Category: Around Oxford

Peter Ganz Centenary

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03/11/2020

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To celebrate the life and work of Professor Peter Felix Ganz on the centenary of his birth, Oxford medievalist extraordinaire, scholar and ambassador of Anglo-German relationship, a group of Oxford colleagues, friends, former students and family was talking about his scholarly legacy and memories of his life. The event was life-streamed on Tuesday 3 November, 6:30-8pm, via youtube. We would welcome further tributes and memories; please send them Adam Ganz.

Schedule

  • Introduction – Adam Ganz
  • Peter Ganz as a German Medievalist – Henrike Lähnemann and Nigel Palmer
  • Peter Ganz as Mentor – Bryan Ward Perkins
  • Peter Ganz and Jacob Burckhardt – Nicolette Mout
  • Peter Ganz as Colleague – Andrew Kahn, Nicholas Cronk, and further Oxford colleagues

About Peter Ganz

Peter Felix Ganz (Mainz, 3 November 1920 – Oxford, 17 August 2006) came to the U.K. in 1938 as a refugee, having been held in Buchenwald concentration camp after Kristallnacht, as he and his family were considered Jews under the Nazi laws. He started to read German at King’s College London, but was soon interned on the Isle of Man. During the war he served first in the Royal Pioneer Corps and then in the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (The so-called Secret Listeners), listening to captured German Prisoners of War. He was part of the team at Farm Hall listening to the German nuclear physicists including Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn as they heard news of the atom bomb at Hiroshima.

He concluded his studies at King’s College London (PhD 1955). After holding lectureships in London, he came to Oxford in 1960 as Reader in German and subsequently Fellow of Hertford College. He was a pioneer of widening participation, part of the small group of Hertford fellows who encouraged applicants from schools who did not usually send pupils to Oxford. In 1972 he was appointed Professor of German and became a Fellow of St Edmund Hall. In 1985 he retired to take up the position of Resident Fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and an honorary professorship at the University of Göttingen (until 1988). His wife Rosemary (with whom he had 4 children) died in 1986. His second marriage to me, a Dutch historian, led him to divide his life between England and the Netherlands.

The subject of his first book (1957) was the influence of English on the German vocabulary, 1640-1815. His interests soon broadened. He edited a number of medieval texts, of which his edition (1978) of Gottfried von Straßburg’s masterpiece Tristan became the best-known. His Oxford inaugural lecture on Jacob Grimm’s Conception of German Studies (1973) showed his own commitment to the study of language in combination with historical investigations. He wrote on Paul Celan, admired Bertolt Brecht, and loved Theodor Fontane. He did not mince his words, though, if he happened to dislike certain literary figures – a fate that befell Thomas Mann. His teaching reflected his exceptional range of interests.

He was instrumental in bringing together the results of Anglo-American and German medieval scholarship through lectures, conferences, and joint publications. With Werner Schröder (Marburg) he set up the Anglo-German Colloquia for German Medieval Studies still the most important forum for the exchange of scholarship in medieval studies between Britain and Germany. He was awarded the German Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz in 1973. Twenty years later he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

At the Herzog August Bibliothek he founded an international work group for medieval studies. Among its aims were the modernization of the catalogue of the library’s vast medieval manuscript collection and the reconstruction of medieval religious culture in Lower Saxony and beyond. The many visiting fellows found in him a kind, but nevertheless quite challenging interlocutor. The reinvention of the Herzog August Bibliothek as a research centre for European cultural history must partly be attributed to his efforts. The current close collaboration between the Bodleian Library and the HAB through the Polonsky German project would not have been possible if it had not been for this well-established link.

In the seventies he developed an interest in the life and works of the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897). He greatly admired Burckhardt for his independent and rigorous scholarship preferring synthesis over narrativism. Ganz devoted his Göttingen inaugural lecture to a rather tongue-in-cheek treatment of Burckhardt’s ambiguous relation to academic society. His edition of Burckhardt’s lectures, Über das Studium der Geschichte (1982), is a masterpiece, and in 2000 the second edition was included in the new Kritische Gesamtausgabe of Burckhardt’s works. His edition of Burckhardt’s medieval lectures was still unfinished at the time of his death.

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Further reading: Nigel F. Palmer ‘Ganz, Peter Felix’ in ODNB. The blog post was first published by TORCH in November 2020. Picture: Peter Ganz at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel 1986

Performing Medieval Studies

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30/09/2020

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By Konstantin Winters

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

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…

A Note from Dr Andrew Dunning, R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts

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15/01/2020

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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.

Conference Report: Found in Translation

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29/10/2019

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By Diana Denissen

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.

***

Diana Denissen is a Swiss National Science Foundation post-doc mobility fellow. She works on late medieval religious literature and women’s writing from England and the Low Countries. Her monograph Middle English Devotional Compilations will be out in November of this year. You can follow Diana on twitter under @folioscribbles or on her website.found in translation

Lively discussion during the conference (picture by the Greene’s Institute)

How do you define ‘Architectural Representation(s)’?

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27/05/2017

14:24

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By Hannah Bailey

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.

Report on the Medieval Intersectionality Workshop

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24/05/2017

14:26

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By Rachel Moss

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.

Click here to view the report by Philippa Byrne on the same event.

About Time

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16/05/2017

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By Pauline Souleau

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.

Mourning in Italian Poetry from the Medieval to the Modern Christ Church, Oxford, 4 March 2017

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28/04/2017

14:21

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By Rebecca Bowen and Nicolò Crisafi

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.

The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages

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27/04/2017

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Around Oxford, blog

In February 2017, medievalists from across the disciplines and across the world gathered at St Hilda’s College for a conference on the study of the medieval bible. The conference, generously sponsored by TORCH and Oxford Medieval Studies, focused on the work of the medievalist Beryl Smalley (1905-84), whose research and writing remain fundamental for scholars working across the fields of theology, politics and history.

Beryl Smalley pioneered the study of the ‘literal’ exegesis of the medieval bible, radically altering the way in which medievalists approach questions of scriptural exegesis and biblical commentary. Her most famous work, and the book from which the conference took its name – The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (1941) – is a text which almost all students in medieval studies will have come across. It remains a rich source of inspiration, and entire PhD projects are still to be found by chasing up its footnotes.
It seemed particularly appropriate to be discussing Beryl Smalley’s legacy at the college (St Hilda’s) where she had studied as an undergraduate, and later worked as tutor and vice-principal. Moreover, as we were reminded in the opening session, the need to make the case for the depth and relevance of medieval theological thought is as urgent now as it ever has been. There is still a tendency to consider medieval philosophy as a matter of ‘Aquinas or nothing’. Oxford itself could still be doing better in the way it invites its undergraduates to engage with medieval theologians (the university’s flagship paper on political thought, ‘Theories of the State’, jumps from Aristotle to Hobbes with nothing in between).

The conference began with two fascinating papers which set the tone for the day. Professor Lesley Smith (who had been supervised by Beryl Smalley during her DPhil) spoke on the topic of ‘William of Auvergne and the Missing Bible’. Professor Smith’s paper brought up some of the challenges of writing medieval biography and attempting to engage with medieval theologians. She asked how medievalists can navigate their subjects when separated not just by cultural and temporal distance, but also by complex layers of textual allusions and typologies.

Professor Smith also highlighted how the connection between contemporary concerns and medieval research shaped Beryl Smalley’s own writing, particularly in her choice of topic. Working on the Christian Hebraist Andrew of St Victor in the 1930s, Smalley was engaging both with the medieval world and with her contemporaries. Her decision to focus on how much Christian medieval scholars owed to their Jewish counterparts was a deliberately challenge to prevailing political narratives.

The second paper in this session, from Dr Eyal Poleg of QMUL, entitled ‘Exegesis, Mediation and Materiality’, was an invitation for medievalists to think more broadly and more carefully about the way in which we encounter theological texts, and, in turn, the circumstances in which their medieval readers encountered with them. Exegesis should not be taken in isolation or conceived of as a discrete process, Dr Poleg emphasised: it was intimately connected to the liturgy, and medievalists of all stripes benefit from thinking about the experiential aspects of contact with medieval theology.

Dr Poleg’s advice – not to miss the devotional wood for the exegetical trees – set the tone for a meditative and stimulating day. The themes he raised were returned to during the rest of the conference, including a discussion of questions of ‘genre’ and classification; and how modern scholars order the relationship between medieval texts versus how their medieval readers did so.

To pick out just a few examples of those discussions: Dr Julie Barrau’s (Cambridge) paper on ‘Patristic compendia as exegetes’ toolboxes’ took us down to the building-blocks of medieval theological commentaries. Elisa Monaco (Zurich) brought us to the other end of the scale, with a consideration of how even the most complex of texts (namely Dante’s Commedia) might be read as a work of theological instruction. Dr Ayelet Even-Ezra (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) invited us to think about diagrammatic representations: the relationship between how a text is ordered and how divisiones were visualised in medieval manuscripts in series of complex tree diagrams. The day also offer new light on familiar figures, with David Runciman (Cambridge) examining a series of sermons attributed to the twelfth-century bishop Gilbert Foliot, and making the case for the ‘theological’ sides of a figure better known for his entanglements in political controversies.

All contributors drew attention to the need to think about how medieval texts are put together, and how the technical details of composition and organisation might speak to a ‘bigger picture’ concerning the place and purpose of exegesis in the Middle Ages. Appropriately, for a conference focused around the idea of ‘new developments’ in medieval exegesis, the day concluded with a look to the future, with Dr Toby Burrows (University of Western Australia) providing a comprehensive tour of the world of digitisation projects of medieval manuscripts.

The conference offered an insight into new research in medieval biblical scholarship and a tantalising glimpse into a number of projects which will be coming to publication within the next few years. One only hopes that Beryl Smalley would have thought the day a fitting tribute.

Celebrating Nigel Palmer and Devotional Culture. A Report on the 2016 Medieval Studies Lecture

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29/11/2016

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By Edmund Wareham

This year’s Medieval Studies lecture took on a slightly different form, as not just the annual celebration of the interdisciplinary study of medieval culture but also of Professor Nigel Palmer’s 70th birthday. It was therefore highly appropriate that Dr Stephen Mossman, who wrote his doctorate in the Oxford German sub-faculty but now lectures in the Manchester History department and who himself was a former pupil of Nigel, was able to deliver this year’s highly memorable and engaging lecture.

The focus of Stephen’s lecture was devotional culture in late medieval Strasbourg. The city presents a particular challenge for those attempting to reconstruct its literary, religious and cultural history because of the destruction of the town’s municipal library in its bombardment in the Franco-Prussian war. Stephen offered a number of possibilities of how this could nonetheless be possible, drawing on surviving archival sources, art and architecture from the city, even taking us inside a Strasbourg clothes shop where the back room houses a number of important wall paintings. He showed through an analysis of widely dispersed manuscripts how connections to Strasbourg could still be traced. He underlined the importance of the Alsatian city through the example of the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec, the transmission of whose works centred on Brabant but also Strasbourg, as religious and intellectual trends flowed up the Rhine, often directly.

A highlight of the lecture was undoubtedly the ‘great reveal’ of Nigel’s birthday present, a fifteenth century Carthusian manuscript in its original limp binding bought by the Bodleian library. This collection of devotional texts, focussed on the Passion (such as Bonaventure) and Carthusian spirituality (such as Adam of Dryburgh), contains a reference to a Strasbourg Carthusian famulus, a significant discovery given the particular transmission situation from the city. Thanks to references to the diocese of Trier in the binding material, Stephen suggested that the manuscript was produced in the Koblenz Charterhouse and made its way to Strasbourg. Nevertheless Monika Studer, in a colloquium the following day on German Manuscripts in Oxford, suggested through a comparison with a Basel manuscript from the Strasbourg Charterhouse, that the Oxford manuscript could in fact have been produced there. Nigel had no idea about the existence of the manuscript or that it had been purchased by the Bodleian: further research is now an exciting possibility.

The Strasbourg Charterhouse manuscript was one strand in Stephen’s lecture on the central importance of a new kind of domestic devotion within Strasbourg in the later Middle Ages. He showed how the division between cloister and world was less pronounced and more permeable than has previously been recognised. Institutions such as the Strasbourg Charterhouse and the Hospitaller commandery at the Grüner Wörth (founded 1367) were at the forefront of a new lay, devotional culture. These institutions, less connected to the town’s guilds but more with its citizenship, offered a particular blend of monastic and worldly devotion and offered a distinctive development from earlier forms of monastic, urban spirituality. Contemporary writers suggested that the decline of monasteries lay less in their separation from the world, but rather in the lack of lay oversight.

The developments in these institutions paralleled a rise of a new understanding of domesticity, emerging in the fourteenth century, in which qualities such as orderliness and privacy came more to the fore. An increased focus on interiority was not just evident in Flemish or Italian art, but was in evidence in Strasbourg as the domestic sphere became sacralised. Altar pieces such as the Meister des Paradiesgärtlein’s altar piece ‘Joseph’s Doubt’ (1430), were one such media in which this became clear and were part of a widespread phenomena in stained glass, tapestries and wall paintings. The domestic and the sacred had become merged. 

Following the talk, a drinks reception was held in the Taylor and the newly-acquired manuscript was on display (behind glass!). Strasbourg was then the focus of attention at the morning session the following day at a colloquium in the Weston Library on German manuscripts in Oxford. Former students, colleagues and friends of Nigel gave a number of short presentations on various manuscripts held in Oxford, including from the Taylorian and Merton College Library, and suggested various palaeographical, codicological and textual approaches to a diverse set of material ranging from a set of eighth century psalms to an early seventeenth century Yiddish songbook.

You can watch the lecture here.

Oxford, 22 November 2016
Edmund Wareham (Research Associate on the ‘Nuns’ Network’ Project) edmund.wareham@jesus.ox.ac.uk