Visiting the Ashmolean Museum is one of the many great privileges that the University of Oxford has to offer. One can travel to a myriad of different times and places within its walls, and speaking personally, I am always eager for the encounter with the medieval past made possible through its collections. Recently, Jim Harris, the Andrew W Mellon Foundation Teaching Curator at the Ashmolean, gave the Oxford Medieval Studies Lecture for Trinity Term on precisely this topic. His talk, entitled Museum in the Middle: Medieval Things in a (Still) Medieval University, provided much food for thought about the wonder, loss, and strangeness in both the medieval and the museum.
Wonder
Much of Jim’s teaching is rooted in the medieval collections, which has allowed him to engage both with the material culture of the Middle Ages and with those who study it – us medievalists. In Jim’s words, the “thread connecting medievalists to the past of their study is wonder,” and it is wonder that can be channeled through teaching with objects. As medievalists, this sense of wonder, the idea that knowledge can be derived from studying things we do not know about and do not yet understand, has driven us to acquire the skills to access that knowledge. We have learned new languages, both medieval and modern, how to decipher different scripts and to what location and periods these scripts belong, and how manuscripts were produced, among many other things, to bring us closer to the past that inspires so much wonder in us. Undertaking this learning allows us to further our connection to this past, as medieval people also had to learn new languages, ways of writing, methods of production, and many other skills to create the texts, documents, and objects that are now the subject of our study. Jim stressed that such wonder-motivated learning is not a product of the Early Modern Period or the Enlightenment, but rather is human, and was certainly present during the Middle Ages.
Jim described how teaching with objects can put this sense of wonder back into the curriculum. When we look at objects in ways that make them speak to us, using the skills that our sense of wonder has motivated us to learn, we become connected to a tradition, a history of looking, and the past that we look at is in turn bound to us through this act. Jim made clear that teaching with objects is not about being an art historian or portraying the rare and exceptional as exemplary, but rather about the wonder contained within the everyday and the mundane. Like the sense of wonder that drove us to learn how to communicate with the Middle Ages, wondering at its everyday objects once again brings us closer to the people who made them and to the period in which they lived.
The wonder that object-centred teaching can bring to the study of the Middle Ages speaks to what literary historian Stephen Greenblatt calls the resonance and wonder of museum objects. Greenblatt characterises resonance as the power of an object “to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which it may be taken by a viewer to stand,” while wonder is an object’s power “to stop viewers in their tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.” While everyday objects, like the holy water ampulla associable with the Beckett pilgrimage and the pilgrim badge of John Schorne that Jim featured in his lecture, may not cause the viewer to stop in their tracks on display, in Jim’s words these objects become “capable of answering questions beyond what can be shared in a museum label” when they are taken off display and brought into the teaching room.
This can be seen clearly in Jim’s example of a small Limoges pyx, dated to c. 1200, that shows signs of its wear and use. While its well-preserved counterpart can be found on display in the museum, and it has been selected for display because of its condition and beauty, the pyx that Jim uses for teaching, with its worn exterior and signs of copper corrosion, has the potential to reveal more about the lives of medieval people than the one on display. This is because we can interrogate this object in ways that we cannot apply to the example on display: we can look inside this pyx, we can touch it, we can see it up close and from different angles and in different lights; we can ask questions about its manufacture, iconography, and use in devotional practice. While the ways of looking that we can use to interrogate the pyx on display are restricted by its exhibition, the pyx that Jim teaches with, though off display, becomes accessible to us from seemingly endless perspectives.
That this object can be interrogated not only by medievalists and other students of the humanities, but also students of medicine, neuroscience, and psychiatry, makes this what Jim calls an “agile” object with the “capacity to submit to interrogation from any number of disciplines.” In their agility, objects like the pyx cultivate resonance: they reach out to us from the past and can tell us how they were made, how they were used, and what they meant within the world that produced them. The resonance of these agile, everyday objects can stop us in our tracks and inspire our sense of wonder, as their agility allows us to discover their uniqueness and can further connect us to the past that they represent.
Loss
Loss is something that medievalists are often faced with. Whether it be the loss of texts through the deterioration or destruction of manuscripts, the loss of traditions and customs that have faded from memory, or loss due to the simple absence of information, the impact of loss is felt greatly within Medieval Studies. Loss is likewise ever-present in the museum, and Jim spoke of objects of loss: those that have been broken, discarded, or intentionally destroyed, or those that we no longer understand or recognize.
If we look at objects of loss with a sense of wonder, however, their loss can reveal much about the world from which they came. Jim demonstrated this with a small, broken corpus that had been removed from a crucifix, its arms deliberately broken and its feet bent. Jim explained that the stubs of its broken arms had been worn smooth not through cutting or filing but by touch, and when we look at this corpus this way, it reveals itself as a personal devotional object. This broken corpus, and other objects like it, had afterlives beyond their intended uses, and they take on yet another afterlife as museum objects.
When we, as medievalists, study the texts, documents, and objects that bring us closer to the past, these things too take on afterlives as the subjects of our study. Just as the producer of the crucifix to which the broken corpus originally belonged likely did not imagine that their creation would be transformed in this way, the medieval producers of the texts and documents that we study probably did not envision that they would be scrutinized by scholars in countless ways centuries later. We can interrogate these texts and documents from a variety of different perspectives: literary, historical, cultural, social, feminist, queer, ecocritical – the potential is almost endless. In studying the products of the past, we contribute to shaping the afterlife of the Middle Ages.
It is in our scrutiny and interrogation of the past that we will encounter loss, and we require certain ways of looking at what we study in order to see through the gaps. The ways we look at texts and documents are not unlike those that Jim uses to teach with objects like the pyx, as they allow us to extract information, to make new connections, and to expand our knowledge. As sociologist and museologist Tony Bennett says, these ways of looking allow objects “to be not just seen but seen through to establish some communion with the invisible to which they beckon.” Approaching both texts and objects, at times in tandem, from different perspectives allows us to see through to the past, and sometimes loss provides us with another view to the Middle Ages.
Strangeness
The Ashmolean was founded in 1683 by the polymath Elias Ashmole, and as such it is not technically a “medieval” museum. It exists, however, within a medieval university, and Oxford’s “medievalness” helps to remind us that the medieval did not simply stop on New Year’s Day of 1500. One need only to look at Oxford’s buildings and participate in its traditions to see that the medieval is still all around us. Medieval traditions and structures thus continued to shape society and culture long after what is now considered the “end” of the Middle Ages, and as Jim illustrated, this is certainly true of the Ashmolean and its collection.
Elias Ashmole acquired his collection from John Tradescant the Elder and his son, who were interested in gathering together rare and wonderous things from near and far in order to gain knowledge from them. The world in which the Tradescants and their associates were interested, Jim explained, was the world of medieval travel tales, and the medieval therefore had a large role to play in the formation of these early collections. The “medievalness” of the creation of knowledge from the gathering together of strangeness, and the documentation of this collecting, can be seen not only in Jim’s examples of the inventories of the Valois kings, who produced huge and highly detailed catalogues of their collections, but also in cathedral inventories that document the relics, offerings, and even sometimes natural curiosities that they possessed. As vast works of looking carefully and recording what is seen, Jim likened these prolific medieval inventories to the Ashmolean’s own digital archive, which currently makes over 200000 object records accessible online.
As the museum is often viewed as a strictly modern phenomenon, the Middle Ages are generally excluded from discussions of its development and practices. What Jim’s fantastic lecture drove home was that the wonder, loss, and strangeness found in both the medieval and the museum forge a connection between them: the museum can be medieval, and the medieval can be museal. Jim’s example of the Nuremberg Chronicle perfectly illustrates this connection in that it brings together the ancient and the current, the factual and the mythical, in a way that mirrors the museum’s ability to bring together different times and places in a single location. The Nuremberg Chronicle, as a product of the Middle Ages, and the museum are both what Michel Foucault would call “heterotopic,” in that they are capable of juxtaposing, “several sites that appear incompatible within a single space.” As Jim said, “the medieval mind is encompassing, and in itself a museum.”
Jim’s OMS Lecture is a must-see for medievalists and museologists alike. Though the Middle Ages may seem like another world, Jim underscored that the “middle age” between the past and the future is, in fact, now. There is perhaps nothing quite like a global pandemic to highlight just how much is shared between the medieval and the present. As we emerge from the third lockdown and museums reopen, this summer will hopefully allow us to visit the Ashmolean to encounter the wonder, loss, and strangeness of the medieval held therein.
Watch it here:
Bibliography
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” In Exhibiting Cultures, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, 42–56. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Abingdon: Routledge, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. “Different Spaces.” In Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Volume Two, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley, 178–185. New York: The New Press, 1998.
About the author
Olivia Elliott Smith is a DPhil Candidate at Linacre College and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow. Her research focusses on developing museological and heritage studies approaches to Old Norse literature. She has a background in museology and has worked for the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
‘The Evangelist St. Matthew writing, with his symbol the angel’, Book of Hours from the southern Low Countries (f. 18r; detail). Early sixteenth century. Now in Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum, The Hague, RMWW MS 10 E 3. Image: Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum & Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag. Source: manuscripts.kb.nl; https://manuscripts.kb.nl/show/manuscript/10+E+3; CC0 1.0)
Introduction On a chilly Autumn day, two postdoctoral fellows (Lena Vosding and Godelinde Gertrude Perk) were conversing in their shared office. They were very fond of their group of fellow supervisees, its camaraderie, and the support it provided. Nevertheless, the two early-career researchers still struggled on occasion to improve the argument of the articles they were working on and wanted additional peer feedback and an additional space for sharing ideas. “How about we start a WIP (work in progress) group ourselves?” A pen was seized from a nearby desk, and, after a little brainstorming and scribbling on a scrap of paper, the first outline for Pre-Modern Conversations emerged. Joined shortly thereafter by Lewis Webb from Classics, the duumvirate of convenors became a triumvirate, who quickly submitted a description to the OMS booklet.
What is Pre-Modern Conversations? Pre-Modern Conversations is an interdisciplinary group of early-career pre-modernists, offering an informal, supportive environment for helping each other revise, refine, and complete a work in progress. In the past, we’ve found that whether one works on medieval religion or Republican Rome, one tends to encounter similar theoretical and methodological questions. What is more, the challenges one encounters when writing or revising tend to be similar across fields. We, therefore, defined “pre-modern” very broadly and included any period up to 1800. Since the convenors’ research shared a focus on pre-modern gender, we were particularly interested in hearing from other scholars with a similar or adjacent focus. We had initially decided that the format for the one-hour session would alternate between a presentation to the entire group (for conference contributions) and a discussion of a pre-circulated written text. For Hilary Term, however, the WIPs submitted were mostly written texts, which we discussed in detail, focusing mostly on content and argument.
Tondo of woman with wax tablets and stylus (so-called “Sappho”), VI.Ins.Occ., Pompeii. First century CE. Now in National Archaeological Museum of Naples (inv. no. 9084). (Image: Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 2.0)
Experiences so far To our delight, the four available slots filled up very quickly. Both medievalists and Classicists joined the group, which led to lively interdisciplinary synergy. Topics varied widely, from Roman law and urban space in Asia Minor in the late Antique period through medieval recluses to early-modern refugees and twentieth-century poets, yet similar themes emerged. We also decided to spend the last twenty minutes discussing more general concerns, for instance writing grant applications, and sharing our experiences as ECRs. The phase following one’s DPhil or PhD can potentially feel stressful, precarious, and directionless, and many ECRs feel lost at sea, a problem our friends in the ECR Network of Medieval and Modern Languages also seek to alleviate. A forum for sharing ideas, knowledge, experiences and alternative perspectives can help ECRs find their bearings and navigate this uncertain stage of their career.
Plans for next term We’re thrilled to continue in Trinity Term! We will again convene in weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8 on TEAMS. The programme looks very promising already, but there are still slots left. Interested in joining? Send an abstract (up to 300 words) of your WIP, accompanied by a short biography to lena.vosdingATmod-langs.ox.ac.uk by Friday 30 April. You are also very welcome to participate without contributing a paper.
One year in the Medieval Germanosphere, or: Reflections on the strange, yet fitting relationship between language studies and performance art
When I arrived in Oxford one year ago, as an Erasmus intern taken in by Henrike Lähnemann, professor of Medieval German, I couldn’t have imagined how my weekly schedule and the work habits associated with it would turn out to be in the end.
The languages and dialects associated with the term Medieval German are dead, obviously. They are hypostatized as written text, unchanging and lifeless, and your relationship with them will only ever be a one-sided one, as you silently consult the bulky manuscripts in the depths of a library or their digital counterparts somewhere on a badly programmed web page. That was the way I had always treated Medieval Latin – as a fixed and atemporal entity, being a mere tool to express the lofty and otherworldly conceptual reality of theologians and scholars alike.
This began to change, however, when the acting started. There were only small gestures in the beginning, such as reading out loud the texts you were about to discuss in the Medieval German graduate colloquium. That was the ritual to be done at the beginning of each session, and one would have to just go along with the text to make it work. The relationship between language and acting became clearer when it subtly pervaded social events among medievalists, too. Celebrating a medieval compline in the crypt of Teddy Hall’s own St Peter in the East might not be an intuitive choice, – it is dusty, has the narrowest stairway imaginable and there are spiders everywhere! – but it is an authentic choice. And traditionally having one person dress up as St Nicholas at a get-together on the eve of the fifth of December to moderate the performance of the Christmas carols – while at the same time getting a bit tipsy himself from the good German Glühwein – seems to be rather a symptom of a more general phenomenon than just some spontaneous whim at this point. But: why exactly are we doing this?
Performance art is a new means of expression that literature scholars bring to the academic world. Their objection to the old mode of textual reception is that it doesn’t go beyond the abstract, or better: mediated. They want to put the text to action, to act it out, to take from it its mediate status and make it immediate. It doesn’t do, therefore, to just employ a categorial scheme to analyze a given text because every analysis has always already taken away the immediacy of its content. To perform something is the attempt at a mode of presentation capable of transcending the abstract and affecting its recipients in an immediate manner. It is in this theatrical setting that the scholar becomes a director. Of course it is not an academic theatre in the sense of a replacement of the old, but rather a theatre within academia, coexisting with and complementing the old.
Screenshot of a lecture capture of the Easterplay recordings
My year in Oxford continued into January, and Henrike had already planned the next staging. Her Hilary lecture on medieval Easter plays were to be complemented by a two-person performance of the historical screenplay at the end of each session, and I was chosen as the second performer. (Watch the lecture series Easterplays recorded via the university lecture capture system panopto). I didn’t understand most of the textual content as they were written in some long-dead dialects of German I had no idea had even ever existed. Acting it out, however, this changed over the course of the term, as I gradually understood more of it, although in a more intuitive way. Most of the acting dynamics, I felt, didn’t go according to any preconceived plan, but were rather a matter of intuitively playing along. Towards the end of the term I learned about Oxford’s annual Easter play tradition and looked into some of the older performances from earlier years. Guess who was at the forefront every time? Language students. (Watch the Harrowing of Hell in Middle High German on the Mystery Cycle website)
The drama was at the artistic apex of ancient Greece, and no one captured its significance better than Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche, academically raised as a classical philologist, deliberately chose the novel as his genre of philosophical expression. His radical break with classical philosophy was less motivated by its contents, but more by the means of expression used to convey them. Only a gay science, the old organon of poetry-writing, of literary and dramatic art, would be able to express the human condition, the mode of us humans being in the world, without reducing us to the technical language of ossified metaphysics and morals. Fittingly, Nietzsche’s biggest and best known dispute didn’t involve another philosopher or academic in general, but Richard Wagner, the great German opera composer, for the allegedly heavy and exhausting atmosphere the latter created in his operas. Nietzsche himself prefers the light-hearted comedy, visualizing and detailed staging everything in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra to not only convey his philosophical message – which one may not entirely agree with – but also how it should be presented on stage. Sometimes Nietzsche even creates actor-characters within his literature, overtly hinting at its performative nature and complexifying the actor-character-relationship in the process.
Unfortunately, the real Easter play performance was cancelled due to the COVID19-pandemic steamrolling into each and every corner of society. But performance art as a means of exploration didn’t die then. The performances resumed, albeit in a much smaller fashion, by the end of July when it became possible again to meet up in small groups. By then, the very small performances were all recorded, without any live audience. The recording of the Hans Sachs dialogue between a catholic priest and a protestant cobbler involved a genuine medieval text and was recorded in one take over 45 minutes, though, without any warm-up. Performance art doesn’t need much preparation; it is just a matter of spontaneously going with the flow.
Fictional literature is never completely fixed. It think this lesson can be learned from all that. Every new reading creates its object anew; it is never just a bland repetition of something preexisting. Accordingly, performance art is not a scholarly method, let alone a scientific one. It is a reminder of this very incommensurability of all individual readings if you tried to grasp their essence in an abstract sense. In this eternal recurrence of new and unique readings and performances we do not seek to understand, but rather capitulate before the realization that in the end you can only choose to play along.
***
Konstantin Winters is a doctoral student in medieval history and philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf, editing part of the Commentary of the Sentences by William of Ware, a former Oxford student. During the academic year 2019/20, he worked as an Erasmus+ and DAAD funded intern at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.
Listen to Konstantin Winters…
…to half of the characters in the Innsbruck and Muri Easter plays in the final 20 minutes of each of the eight lectures in the Osterspiele series
By Dr Andrew Dunning R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts
Welcome to Dr Andrew Dunning, R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts
January is my first month as the R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. This position is named for Richard Hunt, the beloved Keeper of Western Manuscripts from 1945 until 1975. I am working with Martin Kauffmann (Head of Early and Rare Collections) and Matthew Holford (Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts). Together, we are responsible for the Bodleian’s premodern manuscripts from across Europe and the Byzantine Empire. I’m often asked: What does a curator do?
R.W. Southern’s obituary for Hunt notes that he was attracted to the Bodleian for the prospect of ‘helping and advising readers’. This remains my first priority. Curators make collections accessible: our catalogue descriptions interpret their contents, physical makeup, and history; we look for new acquisitions; and we produce new research to demonstrate the importance of underappreciated items. We also participate in the university’s teaching, collaborate on exhibitions, and promote public engagement. We’re constantly looking for ways to fund all this and grow the library’s capacity through grants and donations.
By caring for both collections and people, we are ensuring that Oxford’s manuscripts will be here for generations to come, and that future readers will still care about them. To read a medieval book, one must empathize with someone quite different from oneself – we all need to develop that skill. At a time when we are facing change and loss, preserving cultural heritage is crucial to human resilience. Manuscripts are for everyone.
My own research uses evidence for collaboration in manuscripts to reconstruct the relationships between textual communities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – producing prose analysis, digital resources, and new editions and translations of source texts. My forthcoming book Two Priors and a Princess: St Frideswide in Twelfth-Century Oxford, in collaboration with Benedicta Ward, reinterprets manuscripts made at St Frideswide’s Priory (now Christ Church) and shows how everyday people in medieval Oxford coped with physical and mental illness.
I was previously Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library; a Mellon Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto; and Curator of Medieval Historical Manuscripts (1100–1500) at the British Library. I conducted my postgraduate work at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies.
It is my ambition to strengthen the Bodleian’s position as a hub for the university’s community of medievalists: our research, teaching, and public engagement. If you would like to discuss an idea or have a question about a manuscript, you can find me at our weekly coffee mornings, every Friday at 10:30–11:30 in the Visiting Scholars’ Centre of the Weston Library; or write me at andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
Professor Henrike Lähnemann’s interactive keynote lecture (picture by Henrike Lähnemann)
On Saturday 19 October, I attended the morning of the first conference of the Greene’s Institute, ‘Found in Translation’ (full programme). As the call for papers stated, scholars working in any field of the humanities are often very aware of ‘translation loss’: the precise meaning of important ideas and concepts shifts when translating them from one language into another and the literary language of the original cannot be fully grasped when reading a translation of a text. ‘I am frustrated that my students are not able read important texts in the original language any more’, said one of the conference participants. However, only thinking about translation in negative terms, using words as ‘loss’ or ‘compromise’ is too limiting. The aim of the ‘Found in Translation’ conference was, therefore, to take another, more positive angle and ask what is actually found in translation. In the remainder of this blog, I will briefly describe some recurring themes discussed during the morning of the conference.
A number of participants discussed the orality of medieval narratives and what happens when elements from this oral tradition are transmitted, or rather ‘translated’, to a written tradition. ‘The enclosing of the saga within codicological boundaries’, Brian McMahon named it in his paper. Julie Dresvina pointed to the fact that some stories from an oral culture ‘slip through the cracks’ such as in The Book of Margery Kempe, a text in which Margery Kempe is a ‘compulsive storyteller’. Godelinde Perk’s discussion of Modern Devout Sister Books from the Low Countries, which contain biographies of exemplary members of religious communities, revealed similar elements of orality. In addition to this, Godelinde stressed that her paper, which focussed on Middle Dutch texts for an English-speaking audience was, of course, already an act of translation – and therefore interpretation – in itself. Ilya Sverdlov also pointed to this in his paper on the complex practice of translating Icelandic compound (place) names into English.
Another interesting aspect discussed during the conference was how the present can inform an understanding of the (medieval) past. Julie Dresvina explained how modern day memes helped her to grasp both the centrality and the marginality of medieval misericords (small wooden images on the underside of a folding seat in a church). Sander Vloebergs used modern dance to establish a connection between modern and medieval bodies, transmitting the female saint’s life of Lutgardis of Aywières to contemporary dance: https://artistictheologylab.com/portfolio/videos/.
The morning ended with professor Henrike Lähnemann’s interactive keynote lecture on the impact of Luther’s Bible translation (watch the first part of the keynote on youtube and follow the exercises on the handout). When we were asked to write our ideas about Bible translation on post-it notes, they varied widely, ranging from ‘translating the Bible is impossible’ to ‘we should translate the Bible in as many ways as possible’. According to Luther, translation was a process of ‘letting go of the letters’ (the title quote of the keynote lecture, taken from the Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, fol. b2r) and focussing on a translation that would make sense to a contemporary audience. During her final reflections, Professor Lähnemann stressed that ‘translation is political’. What is found in translation is a world that is more open and more connected. Translations allow for more dialogue and understanding across language boundaries, across space and time, and even across different media.
Thank you to the Greene’s Institute for organizing this wonderful conference.
This was one of the questions discussed in a collaborative session during the ‘Architectural Representation in the Middle Ages’ conference, held at University College, Oxford, on 7th–8th April. This conference was the latest activity of an ongoing interdisciplinary research network on medieval architectural representation which began its life two years ago as a Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute project and which is currently funded by University College, Oxford. The question was designed to expose our disciplinary biases. Depending on your disciplinary background, you might assume that ‘architectural representation’ refers to architectural plans or images of buildings, the values or power-structures conveyed by actual buildings, or architectural metaphors that ‘represent’ ideas about the mind or the cosmos. We hoped that by recognizing and challenging those biases we can develop a more accurate understanding of what architecture meant to the medieval people who built, inhabited, depicted, and wrote about it.
The conference was framed by two fantastic keynote papers given by Robert Bork of the University of Iowa and Christiania Whitehead of the University of Warwick. In the first of these, which opened the conference on the Friday morning, Robert first gave an overview of medieval architectural representations, before expertly taking the audience through the geometric processes behind medieval architecture and technical drawings. Christiania closed the conference on Saturday afternoon with an exhilarating examination of how the relationship between architectural representation and narrative creates meaning in medieval hagiographical texts.
The keynotes’ very different interpretations of ‘Architectural Representation’—on the one hand, imagistic depictions, on the other, verbal-textual accounts—mirrored the diversity of materials and approaches featured in the conference papers. The speakers included historians, art historians, literary critics, archaeologists, and anthropologists, and their papers took in real and imagined architecture from Iceland to the Holy Land. We heard about architectural imagery, metaphor, and allegory in texts ranging from the age of Bede to the era of Caxton; we heard about visual and physical representations of architecture in manuscripts, on monastic seals, and on iron bag-frames; we heard about the form and decoration of real structures; we heard about images of architecture employed in the decorative schemes of actual buildings.
That diversity prompted the discovery of surprising cross-disciplinary and cross-period connections. We saw the unexpectedly architectural and the unexpectedly domestic in Italian images of St Jerome and a Middle English text about Christ. We saw architecture repeatedly figured as an object of desire. We saw it repeatedly figured as a tool of control—it was particularly exciting to see the same mechanisms used in very different times, places, and cultural contexts to construct landscapes and viewscapes of power. We were asked to think about how architecture exists in time, through time, and out of time.
At the end of the first day of the conference, we were treated to an exhibition of architectural materials from the archive of University College, courtesy of librarian Elizabeth Adams and archivist Robin Darwall-Smith. The exhibition displayed plans, models, and documents relating to the various building campaigns of the college from the medieval period, as well as other material related to the theme of the conference, including the oldest architectural model in Oxford. This was followed by the conference dinner, held at Wadham College and enjoyed by all.
The afternoon of the second day of the conference included a session in which we broke up into small groups for discussion of the themes of the conference. The groups were given four questions to kick off the discussion. Two questions asked people to speak about their own work, and about interesting connections they’d made with other people’s work over the course of the conference. Many of the people attending the conference who weren’t giving papers are also doing very interesting work in this area, and this session offered an opportunity for them to share their research (and in some cases, photographs!). The other two questions sought the delegates’ perspectives on issues that had come up in previous projects of the Architectural Representation network. Asking delegates to define ‘Architectural Representation(s)’ elicited responses that varied considerably along disciplinary lines; some people spoke of having the assumptions they’d brought to the conference challenged. The final question, stated simply as: ‘Interdisciplinarity?’ encouraged broader discussion of any theoretical or practical aspect of attempting interdisciplinary work. These four questions offered a starting point, but the discussion ranged widely—one group discussed parallels between castles and churches and churches as defensive structures in fact and rhetoric, while another debated the orientation of the planks in Anglo-Saxon wooden buildings. Researchers made connections with people working on different times and places, or in different fields, which we hope might spark future collaborative projects.
Being early career academics ourselves, the organizers felt strongly that the conference should be accessible to academics at all career stages. The conference expenses were substantially covered by generous support from the John Fell Fund and University College. Thanks to additional assistance from Oxford Medieval Studies and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, we were able to offer a total of 12 bursaries to graduate students and early career academics without research allowances. We are grateful to Oxford Medieval Studies, and to all of the various institutions, societies, and individuals that contributed to the tremendous success of the conference. Moving forward, we are currently speaking to publishers regarding a collection of essays built around the theme for the conference. We hope to publish this in the near future, providing a lasting legacy for a thoroughly enjoyable and productive conference.
This blog post was originally posted on the 3 April on this website.
A little while ago now (15 March), I went to a one day workshop titled Medieval Intersectionality, pulled together by Amanda Power and Robin Whelan. It was a day to bring scholars across Oxford together to consider:
…ways that we might examine the multiple and complex interactions of…identities, experiences and labels, and how they shed light on the societies in which medieval people lived. … How can it [intersectionality] enrich our research? What has the prospect of deeper histories of intersectional oppression, resistance and power relations to offer those working in more contemporary fields? Given the concept’s roots in fighting discrimination and inequality, what are its broader implications for Medieval Studies as a discipline?
The day was framed around two sessions, each with a handful of short (10 minute) papers, and plenty of time for discussion. This worked very well as a model, and there was lots of fruitful conversation. The papers ranged in theme/period from late Roman Africa to my own paper on late medieval England. The two papers I enjoyed most were Philippa Byrne’s “Lucaera Saracenorum: building urban identity in the persecuting society” and Azfar bin Anwar’s “Intersectionality of identities in medieval Islamic biographical dictionaries”, both of which did the magic triangle thing of (1) introducing me to new sources while (2) asking the kind of questions I like to ask of my sources, and (3) talking about places or people often neglected by Western medieval studies. Philippa’s discussion of the forced settlement of 20,000 Muslims in the Sicilian city of Lucera made me think a lot about boundaries and identities, particularly in the current climate of refugee-phobia, and Azfar’s paper on the homoerotic and homosocial potential of Islamic biographies gave a fascinating insight into the creative opportunities offered by a genre of literature I know nothing about.
Days like this are so important – though as I said during one of the question sessions, it’s all very well bringing academics together and making them think outside their neat little specialised boxes, but that only has a chance of greater impact if we think more broadly about decolonising medieval studies.The room full of people who assembled in Oxford that day were largely – though not entirely! – white Westerners. Engaging with a global middle ages also means engaging with global medievalists, both in our scholarship and in our teaching. This is not just an intellectual issue, where we earnestly discuss what we can do to make medieval studies more inclusive. White nationalism is on the rise and is co-opting our field. As Dorothy Kim forcefully argues, white medievalists have a responsibility to clean up our field and to make it clear that racism, misogyny and ableism have no place here. This is not work that should just be left to minorities.
Your colleagues and students are now specific targets of virulent attack, not just bodies that have to deal with implicit bias and a host of daily microaggressions. … What are you going to do about it medievalists? Will you hide and just hope that being silent will allow you to be overlooked? … Let’s call it what it is, will you collaborate? If this is your thought or answer, this is also your incredible privilege. Guess what, it completely changes the bodies in this field who do not have your cisgendered, white, male, Christian privilege. Your silent, tacit, or enthusiastic compliance will mean these bodies will be violently driven out of the field.
So, a day like Medieval Intersectionality was important in getting conversations started. But if we just leave it at talk, it will have been an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful event.
On Friday 31st March and Saturday 1st April 2017, graduate students, early career researchers, and established scholars met for the Thirteenth Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference held at Merton College, Oxford. As usual, the conference revolved around one word, one theme, chosen by the delegates of the OMGC held the year before. This year, it was about Time.
What is the OMGC? An annual conference that welcomes graduate students and early career researchers to Oxford for two full days of academic discussions around one theme. It provides a friendly and convivial forum for young academics to both gain experience presenting in a formal setting, and to meet their peers and colleagues who will make up their cohort for the length of their careers. This year, speakers came from the UK (Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Oxford, and York) and from Germany, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA. As such it assures Oxford’s place as a centre for medieval graduate student interaction, and as a conference hosting up to twenty-one papers, two invited speakers, and about sixty delegates, it is one of the biggest of its kind.
This year, the conference considered various aspects of medieval Time and temporality (all panels, keynotes, and more were live-tweeted under the hashtag #OMGC17). How is Sacred Time expressed through astrology, architecture, and cosmology? How can Time be measured? How was it perceived in texts, in everyday life? Does Time stop? Can Time stop? Many discussions arose about Purgatory, its emergence and its function(s). Time was also considered in a spatial form: relics, for example, can lead the viewer to a specific point in Time/History. Visions, mystical writings, and their use of Time were another topic and focus of the days’ conversations; as were manuscripts and archives. Each day ended by a thought-provoking keynote address: one by Professor David d’Avray on ‘Questions about Time’ which considered medieval Time in relation to modern scholarships and past and present approaches on Time; another by Professor Eric Stanley on ‘Indefinable Time Experienced in Medieval Living, Sinning, Doubting, Dying.’ Professor Stanley productively talked about unproductive Time and the off-putting of Time, such as procrastination!
The quality of the papers this year was extremely high and I would like to take the opportunity to thank and congratulate all speakers, but especially those who were giving their very first paper! Discussions were equally enlightening. They were lively and respectful; a testimony to the lovely atmosphere I experienced throughout the conference. More relaxed gaps between the panels were far from unproductive: from the coffee breaks with home-made cakes baked by the Committee to the wine reception with a Time playlist and the lovely dinner in Merton College Hall. Each lunch break allowed delegates to unwind and chat and/or to visit the Merton Astrolabes (many thanks to Dr Julia Walworth, Librarian at Merton College, and to Sarah Griffin for making these visits possible).
The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference would not have been possible this year without its committee and its sponsors. The organisers who have all done an amazing job are all postgraduate or early career Oxford medievalists from different Faculties (History, English, Music, and Medieval and Modern Languages): Caroline Batten, Anna Boeles Rowland, Hannah Bower, Henry Drummond, Sarah Griffin, Pauline Souleau, and Sian Witherden. The team was amazing and strong friendship bonds were woven which I am sure will produce more interdisciplinary collaboration in the future. All Committee members either presented at or organised the OMGC in 2016 and I am confident that some of this year’s speakers will take part in the OMGC 2018 organisation (which will be on Animals). The conference sponsors (Merton College; the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Faculties of Music, English, and Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford; the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities; and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature) provided the necessary support to ensure minimum registration cost for our delegates and travel bursaries for our speakers.
I will end this rapid overview with the very last panel which focused on Cycles in life, death, and narratives. One question that was asked was: does Time just repeat itself or is there change? In the case of the OMGC, both aspects are present: Time does repeat itself as in 2018 there will be an Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference as there has been for the past thirteen years; there is also room for change from one theme to another and from one generation of postgraduate/early career academics to the next.
The conference Mourning in Italian Poetry from the Medieval to the Modern was organised and led by Adele Bardazzi, Jennifer Rushworth, and Emanuela Tandello with the support of Christ Church and St John’s College, the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford, the Society of Italian Studies, and in association with Oxford Medieval Studies sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
The conference happened to coincide with the recent publication of Rushworth’s Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch and Proust which truly rests on the Medieval and the Modern. In practice, the conference pivoted on the two centuries from Giacomo Leopardi to the living poets Antonella Anedda and Jamie McKendrick, who crowned the event with a bilingual reading of each other’s work and its translation. The Middle Ages were nonetheless an intertextual presence, brought out in the Q&A sessions when not in the papers.
The event was designed to encourage this: speakers and participants sat together around the table in the Kidd Room at Christ Church; a selection of secondary literature was circulated in advance, and a small booklet of poems referenced was handed out on the day to ensure that everyone could be on the same page. These careful details were successful in making the conference also a conversation.
Seven convenors and one respondent took turns over three sessions and one roundtable. The Oxford-based majority was made up of Adele Bardazzi, Marzia D’Amico, Vilma De Gasperin, Eleanor Parker, Francesca Southerden, and Emanuela Tandello; Fabio Camilletti joined them from Warwick, Francesco Giusti from ICI Berlin and Manuele Gragnolati from Paris Sorbonne.
The picture of the experience and theme of mourning that these papers painted was complex and paradoxical. Loss, grief and mourning exceed expression. When they are expressed they face the struggle to ring true. When they manage to ring true, they struggle to be conclusive. And indeed definitive conclusions were not sought on a subject where conclusion is rather the question.
Fittingly, then, the papers moved between two poles: presence and absence, sound and silence, public and private. Papers navigated these tensions by showing how literature bears witness to the universal experience of loss and the fact that such experience is only given to us in a personal form (De Gasperin). For poets, ‘time’ is truly, as Ezra Pound wrote, ‘the evil, beloved’, and memory is alternatingly the enemy and the solution (Gragnolati). In their writing, poets look to the literary past for help, seeking it in the topos of the prematurely dead (Camilletti), in the tradition of elegy (Bardazzi), in the figures of myth (Parker); or they try to find respite from those very myths and conventions (D’Amico). The mourner, like the writer, is caught between the compulsion to look back and the necessity (narrative, existential, aesthetic?) to move forward; it is small wonder that mourning tests linear development with intermittences, closure with open-endedness, and time-specificity with timelessness (Giusti).
Francesca Southerden did justice to these paradoxes with the difficult task of responding to the papers and leading the roundtable. There is indeed, as she claims, a metapoetic thread which makes writing of mourning also writing of writing, involving as it does, the building-blocks of literature: time, words, memory, ends. The papers and discussions surely reflected this.
The day closed with a reading by Antonella Anedda and Jamie McKendrick from their haunting poetry collection ‘Archipelago’. Like a scattering of islands, each poem stood alone and together reflected on, enacted, the poetics of mourning analysed by the day’s papers.
‘noi non siamo salvi | noi non salviamo’
[we are not saved, | we do not save]
Anedda’s verses and McKendrick’s translations sketched a tension observed throughout the day, eloquently summarised by Francesca Southerden as the making and remaking of poetic subjectivity through encounter with the other. An absent-present other who the verse recalls but whose death is irrevocable:
‘se non con un coraggio obliquo | con un gesto | di minima luce.’
[unless with oblique courage, | with a gesture | of minimal light]
A day of gestures then, towards illuminating the processes through which poetry communicates – expiates – loss through language, always under threat from the silence waiting at the end of the final line.
The full programme of the day can be found through here.
