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.
On Saturday, 11th May 2019, over 40 academics, students and activists met in the Doctorow Hall room of St Edmund Hall to hold a conference on the relationship between Medievalism and far right politics. Organisers Alyssa Steiner, a graduate student in Medieval German at St Edmund Hall, and Charlie Powell, a student on the MSt in Medieval Studies at Wadham College, describe the impetus behind organizing the conference, and the day itself.
In October, the two of us were discussing our concerns about the Oxford Union’s decision to invite Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany, to give a speech to Union members. Discussing the AfD’s links with Neo-Nazi group Pegida, our conversation turned to the rise of far-right nationalism across Europe, and the narratives through which it is spreading. We had both witnessed medieval tropes, symbols, and stories being instrumentalised by contemporary far-right movements, from the violence of white supremacists calling themselves “alt-knights” in the USA to the racist backlash against a woman of colour representing Joan of Arc in Orleans. We quickly discovered countless examples of medieval symbols, stories and tropes providing inspiration and legitimation for contemporary far right movements across the world. In fact, the prevalence of medievalism within far-right discourse has a long history, which goes back to the romantic nationalism of the 19th century, a movement which also produced some of the first medieval scholars. We decided to organize a conference to explore these troubling relationships, and how medievalists might respond to the current political use of medievalism in our own capacity.
We quickly received a lot of interest, and abstract submissions for more papers than we could accommodate with a one-day event. The three areas on which we wanted to focus the discussion were racism and violence in medieval contexts; the politics and origins of medieval studies, and the instrumentalisation of the medieval in contemporary far right movements. In the end, the day was packed with ten papers and a plenary discussion: topics included violence in Anglo-Saxon literary portrayals of Judaism, the impact historical constructions of Islam and premodern Europe had on German policy in World War One, medievalism in contemporary far-right metal music, and the role of the medieval in growing eco-fascist movements. See the programme at the bottom of this post for the full list of papers with short abstracts, hyperlinked to recordings of the papers.
Throughout the day, a picture of the past and present relationships between fascism and the medieval began to emerge. The power of academic narratives of the medieval to influence contemporary society, and the consequent responsibility of us as medievalists to be vigilant and mindful, was firmly apparent. However, many of the papers highlighted situations in which traditional academic paradigms offered no solution to medieval myths and their role in racisms, anti-semitisms, and contemporary white supremacy. In the question sessions at the end of each panel, the discussion often came back to the relationship between academia and broader public discourse, and questions over the construction of historical truth. If academic rigour entails dry, dense, and complicated research in constructing our narratives of the medieval past, but far right movements have the luxury of fiction and myth in their use of medieval narratives to legitimise racism, misogyny, and other bigotry, what can academics do but raise their voices and refute the claims of the far right? This perceived disjuncture between the responsibility of medievalists to oppose far right trends, and their actual ability to reach a broad social audience in order to do so, was met with several responses. Academic projects aimed at increasing access and engagement in the medieval, such as the public medievalist, were one. Counter-creation and humour, such as the demystification of the middle ages in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (informed by the writers’ experience studying Old and Middle English at university), were another. Lastly, an important and salient response recognised the limitations of academic discourse, and urged the importance of taking our opposition to far right medievalism to the places where it is aired: online spaces, media commentary, and – most importantly – the streets.
We had speakers from every academic stage from recent graduate to professor, and for some early career researchers, it was an excellent opportunity to present in an explicitly contemporary-focused and intellectually open space. It was important to us that the conference should be free to attend, and not limited to established academic researchers, as the casual delineation of academic from non-academic spaces is part of the issue at hand. It is important that this conference be a starting point for further discussion both inside and outside academic medieval studies, and we will be hosting recordings of the papers on the open-access oxtalks website to help facilitate this. We hope to organise more events in the future and develop models for truly open-access discussion that resists the cordoning-off of academic interests, and we hope to see our fellow medievalists resisting the far right in the pages of journals, in the press, and on the streets.
‘Evaluating’ means approving or condemning phenomena of the past based on our values today. In the context of this conference these values are those of an enlightened intellectual elite that stand against those of the far right. The former condemn racism, nationalism and fascism, which mostly originate in the 19th century, while the latter support ethnic or religious supremacy, xenophobia and violent behaviour which can be found throughout the ages. In my talk I want to discuss the scientific and methodological difficulties and opportunities of applying anachronistic terms to medieval phenomena that relate to the ideology of the far right.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this paper examines Western academic and political discourses of power in twentieth-century constructions of the late antique and early medieval past and asks questions relating to periodisation. The late antique and medieval paradigms have been challenged by scholars of ancient and medieval intellectual currents. For example, the First Millennium perspective (G. Fowden, Before and After Muhammad, Princeton 2014) redefines the foundations of the Western debate with Islam. I argue that the First Millennium as a multicultural/multiconfessional category can also help to shed light on developments in the emergence of the Greek and Latin civilizations after Antiquity.
The quincentenary of the Reformation in 2017 has not only resulted in new critical readings of its leading figures but also stimulated research into memorial culture. There are few figures in German history, which have been claimed by such diverse groups as Martin Luther. In my paper, I am looking at National Socialist pictures of Luther and then particularly at the celebrations in 1983. How can it be that at the same time as the medieval roots of Luther‘s thinking were discussed, German nationalists also reclaimed him as their prophet?
11:30-12:00 – Coffee
12:00-13:00 – Session 2: Racialising in the Middle Ages
Cynewulf’s Elene is oft-analysed in awe of the poet’s subtle and intricate design, and critics have been prone to neglect the anti-Semitic violence and oppression written into the poem’s operations. My analysis reveals sustained and constitutive literary patterning depicting the persecution and forced conversion of Judas Cyriacus from Jew to Christian saint as heroically transcendent; his dynamic characterisation sanctions, in Anglo-Saxon terms, the narrative and semiological abuse committed against him. Interrogating rhetorical constructs of power involving ideological coercion, which we associate with totalitarian regimes of today, requires the self-awareness and sensitive critical distance I hope to display in my study.
Economy has been a crucial part of society for millennia. Therefore, the far right has to relate to economic thinking if they claim to provide a vision of what society should be like. For propagating their political ideologies, emotional and narrative approaches have proven much more effective than theoretical explanations. Examples starting from programmatic Nazi writings to 21st century politics can show how referring to the middle ages has served nationalist and far right literature, science, and political decision making in Germany until today, employing the myth of a less monetary and therefore righteous golden age.
13:00-14:00 – Lunch
14:00-15:00 – Session 3: Instrumentalising the Middle Ages
Linus Ubl, Oxford: Place and identity: Storytelling of lieux de memoire. The example of Montségur
Historical places provide a special potential to create identity as Pierre Nora had already pointed out by his concept of lieux de memoire. These places need a story to tell about the historical event while simultaneously incorporating it into the present context. Far right story tellers take part in this process by trying to establish their own (hi)story. The study case, the Castle of Montségur, provides a prototypical example of such a scenario. It can be shown, how several storytelling methods were used by the extreme right trying to incorporate Montségur into their own contexts.
In the early 1990s, parts of the Metal-Subculture underwent a drastic radicalization in its ideological and religious background. Earlier bands have already used esoteric, neo-pagan, satanist or fascist symbols and topoi in order to provoke with a demonstrative but carnivalesque ‘sympathy for the devil’. Bands like Burzum or Absurd however, started recurring to a ‘Germanic’ religion and culture which laid the basis for a racist and ethnopluralist blood and soil ideology. As the sources for Norse Mythology and the Scandinavian Early Middle Ages are relatively scarce, this new tradition is largely based on invention.
15:00-15:30 – Break/Crypt tour
The 12th-century church of St Peter-in-the-East is on the site of St. Edmund Hall, and currently serves as the college library. During this break, there was the opportunity to tour the crypt of this Norman church with Professor Henrike Lähnemann.
15:30-17:00 – Session 4: Theorising the Medieval
Ilya Afanasyev, Moscow: Beyond the Far Right: Medieval Studies and Common-Sense Nationalism
This paper argues that it is necessary but not sufficient to criticise the appropriation of medieval history by the far right. We must also criticise the persistent common-sense nationalism of mainstream historical writing. To elaborate on this point, the paper proceeds in two steps. First, it shows how the reification of ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’ categories persists in a self-contradictory fashion even within the critical strands of scholarship on collective identifications in the middle ages, despite by now routine appeals to constructivist methodologies. Second, it demonstrates how we can use the complexity of the ways in which ‘ethnic’/’national’ identifications were constructed in the Middle Ages to challenge, unsettle and eventually unmake our own problematic political and analytical categories.
This paper examines the claim that new materialist and object-oriented philosophies deploy a critique of modernity that has disquieting parallels with fascist politics. A fetishization of ‘the premodern’ afflicts the work of Graham Harman in particular, whose atomised and essentialist ontology overlaps with far-right discourse. Yet critical responses to Harman often recalibrate Enlightenment dogmas which are equally unsustainable. The new materialist task is thus to theorise a more nuanced relationship between the premodern and the modern: one that avoids Harman’s obscure essentialism while retaining his suspicion of the transcendental subject. I propose that reading medieval texts can help us to develop this philosophy.
Provoked by the alarming capacity for the far right to claim the preoccupations of both medieval studies and environmentalism as its own, this paper posits that both these convergences share common coordinates. I will argue that ‘nature’ and the construction of an antithesis to modernity play central and combined roles in the strategic reorganisation of historical experience through the categories of race and nation represented by fascism. Theorising the tradition of appeal to these themes, alongside the contemporary iterations of such gestures, I will attempt to pose an environmentalist and anti-fascist query as to the responsibilities of medieval studies in this consequential discursive situation.
Drinks were provided by courtesy of the Principal of St Edmund Hall.
We would like to extend our thanks to Oxford Medieval Studies of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) for sponsoring the conference, to the Principal of St Edmund Hall for her kind hospitality and generosity in sponsoring our plenary refreshments, and to Professor Henrike Lähnemann for her technical assistance and podcasting.
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.
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.
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.
This interdisciplinary conference, kindly supported by the TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme, hoped to unite classicists, archaeologists, celticists, historians, and literary scholars in investigating the profound influence of Celtic and Classical heritage on the development of British identity. Three chronologically arranged panels attempted to trace the respective importance of Ancient Britons and Romans in British culture over the centuries, starting in the pre-Roman period and ending in the present day. Covering such a vast expanse of time presented a particular challenge to our medievalists, whose papers were separated from each other by centuries. However, they made sure that medieval legacies loomed large throughout the conference, with ideas about Roman influence in post-Roman Britain and the long shadows cast by medieval origin myths recurring again and again.
The first panel, chaired by Prof. Thomas Charles-Edwards (Oxford), featured Sir Barry Cunliffe (Oxford) on the theory that Celts first emerged in western Europe, Dr. Alex Woolf (St. Andrews) on how a British people might have developed in late antiquity, and Prof. Helen Fulton (Bristol) on the use of Troy by medieval English writers.
The second panel, chaired by Rhys Kaminski-Jones (University of Wales), featured Prof. Ceri Davies (Swansea) on the reception of Trojan origin myths by Welsh renaissance humanists, Prof. Philip Schwyzer (Exeter) on the politics of British antiquity under James I, and Mary-Ann Constantine (University of Wales) on how eighteenth-century travellers to Wales and Scotland imagined the Celtic and Roman past.
The third panel, chaired by Dr. Nick Lowe (RHUL), featured Prof. Rosemary Sweet (Leicester) on how nineteenth-century antiquarians reconsidered Roman Britain as a domestic and commercial society, Dr. Philip Burton (Birmingham) on the complex Celtic themes and echoes in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and Prof. Richard Hingley (Durham) on how Hadrian’s Wall is used today as a symbol of national division and international co-operation.
The discussion sessions following each panel provided a wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary analysis of this aspect of British identity, touching on the problematic nature of “indigenous” Britishness from the Middle Ages to the present day, the exclusion of women from a male-dominated Celts v. Romans historical narrative, and the role of contemporary heritage bodies in emphasising Celtic or Classical aspects of the British past. The conference was enthusiastically received, with all 60 available places filled, and with the possibility of published conference proceedings being actively considered. The organisers would like to thank everyone involved in making it a success, and especially the Oxford Medieval Studies Programme who helped make it possible in the first place.
By Dr Liv Robinson, Brasenose College/English Faculty
‘The bottom line is that, even when written with probing wit by [Carol Ann] Duffy, medieval morality plays are not the place to go to for sophisticated characters and gripping plot twists.’
TimeOut’s review of the recent National Theatre production of Duffy’s Everyman articulated a sense that the medieval play’s 2015 update was perhaps hampered by its late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century origins. Reviews of the play – whether the reviewers loved it or loathed it – returned frequently to what they perceived as the aesthetic and intellectual paucity of the medieval Everyman upon which Duffy based her twenty-first century adaptation. They contrasted her ‘memorable characters’ with the ‘intrinsic thinness’ of the medieval play (TimeOut again); they described the play as ‘dramatically threadbare’, lacking ‘psychological substance’, but revealing that ‘that’s partly the limitation of the medieval source material’ (The Telegraph); or they congratulated her on making a now-irrelevant piece of medieval literature speak to contemporary concerns: ‘what was originally church propaganda has been turned… into a scathing assault on the myopic materialism of the modern age’ (The Guardian).
As a medievalist with research specialisms in translation and medieval drama, these reviews rather got my goat. It wasn’t that so many reviewers enjoyed Everyman’s 2015 incarnation: I too thought it was outstanding – thought-provoking, terrifying and moving in equal measure. My own academic work centres in part upon the re-creative and critical potential which resides in translation, and I was excited by the ways in which Duffy had creatively responded to the dialogic form, the sounds and rhythms of the medieval play, as well as to its complex ethical and soteriological concerns. My frustration with the critical reception of her work arose principally from the fact that so many reviewers seemed to take as read the tediousness of the medieval Everyman, to cheerfully assert its poor quality as drama and the unsophistication of its intellectual endeavours.
Everyman, to me, is emphatically not a dramatically limited or unsubtle play; nor is it simply ‘church propaganda’ aimed at a credulous, unquestioning medieval Catholic audience. The play speaks to shared and complex apprehensions, imaginings and terrors. It begins as an abstracted, allegorical dramatization of a character called Dethe’s approach to a character called ‘Everyman’ – who represents each and every one of us – and it concludes as an attempt to actively think through and beyond the end of our lives. It asks, how can we prepare ourselves for death? How do we give shape to what happens when we die, in terms of the ‘experience’ of dying? How do we imagine death – not just in the sense of watching a character, on-stage, dying, but rather ‘from the inside’: what it’s like to go through the process of becoming not-alive? Can we even conceive of this state, given that the acts of thinking, imagining and questioning are all, in some senses, predicated on the state of being alive and conscious – and this is the one thing we won’t be when we die?
In its sixteenth-century printed editions, Everyman travels with a subtitle: ‘a tretyse… in maner of a morall pleye’. The term ‘tretyse’ perhaps suggests something other than drama – yet the fact that it is ‘in maner of a pleye’ is also key – what is it that performance brings? One of the key elements here is sophisticated on-stage embodiment of allegorical concepts. Everyman begins with the stage representing its audience’s own world, or something like it – watching, we’re apparently on the outside, as Everyman, an individual, a character external to us, even as we know that allegorically ‘represents’ us all, meets (quite literally) his Dethe, and then seeks out some other characters – his Felawshyp, or friendships; his Kindrede and Cosyn, or family members; his Goodes, or possessions – to attempt to persuade them (fruitlessly) to help him make his reckoning before God. Once his worldly goods have left Everyman, he’s forced to seek out his Good Dedes, and this moment marks a pivot in the play. On one level, that’s because Everyman has turned to the ‘right’ people, things or processes to help him secure salvation – his own good deeds, and Knowledge, who points the way to the sacraments of Confession and extreme unction at the hands of a priest – so it marks a movement from bad choices to good, from despair to hope.
But it also marks a pivot in terms of what we, as the audience, are watching, in that the playing space suddenly ceases to represent a world peopled by other individuals and characters (friends, family, objects Everyman owns), and begins to represent the internal world of Everyman himself. The stage disorientingly shifts to become the space inside his mind and body, which is peopled by his own physical and psychological forces, each played by a different actor: his Strength, his Beaute, his Fyve Wyttes or five senses, his Discrecion, his Knowledge. Everyman, then, is allowed to enter a conversation with parts of himself, to become sensitised to the presence of the faculties within him which allow him to experience, to know, to interact with other individuals and the world – to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, to feel, to move, to learn – in a word, to live. At the play’s climax, Everyman is stripped of these faculties one by one in a really challenging attempt to imagine and perform, not what it looks like when an individual dies but what it is like to experience death within a fractured and multi-voiced human psyche, moment by moment. And because Everyman is who he is – each and every one of us – the space of the stage becomes in some senses the inside of everyone’s head. It forces us all to attempt to imagine a conscious calling into being, then a gradual abandonment of our own, unique and personal bodily and psychological attributes – to confront our own mortality. The play certainly does express an orthodox medieval Christian message about salvation: that it can only be assured through an intricate mixture of our own works during our lifetimes and the operation of divine grace; that the sacraments, particularly penance, mediated through the proper ecclesiastical authorities, are key to that process. Yet the questions that it asks about the terrifying and disorientating experience of dying are no less resonant for the fact that they are approached through this framework.
It was with all this in mind that I embarked, in November 2015, on my own production of Everyman at the generous invitation of the University Church, using mainly my second-year English students as actors. Many saw the production as an opportunity for them to become far more familiar with a medieval text, and to appreciate more fully its dramatic workings, than if they had simply read it for a tutorial. My own aims were two-fold: one was certainly pedagogic, in that I too hoped for these outcomes for my English students, and was curious to see how performing the play would impact on their Middle English comprehension and close reading skills. However, I also wanted to interrogate, through performance, the assessments of Everyman prevalent in press reviews of Duffy’s play. Would my students succeed in conveying to a non-specialist audience the complex questions that the medieval play poses, in rendering them critically engaging and thought-provoking? Could Everyman be provocative of discussion and interest, and could that challenge some ideas about the ‘relevance’ of medieval literature to today’s culture, and how that ‘relevance’ might be conceptualised? I wasn’t trying to suggest that the medieval play holds up a straightforward mirror to our own, twenty-first century preoccupations and desires, or that ‘medieval people were just like us’ (for a compelling critique of ‘relevance’ and an argument for the importance of underlining alterity in relation to medieval literature, see Marion Turner’s post here). What I wanted was to show that experiencing the medieval play on its own terms could provoke questions and conversations; that the play was ‘relevant’ in the sense that it challenged us to think.
We performed to a full house in the University Church’s Old Library, and the audience comprised a wonderful mixture of academic colleagues (largely non-medievalist), students and members of the public. We held an audience Q and A session after the performance, in which all the actors took part, and the questions they were asked – about the process of representing and embodying abstract forces such as Fyve Wyttes, about the shifting ownership of Knowledge throughout the play and how its staging might convey this, about the role and presence of God in the world, the ambiguous potential for corruption amongst His representatives, the Priesthood, and the consolatory, supplicatory presence of embodied, human Good Dedes at the moment of death – left me in no doubt that the medieval play had been as generative of thought and engagement as I had hoped.
The pedagogical impact, too, has been rich: although perhaps not primarily in the areas I’d anticipated. Certainly, performing the play forced the students to understand every single word or line spoken by their character(s), and so forced them to think through sometimes confusing or counterintuitive syntax carefully, to notice the impact of verse form and register on meaning. This is especially important in a play like Everyman where the actors have to give embodied shape to forces and concepts which have no ‘set’ physical form. There was a danger that the play would become very static – two or more allegorical characters standing still in conversation – and we worked hard on translating close reading into dynamic, physical performance. Yet some of the most rewarding pedagogical outcomes that I’ve seen have been in students’ grasp of more conceptual ideas and challenges. In class, we have discussed shifting or co-existent times and spaces in texts; or tensions between the abstract and the ‘real’, the human and the divine, and a student has begun with ‘it’s a bit like in Everyman, when…’ The play seems to have formed a reference point, a shared set of ideas and questions which can help to understand other unfamiliar medieval texts. It also gave the students an opportunity to mix theatrical creativity fully with their academic work: their insights, suggestions and intellectual excitement were crucial in rehearsal (you can read about two actors’ perspectives here. I was very proud of them as they confidently and sensitively fielded questions about our creative work: I realised in those moments just how much they had taken from the process, in both an academic and non-academic sense.
It’s for all these reasons that I’ll be returning to the University Church in 7th week Trinity Term with (hopefully) a new set of student performers and a new medieval play: we warmly invite readers to join us. (For further information, email olivia.robinson@bnc.ox.ac.uk or penny.boxall@universitychurch.ox.ac.uk).
