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We are pleased to trial a new session, once or twice a month, in which readers of medieval manuscripts can pose questions to a mixed group of fellow readers and Bodleian curators in a friendly environment. Come with your own questions, or to see what questions other readers have! The sort of questions you might… Read more: Medieval MSS Support Group at the Weston Library

The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. The scheme has a rolling deadline. Closing date for applications: Friday of Week 4 each term for activities taking… Read more: OMS Small Grants Now Open!

3–4 July 2025 / St John’s College, Cambridge. Deadline for paper submissions 9 January 2025 This two-day, in-person conference will explore developing traditions of silence in dramatic texts from antiquity to the Renaissance. Papers are sought from scholars across a range of fields, including classical reception, comparative literature, and medieval and/or early modern English literature.… Read more: CfP: Staging Silence from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Ugo Mondini is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the Principal Investigator of the TORCH Network. He works on medieval Greek poetry and language education in the eleventh-century Byzantine Empire. As we approach our first summer break, it is time to reflect on the initial activities of… Read more: The TORCH Network Poetry in the Medieval World after Two Terms of Activity

During the Medievalist Coffee Morning on Friday, 21 June 2024, Henrike Lähnemann launched her new book The Life of Nuns. Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers 2024, open access: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0397To purchase a paper copy with a 20% discount, use the code LONHL_24 at checkout On show were the following… Read more: Launch of the ‘Life of Nuns’

The Medieval Women’s Writing Research Group Conference 2024 will be held on 18th June 2024 with the theme of “Exchanging Words” in Room 2 of the Taylor Institution Library both in person (presenters/attendees) and online (attendees). Tuesday 18 June 2024, 9am – 5pmOnline and In-person, Room 2, Taylor Institution Library, Saint Giles’, Oxford OX1 3NAFree… Read more: Medieval Women’s Writing Research Group Conference 2024: Exchanging Words

It feels like only yesterday that I was welcoming you all to Oxford for the academic year, and yet here we are at the very end of Trinity Term. It has been such a fantastic and busy year, and it’s hard to believe that it’s almost over. Here is some wisdom on endings, specially for… Read more: Medieval Matters: Week 8

A Year in the Life of the OMS Communications Officer and MSt Academic Mentor As we come to the end of the teaching year and Medieval Matters shuts down for the summer, I was asked to reflect on the year’s happenings, and on some of the work that I do in my role as Communications… Read more: A Medievalist Menologium

Call for Actors, Directors, Costume Makers, and Musicians! Would you like to take part in a medieval dramatic experiment? Directors, actors, costume makers and musicians wanted! The next cycle is going to take place on 26 April 2025 at St Edmund Hall These plays were a very popular form of drama in the Middle Ages… Read more: The Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays 2025

Putting a halt to in-person events, face-to-face conversations unmediated by a digital screen, and forcing people around the world to re-think how the interacted with each other, COVID-19 also placed a stranglehold on much academic dialogue and conferences experiences. One of the victims of the pandemic era was the Cambridge, Oxford, and London Symposium on… Read more: COLSONOEL 2024 in Review

Free books for medievalists! Professor Richard Sharpe (1954–2020) was Professor of Diplomatic in the University and one of the country’s foremost medievalists, whose research ranged from the early Irish church to Anglo-Norman royal acts to the transmission of medieval Latin texts and medieval books and libraries. He was also a large presence in the History Faculty and… Read more: Books for Medievalists

I don’t quite understand how it’s come around so quickly, but here we are in Week 7. For those who need a bit of a boost at this late stage in the term, some wisdom on the joys of (medieval) texts, taken from the  Epistolae  project: In nullis nobis desit doctrina legendi,Lectio sit nobis et liber omne… Read more: Medieval Matters: Week 7

Practices of Contrafacture in Monophonic Song (1150–1550) When: 20 June 2024 (week 9), 10am-7pmWhere: Committee Room, Faculty of MusicConvenor: Philip Wetzler Looking at different repertories of monophonic song between 1150 and 1550, the aim of this workshop is to explore different approaches to the widespread spectrum of practices and concepts of contrafacture: composing new texts… Read more: Reconsidering Contrafacts

CAT is back! After a successful run in June 2023, artist in residence at the Physics Department Pam Davis has developed a second art-piece ‘Conversations Across Time’. Free tickets for the performances moving from the Ashmolean to a second secret hidden location are available via the website https://www.citizensai.com/ Dates: June 15th (preview at 11am –… Read more: CAT – Conversations Across Time

Tuesday 4 June 2024, 12 noon–4PMLecture Room 6, New College, Oxford We are delighted to announce New College Library’s upcoming exhibition ‘Mythical and Monstrous: Fantastical Creatures at New College Library’. Hunt for weird and wonderful beasts in items from the College’s fabulous special collections, from dragons and unicorns, to centaurs, blemmyes, and merpeople. Among the wide… Read more: ‘Mythical and Monstrous’ Exhibition at New College, Oxford

Wednesday, 29 May 2024, 5.15-6.45 UK timeMemorial Room: The Queen’s College, Oxford Dr Peter Tóth (Cornelia Stark Curator of Greek Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford) will speak on “In Quest of a Medieval Best-Seller: The Authorship of the Meditationes Vitae Christi” as term lecture for the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures The Meditationes Vitae… Read more: The Authorship of the Meditationes Vitae Christi

As we near the end of the teaching year I am driven to reflect on all of the fantastic things we’ve seen at OMS during the course of the year. I’m always struck by the phenomenal range of our medievalist activities: particularly by the huge number of languages represented! Some wisdom this week, then, on… Read more: Medieval Matters: Week 6

A one-day conference, Recording Oxford’s Medieval Lives. A Mise en Perspective of Lincoln Documents, as part of the seminar started in October, Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln archives. The conference in the Oakshot Room of Lincoln College featured student presentations on their year-long research into Lincoln’s medieval documents, alternating with academic papers. Anyone with an interest in… Read more: Recording Oxford’s Medieval Lives

The end of the teaching year is fast approaching! We’ve had such a busy and exciting year that I’m sure many of us are feeling rather exhausted – especially when it’s so warm outside! But there are still four more weeks of official term, and a medievalist’s work is never truly done – if you… Read more: Medieval Matters: Week 5

An event organised by Living Stones, St Mary the Virgin, Iffley on Saturday 18 May, 2.00 – 5.00 Iffley Church Hall OX4 4EG. Iffley Church was built in the 1160s. Its lavish design and ornamentation clearly express complex ideas that were topical then but which mystify today’s visitors. Living Stones, the church’s education and heritage… Read more: 12th Century Iffley – Study Day

The sun has finally arrived in Oxford! After such a long winter and such a cold and windy April, I think I speak for us all when I say that seeing Oxford in the sunshine is a real joy! I for one was so overjoyed to see the sun this weekend that I was reminded… Read more: Medieval Matters: Week 4

23rd–24th September, 2024 | St John’s College, OxfordKEYNOTE: Professor Corinne Saunders The inaugural ADAM workshop will bring together medievalists of all disciplines to discuss the research and teaching of ‘difficult’ or ‘taboo’ topics. We welcome applications for scholars working in any field that demands sensitivity and resilience from researchers, such as (but not limited to):… Read more: CALL FOR PAPERS: Addressing Difficult Aspects of the Medieval (ADAM)

By Daniel Sawyer [Workers rebuild Troy, in a copy of John Lydgate’s Troy Book: Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Eng 1, f. 31v. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence, CC-BY-NC 4.0.] For most people, poetry in Middle English—roughly 1100 to 1500—is a world unknown. I’d long thought this a shame, but it was only through… Read more: How To Read Middle English Poetry

Week 3 has arrived, and the term (and year) seem to be rushing by. Today is, of course, a bank holiday, but OMS is still here to bring you all of the latest Medieval News. I hope that you are all managing to get some rest as well as some work done. For those of… Read more: Medieval Matters: Week 3

by Katarzyna Anna Kapitan This blog post and book display in the Voltaire Room between 3 and 10 May is a showcase of the excellent range of books on Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature held at the Taylorian. The display accompanies the launch of new digital editions of three versions of an Old Norse-Icelandic saga,… Read more: Old Norse-Icelandic at the Taylor Institution Library

Poetry needs space. As music relies on its opposing silence; to be recognisable at first sight, poetry needs blanks. Transmitting texts in the Middle Ages was also a matter of space but rather concerned with the cost of writing material and the lack thereof. As a result, single poems were squeezed into the page at… Read more: Binding the world, withholding life: Poetry Books in the Medieval Mediterranean

Has a whole week really flown by already? They do say that time always flies when you’re having fun, and we’ve already been blessed with a wealth of amazing medievalist events! Every term when I assemble the booklet, I am always in awe of the great number of things on offer. Thank you to everyone… Read more: Medieval Matters: Week 2