1st and 3rd Conference – 25th-27th May 2023 St Cross College and Pusey House, Oxford
25th May Thursday
9h Registration and Coffee 9h30-10h Introduction and Problematique (Maximilian Lau Worcester College, University of Oxford and Gregory Lippiatt University of Exeter) 10h-10h30 Coffee 10h30–11h15 Political argumentation in the 1150s and 1160s: the example of the Saint-Victor Register (Alice Taylor) 11h15–12h The Maliks of Hindustan: A New Conquest Nobility? (Abhishek Kaicker UC Berkeley and Hasan Siddiqui University of British Columbia) 12h–12h30 Questions and Discussion 12h30–13h30 Lunch 13h30–14h15 Benevolent Elites? Shared Rulership and Privileges in Early Medieval Japan (Mickey Adolphson University of Cambridge) 14h15–15h The Kouroukan Fouga and Oral History: Further Reflections on African Narratives of Noblesse oblige (Adam Simmons Nottingham Trent University) 15h–15h30 Questions and Discussion 15h30–16h Tea 16h Optional Visit to Oriel College Archives (Magna Carta, Papal Bulls and More) 19h Speakers’ Dinner
26th May Friday
9h30–10h Coffee 10h–10h45 Minority Rule in Medieval Syria: The Establishment and Maintenance of the Burids in Damascus during the Reign of Tughtegin (1104-1128) (Alex Mallett Waseda University, Tokyo) 10h45–11h30 L’aristocratie, l’empereur et le bien commun dans l’empire romain d’Orient (Jean-Claude Cheynet l’Institut universitaire de France) 11h30–12h15 The common good and baronial rebellion in England, c. 1199-1327 (Sophie Ambler University of Lancaster) 12h15–12h45 Questions and Discussion (Alice Taylor King’s College London) 12h45–14h Lunch 12h–12h30 Questions and Discussion 14h–14h45 A Shatterzone on an Ecotone: Fortifying the Steppe-Sown Frontier and Contending for Authority in the Ordos Region of Asia, Circa 800- 1200 (Ruth Mostern University of Pittsburgh) 14h45–15h30 Defining Elite Alterity in the medieval Maghrib and al-Andalus, c. 1000-1300 (Amira Bennison Magdalene College, University of Cambridge) 15h30–16h Questions and Discussion 16h–16h30 Tea 19h Conference Dinner
27th May Saturday
9h30-10h Coffee 10h–10h45 The Limits of Leadership: Cities, Frontiers, and Incursion in the Narratives of North-Western Europe, 1100–1300 (Emily Winkler St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford) 10h45–11h30 Basqaqs, darughas or envoys? Transience, mobility and Mongol elites in Rus (Angus Russell Trinity College, Cambridge) 11h30–12h15 The Rich, The Poor, and The State: Ideas of Good Government in Song Dynasty China (Sukhee Lee Rutgers University) Questions and Discussion 12h30–13h30 Concluding Remarks, Round Table Discussion, Next Steps (Gregory Lippiatt University of Exeter and Maximilian Lau Worcester College, University of Oxford) 13h30-14h30 Lunch and Farewell
About the Noblesse Oblige? Project
This project and its conference is a forum for the re-evaluation of ‘baronial’ government and the common good between the tenth and fourteenth centuries across Afro-Eurasian polities. By bringing together emerging and established international scholars, it challenges the traditionally Eurocentric approach to this problem and uses new methodologies to reassess our framework for studying the medieval period, leading to a fundamental reappraisal of the teleological narrative that has previously explained the rise of modern states. The story of the medieval barons is commonly a negative one. Because aristocracies have been almost universally eclipsed by centralised states in the modern world, they are often cast as regressive forces whose self-interest held back ‘progress’. Nor is this exclusively a European narrative: the historiographical attention paid to the ‘rise of the State’ has privileged the Latin Christian experience of political formation and shaped the way in which non-royal élites are seen in other historical contexts. As a result, ‘private’ rulers such as lords, amirs, jun and kshatriya are often assumed to have been at odds with the needs of the wider society. This network is challenging this understanding of the role of ‘barons’ in their relation to public good in two important and complementary ways. First, we are exploring case studies of how these non-royal élites conceived and implemented responsible government, whether for themselves or for others. Second, we are comparing these case studies in a bold transnational framework, reaching from western Europe to China, that spans the collapse of major centralised imperial projects in the ninth century to the destabilising experience of the Great Death in the fourteenth.
We would like to thank the following organisations for their support of this project and the organisation of this conference:
Supervisory Board Nandini Chatterjee – University of Exeter Bernard Gowers – Keble College, University of Oxford Catherine Holmes – University College, University of Oxford Yasuhiro Otsuki – Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo Nicholas Vincent – University of East Anglia
Associate Members Fernando Arias – University of Valladolid Susannah Bain – Jesus College, University of Oxford James Cogbill – Worcester College, University of Oxford Lars Kjaer – Northeastern University London Mario Lafuentee – University of Zaragoza Carlos Laliena – University of Zaragoza
Report by Elisabeth Dutton, Université de Fribourg, on the staging of the Comédie des Innocents, by Marguerite de Navarre. Presented by les perles innocentes as part of the Medieval Mystery Cycle 2023 at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford (see there for a synopsis of the play and the cast list).
The play at first reading seemed to me a fairly conventional dramatization of the story, not so different from the story as told in the English mystery plays, for example– the idea that Herod kills his own son is found in the Golden Legend and thus well established in European tradition. But Marguerite gives particular force to female characters, not just the feisty mothers and Nurse who care for the slaughtered babies, but also most importantly Rachel, whose lengthy lament, a rhetorical tour de force, is really the climax of Marguerite’s script. In a play which shows mothers and Herod violently deprived of their children, and which foreshadows God’s loss of his own Son, the Old Testament matriarch Rachel powerfully gives voice to the grief of women, King, and ultimately God. She also raises a protest against tyranny and abuse that feels all too contemporary.
I knew that I needed an actress for Rachel who could be at once strong and feminine, and utterly absorbing to the audience, and I was delighted that Elisa Pagliaro agreed to play the role. I wanted the speech to be supported by some haunting music, and am grateful that Lucy Matheson found a medieval French setting of the Vox in Rama, and agreed to sing it for us for the performance in Oxford. The effect of Marguerite’s verse, delivered by Elisa directly to the audience, with Lucy’s haunting song underneath, was very powerful indeed, and quite unlike anything I had experienced in other dramatisations of the Innocents. Its power took us all a little by surprise. There was a completely different reading and understanding of the Comédie des Innocents – in particular of Rachel’s lament – from the very first time I independently read it, and the way I felt and understood it on the day of the performance in Oxford.
Elisa Pagliaro on performing Rachel’s lament
The original play is 1075 lines long: in order to fit into our allotted 20 minutes, Aurélie Blanc cut more than half of its lines, while expertly maintaining a sense of the versification. Aurélie was also essential to my vision of the play from the start, as I needed her exceptional talents for the roles both of Herod and of God. As a travelling troupe, we had to keep our costs down through maximal doubling – and the structure of the various scenes required that God be doubled with the royal tyrant, as well as one of the mothers. This doubling was in fact rather pointed, as Aurélie writes:
The main challenge when participating in this play was to take on three roles: I played God, then Herod, and then one of the women whose child is killed by the soldiers. During the play, I did not have much time to go from one character to another. I struggled with those transitional moments because God, Herod, and Woman 1 seemed so different from each other. I tried to find what their main characteristics were so I could focus on these while changing roles. God and Herod are both rulers, both authoritative and confident (at least at times in the case of Herod). However, Herod is more frantic, chaotic, and changeable than God. Surprisingly perhaps, I found the character of God harder to play. It was much easier to relate to Herod with his mood swings and emotional outbursts! As for the Woman, she seemed completely unlike the other two characters. Her tender love for her child is her main concern throughout her scenes. Thinking about these characters helped me understand them, but I felt that things truly came together when I realized that all three were parents and all three lost their child. God’s worry for his son is what prompts him to send an angel to Joseph and Mary, it is the reason motivating his first speech. Understanding this helped me relate to God: when playing him, I did not have to try to pretend to be all powerful and all knowing, I had to focus instead on thinking about saving a person that I loved. Herod’s motivations are more selfish, but he also acts with his son in mind: he wants his son rather than Jesus to rule over his kingdom after him. Once I saw this, I found it much easier to play his shock and grief when his dead son is presented to him. And Woman 1, of course, was always a character focused on her child. Understanding these connections between my three characters was really helpful to me. These people no longer seemed entirely different from each other but were united by the same love and the same grief. This love and grief could stay with me throughout the play as I moved between God, Herod, and Woman 1.
Aurélie Blanc on playing God, Herod and a grieving mother
Aurélie’s performance of all three roles was extraordinary. And the requirements of the doubling also lay behind the blocking of the piece, which came to me very early on in rehearsals. I wanted to find a way to use the whole of Teddy Hall’s front quad: early drama, I believe, always exploited its venues to the full, and it’s good to make actors do hard physical work. Then, the actors would have no ‘offstage’ space for changing, and in any case they wouldn’t have time to do anything other than change ‘onstage’; but the audience needed to recognize clearly their changes of role, so we associated role with place (an idea most clearly demonstrated in medieval drama by the extant stage plan of the Castle of Perseverance, with its ‘skaffolds’ for the God, the World, the Flesh and the Devil.)
I enjoyed the sense of empowerment that came from filling the front quad with our voices and bodies.
Helene Wigginton on performing in a medieval venue
God begins the play in a scene of heavenly harmony, commanding his angels. We established him standing on the well in the centre of the quad (scriptural associations of wells are a pleasing coincidence). In each of the four corners of the quad we placed a black storage stool, containing costume changes, and Mary and Joseph began sitting on the stools to God’s right, while Herod was to occupy the stool on God’s left. The effect was formal and stylized, which matches the verse. The angels could move freely between ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, delivering messages and also distributing chocolates to the audience (we are a Swiss troupe, after all); when the angel actors had to become soldier-tyrants, they went to the other ‘left’ stool to swap their wings for helmets.
As the scene shifted from heaven to Herod’s court, Aurélie left her golden cape on the well and donned regal robes on Herod’s ‘throne’: since Herod then issues quick-fire commands to doctors and soldiers, frantic activity ensued as all the other actors rushed backwards and forwards across the playing area to obey his orders. The pace contrasted with the calm order of heaven, and the audience had a disconcerting sense that the focus was pulled ‘off-centre’ with Herod’s power. Tyranny pulls all things out of joint.
The babies (dolls with soft torsos) were slaughtered using a sword and two spears, mainly because I am haunted by the image of ‘naked infants spitted upon pikes’. We used this device once before, in a staging of the Middle English Digby Killing of the Children, and it provoked horrified laughter in the audience. I was fascinated that the effect in Marguerite’s play was completely different: there was no laughter, but there was genuine horror. I think this is partly because, whereas the Digby play includes a Fool character among Soldiers, who all seem rather dim, Marguerite writes her killers concisely and explicitly as Tyrants.
Carmen Vigneswaren-Smith on her role as soldier: ‘the audience flinched back from my spear, gasped and covered their mouths in surprise at the murder of the babies, and I was suddenly reminded of what the familiarity of rehearsal can make you forget — that it was in fact a brutal massacre that we were acting out.’ One woman in the audience clutched her own baby to her. Audience members commented that their stomachs were knotted.
The sense of horror was not entirely dispelled by the final song, which was a Christmas song, since the play would originally have been performed on the feast of the Innocents, December 28th. The script states that it should be sung to “Si j’ayme mon amy”: for our performance, Sandy Maillard, founder of the all-female choir Fa Mi Cantar, adapted a tune of that name found in the songbook of Françoise de Foix, Countess of Châteaubriant, 1495-1537, celebrated beauty and lover of King Francis I (the songbook is now British Library MS Harley 5242.) It is a strangely unnerving ending to a powerfully disconcerting play.
The sixteenth-century French seemed to present no obstacle to the audience’s engagement, and we are grateful to have had such an opportunity to explore its quality. Our production was probably different in many ways from any performance Marguerite might have seen or even envisaged, but we hope that our all-female production, delivered with precise attention to the words she wrote, may have captured something of their spirit, which seems that of an almost feminist protest against tyranny.
A fantastic day was had by all at the third Medieval Mystery Cycle held on Saturday, 22 April that took place across the Front Quad and St Peter-in-the-East churchyard of St Edmund Hall. Actors, directors, singers and designers staged six plays dating from between the 12th and 16th centuries. Retelling Biblical stories from the Nativity to the Last Judgement, the cast expertly performed in medieval and modern languages, including Latin, Middle English and Middle High German.
Master of Ceremonies Jim Harris (left) and the Choir of St Edmund Hall (right)
Master of Ceremonies Jim Harris (Teaching Curator, Ashmolean Museum) delighted everyone as audience guide and play narrator with linking verse composed by David Maskell, and we were treated to Peter Abelard’s ‘O quanta qualia’ sung by the Choir of St Edmund Hall led by College Chaplain the Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano.
Piers Plowman with tackling the seven deadly sins (left) and the Virgin and Christ Child of the Nativity scene (right)
Group ‘Swonken ful harde’ performed first with extracts from Piers Plowman in Middle English, that saw Piers taking on the seven deadly sins through the visions of Will the Dreamer. Following in Middle English, The English Faculty wonderfully performed the Chester Nativity and Salutation with a humorous interpretation of Roman Emperor Octavyan as King Charles III in time for the Coronation!
Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays 2023
God announces judgement in the Slaughter of the Innocents (left) and Mary Magdalene steals a member of the audience (right)
Marguerite de Navarre’s 16th-century French play of the Comédie des Innocents was performed by group ‘Les perles innocentes’ with singing by Lucy Matheson (read a report by director Elisabeth Dutton), with the dark scenes of the Slaughter of the Innocents countered by a comically scheming Herod and angels supplying chocolates to the audience. We were then treated to a charity coffee and cake stall in the break by the Oxford German Society in support of the German Red Cross. This was followed by a fantastic adaptation of the Carmina Burana Bavarian Passion play by the ‘Sorores Sancte Hildae’ group in Latin and German, with audience participation!
Professor Henrike Lähnemann and trumpet leading the angels (left) and a gleeful Lucifer capturing lost souls for Hell (right)
The unofficial award for best costume design went to the Medieval Germanists who performed the Harrowing of Hell in Middle High German with English narration, that saw a troupe of winged angels and Lucifer herd an imaginative array of lost souls to the Crypt’s Hellmouth. The day closed with Past and Present Teddy Students delivering a high-energy staging of a modern English version of the Last Judgment with St John of Patmos being guided by an exacerbated angel through comic visions of the battle between Christ and Satan for souls.
St John of Patmos and his visions of Heaven and Hell in the Last Judgement
We are particularly grateful to Professor Lesley Smith and Professor Henrike Lähnemann, co-directors of Oxford Medieval Studies, the driving force behind the Mystery Cycle, Michael Angerer, Graduate Convenor for the Mystery Cycle, and to the Fellows and Principal of St Edmund Hall, for once again agreeing to host our medieval madness!
Welcome back to Oxford for Trinity Term! I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to making the Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference and Medieval Mystery Cycle so wonderful. So much hard work goes into these events, and you really showcased the wide range of approaches and the incredible vivacity of Oxford’s medieval community. We could not have hoped for a better start to the term. In the words of Alcuin:
tantas grates et laudes agimus […] quantas habet liber ille syllabas! [I give you as many thanks and praises as the book has syllables! Ep. 206 ]
But of course, these events were only the beginning of what is sure to be a busy Trinity. Indeed, you will notice that a certain book of very many syllables has arrived in your inboxes this week: the Trinity Term Medieval Booklet is now live! I have attached the compressed pdf version for your reference, but for all of the very latest updates you can consult the live version here on our website. If events are cancelled or details change, we will update them on the calendar, so check that out in case of doubt. For a guide to everything happening this week, please see below:
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
SAVE THE DATE! The Oxford Medieval Studies Trinity Term Lecture will take place on May 4th at 5:30-6:30pm in St Edmund Hall, Old Library. Alison Ray (Archivist at St Peter’s) and Heather Barr (Library Trainee at St Edmund Hall) will be speaking on “GLAMorous work: Medievalist Pathways in Archives and Libraries”. Join us for a careers talk with a twist and with coffee and cake PLUS the chance to see an exhibition in the Old Library and handle some of the special collections!
To celebrate the life and scholarship of Nigel F. Palmer, Professor of German Medieval Literary and Linguistic Studies at the University of Oxford, Faculty, College and academic community will honour his memory with a symposium, to be held at the Taylorian and the Weston Library on 19-20 May 2023. Admission is free for symposium and reception; dinner to be charged (subsidized for graduate students and early career people). Please register to attend the symposium by 30 April 2023. There will be a separate registration deadline for attending the Garden reception on Saturday, 20 May, 5pm, to which everybody is welcome, and the dinner 7:30pm, both at St Edmund Hall.
The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Prolet Decheva (University College Dublin), Late Antique Personifications of Abstract Ideas and Elite Identity. To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.
The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Brianne Dolce (Merton) ‘Hell’s Army: Heretics and Usurers in Medieval Arras‘. The seminar will also be available remotely viaTeams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
The Oxford Interfaith Forum is hosting lecture on The Popes and the Jews in Sixteenth-Century Italy through the Chronicle of Pope Paul IV at 6pm, online. For full details and to register, please click here.
Tuesday 25th April:
The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12:00 in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. This week’s speaker will be Hannah Lucas (Newnham College, Cambridge): Contemplating Criticism.
The Medieval Churchy and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Claire Holthaus (Christ Church): Royal Displays of Power in the Welsh Castles of Edward I.
The Medieval French Research Seminar will meet at 5pm for drinks, with the presentation starting at 5:15pm, at the Maison Francaise d’Oxford on Norham Road. This week’s speaker will be Marion Uhlig (Université de Fribourg), ‘Tuer l’auteur. Sur quelques curieux cas de métalepse dans la littérature médiévale en français’. For more information, to be added to the seminar maillist, or for the Teams link to join a seminar remotely, contact helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk.
Wednesday 26th April:
The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. This week we will have a shorter organisational meeting. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. We will meet in person in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Ivana Jevtić (Koç Üniversitesi, Istanbul) ‘The Landscape and Rock-Cut Architecture of Medieval Thrace: Historiography, Fieldwork, and Photogrammetry across Three Countries’.
The Piers Plowman in Context discussion group, for those who believe more Langland is better than less, kicks off in the Main Quad Boardroom at Univ from 16:30-17:30. This week’s seminar will be led by Professor Lawrence Warner (KCL). In preparation, please read Passus III of the B-text, plus the following short contexts: the Westminster Chronicle (pp. 60-65), John Leeder’s proclamation of 1421, and Deguileville’s Pilgrimage of Human Life (lines 2921-3300), all available through this link All welcome! Email jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk with any questions.
Interface of Old English Dictionaries: Inflection and Derivation, a special talk by Javier Martín-Arista, Professor of Old English Linguistics at the Universidad de La Rioja and the President of SELIM (Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature) will take place at 5pm at Magdalen College, Daubeny Laboratory.
The Oxford Interfaith Forum is hosting lecture on Seventy Languages (and Translations) for Seventy Nations at 6pm, online. Register here.
Friday 28th April:
The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections. This week, Charles Webster will present some rare 17th century books from the Hartlib network.
The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm at the Julia Mann room, St Hilda’s College and online. This term we are reading extracts from Hue de Rotelands’s Protheselaus. Please contact Jane Bliss and/or Stephanie Hathaway to let us know if you can come in person (so we know whom to expect), also to obtain copies of the texts, and for the Zoom invitations.
OPPORTUNITIES:
CFP: Pax Normanna. This conference will address the notion of “first generations” in relation to the medieval Norman conquests in England, Wales, Ireland, southern Italy, Sicily, and the Crusader states. Focusing on the conquerors’ departure from their places of origin, the papers will explore the rhythms, modalities, reasons and objectives for leaving. Please send your paper proposal to pierre.bauduin@unicaen.fr and annick.peterscustot@univ-nantes.fr. Deadline: 10 May 2023. For full details, please see the blog post here.
Job in Medieval History: UCD’s School of History has just advertised a position in medieval history through the Ad Astra Fellowship scheme. Appointments will be made with a view to permanency subject to a review after four years. Further details attached. To apply click on the ‘apply’ button in the link below: https://www.ucd.ie/adastrafellows/en/ucdcollegeofartsandhumanities
PhD Opportunity: The Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” is looking to recruit doctoral research associates to pursue their dissertation project. The core responsibility of the research associate is to pursue their dissertation project that fits the overall comparative research profile of the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts”, and to contribute to the collaborative research activities of the Cluster. Candidates should have a strong interest in cooperating beyond disciplinary boundaries, especially across the humanities, natural science and computer sciences. For further information, see: https://www.uni-hamburg.de/stellenangebote/ausschreibung.html?jobID=2c372021cdb6fff2c64a56b1d8102ec996320586
ASIMS announcement: The Terence Barry Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Irish Medieval Studies: The prize is open to graduate students from any field who either have presented or have written and intend to present a paper on a subject of relevance to Irish Medieval Studies at any conference, including virtual ones, during the year beginning with the Kalamazoo Congress (ICMS) in May 2022 and ending with the Kalamazoo Congress (ICMS) of 2023. Please note that only graduate student papers written/presented by members of ASIMS will be considered. Membership may begin at the time of submission. For membership and more details, please see http://www.asims.org.
It is always a pleasure to assemble your submissions for the Booklet: I’m always struck by the incredibly wide range of events and seminars happening at Oxford, and how lucky we are to have such a vibrant, busy community. In fact, there’s so much on that it can be hard to keep track. Afterall, as Alcuin says:
[memoria] saepe perdit quod servare debet, nisi in thesauro litterarum reconditum teneat [the memory often loses what it should keep, unless it holds it stored away in the treasure hoard of the written word,Ep. 49]
I’m honoured to once again be your guide to the term’s events, and to store all of your information about Oxford’s medievalist happenings in the treasure hoard of our booklet and blog! If you have any treasures you would like to add to our proverbial hoard, be they news of publications, calls for papers, upcoming events, or even media appearances, please do get in touch: we’d love to advertise all of these things on our blog and celebrate them. For now, I wish you all a joyful first week!
[The communications officer gathering submissions to store in the treasure-hoard of the Medieval Booklet…] Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 35v. Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian
The First Generations of the Conquest (Norman Worlds, 9th-12th Century) – 1. Departing Symposium at the Maison Française d’Oxford, 22-23 September 2023
This conference will address the notion of “first generations” in relation to the medieval Norman conquests in England, Wales, Ireland, southern Italy, Sicily, and the Crusader states. Focusing on the conquerors’ departure from their places of origin, the papers will explore the rhythms, modalities, reasons and objectives for leaving.
The conference aims at:
1/ Determining how relevant the notion of “first generations of the conquest” is. All these movements were phenomena that took place over several generations and featured different kind of protagonists – soldiers, mercenaries, pilgrims, merchants, clerics and monks.
2/ Considering the horizons of those who departed, while avoiding teleological and unilinear assumptions. These horizons require an analysis of diverse dynamics and “push and pull” factors: political motivations, economic grounds, social mechanisms, acculturation processes, social and political creativity.
3/ Exploring the documentation, approaches, and tools that help to answer these questions. Our documentation was often produced in the regions where the conquerors settled, and it focuses on their new status; it must be compared retroactively with sources from Normandy (and more broadly speaking from northern France) to enlighten the dynamics that led to the mobility of these people.
This symposium is part of the 2022-2026 research project Pax normanna (dir. Prof. Pierre Bauduin, University of Caen-Normandie, and Prof. Annick Peters-Custot, University of Nantes). Please send your paper proposal to pierre.bauduin@unicaen.fr and annick.peterscustot@univ-nantes.fr.
26 APRIL (Wednesday week 1 of Trinity Term), 5.15pm UK time
In celebration of the release of vol. 2 of the Journal of Manuscript and Text Cultures (MTC), which takes an explicitly experimental approach of involving digital tools for the presentation of research in manuscript cultures, the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC) is holding a round table 26 APRIL (Wednesday week 1 of Trinity Term), 5.15pm UK time at the Memorial Room of The Queen’s College, Oxford. The topic of the round table will be digital publishing and future research in manuscript studies.
The round table will be chaired and moderated by Richard Ovenden, OBE, Professorial Fellow and Bodley’s Librarian.
Members of the round table are Yegor Grebnev, Lesley Smith, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, and Simon Aldridge.
Máire Ní Mhaonaigh is professor of Celtic and medieval studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at St John’s College. Her research stands at the interface of history and literature and focuses on connections between Ireland, England and Scandinavia and the wider western world. Máire is currently working on a complex multi-manuscript corpus of medieval Irish landscape literature, as part of a Leverhulme project which she leads, and she co-directs ongoing research on the electronic dictionary of medieval Irish (www.dil.ie) funded by the AHRC.
Lesley Smith is professor of medieval intellectual history at Oxford and Fellow of Harris Manchester College. Her research centres on the medieval Bible as both an intellectual and a material object, as it was studied in the schools and proto-university of medieval Paris. Lesley is the co-editor of vol. 2 of MTC and a member of the board of CMTC.
Yegor Grebnev is Distinguished Associate Research Fellow at Beijing Normal University (Zhuhai) and an assistant professor at BNU-HKBU United International College. Trained as a specialist on early China, he has initiated multiple collaborative projects with scholars of history, texts, and manuscripts from various regions of pre-modern world. Yegor is the co-editor of vol. 2 of MTC and a member of the board of CMTC.
Simon Aldridge is professor of Main Group Chemistry at Oxford and Fellow of The Queen’s College. He is the Director of the OxICMF CDT and will bring the perspective of the exact sciences to the table.
Trailer of the most dramatic moments, compiled by Natascha Domeisen
0:00:34 Prologue 0:02:50 O quanta qualia (St Edmund Hall Choir) Latin 0:06:18 Extracts from Piers Plowman (Swonken ful harde) Middle English 0:35:40 The Nativity and Salutation (English Faculty) Middle English 1:07:13 The Innocents (Les perles innocentes) 16th-century French 1:30:19 The Passion (Sorores Sanctae Hildae) Latin and German 1:54:03 The Harrowing of Hell (Medieval Germanists) Middle High German 2:08:08 The Last Judgement (Past and Present Teddy Students) Modern English
Full length version of all prologues and plays – navigate to a particular play via the menu above
Welcome to the third incarnation of the Oxford Medieval Mystery Cycle! As in 2019 and 2022, this highlight of the Oxford medieval calendar offers a variety of plays in different medieval and modern languages, staged at several stations in the beautiful grounds of St Edmund Hall. Cycles of plays retelling stories from the Bible were a popular form of entertainment in the Middle Ages, which we are only too happy to revive for modern audiences. Admission is free and you are welcome to turn up at any time.
Join us, then, on this merry multilingual journey featuring plays dating from between the 12th and the 16th century! When the chapel bell rings at midday, the choir of St Edmund Hall will open the Cycle with a performance in front of the Old Dining Hall. We then start with an allegorical vision of Piers the Plowman before running through episodes of the New Testament, with the Christmas cycle unfolding in the Front Quad, followed by the Easter cycle in the churchyard around St Peter-in-the-East and – last but not least – the Last Judgement closing with the sound of the trumpet from the tower of St-Peter-in-the-East.
A special thank you goes to all the actors, directors, singers and other enthusiasts who have made these performances possible, to Professor Lesley Smith and Professor Henrike Lähnemann, co-directors of Oxford Medieval Studies, the driving force behind the Mystery Cycle, and to the Fellows and Principal of St Edmund Hall, for once again agreeing to host our medieval madness!
Jim Harris is Teaching Curator at the Ashmolean Museum, a career he came to having trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked for over a decade in theatre, television and radio before deciding there was more to life than castings for shower gel commercials. “Some people would describe this as the role of a lifetime. Me, I’m just glad I don’t have to actually learn the lines.”
David Maskell specialises in both the academic and practical aspects of theatre in Classical and Modern Languages. He is an experienced creative writer, and he also created the verses linking the plays for last year’s Mystery Cycle.
The Mystery Cycle will be opened by a performance of Peter Abelard’s ‘O quanta qualia’ by the Choir of St Edmund Hall. Afterwards, our plays will be accompanied by the heavenly choir of the Turba Angelorum, composed of the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ angels.
The Mystery Cycle is managed by Henrike Lähnemann, Co-Director of Oxford Medieval Studies and Professorial Fellow at St Edmund Hall, and Michael Angerer, Graduate Convenor for the Medieval Mystery Cycle and a DPhil student in medieval English.
The performances was filmed by Natascha Domeisen and documented by members of Oxford Medieval Studies. The videos were uploaded to the Oxford Medieval Studies Youtube and TikTok account.
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A coffee and cake stall was provided by members of the Oxford University German Society, organised by Thomas Henning, in aid of the German Red Cross.
While our complete play follows a man named Will, who falls asleep beside a stream on a May morning in Malvern Hills with a succession of dreams, we begin with the deadly sins. We then find Piers Plowman, taking only momentary repose from his plough to guide the field of folk towards Truth, although his directions are very confusing. He agrees to take the folk himself as long as they assist him in ploughing the half-acre. However, he finds many of the folk, including pickpockets, knights, common women, wafer-sellers, pardoners, to be wasters! Piers calls Hunger to encourage them to work however, after the acre has been ploughed, Hunger refuses to leave until he has consumed the best food and wine! Truth intercedes and sends Piers a pardon however it is discovered to not be a true pardon at all so Piers, in scandalous fashion, tears it asunder! Watch a full performance of Piers Plowman on the OMS Youtube channel.
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Group: English Faculty. Language: Middle English. Director: Rachel Burns
In this play from the 15th-century Chester Mystery Cycle, witness the wonder of Jesus’ birth, the prophecy of the Sybil, the magnificent humility of Emperor Octavian, and the discomfiture of the midwives!
Gabriell/Angelus: Mishtooni Bose
Marya: Eugenia Vorobeva
Josephe: Tom Revell
Elizabeth/Preco: Siân Grønlie
Nuntius/Expositor: Cosima Gillhammer
Octavyan: Jacob Ridley
Primus Senator/Tebbell: Michael Angerer
Secundus Senator/Salome: Yinghan Li
Sybbell: Clare Mulley
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Group: Les perles innocentes. Language: 16th-century French. Director: Elisabeth Dutton. Read a report on the play.
Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549) was wife of King Henry II of Navarre, sister to Francis I, King of France, and ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France. With her brother she made the French court a celebrated intellectual and cultural centre; having received an excellent classical education, she became an author and patron of humanists and reformers. Her salon was internationally famous as the ‘New Parnassus’. She wrote poems, a collection of short stories called the Heptameron,and the intense mystical poem Miroir de l’âme pécheresse. She also wrote a number of plays: today we present her dramatization of the narrative of King Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents.
God/Herod/1st Woman: Aurélie Blanc
1st Angel/1st Tyrant: Coraline Vuarnoz
2nd Angel/Captain: Helene Wigginton
3rd Angel/2nd Tyrant: Carmen Vigneswaren-Smith
Mary/1st Doctor of the Law/Nurse of Herod’s Son/1st Soul: Felicitas Harris
Joseph/2nd Doctor of the Law/2nd Woman, Rachel/2nd Soul: Elisa Pagliaro
Singer: Lucy Matheson
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Group: Sorores Sanctae Hildae (unter Beteiligung einiger Bauern aus Iftelei). Language: Latin and slightly modernized Middle High German. Director: David Wiles. Stage manager: Isabel Schwörer
Mary Magdalene is a courtesan who repents her life of sin and pleasure. When she anoints Christ’s feet with expensive ointment, Judas is outraged, and betrays his master for thirty pieces of silver. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus begs for the cup to be taken from him, before accepting God’s will. Mary his mother suffers at the foot of the cross, and takes John as a replacement for the son she is losing. The juxtaposition of the two Maries is a striking feature of the play from which our extract is taken. The text originates in 12th-century Bavaria. The performance was repeated in Iffley churchyard on the following day.
Narrator: Alex Marshall
Angel/Voice of Jesus: Imogen Lewis
Devil: Andrew Stilborn
Mary Magdalene: Irina Boeru
Merchant/Weeping Woman/Longinus: Laura Laube
Caiaphas/Woman: Jonathan Honnor
Judas: Alice Hawkins
Virgin Mary: Laurence Nagy
Amator/John the Evangelist: Justin Vyvyan-Jones
Joseph of Arimathea: David Wiles
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Group: Medieval Germanists. Language: Middle High German. Director: Luise Morawetz.
In the Harrowing of Hell you can follow the battle between Christ and Lucifer – good and evil – from Lucifer’s perspective. Imagine how Lucifer feels when Christ and his retinue of angels storm hell without difficulty and rush off with his most precious captured souls, Adam and Eve! No wonder he overreacts and tries to make up for quality with quantity by sending his faithful servant Satanas on the hunt for as many lost souls as possible. Watch out, or they might get you too!
The script is based on the ‘Innsbruck Easterplay’ edition by Nigel F. Palmer & Henrike Lähnemann, with modern English narration by Haley Flower.
Lucifer: Montgomery Powell
Satan: Freya Hoult
Jesus: Timothy Powell
Adam: Alyssa Steiner
Eve: Nicholas Champness
Narrator: Evgeny Gurin
Lost souls: Lena Vosding, Godelinde Perk, Anja Peters, Justin Vyvyan-Jones, Julia Brusa, Felix Clayton McClure, Elizabeth Hogermeer, Georgia Macfarlane
Angels: Andrew Dunning, Travis Fuchs, Cosima Gillhammer, Nicole Jedrzejko, Henrike Lähnemann, Oliver Riordan
Group: Past and Present Teddy Students (and Friends). Director: Amy Hemsworth. Assistant Director: Aili Channer
Language: Modern English
A modern take on the final play of the Towneley Cycle by Amy Hemsworth and Alex Gunn, featuring a very confused John of Patmos, an exasperated Angel, and their best attempts to make sense of the Book of Revelation. For a full account of the story behind the script, read the blog post on the 2019 Medieval Mystery Play website.
John of Patmos: Patrick Painter
Angel: Lily Massey
Jesus: Sebastian Morson
Satan: Freddie Houlahan
1st Evil Soul: Hester Gleeson
2nd Evil Soul: Holly James Johnston
1st Demon: Alex Gunn
2nd Demon: Jake Caudwell
1st Good Soul: Aili Channer
2nd Good Soul: Amy Weihang Deng
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The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference is back on April 20-21, 2023 with the theme of ‘Names and Naming’!
The conference takes place fully hybrid, in Oxford and online. Follow us on Twitter @OxMedGradConf and In the meantime, check out the conference website (https://oxgradconf.wixsite.com/omgc), with its extensive digital collection of Oxford medieval medical manuscripts and its blog featuring some excellent articles on past conference themes. If you’d like to contribute a blog post or have any questions about the conference, you can get in touch at oxgradconf@gmail.com.
Tristan Alphey, ‘Nicknames in Early Medieval England and Social Regulation’
Will Hoff, ‘In the name of Robin Hood: a new look at byname evidence for the outlaw tradition’
Sebastian Dows-Miller, ‘Jean from Saint-Quentin: who was he, and does it matter?’
12:00-13:30 Session 2: Patterns & Variations
Madeleine Killacky, ‘Rubricating Names in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’
Birger Mård, ‘Name-phrase variation in the Arboga municipal court records (1450–1569)’
Marina Ilia, ‘Naming Patterns in Venetian Cyprus’
14:30-16:00 Session 3: Reading the Land
Abigail Lloyd, ‘How to find a medieval settlement by the name of a hill? A challenge to the Gelling and Cole hypothesis’
Christophe de Coster, ‘‘Hic Sunt Dracones’: data-driven analysis of the (un)changing nature of toponyms and its implications for toponym-based landscape-reconstructions
Em Horne, ‘An Examination of the value of place-names as evidence for the history, landscape and, especially, language(s) of the Lancashire Coast’
16:30-17:30 Keynote Address 1 Dr David Zakarian, ‘The World through the Eyes of Medieval Armenian Scribes’
FRIDAY, APRIL 21
10:00-11:30 Session 4: Genealogies & Histories
Claire Lober, ‘Monuments to Meaning in the Historia and Brut y Brenhinedd’
Deepashree Dutta, ‘The Little Kingdom of Bishnupur: Naming, Self-Fashioning and Making of a Vaishnava Devotional Realm’
Jodie Miller, ‘Naming and Moral Lineage in Les Enfances de Renart
It feels like term has just begun, but here we are in week 8 already! That said, the medievalist happenings at Oxford are far from over. In fact, we have an especially full week of exciting events and seminars lined up for you! This isn’t surprising: even Alcuin knew that week 8 was sometimes the richest of all the weeks:
saepe posterior adfert hora, quod prior non poterat [Often the later hour brings what the earlier hour could not, Ep. 239]
Please do peruse the announcements, events and opportunities listed below, to see all of the joys that the ‘late hour’ of Week 8 has brought to us:
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
New AHRC Network: Noblesse Oblige?‘Barons’ and the Public Good in Medieval Afro-Eurasia (10th-14th Centuries). This network is a forum for the re-evaluation of ‘baronial’ government and the common good between the tenth and fourteenth centuries across different Afro-Eurasian polities. For full details, please see the network website here. The network is also offering two opportunities: a conference and call for associate membership — see the “opportunities” section of this email for full details!
The Oxford Interfaith Forum will be hosting a talk of interest to Medievalists next week, on 13th March, 6-7pm, via Zoom. The talk will be Dr Nick Posegay (University of Cambridge), ‘Material and Linguistic History of Arabic Manuscripts in Muslim and Jewish Contexts‘. To register, please click here.
EVENTS THIS WEEK:
Monday 6th March:
The Byzantine Graduate Seminar takes place at 12.30-2pm online via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Juliana Santos Dinoá Medeiros (Uniwersytet Warszawski), Hagiography and miracle performance in seventh-century Gaul. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.
The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford and Andrew Dunning is meeting as usual via Teamsfrom 1-2pm. We will start with natural history from a medieval encyclopaedia. Sign up for the mailing list to receive updates and the Teams invite, or contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for more information.
The Queer and Trans Medievalisms Reading and Research Group meets at 3pm at Univ College, 12 Merton St Room 2. This week’s theme is Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst. All extremely welcome! To join the mailing list and get texts in advance, or if you have any questions, email rowan.wilson@univ.ox.ac.uk.
The Medieval Archaeology Seminar today is CANCELLED.
A Workshopfor the Medieval Mystery Plays will take place in the Pontigny Room, St Edmund Hall, with David Wiles and Jim Harris, for all actors and directors, 4:30-6pm.
The Medieval History Seminar takes place at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will beJacopo Gnisci (UCL), Ethiopia and Byzantium: Reframing the Evidence. (You may also attend remotely, Teams link here: or log in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and join the group “Medieval History Research Seminar”, team code rmppucs. If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk).
The Lincoln Leads seminar takes place at 5.30–7pm at Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College. This week’s panel is ‘How do we define ‘child’ and ‘adult’?’, and features Harriet Soper (Fellow in English Literature) on life courses in Old English poetry. Book a free place here.
Tuesday 7th March:
The Europe in the Later Middle Ages Seminar will take place at 2–3.30pm in the New Seminar Room, St John’s College. Tea and coffee available from 1.45pm. This week’s speaker will be Duncan Hardy, University of Central Florida, ‘Reform and crusade at the imperial diets: towards a new explanatory framework for political change in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire‘.
The third and final lecture of this year’s E. A. Lowe Lectures in Palaeographytakes place at 5pm in the MBI Al Jaber Auditorium, Corpus Christi College. This year’s lectures are given by Prof. Niels Gaul, A G Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies and Director of the Centre for Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Today’s lecture will be on the subject of “Authority”, and relates expressions of authorial ethos to matters of mise-en-page, with particular attention to marginal spaces. All welcome.
The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets in the Charles Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College. Paper starts at 5.15pm, with tea, coffee, biscuits and friendly Medievalist chat from 5pm! This week’s speakers will be Henrietta Leyser (St Peter’s) and Samuel Fanous (Bodleian Library): The Vision of the Monk of Eynsham
Concert ‘Inn stetter hut’: The Linarol Consort of Viols and James Gilchrist present a songbook from the court of Emperor Maximilian 7.30-9.30pm at the Holywell Music Room, preceded by a freepre-concert talk 5.55-6.45pm at the same venue with Henrike Lähnemann. Tickets for both can be obtained at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/linarolconsort. Listen to the concert playlist.
Wednesday 8th March:
The Medieval German Seminar features a special guest lecture by Dr Aletta Leipold (Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch, Leipzig), 11.15-12.45 in the island room, Oriel College.
The Medieval Crafternoon will take place at 1.30-4.30pm at 21 St Giles, St John’s College. Come along for an afternoon of medieval textile crafts! The guided workshop will focus on four textile techniques, and refreshments will be served. To sign up, click here. For question, email Eleanor Birch.
The Medieval Italian Seminar will take place at 3.30pm at G. Martin Room, History Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Nicola Carotenuto (Oxford, St Hugh’s): ’Trade, traders, and institutions in late medieval Venice’.
The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar takes place at 5pm at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles. This week’s speaker will be Zachary Chitwood (Univ. of Mainz), ‘A Cloister for the (Grand) Komnenoi: Dynastic Rivalry and Memoria at the Foundation of Dionysiou Monastery on Mount Athos’.
The Medieval English Research Seminar takes place at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty, followed by a drinks reception. This week’s speaker will be Niamh Kehoe (University of Düsseldorf), ‘Humour and Horror in Ælfric´s Passion of St Vincent’.
Thursday 9th March:
The Oxford Medieval Commentary Network will meet at 12.45-2.15pm in Thatched Barn, Christ Church (by meadow entrance). Free lunch from 12.45, seminar paper begins at 1.15. Today’s speaker will be Alistair Minnis, Emeritus Professor, Yale, ‘Reconciling amour and yconomique: The significance of the Chess of Love commentary by Evrart de Conty (c.1330–1405)’. Please direct all questions to Cosima Gillhammer, or visit the website
The Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music will take place on Zoom at 5pm. This week’s speaker will be Emily Zazulia (University of California at Berkeley), The Fifteenth-Century Song Mass: Some Challenges. If you are planning to attend a seminar this term, please register using this form. For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have questions, please just send an email to matthew.thomson@ucd.ie
The Celtic Seminar will take place at 5.15pm via Teams and in The History of the Book Room, English Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Nora White (Maynooth), ‘Multimedia ogham and digital epigraphy‘. Please contact David Willis if you need a link.
The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5.15pm at St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Mary Carruthers New York University, All Souls College, Oxford, ‘Envisioning Thinking: Geometry and Meditation in the Twelfth Century‘.
The Medieval Vestments Conference takes place at St John’s College on March 9-10. This conference is inspired by the college’s collection with a mixture of impressive speakers, interactive workshops, and dynamic displays. To register, visit the eventbrite page.
Friday 10th March:
Weston Library Medieval Coffee Morning, 10.30-11.30, will feature Old High German glosses, scratch and otherwise, presented by Luise Morawetz. For more information on newly found glosses in the Bodleian cf. http://medieval.seh.ox.ac.uk/2022/12/13/ms-canon-pat-lat-57/
Double bill on etymology in German and English with Aletta Leipold (Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch) rûna, rîzan, scrîban – A Cultural History of Writing based on examples from the Old High German dictionary, 3-4pm, and Philip Durkin (Oxford English Dictionary): Lexical Borrowing – Fremdwörter, Lehnwörter and German words in English, 4-5pm, in 47 Wellington Square, 1st floor, lecture room 1 (access via the second staircase, end of the corridor), the final session of Henrike Lähnemann’s lecture series on German Historical Linguistics.
OPPORTUNITIES:
Conference and Call for Associate Membership:Noblesse Oblige?‘Barons’ and the Public Good in Medieval Afro-Eurasia (10th-14th Centuries). We would like to welcome any who might be interested in our research to join a conference, which will take place in Oxford between the 25th and the 27th May 2023 – 5th week of Trinity. In addition, we would like to open our network to associate members: this is especially aimed at early career academics or students interested in questions of governance, elites, and the common good in this period. Any student or ECR interested in joining as an associate member should email max.lau@worc.ox.ac.uk with a CV and short personal statement on their research and what they would contribute to the network. For full details, please see the OMS blog here and the network website here.
CfP: Dissolving Kinship in the Early Middle Ages, ca. AD 400-1000: The University of York, 1-2 June 2023. Proposals for 30-minute papers are invited from late-stage postgraduates and ECRs. Due to the generosity of the Past & Present Society and the Department of History, University of York, accepted speakers who wish to present in person will receive at least a 150-pound bursary towards travel and accommodation. We also welcome applications for virtual presentations. Please send ca. 300 word abstracts and a brief bio to both organisers, Dr Alex Traves (alex.traves@york.ac.uk) and Dr Becca Grose (becca.grose@york.ac.uk), by 7 April 2023. For full details, please click here.
Invitation to Attend an International Conference “Episcopal Leadership. Shaping Power in Gaul and Hispania (IVth-VIIth centuries)”, organized by Prof. Dr. Sabine Panzram (RomanIslam Center, Universität Hamburg), Prof. Dr. Marc Heijmans (Aix Marseille Université, Centre Camille Jullian) and Dr. Paulo Pachá (RomanIslam Center, Universidade Federal di Rio de Janeiro). The workshop will take place on 6-8 March 2023 (in person and on Zoom). For full details, please click here.
Of course, whilst this week marks the last week of teaching term, it’s not the end of Medieval happenings in Oxford. In fact, I’m sure many of us are looking forward to the opportunity to hunt down some elusive research time! Here is Alcuin on the difficulty of finding research time:
Fateor siquidem: propemodum ante annos triginta voluntatem huius habere operis; sed quievit calamus meus… [I confess, I had a desire to write this work thirty years ago: but my pen was at rest… Ep. 159]
Wishing you all a week full of exciting medievalist gatherings, and a vac full of bountiful and productive research time!
[Medievalists hunt for the rare beast known as “research time”] Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 10 r. Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian
‘Barons’ and the Public Good in Medieval Afro-Eurasia (10th-14th Centuries)
Conference and Call for Associate Membership
This network is a forum for the re-evaluation of ‘baronial’ government and the common good between the tenth and fourteenth centuries across different Afro-Eurasian polities. By bringing together emerging and established international scholars, it challenges the traditionally Eurocentric approach to this problem and uses new methodologies to reassess our framework for studying the medieval period, leading to a fundamental reappraisal of the teleological narrative that has previously explained the rise of modern states.
The story of the medieval barons is commonly a negative one. Because aristocracies have been almost universally eclipsed by centralised states in the modern world, they are often cast as regressive forces whose self-interest held back ‘progress’. Nor is this exclusively a European narrative, though the historiographical attention paid to the ‘rise of the State’ has privileged the Latin Christian experience of political formation and shaped the way in which non-royal élites are seen in other historical contexts. As a result, ‘private’ rulers such as lords, amirs, kshatriya, and samurai are often assumed to have been at odds with the needs of the wider society.
This network is challenging this understanding of the role of ‘barons’ in their relation to public good in two important and complementary ways. First, we are exploring case studies of how these non-royal élites conceived and implemented responsible government, whether for themselves or for others. Second, we are comparing these case studies in a bold transnational framework, reaching from western Europe to China, that spans the collapse of major centralised imperial projects in the ninth century to the destabilising experience of the Great Death in the fourteenth.
We have brought together international scholars in two online working groups, followed by an international conference in order to discuss, debate, and disseminate interpretations of the ‘public’ role of the baron in an Afro-Eurasian Middle Ages. The two working groups are organised two major axes of research: ‘Barons and the Public Good in a Transnational Context’ and ‘Minority Élites and Government in a Transnational Context’ which will work separately before uniting in a three-day conference in 2023 to share their findings.
Conference
This conference will take place in Oxford between the 25th and the 27th May 2023 – 5th week of Trinity. We would like to welcome any who might be interested in our research to join, though spaces are limited. In order to express interest in attending, please email max.lau@worc.ox.ac.uk. The full programme will be announced in the coming weeks, though all network members on the website will be giving a paper, and there will be a keynote speaker as well.
Call for Associate Members
In addition, we would like to open our network to associate members: this is especially aimed at early career academics or students interested in questions of governance, elites, and the common good in this period. Associate members will be invited to all future events, and they will be encouraged to share their research on our website and at these events. We intend to apply for further funding so that these associates can be made full members of the network in future.
Preference will be given to those whose research covers areas not already well covered by our network members, but even those with substantial cross-over will be considered. Any student or ECR interested in joining as an associate member should email max.lau@worc.ox.ac.uk with a CV and short personal statement on their research and what they would contribute to the network.
We look forward in future to sharing our research at Leeds IMC 2023 and 2024 as well, and if any seminar organisers in Oxford would like to collaborate in order to invite these speakers again, or to keep them in the UK longer to give another talk, they should not hesitate to get in touch.
