Oxford Medieval Studies will be celebrating the end of term with a Midsummer outing to Godstow Abbey! All are welcome to join on Saturday, 24 June from 4pm and encouraged to take part in summer activities, including singing, sketching and swimming (weather permitting). Take along a picnic too!
When? 19 June 2023 Where? Taylor Institution Library (St Giles, OX1), Main Hall
9am Panel One ‘Distance’ in Pre- and Early Modern Times (Panel Chair: Sebastian Dows-Miller)
Jack Nunn, University of Oxford: ‘Distant voices’: The Making of Late-Medieval Anthologies
Marlene Schilling, University of Oxford: ‘Defying Distance’: The Rhetorical Potential of Personifications of Time in the Prayerbooks of the Northern German Convent Medingen
Samuel FitzGibbon, University of Cambridge: Windows to New Worlds: Illustrations as Conveyors of Eyewitness Testimony in 16th Century Travel Accounts
10:40 Panel 2 ‘Distance’ in Translation, Reception and Adaptation (Panel Chair: Alexia Ji Wang)
Edward Voet, University of Oxford: Sanskrit to Korean transliteration in the Ansimsa-pon Chinŏn chip (1569)
Xiyuan Meng, University of St. Andrews: Performing ‘Distance’ on Chinese Stages: Translation, Adaption, and (Re-)Performance of Euripides’ Medea
Mariachiara Leteo, University of Oxford: The Distant Perspective of Greek Tragedy in Woolf’s Jacob’s Room
13:00 Panel Three Distance, Oppression and Transgression (Panel Chair: Mathieu Farizier)
Jake Robertson, University of Oxford: Art on the Edge: Patronage and Precarity in Gulag Theaters on the Soviet ‘Periphery’
Audrey Gosset, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne and EHESS: From Stasis to Democratic Ex-stasis: Bridging the Distance through Shared Art
Georgina Fooks, University of Oxford: Susana Thénon’s Distancias: Poetry as Choreography
14:35 Panel Four ‘Distance’ in Literary Correspondences (Panel Chair: Aditi Gupta)
Tess Eastgate, University of Oxford: The implications of distance in Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence
Valery Goutorova, University of St.Andrews: “My plan is to treat you as detached spirit”: Virginia Woolf’s Effigy to Beloved Women
15:40 Panel Five ‘Distance’ in Migration and Diasporic Literature (Panel Chair: Ola Sidorkiewicz)
Ruming Yang, University of Miami: Orientalism and Auto-orientalism in Contemporary Peruvian Literature
Madeleine Pulman-Jones, SOAS University of London: The Love Poems of Debora Vogel: A Jewish-Modernist Aesthetics of Longing
Kendsey Clements, University College London: Through Her Eyes: An Analysis of écriture migrante au féminin in Québec
17:15 Keynote: Karolina Watroba
Conference programme flyer designed by Anna Glieden
A re-enactment of a forgotten liturgy for St Thomas Becket
When: Tuesday 6 June at 9 pm Where: New College Chapel
Free entry. All welcome!
The service has been prepared specially by Dr Henry Parkes (University of Nottingham), currently Albi Rosenthal Visiting Fellow in Music at the Bodleian Library. His research project ‘Music in the Shadows: Staging the Medieval Night Office’ explores the cultural history of Christian night worship through a mixture of archival, performance-led and ethnographic research.
Many Oxford colleges preserve the late evening office of Compline, once sung daily. But in medieval times there was a much more substantial service to follow, known as Nocturns, Vigils, or the Night Office.
New College Choir will enact a short-form Night Office as it might have been known in 15th-century Oxford, to explore how this now- forgotten liturgy worked in performance. In southern England from the late 14th century on, Tuesdays were commonly given over to the veneration of St Thomas Becket. This service recreates a ‘commemorative’ Tuesday Becket office, as precribed in late medieval books of the Sarum Use—many of which survive in Oxford libraries.
For an introduction to the service, watch a presentation of some of the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library
Andrew Parrott will be in conversation with Henrike Lähnemann on musical life in medieval and early modern Europe. This is a celebration of 50 years of the Taverner Consort and Andrew Parrott’s The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings & Art c1200–1770, a uniquely colourful compendium of almost everything to do with pre-modern musical life. The lecture will take as its starting point how the examples on music in the everyday life of medieval and early modern Germany can be used as a teaching tool and will also discuss questions of translation of premodern sources. All original source material is open access available on the publication website, e.g. https://www.taverner.org/everyday-life.
With over 60 albums under its wing, the Consort is internationally renowned not only for Parrott’s insights into early music like Taverner, Tallis and Josquin des Prez, but also for award-winning recordings of composers including Monteverdi, Purcell, Handel, Bach, and unexpected carols. To announce the 50-year milestone, the Consort has made a special two-track recording involving Fretwork and boys from New College choir with a total of some 30 assorted instrumentalists. The tracks are being released on June 16th via Avie Records: J. S. Bach, ‘O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht’ (BWV 118, version I), c1736/37 Giaches de Wert, ‘Egressus Jesus’ (a7) / Michael Praetorius Commercial pre-save link for Apple, Spotify, etc. Previous recordings have clocked up over 1,000,000 listens (for his 2018 Bach Magnificat alone).
Followed at 7pm by a reception hosted by Merton College and Benjamin Nicholas on the cherry tree lawn outside the chapel after evensong for informal drinks and chats. Buy the book: £35.00, 560 pages, ISBN: 978-1-915229-54-0
The new lecture series on unprovenanced manuscripts/inscriptions seeks to gather a wide range of voices from academics in different fields or disciplines about the methodological pros and cons of working with unprovenanced mss/inscriptions in academic contexts.
The lectures will cover matters such as the legal concerns, ethical concerns, and academic concerns by keeping a strict focus on methodology.
The aim of the lecture series is to work towards a general framework of good academic practice in the field of manuscript cultures.
Our first speaker is Alexander Herman, Director of the Institute of Art and Law. His most recent book is ‘Restitution — The Return of Cultural Artefacts’.
Time and place: 30 May, 5.15pm (UK time), Memorial Room, The Queen’s College, Oxford, UK
Abstract:
Researching and curating historical manuscripts is not without its risks, and these include legal risks. Questions arise in the context of dealing in unprovenanced manuscripts, such as when it is not clear when a manuscript left its country of origin nor under what circumstances. Also at issue are manuscripts that have a clear, but controversial provenance, such as those looted during periods of armed conflict or oppression. This talk will discuss the legal risks – if any – of dealing in such material, both from a national and international perspective. It will also raise the separate, but interlinked, question of morality of such activities.
The speaker:
Alexander Herman is the Director of the UK-based Institute of Art and Law. He has written, taught and presented on an array of topics in relation to art, law and cultural property. His writing appears regularly in The Art Newspaper and he has been quoted widely in the press on art law topics (including in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Telegraph, ArtNET, The Globe & Mail and Bloomberg). His work has also been cited in the UK House of Lords and before the US Supreme Court. He trained in both common law and civil law legal systems at McGill University and practised law in Canada. He is Programme Co-Director of the Art, Business and Law LLM which runs as a partnership between the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London and the Institute of Art and Law. His latest book is Restitution: The Return of Cultural Artefacts (Lund Humphries, 2021).
Online link will be provided later
…and keep an eye out for further announcements!
Image: Beinecke MS 408, also known as Voynich Manuscript, p.32
To celebrate the life and scholarship of Nigel F. Palmer, Professor of German Medieval Literary and Linguistic Studies at the University of Oxford, the academic community honoured his memory with a symposium, which brought together colleagues from around the world. Their presentations spoke to the wide spectrum of Nigel’s intellectual interests, which ranged extensively within the broad scope of the literary and religious history of the German- and Dutch-speaking lands, treating Latin alongside the vernaculars, the early printed book alongside the manuscript, and the court and the city alongside the monastery and the convent.
Friday, 19 May 2023
10:30-11:30 Weston Library, Visiting Scholars Centre
Presentation of incunables and blockbooks linked with Nigel F. Palmer in the Bodleian Library by Alan Coates.
16:00-17:30 Weston Library: Chair: Martin Kauffmann
Andrew Honey, ‘‘I believe they were fixed in some low places in the Church, Chapell or House’: further investigations into the glue stains of Douce 248, a blockbook Biblia pauperum of c.1465-1470’. Recording.
Geert Warnar, ‘The Roman van Limborch in a European framework’. Recording.
Luise Morawetz, ‘Gregory the Great in Old High German: the newly discovered glosses of MS. Canon. Pat. Lat. 57’.
Saturday, 20 May 2023
A small exhibition of medieval German manuscripts used by Nigel Palmer for teaching Palaeography and History of the Book was on display in the Voltaire Room of the Taylor Institution Library, including the two manuscripts from Erfurt Charterhouse Taylor Institution Library MS. 8° Germ. 1 and MS. 8° Germ. 2 (comment by Balázs Nemes).
10:00-11:30 Taylorian Main Hall: Chair: Annette Volfing
Elke Brüggen, ‘Parzival-Lektüren im komplexen Zusammenspiel von Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentierung’
Daniela Mairhofer, ‘Almost lost in transmission: the peculiar case of a Staufer song’
Nikolaus Henkel, ‘Liturgie im Schulunterricht um 1500. Der Osterhymnus ‚Salve festa dies‘ des Venantius Fortunatus und seine deutsche Reimpaarübersetzung’
10:00-11:30 Taylorian Room 2: Chair: Stephen Mossman
Adam Poznański and Reima Välimäki, ‘Petrus Zwicker’s Cum dormirent homines: transmission history and prospects for a critical edition of a popular anti-heretical treatise’
Linus Ubl, ‘Palm(er)ing material culture – medieval German manuscripts in the National State Library of Israel’
Astrid Breith, ‘Locked away for love – the Vita Wilbirgis inclusae and the manuscript holdings of St. Florian (Upper Austria)’
13:00-14:30 Taylorian Main Hall: Chair: Sarah Bowden
Jonas Hermann, ‘What gives? Marquard von Lindau and the ›Buch von geistlicher Armut‹’
Anne Winston-Allen, ‘Sibilla von Bondorf’s art of reform’
Edmund Wareham Wanitzek, ‘Soror in Christo dilectissima: Learning and exchange in the correspondence of Nikolaus Ellenbog and his sister Barbara’
13:00-14:30 Taylorian Room 2: Chair: Elizabeth Andersen
Peter Rückert, ‘Bücher zwischen Kloster und Hof. Neues zur literarischen Topographie in Württemberg’
Monica Brinzei and Giacomo Signore, ‘The rise of ars moriendi at the University of Vienna before the printing press’
Nigel Harris, ‘“Nach dem text und etwen nach dem sin”. Heinrich Haller und das Cordiale de quattuor novissimis des Gerard van Vliederhoven’
15:00-16:30 Taylorian Main Hall: Chair: Christine Putzo
Ralph Hanna, ‘On exempla: “Hoc contra malos religiosos”‘
Peter Tóth, ‘The early history of the Meditationes Vitae Christi: quotations and references’
Hans-Jochen Schiewer, ‘Kollektive Autorschaft und Baukastenprinzip. Geistliche Literatur dominikanischer Provenienz um 1300’
Sarah Griffin, ‘Unfolding time in a late medieval German concertina-fold almanac (SPKB, Libr. pict. A 92)
Youri Desplenter, ‘Newly discovered interlinear Middle Dutch translation of the Psalms (c. 1300?). Analysis and contextualization within the Middle Dutch and medieval Psalm translations’
Wybren Scheepsma, ‘Laudate dominum in sanctis eius: a Limburg sermon with French roots’
We are half way through May, and half way through the term! Everything is starting to feel summery in Oxford: the days are getting warmer and the University parks, gardens and meadows are looking beautiful as all of the plants come into flower. Of course, there is also a flowering of knowledge at this time of year, particularly as our MSt students embark upon their dissertations! Here is some wisdom from Alcuin on the subject:
Quid pulchriussapientiae floribus, quae numquam exhauriuntur? [What is more beautiful than the flowers of wisdom, which never fade? Ep. 206]
We have a truly rich array of wisdom on display this week. See the full listings below for a veritable bouquet of knowledge!
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
A workshop on The Order of St Victor in Medieval Scandinavia will be held at Aula Magna, Stockholm University, 25–26 May 2023. The workshop is open to all interested, subject to availability. Register interest by contacting roger.andersson@su.se. For a full programme and more information, see our blog post here.
The CMTC “Medieval Manuscripts Work in Progress” colloquium will be held on Tuesday 23rd May 2023, 3,30–5,00pm UK time, at Memorial Room, The Queen’s College (and Zoom). The speakers will be Marius Del Core (Pisa/Oxford), ‘Omitti possunt. Evidence for abridgement and athetesis in Plautine manuscripts’ and Stefano Milonia (Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples), ‘Super and Contra. Conversion and resemantisation of mediaeval French lyric in the Ludus super Anticlaudianum’. Registration is mandatory: please register here whether you are planning to attend in person or online.
Announcing a one-day-only exhibition at New College Library entitled Maleficia: Magic, Witchcraft, & Astrology at New College Library. We will be displaying some manuscripts, mostly astrological texts, along with a number of early modern printed books, mostly witchcraft treatises. The exhibition will be on Saturday, 3rd June in New College’s Lecture Room 4 and is open to the public. Contact caitlin.kane@new.ox.ac.uk for queries.
Provenance Unknown: A New CMTC Lecture Series: The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC) is proud to announce this new lecture series, on unprovenanced manuscripts/inscriptions. The series seeks to gather a wide range of voices from academics in different fields or disciplines about the methodological pros and cons of working with unprovenanced mss/insciptions in academic contexts. The lectures will cover matters such as the legal concerns, ethical concerns, and academic concerns by keeping a strict focus on methodology. Our first speaker is Alexander Herman, Director of the Institute of Art and Law, on 30 May, 5.15pm (UK time), Memorial Room, The Queen’s College, Oxford, UK
Ervin Bossányi: Stained Glass Art and Linocut Workshop: St Peter’s College is pleased to host a practical art workshop on Friday, 26 May 2023, 2-4pm in the St Peter’s College Chapel as part of a current display exploring the works of Hungarian artist Ervin Bossányi (1891-1975) in the College collections and Chapel stained glass. A guided tour of the display by Dr Alison Ray (College Archivist) will be followed by a linocut workshop led by Dr Eleanor Baker and participants will produce their own linocut designs. Attendance is free, but booking is required as space is limited. Please contact Alison Ray to reserve a place by email: archives@spc.ox.ac.uk. For more details, click here.
EVENTS THIS WEEK:
Monday 15th May:
The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Benjamin Morris (Cardiff University), ‘Against All Men’: The Movement of Military Service in Byzantine and English Treaties, 900-1200 To register, please contact 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. This term we will read some satirical poetry from a thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Bekyngton anthology’ (Bodl. MS. Add. A. 44). 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 Werewolf romance: William of Palerne. 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 History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Susannah Bain (Jesus) ‘Fashioning connectivity: Political communication and history-writing in late thirteenth-century Italy’. 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.
Tuesday 16th May:
The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12:00 in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. This week’s speakers will be Annika Ester Maresia (Jesus College, Oxford) ‘‹ᚫ›s to ‹æ›s: Looking at Early Old English Front Vowel Orthography‘ and Bond West (Lincoln College, Oxford), ‘Rhetoric and Style in Old Norse Religious Prose’.
The Medieval Church 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 Andrew Beever (Corpus), ‘Anglo-Saxon Crescentic Cross Pendants in their Insular and Continental Contexts’. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
Wednesday 17th May:
The Medieval German Seminar will not meet at the usual time (11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library) but rather concentrate all activities on the Nigel Palmer Memorial Symposium (see below Friday and Saturday); if you want to be added to the medieval German mailing list for future dates, please email Henrike Lähnemann.
The Old High German Reading Group at 11-12 in 41 Wellington Square, 2nd floor (Henrike Lähnemann’s office). This week’s text will be Wessobrunner Gebet. It will be an opportunity to read and analyse some simpler OHG texts and give people the chance to read the oldest form of German if they’ve not been exposed to it before. It will be very informal, and all are welcome. Led by William Thurlwell william.thurlwell@wolfson.ox.ac.uk – contact him for updates
The Early Medieval Britain and Ireland Network will be hosting a lecture at 1pm at Staircase 5 Lecture Room, Worcester College. The lecture will be given by Professor Charlene Eska, on the topic of ‘Stolen Sheep and Wandering Cows: Reclaiming Lost and Stolen Property in Early Medieval Ireland and Britain‘.
The LGBTQ+ Network Seminar will be held at 2-4.30pm in the Rees Davies Room, History Faculty. Today’s speaker will be Dr Conrad Leyser, ‘Purity and Sodimitic Danger in the Eleventh Century West‘.
The Invisible East Group is hosting a seminar at 3pm in the Spalding Room, FAMES, Pusey Lane. This week’s speaker will be Prof. John Tolan, ‘Tracking the Qur’ān in European Culture‘. More information at this link.
The Old French Reading Group takes place at 4-5pm at St Hilda’s College (meet by the lodge) on Wednesdays of Even Weeks in association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). We welcome readers of Old French of all abilities. For further information, please email alice.hawkins@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk or irina.boeru@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk
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 Mirela Ivanova (University of Sheffield) & Benjamin Anderson (Cornell University), ‘Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Towards a Critical Historiography’. You can also join the seminar remotely via Teams, click here.
Thursday 18th May:
The Environmental History Group meets at 12-2pm in the Gary Martin Room, History Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Celeste van Gent, “The Materiality of Travel in Late Medieval England”. We try to keep discussions informal, and we encourage anyone at all interested in these kinds of approaches to join our meetings, regardless of research specialism or presumed existing knowledge. For those interested in joining the group, you can join our mailing list by getting in touch with us at environmentalhistoryworkinggroup-owner@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
The Medieval Women’s Writing Reading Group meets at 3-4pm at Lincoln College: meet at the lodge. This week’s theme will be Rhetorical strategies: how language is used to generate authority. Please email katherine.smith@lincoln.ox.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list and get texts in advance, or to find out more.
The Invisible East Group is co-hosting a webinar with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies online at 5pm. The speaker will be Dr Jennifer Jenkins, University of Toronto, ‘Presence and Silence: The Iran Archives in the German Foreign Office‘. Registration and more information at this link.
Sarah Woodfrom Warwick is leading this week’s Piers Plowman in Context discussion group, which meets in the Butler Room at Univ (please note the change of college room) from 4:30-5:30. This week’s session will be on Passus X of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to the short contextual passages available through this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ev9EWlfl-WtiZ7AzZyLDWV-G9c53Nc8e?usp=share_link All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley (jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk) with any questions.
The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5.15-6.45pm at St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Hanna Vorholt, University of York, Ruled Lines and the Making of Manuscript Images. For further information, contact Elena Lichmanova (elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk).
The Oxford Interfaith Forum will host a talk on Mandaeans: A Minority on the Move and their Manuscripts by Prof. James McGrath, online at 6-7pm. For full details and to register, click here.
Friday 19th May:
Literary, religious and manuscript cultures of the German-speaking lands: a symposium in memory of Nigel F. Palmer (1946-2022) will take place. Everybody is welcome for the opening session at 1pm in the Taylor Institution Library, Main Hall. Please note that the sessions later in the Horton Room are for registered participants only.
The Colloquium starts actually at the Medieval Coffee Morning which meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it). Join us for a presentation by Bodleian curators of items that have a special connection to the interests of the late Nigel Palmer or where given by him to the library. It will also be a chance to meet many German medievalists visiting for the colloquium – as well, of course, for coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
Saturday 20th May:
Literary, religious and manuscript cultures of the German-speaking lands: a symposium in memory of Nigel F. Palmer (1946-2022) continues at the Taylorian. There is a linked pop-up exhibition of books related to Nigel Palmer in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall open 5-6pm.
Dies Latinus et Graecus: ‘Quid antiqui de antiquis censuerint’ will take place from 1pm in the Ship Street Centre, Jesus College. The highlight of the event will be a talk by Professor Eleanor Dickey on the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana (ancient textbooks of the Latin language), incorporating a workshop in which participants can try using these learning materials the way they would have been used in antiquity; the talk and workshop will be in Latin, but questions and comments in English will be welcome. To register interest, please fill out this form. Any questions may be directed to nicholas.romanos@worc.ox.ac.uk or aron.szocs@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk.
Of course, the flowers of wisdom are always enjoyable, but they are best when they are shared. Indeed, Alcuin tells us:
Nec illis tuae decorem sapientiae abscondas, sed inriga florentes bonae voluntatis in eis areolas [Don’t hide the beauty of your wisdom from others, but water the flowers of goodwill in their garden,Ep. 206]
If you would like to share the beauty of your wisdom with others, do come to our Medievalist Coffee Mornings, every Friday at the Weston! You can also ‘water the flowers of goodwill’ there: I’m sure Alcuin would agree that nothing is better for goodwill than a healthy ‘watering’ with free tea and biscuits! Wishing you a week filled with the flowers of wisdom and the flowers of Spring alike!
[A Medievalist takes a break from the flowers of wisdom to smell the flowers of University Parks] Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 10v. Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian
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!
