Shofar player opening Psalm 80, with the caption ‘Sing a new song unto the Lord’ in a Psalter manuscript from the German convent of Medingen, ca. 1500, Bodleian Library, MS. Don. e. 248, fol. 145v
This event will begin with music from medieval manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. The performance will also feature songs in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, and English for all to join, and will be interspersed with the sound of shofar and shell horn.
Music list: Shofar: Call to celebrating unity; ‘Cantate domino’ (Bodleian, MS. Don. e. 248, 247v); ‘Cantate domino’ (Giuseppe Pitoni); ‘Lumen ad revelacionem’ (MS. Lat. liturg. e. 18, 8r); Shell horn: Call to preserving nature; ‘Every part of this earth shall holy be for us’ (round by Stephan Vesper); Sea weed horn: Call to peace; ‘Hinema tov’ (round, orally transmitted); Horn: ‘Üsküdar’a gider iken’; ‘Victime paschali’ & ‘Christ ist erstanden’ (Bodleian, MS. Lat. liturg. f. 4); ‘Dona nobis pacem’ (round, orally transmitted).
This follows on from previous events organised by Henrike Lähnemann and Andrew Dunning ‘Singing from Manuscripts’. Click here to learn more about singing from Medieval Sources in the Bodleian Library.
In association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
We are delighted to announce the finalised programme (and opening of advance registration for online attendance) for the Oxford University Byzantine Society’s 26th Annual International Graduate Conference ‘Transgression in Late Antiquity and Byzantium’, taking place on the 24th-25th February, 2024 at the Faculty of History, George Street, OX1 2BE.
The programme and abstracts of papers can be found on the dedicated conference website and below. The costs for attendance are as follows: In person attendance: £15 for OUBS members / £20 for non-members Online attendance: £5 for students / £6 for non students
Papers will be delivered in-person, with the proceedings broadcast on a Zoom link which will circulate via email to those purchasing online attendance tickets via Eventbrite (see link below). Advance registration for in person attendance is not necessary. If you plan on attending online, please purchase a ticket at our Eventbrite link.
We are grateful for the generous support of The Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR), The Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity (OCLA), Oxford Medieval Studies, in association with The Oxford Research Centre for Humanities (TORCH), and The Faculty of History of the University of Oxford, as well as the many others who have helped with the conference’s facilitation.
We look forward to welcoming you to Oxford. Best wishes, the Conference Organisers: OUBS President Alexander Sherborne OUBS Secretary Ilia Curto Pelle OUBS Treasurer Benjamin Sharkey
The OUBS Committee is grateful for the generous support of:
The Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR)
The Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity (OCLA)
Oxford Medieval Studies, in association with The Oxford Research Centre for Humanities (TORCH)
The Faculty of History of the University of Oxford
The OUBS Committee would also like to express its gratitude to Shaun Cason, Eleanore Debs, Gavriella Makri, Bryce O’Connor, Rosalie Van Dael,Sophia Miller, Alexander Johnston, Nathan Websdale and Duncan Antich for their assistance with the conference’s facilitation.
Conference Programme
Venue: Faculty of History, George Street, Oxford, OX1 2RL
Panel 1b: ‘The Political’ (Chair: Alexander Johnston)
Duncan Antich (Blackfriars College, Oxford) Compassion and Community: The Regula Pastoralis and Gregory’s Approach to Schism Alejandro Laguna López (Central European University) An Anti-Novelistic Novel: Subverting Love in Niketas Eugenianos’ Drosilla and Charicles Averkios (Dimitris) Agoris (University of Athens) Multigeneric examples in Michael Choniates’s Educational Activity
Euan Croman (Queen’s University Belfast) Transgressing the domus imperii in the fourth and fifth centuries: Treason or Family Trouble? Daniel Murphy (Independent Scholar) Usurpation Narratives as Political Commentary in Fourth-Century Historiography Merve Savas (Ohio State University) Twisting the Narrative: Textual Transgression in Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae 14
Session 2: Saturday, 14.00–15.30
Panel 2a: ‘The Sexual’ (Chair: Alexander Sherborne)
Panel 2b: ‘The Conciliar’ (Chair: Bryce O’Connor)
Maria Christian (Independent Scholar) “Look at that wood!” An Investigation into a Bizarre Sexual Practice Ascribed to the “Chaldeans” Involving Iconography in an Early Islamic Sex Manual Vid Žepič (University of Ljubljana) Legal Perspectives on Sexual Transgressions in Early-Byzantine Legal Sources Pierrick Gerval (University of Nantes) Sexual violences during wartime, a transgression of Church prohibitions regarding sexuality in Byzantium (7th -13th century)
Kathleen McCulloch (University of Cambridge) Did Dioscorus transgress, or adhere to, established conciliar procedure at Ephesus II (449)? Alexander Johnston (Kellogg College, Oxford) The Edge of Divinity: The Role of Wisdom in the Logos Prosphonetikos of the Quinisext Council Rachel Edney (University of Notre Dame) The Eucharist in John Rufus’ Plerophories: Eucharistic Theology and Christological Controversy
Session 3: Saturday, 16.00–17.30
Panel 3a: ‘On the Edges of Byzantium’ (Chair: Benjamin Sharkey)
Panel 3b: ‘In the Land of Egypt’ (Chair: Sophia Miller)
Shaun Cason (Worcester College, Oxford) The End of Transgressions? Examining the Seventh-Century Treaty Between Islamic Egypt and Medieval Nubia Dmitriy Kravets (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford) Orthodoxy and/or Empire? A Reassessment of the Career of Gregory Tsamblak (fl. 1402- 1415) Helena Davies (Linacre College, Oxford) Sitt al-Mulk: A Damsel in Distress? Challenging Art-Historical Efforts to Rescue and Vindicate an Early Islamic Princess
Apolline Gay (Université libre de Bruxelles) Looking for Eve: Figures of Female Transgression on Textiles from Byzantine Egypt Michael Dunchok (Kellogg College, Oxford) A Higher Rank of Gods: In Defense of the Greek Magical Papyri Chloé Agar (Harris Manchester College, Oxford) ‘He thrust his spear into the middle of him, and his bowels came out’: Literary violence against religious and legal transgressions in Early Christian Egypt
Session 4: Sunday, 11.30–13.00
Panel 4a: ‘The Archaeological and the Art-Architectural‘ (Chair: Gavriella Makri)
Panel 4b: ‘The Imperial and the Ecclesiastic‘ (Chair: Nathan Websdale)
Eleanore Debs (Pembroke College, Oxford) Examining the Peculiar Presence of Reliquaries Within Late Antique Baptisteries of the Limestone Massif Sophia Miller (Balliol College, Oxford) Trees ‘Pleasant to the Sight’: Tree-Meaning in Late Antique Floor Mosaics in the Northern Provinces Karolina Tomczyszyn (Lincoln College, Oxford) Transgressive Use of Holy Oils: In Search of Popular Religion in Syriac Christianity
Ziyao Zhu (King’s College London) Neither Just nor Unjust: Alexios I Komnenos and the Linguistic Politics of Byzantine Extrajudicial Confiscation. Dilara Burcu Giritlioğlu (Middle East Technical University) Sinners and Saints of Constantinople: Union of Souls and Separation of Church and State Findlay Willis (St. Stephen’s House, Oxford) Natural illness or divine punishment: the use of disability rhetoric to excuse or vilify the transgressions of Michael IV
Session 5: Sunday, 14.00–15.30
Panel 5a: ‘Defining Aspects of Deviance’ (Chair: Dimitri Kravets)
Panel 5b: ‘Transgressing Intellectual Borders‘ (Chair: Ilia Curto Pelle)
Ekaterina Rybakova (Pirogov Russian National Researcher Medical University) Illnesses of Spirit or Being: The Transgression of Pneuma in Byzantine Medicine Thibaut Auplat (Aix-Marseille University) An overview of deviance in the 7th and 8th centuries: the Heresies by John Damascene Patrick Martin (University of Winchester) Transgression in Middle Byzantine eschatological iconography
Mathijs Clement (University of Cambridge) Egeria, Traveller of Borderlands Rosalie Van Dael (St. Hilda’s College, Oxford) Seeing is believing? Imagination in Augustine’s Letter 7 to Nebridius Seyhun Kılıç (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Monk in a Mundane Realm: Exploring the Intersection of Spiritual and Secular Realms in the Middle Byzantine Period
Saturday, 25 May 2024 Organised by John Butcher (Meran Academy, South Tyrol) together with Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford Medieval Studies), Taylor Institution Library (St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3NA), Room 2.
Session 1, Chair: Nigel Wilson
Angus Bowie (University of Oxford) – A Homerist on Looking into the Nibelungenlied: Cortés or a Panamanian? Handout
10.40-11.00 John Butcher (Meran Academy) – Henry Fuseli, Homer and the Nibelungenlied
Andrea Doda (University of Oxford) – Power and Passion: The Role of Women (and Female Figures) in Homer and the NibelungenliedHandout
Session 2, Chair: Henrike Lähnemann
Joanna Raisbeck (University of Verona) – Between Homer and the Nibelungenlied: Literary and Aesthetic Debates in Heidelberg around 1800
Alan Murray (University of Leeds) – Chivalric Warfare and Heroic Combat in the Nibelungenlied
Christoph Schmitt-Maaß (LMU München / University of Oxford) – The Reception of the Nibelungenlied in Eighteenth-century Leipzig
Manuscript Workshop
Weston Library (Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BG), Bahari Room – Homeric manuscripts with Peter Tóth and Nigel Wilson
by Professor Marion Turner (English). All images by Ian Wallman.
Chaucer Here and Now, a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library, was opened on December 7th by Sir Ben Okri, and it runs until April 28th. I’ve curated this exhibition about Chaucer across time; about inspiration, creativity, and readers. It brings extraordinary medieval manuscripts and early printed books together with modern film, animation, cartoons, and contemporary poetry. Across time, Chaucer has been re-imagined in many different ‘heres and nows,’ made to fit changing expectations and tastes. The show is accompanied by a lavishly-illustrated book of essays about the ideas and themes of the exhibition.
The exhibition includes the oldest Canterbury Tales manuscript, the Hengwrt Chaucer, on loan from the National Library of Wales. It also showcases some of the most beautiful illuminated Chaucer manuscripts, alongside particularly gorgeous manuscripts of Dante and Boccaccio’s work. The first and second editions of the Canterbury Tales, printed by William Caxton in 1476 and 1483 are some of the most important early printed books in existence. William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer, perhaps the loveliest of all Victorian books, is another jewel, and there are also collections of Victorian children’s Chaucers, eighteenth-century Chaucerian ballads, and a cluster of translations into languages such as Ukrainian, Japanese, Farsi, Esperanto, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, French, and Korean.
The exhibition reveals that readers have always been actively responding to Chaucer’s texts. In the first case, three manuscripts are open at the same tale, Chaucer’s unfinished Cook’s Tale. While one scribe simply says that Chaucer did not finish the tale, another finishes it off for him, while a third adds a completely different tale (not by Chaucer) calling it a second Cook’s Tale. Early scribes and editors did not treat the text with reverence – indeed they had to make decisions about what to do with the unfinished texts that Chaucer had left behind.
In later centuries, translators and adaptors became concerned about Chaucer’s discussions of sex and the body, and censored his texts heavily. Pope’s translation of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue cuts out all the references to sex, the genitals, desire, and the body, leaving a short and fairly unrecognisable text. In the nineteenth century, the popular tales included the Clerk’s (about female submissiveness), the Knight’s (about chivalry and courtly love), the Nun’s Priest’s (an animal fable), and the Man of Law’s (female suffering again). The tales about farting, adultery, and sex in trees, were less popular. In contrast, in the twentieth-century, many readers focused exclusively on those fabliaux tales – the prime example being Pasolini’s film.
While in the nineteenth-century, Chaucer was seen as a poet of empire, whose texts should be sent out around the world to promote a certain kind of Englishness, in more recent decades, Chaucer has been reimagined as a poet of diaspora and refugees. The exhibition brings together the Refugee Tales volumes (from 2016 onwards), the records of a project whereby refugees and writers walk the pilgrimage route and tell their stories. Other texts that link Chaucer’s focus on travel and giving voice to diverse storytellers to modern diasporas include Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s translation of part of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue into Jamaican English, Marilyn Nelson’s Cachoeira Tales, which uses the Canterbury Tales as an inspiration for writing about the forced migration of enslaved people, and Zadie Smith’s Wife of Willesden which transposes the Wife of Bath’s Tale from Arthurian Britain to a community of Maroons (the descendants of formerly enslaved people) in eighteenth-century Jamaica.
This exhibition shows how the idea of Chaucer as the Father of English Literature developed, and became firmly established in sixteenth century printed editions, which featured dominating portraits of father Chaucer, positioned in such a way as to construct him as the Father of the Nation. This authoritative idea of Englishness elides the multilingual background of Chaucer’s own texts and life: the exhibition showcases Chaucer’s multilingual sources, his own translations, and his use of different languages in his texts. The global author of today – translated into many languages, and inspiring many writers from diverse backgrounds – is not so far away from the fourteenth-century traveller and diplomat.
The exhibition offers various ways to engage with Chaucer’s texts. You can put on headphones and watch some of the BBC animated Canterbury Tales. On the back wall, the opening couplet of the Tales is projected in multiple languages. Every seven minutes, a one-minute monologue is projected onto one wall: the Knight, Miller, or Wife of Bath, talks about themselves in modern English. And just outside the main exhibition, in the transept, there is a pilgrimage wall, with graphics of the pilgrimage route, onto which visitors are encouraged to stick their own pilgrim creations. Craft materials are provided, along with video tutorials by artists about how to draw Chaucer cartoons or make Chaucer puppets.
Students have been involved in various aspects of the exhibition: the review in the Times opened with discussing the area of the exhibition which features photos of current Oxford students and quotations about what Chaucer means to them. The journalist singled out the student who has a Chaucer tattoo on her forearm.
In his opening speech, Sir Ben Okri talked about the fundamental importance of Chaucer, saying that his work and ideas were like a river running underneath world literary culture. He walked on to the podium to the song ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ which faded after the line ‘as the Miller told his tale.’ It was a great example of how Chaucer seeps into people’s consciousness, and continues to inspire poets, playwrights, artists, students, and all kinds of other people, from all over the world, in many different heres and nows. I hope people have fun in the exhibition, and that it surprises them.
Friday 2 February 2024: Chaucer Now: an event to celebrate recent rewritings of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. (click here to find out more)
Saturday 27 April 2024: Creating Chaucer: join us to explore Chaucer’s world through creative activities, talks and discussion. (click here to find out more)
Elliot Vale will be exploring the translation of Genesis B in more detail at the first OCCT discussion group of Hilary Term: Monday 22nd February, 12.45–14.00, Seminar Room 10, St Anne’s College. Lunch provided.
The Old English poem Genesis B is unique as the only verifiable example of a vernacular-to-vernacular translation during the Anglo-Saxon period. Interestingly, its source language Old Saxon and target language Old English were closely related and mutually intelligible. John Hines argues that the residual ‘Old Saxon’ nature of the Old English poem ‘displays the cultural connexions of a now Saxon-dominated England with the Christian Continent’. In this, Genesis B epitomizes the Anglo-Saxons’ continued and evolving relationship with the continental Saxons, exhibiting both the Saxon ‘other’ and the Saxon ‘self’.
In this blogpost, I will survey the historical and linguistic interrelation of the Anglo-Saxons and the Old Saxons to understand what might have motivated the translation of Genesis B.
Let’s begin before the beginning with the pre-migration linguistic situation of Germanic Europe. The Germanic dialects spoken in north and north-west Europe around the 5th century are known as the ‘West Germanic’ languages. They consisted of three main groups, the ‘Irminonic’ (which became modern High German), ‘Istvaeonic’ (which became modern Dutch), and ‘Ingvaenoic’ (which became modern Frisian, Low German, and English). This last group, also known as ‘North Sea Germanic’, divides further into Anglo-Frisian (a branch including both Old English and Old Frisian) and Low German (which includes Old Saxon). During the Age of Migration from the 4th to the 6th century, peoples whose languages were closely related and mutually intelligible migrated in groups and merged. This seems to have happened with the Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the 5th century.
This migration made a distinction as well as highlighted a commonality between what would become the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Old Saxons on the continent. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Northumbrian scholar Bede names three Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the fifth century: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. He has this to say about them:
‘The people of Kent and the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight are of Jutish origin […] From the Saxon country, that is, the district now known as Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. Besides this, from the country of the Angles, […] which is called Angulus, came the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and all the Northumbrian race […] Angulus is said to have remained deserted from that day to this.’ (Bede 51)
The peninsular Jutes seem have been absorbed by Danish expansion westward into the apparently deserted homeland of the Angles (thought to be Angeln in Schleswig Holstein). Only the Saxons became distinguishable as two peoples, the insular Anglo-Saxons in the southern English Kingdoms of Wessex, Essex, and Sussex and the continental Old Saxons in Old Saxony. Consequently, the Germanic inhabitants of Britain could maintain a connection with the continent they had migrated from, defining themselves both in relation to and in opposition to it.
After their own Christianisation, the Anglo-Saxons pursued missionary activity on the continent among related Germanic tribes, primarily the Frisians and the Saxons. Missionary work was conducted among these groups because they spoke languages (namely Old Frisian and Old Saxon) that were closely related to and mutually intelligible with Old English. In the early 8th century, St. Boniface, a Northumbrian monk, established an important abbey for the Saxons at Fulda in Germany. In a letter, Boniface implored the Anglo-Saxon bishops in England to ‘Take pity upon them [the Saxons]; for they themselves are saying: “We are of one blood and one bone with you”’ (75). Clearly, it was recognized that the insular and continental Saxons were connected historically, linguistically, as well as ethnically.
With Christianity came literacy, and the Saxons seemed to define their nascent literary culture in the light of the Anglo-Saxons who converted them. This is exemplified in a pair of Latin texts, the Praefatio and Versus, which are thought to have once prefaced an edition of Heliand, an Old Saxon gospel poem. Among other points touching on Saxon poetry, these texts describe a Saxon shepherd who was divinely inspired to compose vernacular biblical poetry. This is clearly modelled on the Cædmon legend as narrated in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, a text Anglo-Saxon missionaries took with them to the continent. In Bede’s account, a lay brother at Whitby Abbey abandons a feast in shame at his inability to perform a secular song. Nevertheless, he is visited by an angel and divinely inspired to create religious alliterative poetry, thereby fusing the traditional Germanic verse form with Christian subject matter. A Saxon scribe seems to have borrowed this legend to provide a similar ‘origin story’ for Saxon religious alliterative poetry.
Cultural influence seems to have been mutual, however. For example, Barbara Raw has shown how the illustrations in the Junius 11 manuscript cohere more with Genesis B than Genesis A. From this observation, she argues that the illustrations must derive from an illustrated edition of the complete Old Saxon Genesis. This now lost manuscript was likely given as a wedding gift to King Æthelwulf (Alfred’s father), who married the daughter of the Frankish Emperor Charles the Bald in 856. Furthermore, King Alfred’s educational reforms drew many scholars from the continent, such as a man known as ‘John the Old Saxon’. Alfred’s biographer Asser describes him as ‘a man of most acute intelligence, immensely learned in all fields of literary endeavour’ (93). Alfred’s prioritization of the translation of Latin texts into English also strongly suggests that Genesis B was translated at his court. Thus, Anglo-Saxons helped to establish a Saxon literary culture that consequently influenced the further development of their own.
An important text Alfred commissioned to be translated was the fifth-century Latin History Against the Pagans by the Spanish theologian Paulus Orosius. The Old English version of this work contains an interpolated pair of texts, editorially named ‘Ohthere and Wulfstan’. These texts detail anecdotally the passage of two seafarers all around Scandinavia and the Baltics. An editorial aside as Wulfstan approaches his native Hedeby on Jutland remarks that ‘[t]he English lived in that region before they came to this country’ (Orosius 43–5). So we have come full-circle: the Anglo-Saxons’ continued sense of themselves as a migrant nation only strengthened their ties to their ancestral homelands on the continent.
The Anglo-Saxons never forgot their origins on the continent nor played down their continued relations with it but used it in the formation of their own identity. Genesis B is an Old English poem in language and style but retains enough Old Saxon features to nevertheless convey a deliberate ‘feeling of foreignness’. Lawrence Venuti argues that ‘translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures’ (‘Regimes’ 209). As a translation, Genesis B constructs a foreign identity for a national culture, containing in its hybrid language and literary style the Saxon ‘other’ and the Saxon ‘self’.
Elliot Vale holds a BA in English from the University of York and an MSt in English 650–1550 from the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in applying modern translation theory to medieval texts and the reception of Old English poetry from the 19th to the 21st century, especially through translation. He has written on translational ‘bias’ in the Old English poem Exodus and the Old English Hexateuch and on the stylistic analysis of metrically imitative translations of Beowulf. He translates from Old English and Swedish.
Title image: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 11, p. 31.
Works cited
Asser. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, edited and translated by Michael Lapidge and Simon Keynes, Penguin Books, 1983.
Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited and translated by Betram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford University Press, 1969.
Boniface. The Letters of Saint Boniface, translated by Ephraim Emerton, Norton, 1976.
Hines, John. ‘Attitude Problems? The Old Saxon and Old English Genesis Poems’. Language Structure and Variation: A Festschrift for Gunnel Melchers, edited by Magnus Ljung, Stockholm Studies in English 92, 2000, pp. 69–90.
Magoun, Francis P., Jr. ‘The Praefatio and Versus Associated with some Old Saxon Biblical Poems’. Medieval Studies in Honor of Jeremiah Denis Matthias Ford, edited by Urban T. Holmes, Jr. and Alex J. Denomy, Harvard University Press, 1948, pp. 107–136.
Orosius, Paulus. The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius, translated and edited by Malcolm Godden, Harvard University Press, 2016.
Raw, Barbara. ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius II from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’. Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 5, 1976, pp. 133–148.
Venuti, Lawrence. ‘Translation as cultural politics: Regimes of domestication in English’. Textual Practice, vol. 7, no. 2, 1993, pp. 208–223.
Poetry in the Medieval World is a network that explores premodern literature from a global perspective. Its aim is to address broad questions and seek answers building on contemporary discussions in comparative and world literature through a cross-disciplinary approach.
Our case study is currently poetry between c. 600 and c. 1250 CE. Poetry is a multifaceted phenomenon: it answers to different needs, travels across communities, and undergoes continuous changes. It is rooted in shared culture and knowledge; its intercultural communication or its appreciation by posterity can, at times, fail. There are recurring features: vivid images, complex words and rhythm, but also recitation music and singing. It is an expression of beauty and harmony. Even if poetry requires specialised experts to be scrutinised, yet its study should be easily approachable and crucial to the understanding of premodern literature, but also of literature as a whole. This – and way more – is the realm of poetry the Network will explore.
The Network creates an infrastructure for an open dialogue on medieval poetry with reading groups every two weeks, lectures by national and international scholars, and two annual meetings. The focus of our discussion is the production and transmission of poetry, its historical reception, and the challenges of translating it into modern languages, with a particular emphasis on English.
The Network connects people driven by scholarly curiosity. Therefore, we are extremely keen on receiving expressions of interest for collaboration from people at any phase of their career. If you are interested in this project and want to contribute to it actively, please email Ugo Mondini. The first events in Hillary 2024 will be shared in the coming weeks on the TORCH Networks website and the network’s X account (@PoetryMedieval), both of which are currently under development.
Images:
Fujiwara no Yukinari (Kōzei), Excerpt from Bai Juyi’s “Autobiography of a Master of Drunken Poetry Recitation”
Hinksey Meadow is first on record in a grant by Henry I to Abingdon Abbey 1102 x 1110, and it’s still there, in West Oxford in walking distance of Oxford Railway Station, one of the rarest, most species-rich meadows in Britain. But it’s threatened with destruction – by the Environment Agency. The EA is insisting that it should build only the most destructive version of its Oxford Flood Alleviation Scheme, scooping out a 5 km channel through the Oxford green corridor from Botley to Sandford Lock, through Hinksey Meadow.
The UK has lost 97% of its meadows since World War II, including so many floodmeadows that the Thames Valley contains a quarter of those remaining. Hinksey Meadow is even rarer than that: it is a wildflower floodplain meadow with type MG43a grassland, of which only four square miles survive in the UK as a whole. It’s of much higher diversity than, for instance, Port Meadow.
Hinksey Meadow has survived for the best part of a thousand years because it’s part of a sustainable agricultural collaboration between humans and their environment: managed grazing fertilizes the meadow, and the meadow’s hay cut provides food for stock with no need for industrial fertilizer. Hinksey is also an invaluable seedbank for the future of regenerative farming.
Image1. Part of the scheme area, showing the direction floodwater takes and the location of the EA’s channel (up to 200 metres wide). Red arrow marks site of Hinksey Meadow
The channel requires
digging out c.400,000 cubic metres (700,000 tonnes) of soil and gravel
removing 3780 mature trees and 11 kms hedgerows
destroying habitat for many species of insects, birds and animals
destroying existing braided floodplain streams and wild life corridor
compulsory purchase of some 1000 parcels of land in and around the scheme area
release of sequestered carbon: grassland is second only to peat in its capacity
Hinksey Meadow cannot survive digging up and hydrological interference.
Landscape artist Elaine Kazimierczuk painted the Meadow for a charity auction to raise funds for its defence: see her at work and hear why, even on the grey windy English summer’s day the weather gave her, she feels so passionately about the Meadow
The EA’s channel offers
a small increase in alleviation to a few dozen houses and shops at massive financial and environmental cost
a big ticket scheme that will ultimately enable more development in and around the floodplain
And it is not needed:
up to 85-90% of the scheme’s protection is offered by much smaller localised flood defences such as bunds and earthworks
independent experts in hydrology and cost/benefits have shown that no channel works very nearly as well, without the enormous environmental destruction, and have also proposed several other alternative strategies.
Why does the EA insist on the channel?
It won’t say. In the absence of clear reasons, we can only speculate that it decided on the channel (its characteristic response in twentieth-century flood schemes) in advance and then worked backwards to try to find mitigations. Independent experts pointed out that the EA used the wrong DEFRA metric for the area’s biodiversity in its application. In its revised application the proper metric turned the EA’s claimed 10% increase in biodiversity into a biodiversity loss.
The EA now claims it will
translocate MG4a grassland. This cannot be done according to independent experts: such grassland takes hundreds of years to create.
create wetlands and plant saplings onsite and offsite (in unspecified locations somewhere in Oxfordshire)
secure environmental partners and get landowners to help with the costs of monitoring and maintenance
This leads to absolute loss of irreplaceable bio-diversity and interlocking mature eco-systems at least 30 years to wait before saplings become mature trees – if they are maintained. (For the effects of a riverine EA scheme in 2022 see this BBC Interview)
Some of the trees that will be lost within and beside the Oxford meadowsThe Willow Walk, the path by Hinksey MeadowThe EA’s proposed replacement for Willow Walk
What can be done? Objectors have secured a Public Enquiry into the scheme. The Enquiry opens 10 am on Tuesday 14 November 2023 for a month at The King’s Centre, Osney Mead, Oxford OX2 0ES (walkable from the railway station). FIND US | The King’s Centre (kingscentre.co.uk)
You can
1. Support the Public Enquiry by joining a peaceful demonstration 10am on 14th November outside the King’s Centre entrance. Feel free to bring your own signs and banners. Please do get in contact at the email below if you would like to come on the 14th.
3. Spread the word! And if you know people who might be able and willing to contribute to the defence of the meadow, direct them to the Go fund me page
References and more information
Chance, E., Colvin, C., Cooper, J., Day, C.J., Hassell, T.G., Jessup, M., Selwyn, N.,1979. A History of the County of Oxford London (Victoria County History: London, 1979)Volume 4, The City of Oxford, ‘Other Meadows’: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol4/pp265-283#h3-0021
Hanson, W.J. A Thousand Years : A Study of the Interaction between People and their Environment in the Cumnor, Wytham and North Hinksey Area of Oxfordshire, formerly Berkshire, vol. 2 (privately printed, 1996: copies held by Bodleian and Oxfordshire History Centre).
Any questions to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, FMAA SCR Associate St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford Thomas F. X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature (Emerita), Fordham University olim Professor of Medieval Literature, University of York
The last three talks will be of special interest to medieval graduates working in Old English (or Old Norse): Grace Khuri (Nov. 8) will look at compound personal names starting with Ælf- (‘Elf’) that Tolkien encountered in his set texts as an undergraduate (c. 1913-1915) and how these contributed to building (what Tolkien himself later called) his ‘Elf-centric’ mythology for The Book of Lost Tales (c. 1917-1919) — the earliest version of what would later become The Silmarillion (1977), the epic, mythic-legendary prehistory of Middle-earth. The following week is Dr. Laura Varnam’s lecture on ‘Tolkien and Beowulf’ (Nov. 15), and the last lecture of the term will be given by Dr. Simon Horobin on ‘Tolkien the Philologist’ (Nov. 22).
Although there is an online booking system that now states that all these lectures are full, there have been many no-shows at these seminars and the organizers have said that anyone can come along now (without booking) and there should be room to fit everyone in. For those who cannot make it (due to teaching commitments, lectures, tutorials etc.), the talks will be recorded on a case-by-case basis (depending on the permission of each speaker). If there are any questions about this, contact Dr. Stuart Lee at stuart.lee@ell.ox.ac.uk.
(By Sophie Bacchus-Waterman, Special Collections Photographer, St John’s College)
As Special Collections Photographer for the Digitization Project at St John’s College, I photograph the manuscripts and early printed books from our Special Collections. Given that we have over 20,000 early printed books and over 300 manuscripts, and it would be impossible for one person to digitize them all, we have devised a shortlist of items which will be made available online during this project. These might be manuscripts with significant cultural or historic value, interesting provenance, unique texts, or items that are regularly requested by researchers. Several items have already been made available on Digital Bodleian, and more are being added regularly.
Grazer Conservation Cradle
Books being photographed are placed onto the Grazer Conservation Cradle. The cradle is set to a 120° opening angle. If a book is not able to be opened at that angle, it is supported with foam wedges. Along the side of the cradle is a vacuum bar, on which the page being photographed is placed. Each page of the book being photographed is placed onto the vacuum bar, which, when switched on, acts like a vacuum and gently pulls the page into place. Along the vacuum bar is a ruler, which allows anyone viewing the book on Digital Bodleian to see its size. The colour swatch lets me keep the lighting and colour accurate from page to page.
Vacuum bar, ruler, and colour swatch on the cradle
Images are taken with a PhaseOne camera, which is directly parallel to the page being photographed. The camera can be moved closer or further away using a control panel on the side of the cradle. If I’m working with a smaller book, for instance, the camera might need to be closer to the cradle than if I’m working with a larger book. The cradle can also be adjusted with the control panel, and moved up or down as necessary, or left and right with a small dial. As I move through a book, the cradle might need be adjusted accordingly.
Control panel and dial for adjusting the cradle
Besides photographing the internals of our books, I also photograph the externals, using a flatbed and a wall-mounted Canon camera, in the setup seen in the photograph below.
MS 164, a 14th century French manuscript with a velvet binding, on the flatbed
The book is placed on the flatbed, and I photograph its front and back covers. It is also placed on its fore edge and spine, carefully supported with small towers of foam blocks on either side, which are covered with black cloth. I also include a ruler and colour swatch in photos of the externals, for the same reason as they are included in the internal shots.
Photographing MS 61
MS 61 was always high on our priority list for items to be digitized. A 13th century bestiary made in York, richly illuminated, MS 61 is one of the jewels of our Special Collections. If you would like to read more about it, you can see its catalogue description on Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries, encoded by my colleague, Sian Witherden.
I knew that MS 61 would initially pose challenges, due to its extensive use of gold leaf. Each illumination is backed with a thick ground of gold leaf, which reflects light when photographed. Given the amount of gold on certain folios, the light reflected in such a way that the gold looked white, an effect known as “specular highlights”, as seen in the below left photograph. In order to photograph a manuscript with extensive gold leaf, the lamps in the Photography Studio must be pointed upwards, away from the cradle. The light then bounces off the ceiling and onto the gold leaf, as seen in the below right photograph.
St John’s College, MS 61, fol. 9r
Once the issue of lighting the gold leaf was resolved, MS 61 was a dream to work with. For an 800-year-old manuscript, it was incredibly easy to handle. Written on high quality vellum, it was sturdy, its pages turned easily, and its modern binding meant that it was happy to open to the 120° angle of the cradle. As with the other books I’ve worked with so far, MS 61 was placed onto the cradle – it opened easily, and was handled with the usual care I handle the Special Collections items, but it didn’t need any extra support while out.
As I moved through the manuscript, I was struck by the incredible illuminations throughout it. Even after centuries, it is in a stunning condition, almost as if it had been made yesterday. In order to accommodate the manuscript, I moved the cradle left and right, and up and down, as needed, so that it was resting comfortably on the cradle. Above everything else, the preservation of whatever book I am working with is paramount to the project. Luckily, MS 61 didn’t require any extra support, or prove difficult at all.
The social media response to MS 61 being digitized was astounding, but also hardly surprising. MS 61 is one of the most beautiful and treasured items in our collection, and a lot of people have been excited to see it online. Not only is it a privilege to work with such stunning and rare books in my role, but knowing that the Digitization Project is facilitating research and introducing people to our collection online makes it all the more rewarding.
If you would like to see more of our collection, please visit our Digital Library, where you can read more about our collection, and see what has already been made available to view online. If you would like to read more about MS 61, take a look at this Book of the Month blog post here.
Jewish languages are essential and incorporeal parts of Jewish history, creativity, culture and identity. Most of them are currently in danger of extinction while others are already dead, known only from early writing. Various research programmes stress the immense role of vernacular languages in Jewish life and culture as well as point to their fragility, yet universities offer very few learning opportunities for most of these rare Jewish languages.
Created in August 2021 by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies (OCHJS) in collaboration with the Institut des Langues Rares (ILARA) at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), Paris, the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages (OSRJL) offers free, online teaching of rare Jewish languages and their cultural-historical contexts—along with a public lecture series, academic blog, Visiting Fellows programme, Jewish music classes (this year focusing on the history of Yiddish music!) and language Cafés—accessible at no cost to accepted students and members of the general public around the globe. By doing so, the OSRJL aims to preserve, spark interest in, enable access to and reflect on the nature and role of Jewish languages as rich linguistic facets of Jewish life and history. It is the first school of its kind globally.
You can read about the OSRJL’s second year, 2022–23, in our recently published Impact Report:
Already, 2023–24 is shaping up to be an exciting year for the OSRJL! We received 671 applications for language classes beginning in Michaelmas Term 2023 alone—more applications than we received in total across all 3 terms in 2021–22 and 2022–23. Clearly, interest in rare Jewish languages is on the rise, and we greatly look forward to facilitating access to and engagement with them in the coming year and beyond.
We are expanding our language offerings this year to include classes on 3 languages new to the programme—Haketia, Judeo-Hamadani and Kivruli. Doing so means we will be teaching a record 18 languages (listed below) alongside continuing our many other activities!
Languages to be taught through the OSRJL in 2023–24 include:
Haketia (Dr Carlos Yebra López, University College London)
Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic (Dr Assaf Bar Moshe, Freie Universität Berlin)
Judeo-Greek (Dr Julia G. Krivoruchko, University of Cambridge)
Judeo-Hamadani (Professor Dr Saloumeh Gholami, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Judeo-Italian (Dr Marilena Colasuonno, University of Naples)
Judeo-Moroccan (Haviva Fenton)
Judeo-Neo-Aramaic (Dr Dorota Molin, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge)
Judeo-Persian (Dr Ofir Haim, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, & Maximilian Kinzler)
Judeo-Provençal (Dr Peter Nahon, Université de Neuchâtel)
Judeo-Tat (Professor Gilles Authier & Dr Murad Suleymanov, EPHE, Paris)
Judeo-Turkish (Professor Laurent Mignon, University of Oxford)
Karaim (Professor Henryk Jankowski, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Kivruli (Dr Hélène Gérardin, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales/EPHE)
Ladino (Dr Carlos Yebra López, University College London)
Old Yiddish (Dr Diana Matut)
Yiddish (Dr Beruriah Wiegand, OCHJS, University of Oxford)
Some of the languages we teach—such as Classical Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Provençal, Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Greek—are extinct, and our teaching is therefore based, at least in part, on medieval texts and manuscripts written in these languages.
While applications for classes beginning in Michaelmas Term 2023 are now closed, applications for language classes beginning in Hilary Term 2024—including Advanced Beginners Judeo-French, Beginners Judeo-Greek, Beginners Judeo-Tat and Advanced Judeo-Turkish—will open in November 2023. To receive notifications about these and future application opportunities, as well as other activities of the OSRJL, follow the Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies on social media (X: @OCHJSnews, Facebook: Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies, LinkedIn: Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies and Vimeo: OCHJS) and/or sign up to its Activities Email List by emailing academic.administrator@ochjs.ac.uk. To learn more about the OSRJL programme as a whole, please visit our website or email us at osrjl@ochjs.ac.uk.
We hope to see you in one of our classes and/or at one of our events soon!