the
study of the queer and trans pre- and early modern remains disturbingly fragmented and vital
sources inaccessible to many.


In our own historical moment, members of the LGBTQIA+ community face frightening and
rising levels of violence and oppression. So what are we, as scholars of the medieval and earlymodern periods, to do? Binghamton University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
(CEMERS) seeks to bring together researchers dedicated to the study of non-binary gender, trans
identities, and queerness during the premodern period broadly defined, to share research and discuss the challenges of LGBTQIA+ scholarship. We invite proposals for papers and panels for
CEMERS’ 2025 conference, Always Here: Non-Binary Gender, Trans Identities, and Queerness
in the Global Middle Ages (c. 250–1650). The conference will include plenary lectures by Leah
DeVun (Rutgers University) and Pernilla Myrne (University of Gothenburg), as well as plenary
roundtables dedicated to translation and pedagogy. We hope to facilitate conversations between
scholars across disciplines and geographic and linguistic boundaries, with the purpose of moving
beyond academic silos to build a broad, truly global, and ideally collaborative textual and
theoretical basis for future research. We are particularly eager for papers that examine regions
beyond Western Europe, but Europeanists are welcome and encouraged to submit proposals.
We invite proposals for papers and panels related to LGBTQIA+ scholarship on the premodern
world, including:

  • Cisgender as an anachronism
  • Significant, overlooked sources that deserve more attention
  • Errors in editions and proposed corrections, including presentations of new translations of previously untranslated (or poorly translated) sources
  • Materiality, manuscript studies, and queer and trans codicology
  • Cohabitation, cultural exchange, and cross-cultural engagement with issues of queer desires, gender fluidity, and gender multiplicity
  • Provincializing Western European medieval responses to “sodomy” and shifting definitions of “nature” and what is “unnatural”
  • The afterlives of medieval European homophobia and transphobia, and their role as weapons in early-modern coloniality and gendercide
  • How oppressive political regimes, historic and modern, have used, abused, and distorted queer and trans medieval texts and history, from Nazi academia to contemporary pinkwashing
  • Responses to cultural appropriation in white LGBTQ Studies, and the tensions between regional and cultural specificity and a global approach to queer and trans medieval history
  • White supremacy in academic seniority and/as the narrowing and distortion of the queerand trans Middle Ages
  • Hagiography, holiness, embodiment, and gender fluidity
  • Integrating LGBTQIA+ medieval sources into undergraduate curricula
  • Artistic and creative responses to and adaptations of queer and trans medieval sources
  • The purpose of studying queer and trans medieval history, literature, art, and people in the face of ongoing and intensifying modern oppression
  • Digitization, queer and trans metadata, and best methods for making the queer and trans Middle Ages more broadly available

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: April 15, 2025
Abstracts (350–500 words) for individual papers and for sessions are invited. Papers should be
20 minutes in length. Send abstracts, along with a CV, to cemers@binghamton.edu.
For information, contact Bridget Whearty at bwhearty@binghamton.edu.

Muhammad Qasim, Portrait of Shah Abbas I and his page. Isfahan
(?), 1627. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © 2019 GrandPalaisRmn
(musée du Louvre) / Mathieu Rabeau.

Medieval Matters HT25, Wk1

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19/01/2025

14:17

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Call for Papers, events, Medieval Matters, News, opportunities, Uncategorized

Welcome back to a new term. I hope you’ve all had a chance to look through the OMS termly booklet, the most recent version in full colour glory can be found here. We’ve had a number of important updates since the booklet was last circulated, so do have a look back through. New additions include:

Of particular note this term are the Ford Lectures (Thursday, 5pm, Examination Schools). Jocelyn Wogan-Browne will be giving a lecture series titled French in Medieval Britain: Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

Events

Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Christian Sahner (New Coll/AMES) will be speaking on ‘A History of Mountains in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: North Africa, Syria, and Iran’.

Tuesday

  • Medieval Afterlives Season Workshop – 1pm – 4pm (lunch from 12.30) in the Colin Matthews Room, Radcliffe Humanities (and online via MS Teams). As part of the preparations for annual ‘Cultural Seasons’ in the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, this is an invitation to brainstorm ideas for a Cultural Programme Season on Medieval Afterlives. RSVP to culturalprogramme@humanities.ox.ac.uk
  • The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Ancient and Medieval Seminar – 4.30pm, location tbc. Vladimir Olivero (Harvard) will be speaking on ‘From Jerusalem, through Alexandria, to the Caucasus: observations on the translation technique in the Armenian Psalter’.
  • Medieval Church and Culture –  5.15pm (coffee from 5pm) in the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Machester College. Mark Williams (SEH) will be speaking on ‘Magic and its Implications in some early 12th-century Welsh Prose Narratives’.

Wednesday

  • Medieval German Graduate Seminar on ‘Geistliche Spiele’ – 11.15am in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. This week will be a short planning meeting. Contact Henrike Lähnemann if you would like to be added to the teams group
  • History and Materiality of the Book Seminar – 2pm in the Weston Library, Horton room. Matthew Holford will be talking about ‘Manuscript Structures’.
  • Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm, online.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Kevin Blachford (King’s College London & Defence Academy) will be speaking on ‘World Order in Late Antiquity: The “Two Eyes” Rivalry of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia’.
  • Slade Lecture Series – 5pm at St John’s College. ‘Gaps in Writing’. Book a place.
  • Medieval English Research Seminar – 5.15pm, Lecture Theatre 2, St. Cross Building. Alice Jorgensen (TCD) will be speaking on ‘The Old English Apollonius of Tyre and the Name of the Father’.

Thursday

  • Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute.
  • Greek and Latin Reading Group – 2.30pm in the Stapledon Room, Exeter College. The theme this week is Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (De Re Publica 6.9).
  • Middle English Reading Group – 4pm, Beckington Room, Lincoln College. The text this term will be the ‘double sorwe’ of Troilus and Criseyde.
  • Ford Lecture – 5pm in the Examination Schools. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne will be giving the first of her lectures: ‘“Alle mine thegenas … frencisce & englisce”: The Languages of 1066 – And All That’.
  • The Khalili Research Centre For the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East: Research Seminar – 5.15pm in the in the Ioannou Centre/Faculty of Classics’ Lecture Theatre. Michael Erdman (The British Library) will be speaking on ‘Reintegrating the Empire: taking an expansive view towards “Ottoman” collections’.

Friday

  • Medievalists Coffee Morning – 10.30am at the Weston Library. All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.
  • Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group – 3pm. This week, the group will be visiting the Balliol Historical Collections Centre. Previous experience of handling medieval manuscripts is desirable. Limited places, write to Elena Lichmanova by 22/01/2025
  • Anglo-Norman Reading Group – 5pm in the Farmington Institute in Harris Manchester College and online. For more information on the texts, email Jane Bliss.

Opportunities

The Great Viking Survey

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16/01/2025

14:09

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opportunities

Members of the OMS community are invited to participate in The Great Viking Survey.

The University of Oslo has recently launched the Great Viking Survey, a wide-ranging study to explore how people across the world perceive and engage with the vikings as history and heritage, and to map the many ways in which contemporary media and academia shape these views. This online survey invites anyone, anywhere, over 18, to share their thoughts on the iconic viking warrior figure, as well as the enduring legacy and memory of the vikings in the modern world. In doing so, researchers will be able to shine an unprecedented light on the means and mechanisms that allow images and myths of the vikings to be shaped and spread in the public sphere.

The survey is part of the Making a Warrior-project, a pan-Nordic network of scholars examining the concept of viking ‘warriorhood’ and its representations past and present. By determining how ideas and images of vikings are shared among different communities and demographics, the project is able inform future outreach and cultural heritage initiatives that respond to public interest, while fostering a nuanced appreciation of the Viking Age.

The Great Viking Survey is now live at vikingsurvey.org, and remains open until mid-May 2025. The associated press release from the University of Oslo can be found here.

Call for Papers: ‘Outsiders – Insiders’ (University of Reading)

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13/01/2025

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Call for Papers, events, opportunities

Postgraduate Research Forum (hybrid), 2nd April 2025

This forum seeks to provide a supportive environment in which postgraduates can share ideas and get helpful feedback. Proposals are welcomed for 20-minute papers that explore the nuanced relationships between ‘Outsiders’ and ‘Insiders’ during the medieval period, which may include, but are not limited to:

Defining Boundaries:

  • How were boundaries—geographical, social, and cultural constructed in medieval societies?
  • Who were considered ‘insiders’ and who were relegated to the status of ‘outsiders’?
  • What role did religion, ethnicity, and class play in shaping these distinctions?

Power and Exclusion:

  • How did medieval institutions (such as the Church, feudal lords, and guilds) wield power over both insiders and outsiders?
  • What mechanisms were used to exclude certain groups from participation in economic, political, or religious life?
  • Were there instances of resistance or subversion by those on the margins?

Cultural Exchange and Hybridity:

  • How did interactions between insiders and outsiders lead to cultural exchange, adaptation, and hybrid identities?
  • What can we learn from the cross-cultural encounters between medieval Europeans, Byzantines, Arabs, and other groups?
  • Did artistic, literary, or architectural expressions reflect these interactions?

Narratives of Otherness:

  • How were outsiders portrayed in medieval chronicles, literature, and art?
  • Were there attempts to challenge or subvert prevailing stereotypes?
  • What can we glean from these narratives about societal attitudes towards difference?

Marginalized Voices:

  • Who were the marginalized groups in medieval society (e.g., Jews, lepers, heretics, women)?
  • How did they navigate their position as outsiders?
  • Can we recover their voices and experiences from historical sources?

Please submit an abstract of up to 150 words and a short biography by 31st January 2025 to readinggcms25@googlegroups.com. Please also provide your name, affiliation, contact information, and if you intend to present your paper either in-person or remotely.

French in Medieval Britain: The James Ford Lectures 2025

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08/01/2025

15:17

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Jocelyn Wogan-Browne on Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500

Thursdays at 5pm, Weeks 1-6 Hilary, Examination Schools

French played a major, though not the only role, in the pervasive multilingualism of British history and culture.  As Britain’s only medieval ‘global’ vernacular, it was also important to a wide range of people for their participation in external theatres of empire, trade, culture, conflict, and crusade.  Displacing the long shadow of nineteenth-century nationalizing conceptions of language and their entrenchment in modern university disciplinary divisions, emerging histories of French in England and increasingly of French in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland offer new ways of understanding language and identity.  These lectures trace francophone medieval Britain in a chronological sequence across its four main centuries, interpolating two thematic lectures on areas especially needing integration into our histories, medieval women and French in Britain, and French Bible translation in medieval England.

About the Lecture Series: The Ford Lectures in British History were founded by a bequest from James Ford, and inaugurated by S.R.Gardiner in 1896-7. Since then, an annual series has been delivered over six weeks in Hilary term. They have long been established as the most prestigious series in Oxford and an important annual event in the University’s calendar.

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne in her allotment on Osney Island in Oxford

About the speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne is Professor emerita of both the University of York, where she held the Chair of Medieval Literature from 2005 to 2010, and Fordham University in New York, where she was the Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature from 2010 to 2019.

Her wide-ranging scholarship has most recently focused on the reconceptualization of English medieval literary culture as a multilingual community. She has created a fundamentally new understanding of the importance attached to knowing, speaking, reading and/or writing French in later medieval England: work on the culture of late medieval England is now unthinkable without taking her insights into account. The approach was spearheaded in her Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translation (with Thelma Fenster and Delbert Russell) (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2016), which built on the earlier The Idea of the Vernacular: Middle English Literary Theory c. 1280-1520, with Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans. A book of essays, The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (2017), speaks to the extensive influence of her work and the esteem in which she is held by the scholarly community.

Jocelyn came to Oxford from Australia to study for the BPhil in Medieval Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College under the supervision of Elspeth Kennedy, one of Oxford’s most inspirational teachers. Her fellow countryman, Bruce Mitchell, another medievalist, became her mentor, and she became established in Oxford at the events he hosted for students from the southern hemisphere. Jocelyn started a DPhil in Old Norse and Old French, but accepted a lectureship in Early Middle English and Anglo-Norman at Liverpool, later receiving a doctorate on the strength of her numerous publications. Liverpool was followed by positions at York and Fordham, where her dedication to students and teaching won her a basket of teaching awards, in addition to her distinguished research profile.

Now living in Oxford and a member of St Edmund Hall, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne remains a dynamo of multi-disciplinary research.  Her Ford Lectures will undoubtedly turn our concept of ‘English History’ on its head.

Lecture Schedule

23rd Jan: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/event/expansions-everyone-knows-that-french-is-better-understood-and-more-widely-used-than-latin-mat

30th Jan: Langue des reines: The Importance of Women to French and French to Women.

6th Feb: Expansions: ‘Everyone knows that French is better understood and more widely used than Latin’: Matthew Paris (in French, 1253×59)

13th Feb: ‘That each may in his own tongue … know his God’ (Grosseteste, in French, 1230s): Bible Translation in Medieval England

20th Feb: “Lette Frenchmen in their Frenche endyten”(Thomas Usk, c.1384-87): French in the Multilingual Fourteenth Century

27th Feb: “Et lors que parlerez anglois /Que vous n’oubliez pas le François” (manuscript dedication, c. 1445) : Off-shoring French?

Thursdays at 5pm, Weeks 1-6 Hilary, Examination Schools

More information can be found here: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history

Gone Medieval: Lives of Medieval Nuns

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26/12/2024

16:10

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Our very own Henrike Lähnemann has recently appeared on the podcast Gone Medieval, discussing her new book ‘The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents‘:

“The often forgotten world of medieval nuns holds many secrets about the lives of ordinary people of the age, their daily routines, education, and societal roles. German medieval historian Henrike Lähnemann shares with Matt Lewis her research into the rich archives of convents, which revealed nuns’ vibrant lives, from their involvement in local politics and commerce to their spiritual duties and family bonds. They discuss how medieval convents served as hubs of learning, medicine, and community interaction, complete with both solemn rituals and moments of joyful laughter.”

Listen to the episode here.

The book also was discussed in the TORCH ‘Book at Lunchtime’ series