Category: Call for Papers

Interim Medieval Matters (Long Vac)

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11/09/2025

14:05

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Call for Papers, events, Medieval Matters, News, opportunities

Term draws near. Please send all entries for next term’s OMS booklet to medieval@torch.ox.ac.uk, by Wednesday of -1 week at the latest (1st October). Until then, please see below a number of upcoming deadlines and opportunities:

  • CFP: CHASE Medieval and Early Modern Research Network (MEMRN) postgraduate conference – deadline 12 September. More info here.
  • Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages classes. The deadline to apply is 12 September at 12 noon UK time. More info here.
  • The Medieval Academy of America’s podcast series The Multicultural Middle Ages is accepting episode proposals for their 5th season. More info here.
  • CFP: Cambridge Medieval History Graduate Workshop. Deadline 29th September. More info here.
  • Applications are open for the John W. Baldwin Post-Doctoral Fellowship. The Post-Doctoral Fellow will be a scholar whose research aligns with the goals of the study of “Europe in the world” and who has demonstrated evidence of innovative methodologies. Deadline 10th Nov. More info here.
  • The West Horsley Place Trust seeks a researcher. More info here.

CFP: Cambridge Medieval History Graduate Workshop

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11/09/2025

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Call for Papers

The Cambridge Medieval History Graduate Workshop is inviting paper submissions
for Michaelmas term 2025.


We host presentations on the cultures, economies, literature, material cultures, politics,
thought, religions, and reception of the medieval world, which we define as broadly as
possible as the global period between c.500 and c.1500. We welcome interdisciplinary
scholarship and encourage submissions which stretch our conception of ‘medieval’ in
time or space, from late antiquity to modern reception and from Scandinavia to the
Middle East and beyond, or which deal with the practice of medieval history.

These short 15–20-minute workshop papers are excellent ways to share your work, gain
presentation experience, and receive constructive feedback in a supportive environment run
for and by graduate students. In terms of scope, we are looking for focused studies that offer
snapshots into ongoing graduate research, and particularly encourage primary source work
and case studies, rather than sweeping overviews of large topics or summaries of entire
dissertations/theses.


We welcome submissions from Master’s and PhD students from any discipline or university,
but especially encourage graduate students based in or around Cambridge to submit.
Accepted speakers will have the opportunity to be featured on our blog, Camedieval.
The Workshop meets alternate Thursdays, 4–5 :30pm, with the option of virtual attendance
on Microsoft Teams for audience members. In each session we will have two 15–20-minute
papers, followed by in-person socialising and refreshments.


Please send abstracts of not more than 250 words and a short bio by 29th September
2025 to: cambridgemedieval@gmail.com

CFP reminder: CHASE Medieval and Early Modern Research Network (MEMRN) postgraduate conference

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11/09/2025

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Call for Papers

November (14th-16th) at the University of East Anglia. Deadline: Friday (12th September).

The CHASE Medieval and Early Modern Research Network (MEMRN) are delighted to share the details for our second annual in-person Winter Conference. Join us from the 14th – 16th of November at the University of East Anglia and online for three days of panels, social events, workshops, networking sessions, and adventure in the historic city of Norwich. 

The Call for Papers and details on how to apply to speak at the event are included below and are also now available via the MEMRN website and our social media. The deadline for submitting an abstract is Friday 12th September. We look forward to seeing you there! 

Call For Papers: Fragmented Worlds, Shared Histories

We, the committee of the CHASE Medieval and Early Modern Research Network (MEMRN), are overjoyed to announce the return of our Winter Conference this year between the 14th and 16th November.

Join us at the University of East Anglia and online for three exciting days of workshops, papers, social events, and adventure through the historic cathedral city of Norwich.
We welcome papers on a range of topics within medieval and early modern studies for this interdisciplinary conference, including:

*   History and politics
*   Philosophy and theology
*   Literature, drama, performance culture and music
*   Latin and vernacular languages
*   Art history, architecture and archaeology
*   Manuscript studies and book history

For this year’s conference, we particularly encourage papers engaging with marginalised histories and communities, global intercultural contact and exchange, or conflict and diplomacy.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words for individual research papers of twenty minutes in length (or 700 words for a panel of three people presenting on a particular subject or sub-theme).

The CHASE MEMRN conference remains open to all UK and overseas postgraduates. This includes independent scholars who are unaffiliated at this time. When submitting your abstract, please include your institution (if applicable) and, if from a CHASE-affiliated university institution, whether or not you are directly funded by CHASE.

All proposals should be emailed to chasememrn@gmail.com by Friday 12th September with the subject line ‘Conference Paper Submission’ and your name. Priority will be given to those available to present in-person, but remote presentation applications will also be considered.

Please feel free to contact the MEMRN team via email or social media DM with any questions you may have. We look forward to welcoming you to Norwich as part of this proudly CHASE-funded event.

Medieval Insular Romance Conference

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23/08/2025

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Around Oxford, Call for Papers

,

OXFORD, 8–10 APRIL 2026

Plenary speakers: James Simpson and Carolyne Larrington

We welcome proposals for papers at the 2026 Medieval Insular Romance conference.

Papers may address any aspect of romance composed in the languages of medieval Britain and Ireland, along with the ways that Insular romances engage with texts and traditions beyond those islands. The focus on discussion at these conferences is traditionally non-Chaucerian, non-Arthurian romances.
We especially welcome papers that respond to the theme of the conference, ‘Moving Medieval Romance’. This may be interpreted broadly, from the ways that romances stage and provoke emotion; to studies of physical movement, travel and exchange; to textual shifts, adaptation and the remediation of romances, in and beyond the medieval period.

Proposals for 20-minute papers; complete sessions of three papers; or roundtables on a particular theme, should be sent to the conference organizers, Lucy Brookes (Merton College, Oxford) lucy.brookes@ell.ox.ac.uk and Nicholas Perkins (St Hugh’s College, Oxford) nicholas.perkins@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk. Please include: your name; affiliation; contact details; title of paper/session; and an abstract of up to 250 words.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 31 October 2025.

Illustration: Cristabel and her baby are cast out to sea; from Eglamour of Artois, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 261, fol. 39v. Creative commons licence: CC-BY-NC 4.0

Ars Inquirendi – Querying the Pre-Modern in the Age of Large Multimodal Models

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22/07/2025

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Call for Papers

Online / Oxford / Stockholm, 4-7 December 2025

The advent of Large Multimodal Models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini – humanly conversant but also unpredictable assimilations of collective learning and experience – has opened a remarkable new era in pre-modern studies. How will LMMs transform our understanding of the pre-modern as they re-interpret the sum of its materials – from manuscripts, music, runes, and myriad other artefacts, to existing metadata and the very history of inquiry into the period?


Ars Inquirendi, a multi-day joint conference to be held on 4-7 December 2025 (online, with in-person workshops in Stockholm and Oxford)


invites demonstrations of all aspects of the nascent art of using LMMs to query the pre-modern – by which we mean, broadly, any Old World cultures before their domination by movable-type print – from pre-modernists already using LMMs, and computer scientists building them, to philosophers and historians of knowledge.

Possible Topics

Nuts and bolts of LMMs. What are the steps for non-technical scholars wanting to incorporate these powerful tools into their active research? We especially encourage the sharing of experience with the crafting of LMM queries (‘prompt engineering’), research corpus customisation, and the integration of different technologies to form a research system. The practical, hands-on workshops accompanying the conference will further support scholars new to these tools.

The darkness of the pre-modern archive. Unlike post-print cultures, the overwhelming output of pre-modern scribal cultures remains unscanned, and thus directly inaccessible to LMMs; moreover, machine learning has to date proven unable to transcribe images of manuscripts en masse, and scholarly editions remain trapped behind paywalls. How do these gaps impact LMMs’ utility for pre-modern studies? Are these tools nonetheless becoming capable of direct transcription? Which materials should be prioritised for digitisation? How might published scholarship be made more accessible to LMMs?

Confabulation, simulation, and history. LMMs are already notorious for their hallucinations (or rather ‘confabulations’ as Geoffrey Hinton tells us). Is this aspect of LMMs a danger to knowledge of the pre-modern, especially if LMMs crowd out other modes of inquiry? Is it a gateway to new forms of understanding the past, from simulation of periods, personalities and experiences, to the kind of hyper-comparative Game (‘Glasperlenspiel’) imagined by Hermann Hesse?

The transferrable value of pre-modern Humanities in an LMM-driven era. LMMs consume and are accessed through human narrative and symbolism; we already know that the greater a user’s prowess at narrative, the richer the results. Indeed such discourse has become a psychoanalytic Royal Road into the interiority of LLMs, which is otherwise largely opaque to investigation. What does this new centrality of narrative and symbolic expertise mean for the value of Humanities subjects, in their own right and relative to STEM subjects, in our cultural, economic and technological future?

Presentations for the online conference are to be around 40 minutes in length and pre-recorded. They will be made available via the Oxford Medieval Studies website several days ahead of the live sessions, which will run from 2pm to 6pm GMT, and will be dedicated to related discussion and round-table exchanges. The practical workshops are to be conducted in person at Stockholm and Oxford, to provide hands-on training and direct experience with LMMs and related technologies.
Please email proposals by 30 September 2025 to Dr Stephen Pink at arsinquirendi@gmail.com

CfP: Borders, Boundaries and Barriers: Real and Imagined in the Middle Ages

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24/06/2025

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Call for Papers

20 and 21 April 2026 in Oxford

Submission Deadline: 15 September 2025.

Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers have become increasingly prominent themes in historical scholarship. Over the last decade, these concepts have been the focus of sustained scholarly interest, drawing especially upon theoretical frameworks and (trans-)national contexts. There is, therefore, a pressing need to examine how these constructs have shaped the lived experiences of historically marginalised groups, as well as how they were perceived, defined, and engaged with by those groups.

This conference seeks to reorient discussions around borders, boundaries, and barriers by foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of marginalised groups and considering how these divisions were perceived fromthe peripheries of societies. Rather than treating these concepts as abstract or solely geopolitical, we will explore the ways in which they have operated — both historically and historiographically — as tools of exclusion and differentiation.


Organised by Natasha Jenman (University of Oxford), Naomi Reiter (QMUL), and Dean A. Irwin (University of Lincoln/OCHJS), the conference will focus on individuals, religious groups, social groups, societal constructions, and natural phenomena. Participants are invited to explore the role played by evolving borders, boundaries, and barriers in the medieval world as part of group identities; and how groups used them to their advantage. Likewise, it will consider the extent to which borders, boundaries and barriers have been imposed upon the medieval world by modern scholars. Possible topics for consideration include, but are not limited to:

  • Legal jurisdictions
  • The natural and the supernatural worlds
  • Socio-economic strata
  • Ritual and religion
  • Space, time, and the environment
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Disability
  • Transgression, delinquency, and the grey middle space

This conference adopts a broad chronological and geographical approach with submissions from all
historically-related disciplines being welcome. The conference will take place on 20 and 21 April 2026 in
Oxford. To submit, please send a title, abstract (c. 250 words), and a bio (c. 100 words) to:
bordersboundariesbarriers@gmail.com. Any questions should be directed to the same e-mail address.
The organisers hope to be able to offer a limited number of bursaries for students and those on low income. Please indicate in your proposal whether you would like to be considered for
one of these if this becomes possible.

Image ref: Latin Psalter (13th-15th C), f.9 – BL Add MS 28681,



Medieval Matters, TT25 Wk 8

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16/06/2025

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Call for Papers, events, Medieval Matters, News, opportunities, Uncategorized

Another academic year draws to a close: welcome, finally, to Week 8. The full Medieval Studies booklet is available here.

Next Thursday, 19 June, 4:30-6pm, is the official launch date for the “The Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays – the Film”. This is a wonderful chance to come together to celebrate the end of the year, and watch some of the excellent performances that were put on earlier in the term. At 4:45pm, the film will have its youtube premiere. You can tune in from anywhere in the world to comment; find the full schedule of when each play will start, more information, and a teaser here.

NB. If you are leaving us at the end of this year, and you would like to remain a member of this mailing list (and you are most welcome to do so), please  register here with your personal email (link always available from our homepage https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/).

Monday

  • Poetry, Power, Literacy, and the Emergence of Vernacular Literatures – 9am in the Radcliffe Humanities Building, Seminar Room. The workshop is part of the activities of the TORCH Network Poetry in the Medieval World.
  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10:30 am in the Weston Library.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Stuart Airlie (Glasgow) will be speaking on ‘Returns of the Repressed: Aby Warburg’s cultural history of Percy Ernst Schramm’. Following the talk, a special drinks reception will be held to mark Julia’s retirement. Please sign up here.

Tuesday

  • The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Medieval Church and Culture –  tea and biscuits from 5pm in the Wellbeloved Room, with talks from 5.15. Cassidy Serhienko (Pembroke) will be speaking on ‘‘That Fayre Lady’: women and the code of chivalry in late Arthurian romance’; Senia Magzumov (Worcester) will be speaking on ‘Imagining the Rus’ Pagan Past in the Radziwill Chronicle: a comparative study with the Litsevoi Letopisnyi Svod’.

Wednesday

  • The Medieval German Graduate Seminar meets Wednesdays 11.15am–12.45pm in Oriel College, Harris Lecture Room. The topic for this term is the ‘Alexanderroman’ and this week Lucian Shepherd and Monty Powell will present. If you are interested to be added to the teams group for updates for future terms, please contact Henrike Lähnemann.
  • Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm, online, please contact Michael Stansfield.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Special OCBR lecture – Marc Lauxtermann (Exeter) will be speaking on ‘The Emergence of Fiction: Byzantium and the East’.
  • Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies Seminar – 5pm in the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies. Dr Glaire Anderson (University of Edinburgh) will be speaking on ‘A Bridge to the Sky: Science and Arts in the Age of Ibn Firnas (d. 887)’.
  • Medieval Women’s Writing Research Seminar – 5pm in the Lower Lecture Room, Lincoln College. The theme is ‘Letters of Friendship and Gratitude’.

Thursday

  • The Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays: Film launch – 4:30pm at the Farmingdon Institute, Harris Manchester College.
  • Lincoln Unlocked – 5.15pm in the Weston Library. Rebecca Menmuir will be speaking on ‘Achilles at Lincoln: Unlocking the Medieval Text of a Classical Poem’. Book here.

Friday

  • Medievalists Coffee Morning – 10.30am at the Weston Library. All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.

Opportunities (new additions in bold)

  • British Academy talks on Anglo-Saxon and medieval Irish numismatics. More info here.
  • The Latin Hymn as Scriptural Exegesis – from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages – 25–26 September 2025. Registration is free but compulsory. Futher details here: https://classics.web.ox.ac.uk/event/the-latin-hymn-as-scriptural-exegesis-from-late-antiquity-to-the-middle-ages
  • Essay Prize for Review of English Studies seeking applications – more information here.
  • A number of roles are available at Hamburg’s ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’: Doctoral Researchers, post-docs, and advanced post-docs.
  • London Medieval Society’s 80th anniversary colloquium on ‘Memory and Commemoration’ is being held at on Saturday 28th June at The Warburg Institute.
  • ‘Big Data’ and Medieval Manuscripts Exploring the Potential of Large-Scale Catalogue Data – Thursday 26th June, 1–5pm, Weston Library. More information here.
  • The Terence Barry Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Irish Medieval Studies – deadline May 30, 2025. More information here.
  • Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society Travel Grant – more info here.
  • Call for Submissions: Taube Prizes for Student Writing in Hebrew & Jewish Studies – see blog post.
  • National Archives Skills Courses – see blog post.
  • CfP for ‘Staging Silence from Antiquity to the Renaissance’ – more information here.
  • CfP for ‘Music and Reformation: A Symposium at Lambeth Palace Library, 16 September 2025’
  • A regular pub trip is being organised on a Friday at 6pm at the Chequers, from 0th week to 8th week, for all medievalists at Oxford. Email maura.mckeon@bfriars.ox.ac.uk
  • Additional spaces are available on the ‘Big Data’ and Medieval Manuscripts workshop – please sign up here.
  • Registration for the Masterclass by Patrick Boucheron – Pourquoi des médiévistes ? Penser le contemporain depuis le Moyen Âge – 29 May, 2:30pm, Maison Française d’Oxford.
  • Registration for Patrick Boucheron’s lecture entitled ‘The Birth of the Black Death: New Approaches in World History’ – 29 May, 5:00pm, Pembroke College.
  • The Digital Medieval Studies Institute is hosting a set of workshops on digital scholarly methods specifically tailored for medievalists as part of the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. More information can be found here.

Medieval matters TT25, Week 5

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26/05/2025

08:22

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Call for Papers, events, Medieval Matters, News, opportunities, Uncategorized

Welcome to Week 5: the full Medieval Studies booklet is available here.

Thank you to those who have submitted their publications for the OMS impact booklet – please continue to send short blurbs to the Oxford Medieval Studies email address ASAP. Pictures also welcome!

Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10:30 pm in the Weston Library.
  • Medieval History Seminar is cancelled due to illness.

Tuesday

  • Medieval English Research Seminar – 12.15 in the English Faculty.  Rowan Wilson (University of Oxford) will be speaking on ‘Feeling Aliene, Now and Then: Work, Contemplation, and Alienation between Medieval Devotion and Modern Academia’, and Anine Eglund (University of Oxford) will be speaking on ‘The Speaking Dead: Conversing with the Living from Beyond the Grave in Early English Literature ‘.
  • The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
  • EMBI ‘Women in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland’ online exhibition – 4pm, location TBC.
  • Medieval Church and Culture –  5pm in the Wellbeloved Room. Rachel Cresswell (Blackfriars) will be speaking on ‘Scripture, text and proof-text in Anselm of Canterbury’.
  • Medieval French Research Seminar – 5pm in the Maison française d’Oxford. Catherine Léglu (University of Luxembourg) will be speaking on ‘ ‘The Anglo-Norman Bible (c.1350): rethinking a context’.
  • Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures Work-in-Pogress seminar – 5.15pm in the Memorial Room, The Queen’s College. Laure Miolo (Lincoln College) will be speaking on ‘Predicting and observing eclipses in fourteenth-century Paris: what the manuscripts tell us’, and Shazia Jagot (University of York) will be speaking on ‘Astrolabe as archive and an archive of astrolabes: Chaucer’s astrolabe and its Islamic affordances’.

Wednesday

  • The Medieval German Graduate Seminar meets Wednesdays 11.15am–12.45pm in Oriel College, Harris Lecture Room. The topic for this term is the ‘Alexanderroman’. If you are interested to be added to the teams group for updates, please contact Henrike Lähnemann.
  • The ‘science of the stars’ in context: an introduction to medieval astronomical and astrological manuscripts and texts – 2pm in the Horton Room (Weston Library). Session 5: Conjunctions and eclipses.
  • Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm, online, please contact Michael Stansfield.
  • Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Rustam Shukurov (IMAFO, Vienna) will be speaking on ‘The Empire of Trebizond: The State of Research and Possible Future Directions’.
  • Medieval Society and Landscape Seminar Series – 5pm in the Department for Continuing Education. Chris Briggs (Cambridge) will be speaking on ‘The Popular Classes and Royal Justice in Medieval England: Evidence from the Derbyshire Eyre of 1330-31’. Book here.
  • Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies Seminar – 5pm in the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies. Professor Blain Auer (University of Lausanne) will be speaking on ‘The Origins of Perso-Islamic Courts and Empires in India’.
  • Medieval Women’s Writing Research Seminar– 5pm, Lower Lecture Room, Lincoln College. Victoria Sands (University of Oxford) will be speaking on ‘The Dormer Newdigate Family, London Charterhouse and English Reformation’.

Thursday

  • Environmental History Working Group – 12:30 in the Colin Matthew Room, History Faculty. Lucia Nixon (Classical Archaeology, Senior Tutor, St Hilda’s, Co-Director, Sphakia Survey) will be speaking on ‘Toward an Archaeology of Sustainability: Resource Packages and Landscape Management in Sphakia, Southwest Crete’.
  • Middle English Reading Group (MERG) – 2pm in the Smoking Room (Lincoln College). Join us to read the ‘double sorwe’ of Troilus and Criseyde in a weekly reading group. We will be reading from the end of Book IV. For more information or to be added to the mailing list, please email rebecca.menmuir@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
  • Masterclass by Patrick Boucheron – Pourquoi des médiévistes ? Penser le contemporain depuis le Moyen Âge – 2:30pm, Maison Française d’Oxford.
  • Patrick Boucheron’s lecture entitled ‘The Birth of the Black Death: New Approaches in World History’ – 5:00pm, Pembroke College.

Friday

  • Fragments of Lives. Medieval Lives in the Muniments of Magdalen, Lincoln, and Beyond – from 9am at Lincoln College. Enquiries to laure.miolo@history.ox.ac.uk.
  • Medievalists Coffee Morning – 10.30am at the Weston Library. All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.
  • Medieval Manuscripts Support Group – 11:30 in the Horton Room. Readers of medieval manuscripts can pose questions to a mixed group of fellow readers and Bodleian curators in a friendly environment. Come with your own questions, or to see what questions other readers have!
  • Anglo-Norman Reading Group – 5pm in the Farmington Institute in Harris Manchester College and online. For more information on the texts, email Jane Bliss.

Opportunities (new additions in bold)

  • ‘Big Data’ and Medieval Manuscripts Exploring the Potential of Large-Scale Catalogue Data – Thursday 26th June, 1–5pm, Weston Library. More information here.
  • The Terence Barry Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Irish Medieval Studies – deadline May 30, 2025. More information here.
  • Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society Travel Grant – more info here.
  • Call for Submissions: Taube Prizes for Student Writing in Hebrew & Jewish Studies – see blog post.
  • National Archives Skills Courses – see blog post.
  • CfP for ‘Staging Silence from Antiquity to the Renaissance’ – more information here.
  • CfP for ‘Music and Reformation: A Symposium at Lambeth Palace Library, 16 September 2025’
  • A regular pub trip is being organised on a Friday at 6pm at the Chequers, from 0th week to 8th week, for all medievalists at Oxford. Email maura.mckeon@bfriars.ox.ac.uk
  • Additional spaces are available on the ‘Big Data’ and Medieval Manuscripts workshop – please sign up here.
  • Registration for the Masterclass by Patrick Boucheron – Pourquoi des médiévistes ? Penser le contemporain depuis le Moyen Âge – 29 May, 2:30pm, Maison Française d’Oxford.
  • Registration for Patrick Boucheron’s lecture entitled ‘The Birth of the Black Death: New Approaches in World History’ – 29 May, 5:00pm, Pembroke College.
  • The Digital Medieval Studies Institute is hosting a set of workshops on digital scholarly methods specifically tailored for medievalists as part of the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. More information can be found here.

Medieval Matters TT25, Week 4

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19/05/2025

08:23

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Call for Papers, events, Medieval Matters, News, opportunities, Uncategorized

Welcome to Week 4: the full Medieval Studies booklet is available here.

OMS are working towards producing an ‘Impact Booklet’, emphasising all of the wonderful things that go on throughout the year. At the moment we are searching for publications – if you have published a relevant monograph/ edited volume/ edition during the past year, please drop an email to this address with a short blurb. Also: Applications to be the next Social Media Officer still welcome; contact Henrike Lähnemann for an informal discussion of the role!

Monday

  • French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10:30 pm in the Weston Library.
  • Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Julia Smith (All Souls) and Ana Dias (Brasenose) will be speaking on ‘Surviving in the archives: how to make sense of early medieval relic labels’.

Tuesday

  • Medieval English Research Seminar – 12.15 in the English Faculty. (NB change of speaker). Professor Christophe Grellard (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris)) will be speaking on ‘St. Erkenwald – Orthodoxy on the Edge?’.
  • The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Medieval Church and Culture –  tea and biscuits from 5pm in the Wellbeloved Room, with talks from 5.15. Kevin Carlson (St Peter’s) will be speaking on ‘Reorienting Towards Life: a queer, medieval phenomenology of death in an anonymous 12thc Latin poem’, and Leslie Pencheng (St Catz) will be speaking on ‘Transforming the Ineffable: metaphors in Julian of Norwich and the Cloud of Unknowing’.

Wednesday

  • The Medieval German Graduate Seminar meets Wednesdays 11.15am–12.45pm in Oriel College, Harris Lecture Room. The topic for this term is the ‘Alexanderroman’ and this week Patrick Leuenberger will be speaking on Alexander’s horse Boucephalus. If you are interested to be added to the teams group for updates, please contact Henrike Lähnemann.
  • The ‘science of the stars’ in context: an introduction to medieval astronomical and astrological manuscripts and texts – 2pm in the Horton Room (Weston Library). Session 4: Planetary motions and horoscope.
  • Medieval Women’s Writing Research Seminar – 2pm, Lower Lecture Room, Lincoln College. Ved Prahba Shama (Independent Researcher) will be speaking on ‘Moving Beyond Knowledge in a Gendered Space’. See their TORCH website to book.
  • Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm, online, please contact Michael Stansfield.
  • Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies Seminar – 5pm in the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies. Dr Michael Callen (London School of Economics) will be speaking on ‘Building State Capacity in Fragile States’.

Thursday

  • Middle English Reading Group (MERG) – 2pm in the Smoking Room (Lincoln College). Join us to read the ‘double sorwe’ of Troilus and Criseyde in a weekly reading group. We will be reading from the end of Book IV. For more information or to be added to the mailing list, please email rebecca.menmuir@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Khalili Research Centre For the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East: Research Seminar – 5.15 in the KRC Lecture Room. Elizabeth Kelly (Independent researcher, London) will be speaking on ‘Zoomorphic incense burners of medieval Khurasan’.

Friday

  • Medievalists Coffee Morning – 10.30am at the Weston Library. All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.
  • Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
  • Oxford Medieval Manuscript Group Reading Group: Connoisseurship – 5pm online. Write to oxfordmedievalmss@gmail.com for more information.

Opportunities (new additions in bold)

  • The Terence Barry Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Irish Medieval Studies – deadline May 30, 2025. More information here.
  • Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society Travel Grant – more info here.
  • Call for Submissions: Taube Prizes for Student Writing in Hebrew & Jewish Studies – see blog post.
  • National Archives Skills Courses – see blog post.
  • CfP for ‘Staging Silence from Antiquity to the Renaissance’ – more information here.
  • CfP for ‘Music and Reformation: A Symposium at Lambeth Palace Library, 16 September 2025’
  • A regular pub trip is being organised on a Friday at 6pm at the Chequers, from 0th week to 8th week, for all medievalists at Oxford. Email maura.mckeon@bfriars.ox.ac.uk
  • Additional spaces are available on the ‘Big Data’ and Medieval Manuscripts workshop – please sign up here.
  • Registration is open for the Masterclass by Patrick Boucheron – Pourquoi des médiévistes ? Penser le contemporain depuis le Moyen Âge – 29 May, 2:30pm, Maison Française d’Oxford.
  • Registration is open for Patrick Boucheron’s lecture entitled ‘The Birth of the Black Death: New Approaches in World History’ – 29 May, 5:00pm, Pembroke College.
  • The Digital Medieval Studies Institute is hosting a set of workshops on digital scholarly methods specifically tailored for medievalists as part of the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. More information can be found here.