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Report on a Talk by Daron Burrows by Josefina Troncoso

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22/11/2018

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Week 1 MT Medieval Seminars

As a way to diversify both the contents of this blog and my interests, I attended professor Daron Burrows’ seminar on anthropomorphic genitalia in medieval French literature, back in first week of Michaelmas.

What?

Exactly that. Genitalia that are, if you may, well-endowed with human characteristics.

Dr Burrows’ discussion began with a reminder that the anthropomorphising of human sexual organs goes much further back than we’d think. In the famous sixteenth-century treaty of witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, for instance, witches are said to have detached penises, which then became animated on their own accord and had adventures of some kind. Instead of behaving like people, however, these loose members were rather more like pets; they even nested and were fed oats.

The subjects of Dr Burrows’ discussion, in addition to resembling archetypal characters of medieval romance to an uncomfortable degree, were a couple of centuries older; they belong in the Old French fabliaux, or short comic narratives written mostly by anonymous authors within the 12thand 14th centuries. One of their distinguishing and most remarkable features is their frank treatment of sex, which one wouldn’t find in courtly and (especially!) religious literature – but their obsession with sexual organs reaches such lengths that Dr Burrows referred to another academic’s suggestion that male genitalia, at least, is “treated like meat on display at a butchers.”

The texts to which Dr Burrows introduced us subvert that by turning the genitalia itself into their protagonists, becoming detached from the human body in five alternative ways.

The first one, “gaze”, refers to the narratorial focus on one of the characters’ genitalia, rather than on the character themselves. In Le Fevre de Creeil, for instance, the smith Gautier’s penis is spoken about in precise detail throughout an impressive twenty-nine lines, and receives more attention than both its bearer and the other protagonists. It is, if you may, described at great length. “Metaphor”, the second degree, occurs when the text uses metaphor and euphemism to separate the characters from their genitalia, as in La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre. The third degree, “uncontrollability”, applies to texts where characters lose control of their sexual organs, as though possessing of their own. Priapism, Dr Burrows adds, “is the order of the day.” After uncontrollability comes “detachment”, a self-explanatory turn of events which is known to occur frequently to priests who have been castrated. The final degree of separation is “autonomy”, in which the sexual organs live autonomously as anthropomorphic entities, without anyone even suggesting that they were once—if ever—attached to someone.

Now that we know the five degrees of genital separation, Dr Burrows introduces his two case studies: Du vit et de la coille, and Do con, do vet et de la soriz; “Vit” and “Con” respectively. In Vit, a verse narrative consisting of 80 lines, a proudly sitting penis rides to a vagina’s rescue after she has been stolen away by two Bretons. Meanwhile, she is tossing hay in a field. The penis is eager to rescue her, but the testicles—who seem like a part of the sexual organ independent of the sexual organ itself!—give him a hard time and refuse. A storm begins to break and the penis asks the vagina to shelter him under the hay, which they’ve set aside in a pile, but she is reluctant to let the balls in because they were unhelpful earlier. This, Dr Burrows concludes, is sort of a twisted lesson that explains why the testicles cannot enter the vagina during intercourse. Con, of 124 lines, describes the adventure of an “impressively sized” penis, a very proud vagina, and their mouse companion. Like the previous protagonist, both penis and vagina engage in various agricultural and military activities; the vagina in particular is noted to be uncharacteristically chivalrous. They make their merry way into a town and are given jobs based on their respective skills by one of its inhabitants; somehow, the penis ends up thrusting the mouse and a handful of grapes inside the vagina. Luckily, the mouse quickly makes its way out: as it turns out, the bottom of the vagina is open. What these disparate narratives leave us with is ultimate genital autonomy.

How could we make sense of these stories? Dr Burrows suggests a number of readings:

  • Comic: perhaps the first one to come to mind, since—unless you’re the prudish type—our immediate reaction is to laugh without thinking of what anything could mean. The comedic aspect of these narratives comes from the transgressive sexual content and language, and the disruptions of conditions of the human body. But could it point towards a more disturbing idea? Burrows suggests the possibility that they might reflect underlying anxieties about social change and sexual desire in their period of composition, as detailed by Peter Lombard and Augustine. Perhaps, for instance, the fanny acting like a knight in the presence of a brave cock reflected fears about women expressing their sexual thoughts.
  • Genre: how were these fabliaux categorised in their period of composition, and how do we categorise them today? Because Vit and Con were not published until 1995 and 2001 respectively, it is an unfortunately likely possibility that scholars may have chosen to ignore them in fear of changing the way we currently understand and define the literary genre of the fabliaux. The consequences for scholars today are, for starters, that there is little material to support our study of these texts. The neglect these texts have suffered teaches scholars of all disciplines that it is crucial to examine primary sources carefully, even when we may assume everything about them has already been said.
  • Intergeneric play with genre: what both the texts do by alluding to Brittany is parodying the matière de Bretagne—that is, material belonging to the Arthurian tradition. In Vit, the cock is modelled on the archetypal romance hero in search for adventures, with the balls dangling from his neck as both his shield and companion; the vagina plays the exquisitely shaped, desperate damsel in distress. The storm could be easily overlooked, but it provides an even more interesting example of intertextual play as its description is almost directly lifted from Chretien’sYvain. In Con, the role of the knight is inverted and played by the assertive vagina. The second genre being targeted here is the fable: “parodic engagement is underlined by misappropriation of the didactic structure of the fable”, Dr Burrows explains, clarifying thus the relationship between the vagina and the testicles. Finally, two contemporary genres are subjected to parody, albeit subtly: the epic—as evidenced by the siege mentality characteristic of both texts, as well as the vagina’s aforementioned knightly behaviour in Con—and the courtly, which actively avoids any mention of genitals in favour of politeness and elevated expressions of love.
  • Generational: one of the benefits of featuring detached sexual organs as protagonists is that pregnancy cannot happen, regardless of how intimately they engage with each other. Fertility and fecundity, however, are still written into the tales in two forms: the penis’ tiredness once he comes out of the vagina is a clear allusion to ejaculation, and the agricultural setting—the tossing of hay by both the penis and vagina—are symbolic with the fertile outcome of the sowing of seed.
  • Linguistic interest: The tossing of hay, as well as the shoving of hay into a pile, are both contemporary euphemisms for sex; in Vit, they provide the basis for the whole narrative. Normally, euphemisms and metaphor would allow speakers to refer to sex without using explicit language, but both narratives mock that need for discretion by having sexual organs as protagonists of stories that make literal use of said euphemisms.
  • Gender: one might be tempted to call Con a “proto-feminist” tale—the vagina, after all, is the braver and more headstrong one in the unlikely trio—but it is much more likely portraying male anxieties about female sexuality than giving women some semblance of empowerment. The bottom of the vagina, Burrows paraphrased from Con, is said to be “so wide and deep that there is nothing in the whole world that if it fell would not perish as though in the salty sea”; the female body is as dangerous as it is alluring. But in addition to performing behaviour that one might consider [more] masculine, the vagina is formally addressed as “sire fanny”, which assuages rather than intensifies any male anxieties since the protagonist is engaging in a recognisably masculine role. In a parodical narrative where genitalia are doing as they please, detached from any men or women, they are no longer signifiers of gender; thus, the knightly vagina does not have to be interpreted as a symbol of feminine empowerment.

Besides having heard the words “cock” and “fanny” more than I ever have in my whole life, this fantastic seminar gave me the opportunity to think about how the way we decide to explore a text may affect the way future generations of scholars choose to work on them; and how, likewise, our curiosity about what we research should not be restricted to nor dictated by the secondary sources available to us. This seminar also reminded me of the importance of paying very careful attention to language, and to consider that in any text I research, there could be expressions or other complex forms of linguistic play that might enhance my understanding should I be savvy enough to spot them. I am thankful to Dr Burrows for the suggested strategies for readings of the two texts—of any text, whether they might be as disparate as these fabliaux or not—and for the many laughs shared from beginning to end of the seminar.

The Medieval French Research Seminar meets at the Maison Française on Tuesdays in odd weeks (refreshments from 17:00; papers starting at 17:15). The programme for MT2018 was as follows:

9 October 2018 (Week 1):      Daron Burrows (Oxford): ‘Une coille et un vit s’esmurent…: genital anthropomorphism and the aesthetics of transgression’

23 October 2018 (Week 3):    Miriam Cabré (Girona): ‘Wit, slander, flattery, propaganda: what’s behind troubadour moral poetry?’

6 November 2018 (Week 5): Rebecca Dixon (Liverpool)

Forbidden Ideas: Medieval Heresy and the Scholastics

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28/05/2018

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Report by Ann Giletti, Faculty of Theology and Religion

Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities: 16 – 17 April 2018

Forbidden Ideas gathered experts on medieval heresy for an international, multi-disciplinary conference, which was held in a workshop format. Ten speakers from the UK, continental Europe and the US, ranging from PhD student and postdoc to established expert and professor emeritus, presented at this two-day event. It was organised as part of a Horizon 2020 Marie Curie project (‘Boundaries of Science: Medieval Condemnations of Philosophy as Heresy’).

The conference’s approach to the subject of heresy was unusual in two respects. First, its aim was to make a clear distinction between heretical ideas and heretical people, and to look at what made ideas heretical in the Middle Ages. Second, in doing this, it brought together specialists who were diverse not only in their disciplines, but also in their general areas of research: popular heresy (heresies such as Catharism) and academic heresy (heresy in the university context). The paths of these specialists normally do not cross, as the two areas are treated as distinct research topics, and are rarely mentioned together in monographs on medieval heresy. The papers had in common that they examined the work of trained professionals – such as scholastic theologians, bishops and inquisitors – to see how they assessed or labelled ideas as heretical, and the systems in which this took place. Through this combination, the presentations offered diverse and surprising perspectives on how ideas were classed as heretical, and on the formal procedures followed in dealing with them.

Five speakers presented on aspects of popular heresy or the institutional systems involved in defining and prosecuting heresy. Irene Bueno (University of Bologna), author of Defining Heresy: Inquisition, Theology, and Papal Policy in the Time of Jacques Fournier (2016), spoke about theological consultations opened by Pope John XXII with scholastic theologians at the Curia, and how the writings of one such theologian, Jacques Fournier, reveals the intellectual processes leading to new codifications of heresy. Lucy Sackville (University of York), author of Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations (2011), and Project Co-Investigator of York’s Doat Project on Inquisition registers of Languedoc, presented on 13th-century heresy trials in Italy, using documents to show how cooperation among bishops, inquisitors and local authorities was necessary for effective pursuit of heretics, and that there was a standard set of offending ideas reported, or looked for, in examining suspects. Amélie de las Heras (IRHT-CNRS, Paris), expert in medieval text and the Iberian Peninsula, assessed the definitions and descriptions of heresies in the works of Martin de León (d. 1203) and Lucas of Tuy (d. 1249), and the heritage of Isidore of Seville in the way they described and denounced heresies. Jack Baigent (University of Nottingham) presented on the coinciding of condemned ideas of two distinct groups, followers of the Waldensians and Spiritual Franciscans in 14th-century Languedoc, and he considered how these groups may have been in contact. Alexander Fidora Riera (Universitat Autònoma deBarcelona), head of the ERC Latin Talmud Project, spoke on how the Latin translation of the Talmud, and the trial and burning of the Talmud in the 1240s, were steps towards reassessing the legal status of Jews and Judaism under Church authority, to class them as heretical.

Interspersed with these talks were five by speakers presenting on academic heresy. William Courtenay (Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison), distinguished expert on medieval universities and pioneer researcher into academic heresy, spoke on how Paris university scholastics were caught up in politics of heresy accusations in the clash between Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII, and in Philip’s attack on the Templars, where the scholars were sought after for their expertise. Andrew Larsen (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), author of The School of Heretics: Academic Condemnation at the University of Oxford, 1277-1409 (2011), presented on the case of Henry Crumpe (fl. 1380-1401), a figure who participated in carrying out academic censure and yet was also a target of it, and was accused of both academic and popular heresy. Gregory Moule, author of Corporate Jurisdiction, Academic Heresy, and Fraternal Correction at the University of Paris, 1200-1400 (2016), presented on Denis Foullechat, a 14th-century Franciscan and scholastic forced to recant his views on apostolic poverty, whose case is revealing about contemporary understanding of heresy as a criminal offence. Deborah Grice (University of Oxford), expert on the University of Paris Condemnations of 1241, analysed use of the terms ‘error’ and ‘heresy’ by Albertus Magnus to speak of dangerous ideas. Ann Giletti (University of Oxford) spoke on how scholastics labelled dangerous philosophical theories as heretical, and on medieval authority to declare ideas heretical.

A round table at the end of the proceedings was chaired by Kantik Ghosh (University of Oxford), author of The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (2002). Throughout the conference, discussion drew together ideas from the various papers; and the round table took up the themes of diverse approaches of historians of popular and academic heresies, as well as questions that arise in distinguishing between heretical people and heretical ideas.

The workshop format worked well in fostering a stimulating and productive environment. One-hour slots for presentations gave time for case studies and in-depth analysis, as well as open discussion. Fruitful exchanges took place among the speakers and participants in the event. Several participants commented that they enjoyed and learned from the presentations, and that they were pleased to make contact with the speakers.

The venue, the Seminar Room in the Radcliffe Humanities building, provided a comfortable setting with excellent handicap access. OMS and TORCH kindly gave us the venue free of charge, with OMS generously awarding a grant for catering costs, and TORCH supplying invaluable help in managing logistics during the event. Marie Curie funding covered the travel and accommodation costs of the speakers. We are very grateful for all of this support, and the opportunity for dialogue it fostered.

The event programme is available here.

This conference was organised as part of a Horizon 2020 Marie Curie project

(Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – IF – 701523 – BoundSci).

Disiecta membra musicae: conference report

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27/03/2018

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27 March 2018 TORCH team

Disiecta membra musicae: conference report

Open any book bound before the 18th century and there is a good chance that you will find fragments cut from another book and re-used to support the binding or to protect the pages from the wooden boards. Often this binder’s waste will be taken from printed books, but in many cases the added strength of parchment made it more effective to chop up a medieval manuscript. A remarkable proportion of medieval binding fragments have musical notation on them—music went out of fashion, liturgies were proscribed, and large choirbooks provided a more versatile format for dismembering than a smaller text-book. Very few complete music books have survived intact from the Middle Ages, and so it is small wonder that musicologists have been working on medieval binding fragments ever since the birth of their discipline. A conference at Magdalen College on 19–21 March 2018 brought together almost 50 specialists to discuss the particular problems raised by disiecta membra musicae.

Margaret Bent opened proceedings with a tour d’horizon of the many vicissitudes affecting manuscripts over time. As founding director of one of the first ever manuscript digitisation projects, DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, which in its early days had the specific purpose of gathering images of polyphonic musical fragments, she could demonstrate the range of applications and innovations which have been used to make worn texts visible again, and to connect fragments cut from the same book and now strewn across the world. These techniques reached previously inconceivable levels of sophistication in Julia Craig-McFeely’s presentation on her latest advances in digital restoration.

Several speakers covered the pleasures and pitfalls of gathering information on musical fragments. Paweł Gancarczyk considered polyphonic fragments from late-medieval Bohemia, and the extent to which they can be associated with the Utraquist brotherhoods from which many complete manuscripts survive. Jurij Snoj has systematically searched through all the libraries in Ljubljana, and most other collections across Slovenia, to produce a database listing more than 550 fragments from around 140 manuscripts. A catalogue of a comparable number of sources from Hungary was published in 1981, but many more have come to light since that date, and Zsuzsa Csagány discussed the means of updating the older records for a new database. In the Nordic countries the scale is altogether greater, with some 50,000 fragments now accounted for in databases in Norway, Denmark, Finland and especially Sweden: Sean Dunnahoe provided a helpful overview of what can and cannot be said by means of statistical enquiries of the Swedish database of medieval fragments, MPO (Medeltida Pergamentomslag/Medieval Parchment Cover Database). The biggest project to date, building on the success of the Swiss manuscripts website e-codices, is Fragmentarium, deftly presented by its director Christoph Flüeler.

It was through e-codices that Susan Rankin came across images of an unusual 10th-century fragment used as a wrapper for documents and preserved in the Swiss nunnery of Müstair. In its format and content it relates to no other manuscript, and thereby raises important questions about the assumptions we make when assigning other fragments to particular types of book which happen to survive in complete form elsewhere. David Hiley took a similar line in discussing fragments of saints’ offices, which might have been attached as easily to codices of saints’ Vitae as to antiphoners. In the case of notated songs, Helen Deeming demonstrated that fragments sometimes assumed to be witnesses to a widespread tradition of song anthologies in medieval England are just as likely to have come from miscellanies of prose and verse.

Reinhard Strohm took a seemingly incongruous collection of musical materials in MS 5094 of the Austrian National Library, and demonstrated that there may in fact be more connections between them than first meets the eye. Other presentations included Daniele Sabaino on the annotations to a charter in Ravenna which may well constitute the earliest musical setting of a text in the Italian language. Karl Kügle discussed a newly discovered group of polyphonic fragments in the binding of a manuscript in the Landeshauptarchiv of Koblenz, and the extent to which the binder may have deliberately chosen particular leaves from his pile of binding materials on grounds of the appropriateness of their texts. Christian Leitmeir introduced us to the complex and idiosyncratic programme of dismemberment and rebinding undertaken by Amplonius Rating de Berka in forming his library, preserved to this day in Erfurt. David Catalunya reconsidered the position of ars antiquapolyphony in Castile, in the light of several recently discovered fragments, and later demonstrated his considerable talents as a performer on the clavisimbalum as part of the ensemble Tasto Solo, which provided a superb concert in the evocative darkness of Magdalen chapel under the direction of Guillermo Pérez, interspersing keyboard arrangements from the Faenza codex with madrigals and ballate by Jacopo da Bologna, Landini and others.

The symposium The Study of Medieval Music Manuscript Fragments ca. 800–1500, organised by Giovanni Varelli, took place on 19 to 21 March 2018 in Magdalen College. The full programme is available on the ‘events’ page of the Oxford Medieval Studies Programme. The full booklet with abstracts and further links can be downloaded here.

This conference report was written by Nicolas Bell (Nicolas.Bell@trin.cam.ac.uk). 

Gender and Medieval Studies Conference: Gender, Identity, Iconography

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14/03/2018

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By Rachel Moss

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD: 8 – 10 JANUARY 2018           

The Gender and Medieval Studies Conference is an annual peripatetic event that has been running since at least the late 1980s and traditionally takes place in early January. It welcomes scholars working across the whole Middle Ages and from any discipline. This small but well-respected conference is a key part of the calendar for medievalists and gender scholars alike. The steering committee of GMS asked me if I could host the conference at Oxford, and I was pleased to accept after drafting in Gareth Evans (Faculty of English) as co-organiser, with able assistance from Ayoush Lazikani and Anna Senkiw. Sixty-five delegates, ranging from masters students to tenured professors, from all around the world, eventually made their way to Oxford this January for three days of stimulating discussion on gender and identity in the medieval world.

This year’s theme was Gender, Identity, Iconography. Constructed at and across the intersections of race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, national identity, age, social class, and economic status, gendered medieval identities are multiple, mobile, and multivalent. Iconography – both religious and secular – plays a key role in the representation of such multifaceted identities. Across the range of medieval media, visual symbolism is used actively to produce, inscribe, and express the gendered identities of both individuals and groups. The aim of this conference was to provoke conversations across disciplines and time periods to understand the ways in which gender identity could be understood through image and iconography. We were also committed to providing a conference for everyone: accessible to all academics at any stage of their career in terms of price point, disability access, and in providing a safe and welcoming environment.

Corpus Christi College was an excellent venue, as its auditorium is very accessible and the conference office was very helpful in accommodating all dietary needs. Delegates were pleased to be able to make use also of Corpus’s beautiful historic spaces, such as the dining hall. As early career researchers ourselves, Gareth and I were keen to ensure the conference was affordable, and with support from Oxford Medieval Studies, the Leverhulme Trust, the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and Castle Hill Bookshop we were able to provide a comprehensive programme while keeping the registration fee down.

The Call for Papers attracted a high number of good quality abstracts. We eventually selected thirty-two speakers out of almost ninety abstracts submitted, organised across ten panels over three days. Speakers talked on topics ranging from Amazon queens to public nudity to imperial eunuchs, in panels organised by theme, allowing for some fascinating cross period and interdisciplinary discussion.

We also secured three plenary speakers – Prof Annie Sutherland (University of Oxford), Prof Patricia Skinner (University of Swansea), and in a new initiative, an Early Career Plenary Speaker, Dr Alicia Spencer-Hall (Queen Mary, University of London). GMS has always been committed to supporting early career scholars, and offering a plenary spot to an outstanding early career researcher was a way to further this aim. Feedback on this initiative at the event and on twitter (we extensively covered the event at #gms2018) was extremely positive, and we would like to encourage other conference organisers to consider following our example by establishing an ECR plenary spot.

On top of all these exciting papers, we were able to commission Dr Daisy Black (University of Wolverhampton) to perform Unruly Woman, a riotous, funny and touching one woman interpretation of medieval fabliaux and romances, and with Dr Charlotte Berry hosted a workshop with medieval seals at Magdalen College Library, allowing delegates to get up close and personal with some fascinating gendered iconography in their impressive collection of seals.

The conference wrapped up with a roundtable on teaching medieval gender, allowing for a reflective conversation about how we communicate our research to our students in empathetic, responsible ways (one of our contributors, Dr Laura Varnam, has a great blog post about that session here). It was a fitting end to a conference that, as one attendee put it, left them feeling “empowered, inspired, and happily cocooned within a supportive and fierce community” and another described as “amazing, inspirational and motivational”.

Report by Rachel Moss, Faculty of History

Teaching the Codex

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14/03/2018

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Teaching the Codex: Pedagogical Approaches to Palaeography and Codicology Report

Organisers: Mary Boyle (Medieval and Modern Languages) and Tristan Franklinos (Classics)

Teaching the Codex began as an interdisciplinary colloquium, with the following rationale:
Palaeography and codicology encompass skill sets which are applicable and of use to a broad range of disciplines across the Humanities. Most students encounter them for the first time at graduate level, in spite of their wide-reaching implications for our understanding and interpretation of the texts and documents with which we work. The approaches taken to teaching and using these skills vary according to the subject area, and interdisciplinary collaboration is often informal.

The event brought together academics from a range of disciplines who are experienced in teaching palaeography and codicology, which enabled a series of discussions on diverse pedagogical approaches.
Our speakers were Prof. Henrike Lähnemann, Prof. Daniel Wakelin, Prof. Tobias Reinhardt, N.G. Wilson, Dr Julia Walworth, Dr Orietta Da Rold, Dr Helen Swift, Dr Peter Stokes, Prof. Niels Gaul, and Dr Teresa Webber. Our panel chairs were Prof. David d’Avray, Prof. Richard Sharpe, Prof. Julia Crick, Dr Stephen Heyworth, and Dr Martin Kauffmann.

The day was divided into four panels: Classics, two medieval panels, and one covering approaches and resources, including digital media. The speakers each gave a paper lasting twenty minutes, and each panel concluded with a lengthy discussion. The day closed with a roundtable discussion chaired by David d’Avray.

We had over 100 attendees, of whom a significant proportion were graduate students from a number of disciplines across the humanities, and our audience was international. In addition to those who joined us on the day, we were also followed on Twitter by those who could not attend: our own Twitter feed now has over 300 followers, and our conference hashtag (#teachingcodex) saw substantial use throughout the day from delegates who live-tweeted various papers. Many participants and delegates have since given extremely positive feedback about the day, and the discussions it triggered.

This has fed into a number of future plans for the continuation of the project. The most immediate are associated with our digital presence. The website is being maintained as a blog, and we have invited contributions for guest bloggers. It will also feature a ‘Teachable Features’ section, to illustrate examples of particular aspects of manuscripts. We expect to make various other announcements in due course, with the aim of facilitating further discussion, and considering the effects of dialogues already begun.

We are extremely grateful to Dr Julia Walworth for her help and support, and to all of the organisations who sponsored us: Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH); the Merton College History of the Book Group; the Lancelyn Green Foundation Fund; and the Craven Committee.

Website: https://teachingthecodex.wordpress.com/
Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/TeachingCodex

The Normans in the South: Mediterranean Meetings in the Central Middle Ages

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09/01/2018

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By Emily A. Winkler

By some accounts, 1017 marked the advent of the Norman presence in Italy and Sicily, inaugurating a new era of invasion, interaction and integration in the Mediterranean. Whether or not the millennial anniversary is significant, the moment offered an ideal opportunity to explore the story in the south, about a thousand years ago. To what extent did the Normans establish a cross-cultural empire? What can we learn by comparing the impact of the Norman presence in different parts of Europe? What insights are discoverable in comparing local histories of Italy and Sicily with broader historical ideas about transformation, empire and exchange?

The conference brought together established, early-career and post-graduate scholars for a joint investigation of the Normans in the South, to explore together the meetings of cultural, political and religious ideas in the Mediterranean in the central Middle Ages. The three-day event (30 June – 2 July 2017) was attended by 115 delegates from all over the world (13 countries). There were 75 papers, including 3 keynote lectures by Professor Jeremy Johns (Oxford), Professor Sandro Carocci (University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’), and Professor Graham Loud (Leeds). The conference organizer, Dr Emily Winkler, opened the conference by reflecting on Charles Homer Haskins’s comments about the Normans over a century ago, and ways in which our study of the Normans might advance by considering the many meetings and relationships which developed as a result of their ventures southwards across Europe. In a special highlight talk, Professor David Abulafia (Cambridge) enlightened the delegates about the influence of Oxford historian Evelyn Jamison, whose many advances both in the history of Norman Sicily and in the scholarly careers of women academics have opened many doors, and have made possible the blossoming of subsequent studies on Norman Sicily over the past century.

The conference featured three parallel strands of sessions: ‘Conquest and Culture’, ‘Art and Architecture’ and ‘Power and Politics’. Scholars reflected on subjects including: the Normans in the theatre of the Mediterranean as a case study in proto-world dominion; manuscript images as insights into the Mediterranean networks which from which wealthy rulers hoped to profit; and nineteenth-century photography of art and architecture from Norman Sicily as a window into the uses of the past. Delegates had the opportunity to visit the beautifully-preserved Norman crypt under St Peter-in-the-East, the church which now serves as the library at St Edmund Hall, on short tours led by Dr Winkler and the two conference assistants (postgraduate students in medieval history), Mr Liam Fitzgerald (UCL) and Mr Andrew Small (Oxford). 80 people attended the conference dinner at St Edmund Hall, which was a festive occasion catered by John McGeever and his team at the college. The Principal of St Edmund Hall, Professor Keith Gull, welcomed delegates to the medieval college and thanked Dr Winkler for organizing the conference.

The conference was designed to fill a gap in Haskins Society conference offerings in the UK and Europe, and to provide a stimulating event on behalf of UK and EU members in particular, as well as Haskins members in general. It was sponsored by TORCH, the Haskins Society, the Khalili Research Centre, the John Fell OUP Fund, and the Royal Historical Society.

Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference

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13/11/2017

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By Henry Drummond and Sian Witherden

One of the winners of the 2016-2017 edition of the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund was the Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference. In this post Henry Drummond (DPhil Music) and Sian Witherden (DPhil English), two members of the organising committee, tell us more about the outcome of the project and about their experiences with the organisation of this interdisciplinary conference.

The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference is an annual, two-day interdisciplinary conference run by and for graduate students and early career researchers. It presents an open, friendly platform for graduate medievalists from a variety of disciplines to share their research upon a common theme. Conferences in previous years have been based upon various topics, from ‘Light’ (2008) to ‘Colour’ (2015) and ‘Sleep’ (2011). The theme for 2017—the conference’s 13th year running—was ‘Time’. 

Our Organising Committee was diverse, incorporating young scholars from the faculties of Medieval & Modern Languages (Dr Pauline Souleau), English (Sian Witherden, Caroline Batten, Hannah Bower), History (Anna Boeles Rowland, Jennifer Jones), Music (Henry Drummond) and History of Art (Sarah Griffin). The conference’s interdisciplinary outlook was also mirrored in the papers themselves, and speakers covered themes as varied as sacred time, manuscripts, time reckoning, visions, and time cycles. Having such a universal theme also meant that papers spanned a wide geographical area, incorporating studies on medieval England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Iberia and Italy.

This enticingly rich selection of papers was summarised through two keynote presentations that drew upon many of the themes addressed over the two days. Prof. David D’Avray addressed the multitude of issues surrounding time’s ontological status in his Plenary: ‘Questions about Time’. The conference was brought to a close with Prof. Eric Stanley’s warning on time’s finality through his Keynote Address: ‘Indefinable Time Experienced in Medieval Living, Sinning, Doubting, Dying’.

This conference would not have been possible without the generous support of the AHRC-TORCH graduate fund. With this grant, we were able to host the event at Merton College, which was a perfect venue for a conference on time in the medieval world.  

Merton College was founded in 1264 and several of its medieval buildings still survive, notably Mob Quad, the oldest quadrangle in Oxford. Thanks to Julia Walworth we were able to offer guided tours of the Old Library in Mob Quad, which dates from 1373. During these tours, one of our committee members, Sarah Griffin, introduced our participants to the medieval astrolabes housed in the library. Astrolabes were used to measure the positions of celestial bodies and even calculate local time, so they were particularly appropriate for our conference theme.

Hosting the event at Merton also allowed us to offer a conference dinner in the historic dining hall, which still has a door with medieval ironwork. There are sculpted Zodiac Men on the nearby Fitzjames Arch, which was yet another nod to the theme of time.

Having such an exciting and well-suited venue undoubtedly helped us to attract such an international audience. This year, speakers came from all over the UK and from Germany, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland and the USA. As such, this conference has once again reinforced Oxford’s place as a centre for medieval graduate student interaction, and we are grateful to the AHRC-TORCH fund for helping this happen. We hope that next year’s conference on the theme of ‘Animals’ is just as successful. 

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

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27/05/2017

14:24

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Around Oxford, blog, paper

By Hannah Bailey

This was one of the questions discussed in a collaborative session during the ‘Architectural Representation in the Middle Ages’ conference, held at University College, Oxford, on 7th–8th April. This conference was the latest activity of an ongoing interdisciplinary research network on medieval architectural representation which began its life two years ago as a Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute project and which is currently funded by University College, Oxford. The question was designed to expose our disciplinary biases. Depending on your disciplinary background, you might assume that ‘architectural representation’ refers to architectural plans or images of buildings, the values or power-structures conveyed by actual buildings, or architectural metaphors that ‘represent’ ideas about the mind or the cosmos. We hoped that by recognizing and challenging those biases we can develop a more accurate understanding of what architecture meant to the medieval people who built, inhabited, depicted, and wrote about it.

The conference was framed by two fantastic keynote papers given by Robert Bork of the University of Iowa and Christiania Whitehead of the University of Warwick. In the first of these, which opened the conference on the Friday morning, Robert first gave an overview of medieval architectural representations, before expertly taking the audience through the geometric processes behind medieval architecture and technical drawings. Christiania closed the conference on Saturday afternoon with an exhilarating examination of how the relationship between architectural representation and narrative creates meaning in medieval hagiographical texts.

The keynotes’ very different interpretations of ‘Architectural Representation’—on the one hand, imagistic depictions, on the other, verbal-textual accounts—mirrored the diversity of materials and approaches featured in the conference papers. The speakers included historians, art historians, literary critics, archaeologists, and anthropologists, and their papers took in real and imagined architecture from Iceland to the Holy Land. We heard about architectural imagery, metaphor, and allegory in texts ranging from the age of Bede to the era of Caxton; we heard about visual and physical representations of architecture in manuscripts, on monastic seals, and on iron bag-frames; we heard about the form and decoration of real structures; we heard about images of architecture employed in the decorative schemes of actual buildings.

That diversity prompted the discovery of surprising cross-disciplinary and cross-period connections. We saw the unexpectedly architectural and the unexpectedly domestic in Italian images of St Jerome and a Middle English text about Christ. We saw architecture repeatedly figured as an object of desire. We saw it repeatedly figured as a tool of control—it was particularly exciting to see the same mechanisms used in very different times, places, and cultural contexts to construct landscapes and viewscapes of power. We were asked to think about how architecture exists in time, through time, and out of time.   

At the end of the first day of the conference, we were treated to an exhibition of architectural materials from the archive of University College, courtesy of librarian Elizabeth Adams and archivist Robin Darwall-Smith. The exhibition displayed plans, models, and documents relating to the various building campaigns of the college from the medieval period, as well as other material related to the theme of the conference, including the oldest architectural model in Oxford. This was followed by the conference dinner, held at Wadham College and enjoyed by all.

The afternoon of the second day of the conference included a session in which we broke up into small groups for discussion of the themes of the conference. The groups were given four questions to kick off the discussion. Two questions asked people to speak about their own work, and about interesting connections they’d made with other people’s work over the course of the conference.  Many of the people attending the conference who weren’t giving papers are also doing very interesting work in this area, and this session offered an opportunity for them to share their research (and in some cases, photographs!). The other two questions sought the delegates’ perspectives on issues that had come up in previous projects of the Architectural Representation network. Asking delegates to define ‘Architectural Representation(s)’ elicited responses that varied considerably along disciplinary lines; some people spoke of having the assumptions they’d brought to the conference challenged. The final question, stated simply as: ‘Interdisciplinarity?’ encouraged broader discussion of any theoretical or practical aspect of attempting interdisciplinary work. These four questions offered a starting point, but the discussion ranged widely—one group discussed parallels between castles and churches and churches as defensive structures in fact and rhetoric, while another debated the orientation of the planks in Anglo-Saxon wooden buildings. Researchers made connections with people working on different times and places, or in different fields, which we hope might spark future collaborative projects.

Being early career academics ourselves, the organizers felt strongly that the conference should be accessible to academics at all career stages. The conference expenses were substantially covered by generous support from the John Fell Fund and University College. Thanks to additional assistance from Oxford Medieval Studies and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, we were able to offer a total of 12 bursaries to graduate students and early career academics without research allowances. We are grateful to Oxford Medieval Studies, and to all of the various institutions, societies, and individuals that contributed to the tremendous success of the conference. Moving forward, we are currently speaking to publishers regarding a collection of essays built around the theme for the conference. We hope to publish this in the near future, providing a lasting legacy for a thoroughly enjoyable and productive conference.

Report on the Medieval Intersectionality Workshop

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24/05/2017

14:26

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By Rachel Moss

This blog post was originally posted on the 3 April on this website.

A little while ago now (15 March), I went to a one day workshop titled Medieval Intersectionality, pulled together by Amanda Power and Robin Whelan. It was a day to bring scholars across Oxford together to consider:

…ways that we might examine the multiple and complex interactions of…identities, experiences and labels, and how they shed light on the societies in which medieval people lived. … How can it [intersectionality] enrich our research? What has the prospect of deeper histories of intersectional oppression, resistance and power relations to offer those working in more contemporary fields? Given the concept’s roots in fighting discrimination and inequality, what are its broader implications for Medieval Studies as a discipline?

The day was framed around two sessions, each with a handful of short (10 minute) papers, and plenty of time for discussion. This worked very well as a model, and there was lots of fruitful conversation. The papers ranged in theme/period from late Roman Africa to my own paper on late medieval England. The two papers I enjoyed most were Philippa Byrne’s “Lucaera Saracenorum: building urban identity in the persecuting society” and Azfar bin Anwar’s “Intersectionality of identities in medieval Islamic biographical dictionaries”, both of which did the magic triangle thing of (1) introducing me to new sources while (2) asking the kind of questions I like to ask of my sources, and (3) talking about places or people often neglected by Western medieval studies. Philippa’s discussion of the forced settlement of 20,000 Muslims in the Sicilian city of Lucera made me think a lot about boundaries and identities, particularly in the current climate of refugee-phobia, and Azfar’s paper on the homoerotic and homosocial potential of Islamic biographies gave a fascinating insight into the creative opportunities offered by a genre of literature I know nothing about.

Days like this are so important – though as I said during one of the question sessions, it’s all very well bringing academics together and making them think outside their neat little specialised boxes, but that only has a chance of greater impact if we think more broadly about decolonising medieval studies.The room full of people who assembled in Oxford that day were largely – though not entirely! – white Westerners. Engaging with a global middle ages also means engaging with global medievalists, both in our scholarship and in our teaching. This is not just an intellectual issue, where we earnestly discuss what we can do to make medieval studies more inclusive. White nationalism is on the rise and is co-opting our field. As Dorothy Kim forcefully argues, white medievalists have a responsibility to clean up our field and to make it clear that racism, misogyny and ableism have no place here. This is not work that should just be left to minorities.

Your colleagues and students are now specific targets of virulent attack, not just bodies that have to deal with implicit bias and a host of daily microaggressions. … What are you going to do about it medievalists? Will you hide and just hope that being silent will allow you to be overlooked? … Let’s call it what it is, will you collaborate? If this is your thought or answer, this is also your incredible privilege. Guess what, it completely changes the bodies in this field who do not have your cisgendered, white, male, Christian privilege. Your silent, tacit, or enthusiastic compliance will mean these bodies will be violently driven out of the field.

So, a day like Medieval Intersectionality was important in getting conversations started. But if we just leave it at talk, it will have been an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful event.

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

About Time

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16/05/2017

14:22

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By Pauline Souleau

On Friday 31st March and Saturday 1st April 2017, graduate students, early career researchers, and established scholars met for the Thirteenth Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference held at Merton College, Oxford. As usual, the conference revolved around one word, one theme, chosen by the delegates of the OMGC held the year before. This year, it was about Time.

What is the OMGC? An annual conference that welcomes graduate students and early career researchers to Oxford for two full days of academic discussions around one theme. It provides a friendly and convivial forum for young academics to both gain experience presenting in a formal setting, and to meet their peers and colleagues who will make up their cohort for the length of their careers. This year, speakers came from the UK (Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Oxford, and York) and from Germany, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA. As such it assures Oxford’s place as a centre for medieval graduate student interaction, and as a conference hosting up to twenty-one papers, two invited speakers, and about sixty delegates, it is one of the biggest of its kind.

This year, the conference considered various aspects of medieval Time and temporality (all panels, keynotes, and more were live-tweeted under the hashtag #OMGC17). How is Sacred Time expressed through astrology, architecture, and cosmology? How can Time be measured? How was it perceived in texts, in everyday life? Does Time stop? Can Time stop? Many discussions arose about Purgatory, its emergence and its function(s). Time was also considered in a spatial form: relics, for example, can lead the viewer to a specific point in Time/History. Visions, mystical writings, and their use of Time were another topic and focus of the days’ conversations; as were manuscripts and archives. Each day ended by a thought-provoking keynote address: one by Professor David d’Avray on ‘Questions about Time’ which considered medieval Time in relation to modern scholarships and past and present approaches on Time; another by Professor Eric Stanley on ‘Indefinable Time Experienced in Medieval Living, Sinning, Doubting, Dying.’ Professor Stanley productively talked about unproductive Time and the off-putting of Time, such as procrastination!

The quality of the papers this year was extremely high and I would like to take the opportunity to thank and congratulate all speakers, but especially those who were giving their very first paper! Discussions were equally enlightening. They were lively and respectful; a testimony to the lovely atmosphere I experienced throughout the conference. More relaxed gaps between the panels were far from unproductive: from the coffee breaks with home-made cakes baked by the Committee to the wine reception with a Time playlist and the lovely dinner in Merton College Hall. Each lunch break allowed delegates to unwind and chat and/or to visit the Merton Astrolabes (many thanks to Dr Julia Walworth, Librarian at Merton College, and to Sarah Griffin for making these visits possible).

The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference would not have been possible this year without its committee and its sponsors. The organisers who have all done an amazing job are all postgraduate or early career Oxford medievalists from different Faculties (History, English, Music, and Medieval and Modern Languages): Caroline Batten, Anna Boeles Rowland, Hannah Bower, Henry Drummond, Sarah Griffin, Pauline Souleau, and Sian Witherden. The team was amazing and strong friendship bonds were woven which I am sure will produce more interdisciplinary collaboration in the future. All Committee members either presented at or organised the OMGC in 2016 and I am confident that some of this year’s speakers will take part in the OMGC 2018 organisation (which will be on Animals). The conference sponsors (Merton College; the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Faculties of Music, English, and Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford; the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities; and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature) provided the necessary support to ensure minimum registration cost for our delegates and travel bursaries for our speakers.

I will end this rapid overview with the very last panel which focused on Cycles in life, death, and narratives. One question that was asked was: does Time just repeat itself or is there change? In the case of the OMGC, both aspects are present: Time does repeat itself as in 2018 there will be an Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference as there has been for the past thirteen years; there is also room for change from one theme to another and from one generation of postgraduate/early career academics to the next.