Category: Around Oxford

Conference: ‘New Visions of Julian of Norwich’

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22/06/2022

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15-16 July 2022, Somerville College & Online

in association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)

Organisers: Antje Elisa Chan (Lincoln College, Oxford), Godelinde Gertrude Perk (Somerville, Oxford), Raphaela Rohrhofer (Somerville, Oxford), Alicia Smith (English Faculty, Oxford)

This international hybrid conference, held in Somerville College (Oxford) on 15th and 16th July, is the first academic event to focus solely on Julian’s writing, life, contexts, and influence long after her death. Offering thought-provoking panels and roundtables on a range of topics, from anchoritic transformations of the mundane to critical race studies, it maps out new and emerging dimensions in Julian scholarship.

The Somerville College choir will perform anthems based on Julian’s writing; a new play by writer-director Cindy Oswin, exploring the effect of age on the anchorite, will premiere at the conference. The opening lecture will be given by Professor Nicholas Watson (Harvard) with responses from Professor Laura Saetveit Miles (Bergen) and Professor Barry Windeatt (Cambridge). Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy (Swansea) will close the conference.

We particularly encourage graduate students and early-career researchers to attend; lower fees are offered for graduate students, unwaged and low-waged attendees.

To register: https://bit.ly/3vTAu5y 

More info: https://visionsofjulian.mml.ox.ac.uk/

Thursday 14th July

18:00-19:00 In-Person Welcoming Performance

New Music for a New Vision
by Dr. Alison Daniell (University of Southampton), Louise Stewart (Multitude of Voyces), and members of Somerville College Choir, dir. Will Dawes

Friday 15th July 

09:15 Opening session 

Keynote speaker – Nicholas Watson 

Julian of Norwich: Witness and Recension 

Respondents – Laura Saetveit Miles, Barry Windeatt 

11:30 Panel 1  

TRANSFIGURING THE MUNDANE 
Chair: Elizabeth Robertson 

Gillian Adler 
Julian of Norwich and Medieval Traversals of Time 

Raphaela Rohrhofer  
Julian of Norwich on Love and Nothingness  

Laura Kalas 
Producing Passioun: Reading Pain Generatively in the Revelations of Love
  

Jo Koster 
The Custom of Our Prayer: Establishing the Context of Julian’s Anchoritic Discourse 

14:00 Panel 2  

MATERIAL AND IMMATERIAL 
Chair: Annie Sutherland 

Fred Morgan 
“But I saw not synne” 

Anna-Nadine Pike 
“dereworthy blod”, Meditation and Performance in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and British Library, MS Egerton 1821 

Melissa Tu 
“These words seyd our Lord”: Virtual Voices in Julian’s Text 
 

Victoria Yuskaitis 
Julian of Norwich’s Cell: The Role Archaeology Plays in Strengthening Authenticity and Impact 

16:00 Roundtable 1a  (at Pusey House)

CREATIVE ENGAGEMENTS WITH JULIAN 
Moderator: Antje E. Chan 

Max Brumberg-Kraus and Jennifer Awes-Freeman 
“Visions of Divine Love”: A Poetic and Visual Response to Julian’s Revelations 

Caroline Golum 
Creative Engagement with Revelations of Divine Love as Transcendental Cinema 

Laura Varnam 
Voices in Dialogue: Meeting Julian through Margery in Contemporary Creative Adaptations 

16:00 Roundtable 1b (at Pusey House)  

JULIAN IN THE COVID ERA 
Moderator: Hannah Lucas 

Gill Butterworth 
An Icon for Such a Time as This: A Pre-UK First Lockdown Anticipatory Consideration of Julian of Norwich and Pandemic Themes 

Margaret Healy-Varley 
Reading Julian for Resilience 

Richard Norton 
Julian of Norwich, The Church and Covid-19: A Scholarly and Pastoral Response  

17:30 Roundtable 2a   (at Pusey House)

PREMODERN CRITICAL RACE STUDIES AND JULIAN OF NORWICH 
Moderator: Mishtooni Bose  

A conversation between:  

Michelle M. Sauer 

Dorothy Kim 

Bailey Ludwig 

Kyle Moore 

17:30 Roundtable 2b (at Pusey House)

JULIAN AND MODERN CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICES  
Moderator: Godelinde Gertrude Perk

Carla MacKinnon 
When a Woman Sits Alone: A Creative Project Inspired by Julian of Norwich 

Emma Pennington 
Doorway to Silence: An Analysis of the Use of Julian’s Text by Contemplative Prayer Groups Today 

Claire Foster-Gilbert 
Contemplating Cancer Cells: A Personal Account of Julian’s Companionship Enduring and Writing about Two and a Half Years of Treatment for Myeloma 

Saturday 16th July 

09:00 Panel 3 

MODERN RESPONSES TO JULIAN  
Chair: Alicia Smith 

Laura De Gaspari 
Divine Motherhood in Julian of Norwich and Spiritual Maternity in Edith Stein 

Heather Glover 
Beholding as Interpretive Strategy: Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and Christina Rossetti’s The Face of the Deep 

Simon Horobin 
“A dangerous book”: C.S. Lewis on the Revelations of Julian of Norwich 

Nancy Bradley Warren 
Julian of Norwich: New Visions of Her Lives and Afterlives 

11:00 Panel 4 

TEXTUAL INTERVENTIONS  
Chair: Laura Saetveit Miles 

Samira Lindstedt 
Towards a Grammar of Revelation: Editing and Translating Julian’s Revelations 

Fumiko Yoshikawa
What Do Scribal Corrections Show in Paris, BNF, Fonds Anglais MS 40? 

Brenna Duperron 
Editing Community in the Works of Julian of Norwich  

13:30 Panel 5 

BEYOND THE ANCHORHOLD 
Chair: Nicholas Watson 

Alexis Becker 
Behovely Work 

Laurence Bond 
“With alle the faith of haly kyrke”: Social Meaning and Dissent in the Writings of Julian of Norwich 

David Palko 
Moving Beyond Economics with Julian of Norwich 

Chase Padusniak 
Julian and the Politics of Norwich 

15:30 Panel 6 

WORKING ON / WITH JULIAN 
Chair: Ayoush Lazikani 

Juliana Dresvina  
Julian of Norwich’s Shewings: A Medieval Failure, An Early Modern Success 

Daniel Fishley 
The Weakness of A Revelation: Julian of Norwich, John Caputo, and the Questioning Event of Theology 

Hannah Lucas 
The Good Enough Mystic: Toward a Practical Theory of Julian Scholarship 

Melaney Poli 
How We got “Saint Julian”: A Short History in Images 

17:15 Respondent  

Liz Herbert McAvoy 

18:15-19:30 Play
A darkly humorous play written and performed by Cindy Oswin
‘Cell’ examines the enclosed life of Julian of Norwich into old age.

20:00-21:30 Closing Dinner

Call to Action: Medieval Mystery Cycle 2023

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20/06/2022

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Following the successful Medieval Mystery Cycle 2.0, plans are underway for the third iteration of what has fast become an Oxford tradition. Please reserve the date of 22 April 2023 (Saturday before Trinity Term) and spread the word! We are looking for actors, directors, musicians, prop makers, and above all a graduate convenor who will take on the mantle of Eleanor Baker in masterminding the operation. Have a look at seh.ox.ac.uk/mystery-cycle for getting a sense of the scope and watching the plays performed in 2019 and 2022.

Please send expressions of interest for the Graduate Convenor by 30 June 2022 to Co-Directors Henrike Lähnemann and Lesley Smith under medieval@torch.ox.ac.uk

CfP: Oxford Medieval Commentary Network: Second Conference, 29 September 2022

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18/06/2022

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Proposals are invited for the second conference organised by the Oxford Medieval Commentary Network, following the successful launch of the Network last year. The one-day conference will take place at Christ Church, Oxford on 29 September 2022.

The Oxford Medieval Commentary Network is a multi-disciplinary network for research and discussion of medieval commentary culture and its long afterlife. OMCN aims to bring together research on traditional forms of commentary as well as research on commentaries in a broader sense, including interpretations of texts through visual art, performance, music, and drama. OMCN seeks to establish a conversation between scholars from a range of disciplines working on different languages and geographical areas. This includes the medieval period and post-medieval responses to the commentary tradition. The longer-term objective for OMCN is to become a nexus of research and discussion of medieval commentary culture and its expression in various textual and artistic forms. The network is open to everyone with an interest in these topics.

Proposals are invited for presentations of 15 minutes on all aspects of the medieval commentary tradition and its post-medieval responses. Topics can include, but are not limited to, biblical interpretation, commentaries on classical texts, forms of commentary, textual criticism, interplay between Latin and the vernacular, etc. Please submit your title and abstract (150-200 words) by 31 July 2022 via this form. If you wish to attend without giving a paper, please sign up via the same form, by 31 August 2022. The workshop is free for all participants and will include a sandwich lunch and wine reception.

For further information, see www.medievalcommentary.network, or contact Dr Cosima Gillhammer, cosima.gillhammer [at] chch.ox.ac.uk.

Coffee Morning with Professor William Chester Jordan

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15/06/2022

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The Faculty of History and Oxford Medieval Studies are pleased to invite you to an informal meet and greet coffee morning with William Chester Jordan (Professor of Medieval History,
Princeton University) on the occasion of his reception of an honorary degree of the University of Oxford.
When? Thursday 23rd June, 10.30am-12 noon
Where? The garden of Harris Manchester College (Mansfield Road), or in the Warrington
Room in the case of rain.
Coffee and croissants will be provided.
For catering purposes, please register your attendance if possible:
https://forms.gle/AkvPUsX2Ur1hbgTU7

Bill Jordan gave the 2021 Oxford Medieval Studies keynote lecture “A Thirteenth-Century Polymath Considers the Jews” – watch it here:

Oxford Medieval Studies lecture 2021

Dag Nikolaus Hasse (Würzburg University): What is European? Medieval, Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives

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08/06/2022

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Friday, 10 June 2022, 5pm, in St Edmund Hall, Old Library

We often talk about Europe, but our traditional ideas about European culture are questionable. This is because we carry views from the colonial and romantic periods that distort our image of history and geography and may prove a burden for future coexistence on the continent. I would like to encourage us to think more openly about Europe, about its broad cultural roots and its intensive relations with its continental neighbours. 
This includes reflecting on medieval clichés: medieval Europe was not a “Christian land” as the Romantics Novalis and Chateaubriand dreamed it. It was much more than that.

If you would like to participate remotely, please contact Henrike Lähnemann to be added to a teams call.

Storyteller (meddah) at a coffeehouse in the Ottoman Empire. The first coffeehouses appeared in the Islamic world in the 15th century. Source: Wikimedia

Marriages, Unmarriages, and Subjectivities: A Roundtable Discussion with Sara McDougall and Hannah Skoda

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09/05/2022

11:30

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The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce our first event of Trinity Term 2022, a Roundtable Discussion with Professors Sara McDougall and Hannah Skoda. 

We invite all interested parties to attend the event on Thursday 26th May at 13:00-14.30, in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College. Participants will be able to ask questions and engage in discussion with Professor McDougall and Professor Skoda on a shared area of their research, Marriages, Unmarriages, and Subjectivities. 

Professor Sara McDougall is Associate Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York) and coordinator of the Medieval Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Specialising in legal history, her research focuses primarily on women and crime in medieval France and explores topics such as gender, marriage, religion and illegitimacy. Her publications include Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800-1230 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Professor McDougall is in Oxford this term as an Astor Visiting Lecturer.  

Professor Hannah Skoda is Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History at St. John’s College, Oxford, and specialises in the cultural and social history of the later Middle Ages. She has particular interests in education, conflict, ownership, slavery and constructions of deviance in late medieval Europe. Her monograph Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 (Oxford University Press, 2013) won the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s 2014 Best First Book Prize, in which year she was also awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize to explore nostalgia in the fourteenth century. 

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions at oxfordmedievalsociety@gmail.com. 

We look forward to seeing you there!

OMS Small Grants TT 2022

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04/05/2022

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The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford.

The activity should take place between June 2022 and January 2023. The closing date for applications is Friday of Week 5 of Trinity Term (27 May 2022).

Grants are normally in the region of £100–250. Recipients will be required to supply a report after the event for the TORCH Medieval Studies blog. Recipients of awards will also be invited to present on their events at the next Medieval Roadshow.

Applicants will be responsible for all administrative aspects of the activity, including formulating the theme and intellectual rationale, devising the format, and, depending on the type of event, inviting speakers and/or issuing a Call for Papers, organising the schedule, and managing the budget, promotion and advertising. Some administrative and organisational support may be available through TORCH subject to availability.

Applications should be submitted to  lesley.smith@history.ox.ac.uk  using the grant application form. Applications submitted in other formats or after the deadline will not be considered.

Informal enquiries may be directed to lesley.smith@history.ox.ac.uk

The Oxford Medieval Studies Programme is sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

For more medieval matters from Oxford, have a look at the website of the Oxford Medieval Studies TORCH Programme and the OMS blog!

Image: OMS Small grant being given to John (or: Bamberg Apocalypse, Staatsbibliothek Bamberg Msc.Bibl.140)

Public Lecture – Christine de Pizan

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28/04/2022

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The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce a public lecture by Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis on Thursday 9th June 2022.

Dr Cooper-Davis will speak on the topic of “Christine de Pizan: Guilty Feminist?”.

The lecture will take place in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College, 13:00-14.30.

About the speaker: Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, and the author of Christine de Pizan: Life, Works, Legacy (Reaktion Press, 2021). Her DPhil thesis explored text-image relations in de Pizan’s works, and a resulting monograph is currently under contract with ARC Humanities Press.

Please direct any queries to oxfordmedievalsociety@gmail.com.

Image credit: British Library MS Harley 4431, f.259v (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

Catch-up: Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays 2022

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27/04/2022

05:48

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Following a two-year pandemic break, it was a joyous occasion for all to be able to attend in-person the second annual performance of the Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays hosted by St Edmund Hall on 23 April last week. The production was led by Professor Henrike Lähnemann, St Edmund Hall Fellow and Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics, and Professor Lesley Smith, Fellow and Tutor in Politics and Senior Tutor at Harris Manchester College, and expertly managed by Dr Eleanor Baker, Project Support Officer for the Post-GCSE Inspire Programme at St John’s College and medieval literature specialist. The full cycle was live-streamed by Natascha Domeisen and is available for watching on the St Edmund Hall Youtube Channel and also linked in to the website dedicated to the Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays.

We’ll be your guide to every play: Mystery Cycle organisers (left) and Jim Harris as Master of Ceremonies (right)

Featuring 11 plays in 6 languages (Middle and Modern English, Spanish, French, German and Latin), the ‘spectaculum’ opened with a performance of period music by the Anonymous Minstrels before The Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano rang the Chapel bell to mark the opening of the Mystery Cycle. We were introduced to each play through prologues prepared by the linking verses creator, Prof David Maskell, and wonderfully performed by our Master of Ceremonies, Dr Jim Harris, who guided attendees across college to each play location. These prologues were essential not only to the day’s enjoyment, but also to making the medieval materials accessible to a modern audience providing plot summaries and descriptions of what we were about to see through rhyming verse!

A marvellous boat will shortly appear: Scenes from the Killing of Abel (Left) and Noah’s Ark (right)

The Mystery Plays presented Biblical stories from Creation to the Resurrection, and were brought to life by an incredible cast of actors, academics and students with links to Oxford Medieval Studies. The Faculty of English kicked things off in the Old Dining Hall with the stories of Creation and the Fall, accompanied by a digital video featuring manuscript illustrations by Prof. Dan Wakelin. We were then led into the front quad to witness the Holloway Mystery Players perform the killing of Abel, followed by the story of Noah’s Ark by Medieval Studies students, which receives an honorary mention here for the best props of the event, including fabric waves and an inflatable parrot standing in for the dove (link to the recording). The morning concluded with the sung Magnificat in a play of the Visitation by Jasmine and the Kilnsians.

You’ll see a dog but it’s a sheep: Timmy waits for his cue (left) and James Howarth as King Herod (right)

Following a short tea break, the play cycle continued in the atmospheric churchyard of St Peter-in-the-East (now College Library). The Pastoral Players provided comic relief as grumpy shepherds and a thief in the Shepherd’s Play, with the Principal’s dog Timmy stealing the show as a reluctant ‘sheep’ and kindly supported by Prof Kathy Willis and her daughter Alice. The entertainment continued with the story of the Wise Men performed by the Wise Women in Spanish, and the Massacre of the Innocents with College Librarian James Howarth playing Herod the Great alongside the 5th Week Blues.

Now to a new location for John the Baptist’s decollation: A scene of the saint’s beheading (left) and the Lazari players (right)

The best special effects of the cycle featured in the playgroup Les Soeurs de Sainte-Hilde, with their version in French of St John the Baptist’s arrest and grisly beheading (read a reflection on the process of directing a play in French by Prof. David Wiles, the director of the play). This was followed by the English MSt students performing the story of Lazarus, with 6 players of Lazarus rising from the churchyard to great effect (here the recording). Undergraduate students then performed a Middle English depiction of the Crucifixion from the York Mystery Cycle dating from the 14th century. The Mystery Plays concluded with a delightful performance in Middle High German, Latin and English by the Mercantile Minstrels, with mischievous merchants, a fight scene, and a chorus of angels merrily announcing the miracle of Christ’s Resurrection (here the recording).

Christ ist erstanden: The Crucifixion (left) and the announcement of the Resurrection (right)

This year’s Mystery Play Cycle was incredibly fun and a fantastic opportunity to engage with medieval culture through the wide-ranging skills of staff and students of Oxford Medieval Studies. The day ended with an exhibition display of works relating to the Easter story in the Old Library. A filming crew worked hard throughout the day to provide a livestream of events for online viewers, that can now watched back on St Edmund’s Hall YouTube Channel (four streams: 1: Creation to Noah, 2: Visitation to Herod, 3: Herod ctd. and 4: John the Baptist to Resurrection). We’re excited to see the continuation of what surely now has become an Oxford tradition!

Dr Alison Ray is a medievalist and the archivist at St Peter’s College, Oxford.

Reflections on directing a mystery play in French

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26/04/2022

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by Prof. David Wiles

The French play was part of the Oxford Medieval Mystery Cycle performed on 23 April 2022 in St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. The Playgroup: Les Soeurs de Sainte-Hilde (avec la participation de quelques paysans d’Iffleï) had been formed for the occasion by director: David Wiles The play is part of a cycle, ‘Le mystère de la passion’, written in the mid C15th by Arnoul Gréban, organist at Notre Dame cathedral, and doubtless also choirmaster. Full text available open access.

People ask me: “Why did you decide to do a play in French?”  Implication: it’s an English-speaking audience, and they won’t understand – middle-English bad enough.  Three responses to this one. 1. Political:  not good to live in a monoglot culture, and unlike modern scholarship the medieval world did not view life through the lens of the nation-state. 2. Theatrical:  to communicate through action and the body is a challenge which forces actors to engage with language on a different level, and reach out to their audience. 3. Intellectual:  venturing into Gréban’s text was a journey of discovery, as impenetrable hieroglyphs yielded slowly through rehearsal into recognisable speech patterns, with every phrase having its theatrical work to do. What looks like literary doggerel turns out to be theatrical gold.

An interesting research question follows – what are the cultural continuities that make Gréban’s mighty four-day passion play recognisably French, when set alongside the familiar English cycles?  Centralisation is one feature – responsibility not subdivided to autonomous guilds, but a single integrated work for an urban community to mount.  Another is the French ability to listen and maintain concentration upon the word.  In the English texts, action typically takes place between stanzas, but in the French text couplets conjoin speeches, so each new speaker has a rhyme to echo in order to come in on cue, a feature we found invaluable.  The sustained rhythmic flow ratchets up the tension, with enough variety of register and poetic form to hold the spectator’s attention. Like the alexandrines of Racine, the eight-syllable medieval line has a lilt that asks to be animated by the arms, so different from English metres which asked to be stamped with the feet.

After seeing the performance, a friend asked me: “What lesson was the play is supposed to impart?”  Implication: medieval theatre was didactic, a case of the church telling the peasants what to think. There is no simple moral to the John the Baptist sequence.  In the artistic structure John’s martyrdom is there because it foreshadows Christ’s.  People didn’t need telling that tyrants are venal, rather, it’s the recognisable social reality upon which a drama is built. Herod has his reasons for acting, and he washes his hands like Pilate. The medieval Salome is an enigma – we are free to draw our own conclusions, not told what to think. The urge to create theatre or art is a human constant, responding to the sensation of life as a cosmic mystery.  The idea that medieval theatre is ‘didactic’ is a handy modernist cliché, serving the narrative of progress, and all the cultural arrogance which that narrative commonly instils.  My preferred picture of the longue durée is one of progressive fragmentation, and I find in medieval theatre a holistic model of how theatre used to embrace and address a complete community in all its diversity, along with the gamut of human experience – comic and tragic, bestial and sublime – before dedicated theatre buildings and professionalism in acting and penmanship locked theatre into its lonely compartment.

David Wiles is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter, and lives in Iffley. He is a theatre historian whose main specialisms have been Greek and Shakespearean drama. He wrote the entry on medieval theatre for the Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre. His medieval CV includes a student production of the plays of the Wakefield Master in the gardens of Westminster Abbey, Mankynde in the Burton Taylor rooms, a crucifixion on a farmer’s trailer in Buckingham marketplace, staging three plays by the C10th nun Roswitha, and a community production of the N-Town Creation/Fall and York Noah in Iffley.

Repeat performance of the play at Iffley Church on 24 April 2022. Cast: John the Baptist – Laurence Nagy Manasses (disciple) – Alice Hawkins Sophonias (disciple) – Laura Laube Herod – Alex Marshall Herodias – Irina Boeru Salome – Alice Hawkins Groignart A (servant) – Kate Bunn Groignart B (servant) – Andrew Stilborn Amphiarus (noble) – David Wiles Radigon (noble) – Laura Laube God – Henrike Lähnemann Crew: Director: David Wiles Consultant: Sebastian Dows-Miller Head Creator: Andrew Stilborn Filmed by Isabel Reichenbach