CAT is back! After a successful run in June 2023, artist in residence at the Physics Department Pam Davis has developed a second art-piece ‘Conversations Across Time’. Free tickets for the performances moving from the Ashmolean to a second secret hidden location are available via the website https://www.citizensai.com/
Dates: June 15th (preview at 11am – 1:20pm) | June 15th | June 16th
Schedule: 15:20 Meet on the steps at the Ashmolean Museum 15:30 Prequel 16:00 Departure for Scene Two 16:15 Scene II is in a Quantum Anomaly [hidden location] 17:40 End | Conversation to Follow
Players: Giovanni De Felice, Sirui Ning and, Juliette Imbert, PDK, Costi Levy, Directors:PDK and Costi Levy Composer: Cheryl Frances-Hoad
From the announcement in 2023: What do horses, medievalists, black hole orbits, boardrooms, and quantum computers have in common? Inspired by the Medieval Mystery Plays, artist in residence at the Physics Department Pam Davis has developed an art-piece ‘Conversations Across Time’ which links medieval theatre, women in science, and Quantum future.
Tuesday 4 June 2024, 12 noon–4PM Lecture Room 6, New College, Oxford
We are delighted to announce New College Library’s upcoming exhibition ‘Mythical and Monstrous: Fantastical Creatures at New College Library’.
Hunt for weird and wonderful beasts in items from the College’s fabulous special collections, from dragons and unicorns, to centaurs, blemmyes, and merpeople.
Among the wide variety of items on display will be a beautiful thirteenth-century Psalter, a fantastic fourteenth-century apocalypse manuscript, a famous fifteenth-century chronicle, and a spectacular sixteenth-century astronomical text.
Discover how depictions and understandings of mythical monsters changed over time and explore what these creatures reveal about how people saw themselves and the societies in which they lived.
New College Library, Oxford MS 284, f. 21rNew College Library, Oxford MS 65, f. 30 r
The exhibition is free and open to all. Signs will be in place to direct visitors to the exhibition from the Porters’ Lodge, located halfway down Holywell Street.
Wednesday, 29 May 2024, 5.15-6.45 UK time Memorial Room: The Queen’s College, Oxford
Dr Peter Tóth (Cornelia Stark Curator of Greek Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford) will speak on “In Quest of a Medieval Best-Seller: The Authorship of the Meditationes Vitae Christi” as term lecture for the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures
The Meditationes Vitae Christi, an anonymous medieval retelling of the life of Christ, appended with a number of extra and emotional details, has been described as the single most influential Franciscan text of the Middle Ages. A real best-seller that has come down to us in hundreds of manuscripts and versions in Latin and almost all the vernaculars of Medieval Europe. The text is known to have exercised an immense influence on Western spirituality and devotion and had decisive impact on Renaissance art and played pivotal role in the evolution of medieval Passion Plays and European theatre in general. Despite this enormous significance, the origin, date and authorship of the work has remained obscure and been in the focus of heated scholarly debates. After a brief survey of the problems of the text and the current scholarly consensus about its origins, the present paper will make an attempt to identify the author of the text and reconstruct its adventurous early history to explain its subsequent anonymity.
Image: Meditationes vitae Christi. English translation by Nicholas Love. Bodleian Library MS. Hatton 31, fol. 28v, mid-15th century. On medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
A one-day conference, Recording Oxford’s Medieval Lives. A Mise en Perspective of Lincoln Documents, as part of the seminar started in October, Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln archives.
The conference in the Oakshot Room of Lincoln College featured student presentations on their year-long research into Lincoln’s medieval documents, alternating with academic papers. Anyone with an interest in the history of medieval Oxford and medieval documents in general was welcome. Organised by Laure Miolo and Lindsay McCormack (Lincoln College Archivist).
The presenters and other participants
10.00 Prof. Henry Woudhuysen (Rector of Lincoln College) Welcome words
10.15 Dr. Laure Miolo & Lindsay McCormack (organisers – Lincoln College) The seminar Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln Archives
10.30–11.15 Dr. Alison Ray (St Peter’s College and All Souls) Archival sources for the medieval Oxford book trade
11.15–11.30 Break & refreshments
11.30–11.55 Tabitha Claydon, Claire Holthaus and Sam Oliver Their current research on medieval documents from All Saint’s Parish
11.55–12.10 Cory Nguyen and Charlie West Their current research on medieval documents from All Saint’s Parish
12.10–12.55 Dr. Richard Allen (MagdalenCollege, Oxford) ‘Qui scripsit hanc cartam’: Charters and their Scribes through the Archives of Magdalen College, Oxford (c.1100–c.1300)
13.00–14.00 Lunch break
14.00–14.15 Keely Douglas and Maria Murad Their current research on Anglo-Norman documents from Lincoln
14.15–14.30 Srija Dutta and Victoria Northridge Their current research on medieval documents from All Saint’s Parish
14.30–15.15 Prof. Philippa Hoskin (Fellow Librarian of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) Stamps of approval: the meaning of seals on medieval documents
15.15–15.30 Mehmet Tatoglu and Lucy Turner Their current research on medieval documents from All Saint’s Parish
15.30–15.45 Break & refreshments
15.45–16.30 Dr. Michael Stansfield (New College, Oxford) The Archival Ambition of William of Wykeham
16.45–17.00 Jess Hind and Lika Gorskaia Their current research on medieval documents from All Saint’s Parish
17.00–18.00: Break and drinks reception
18.00–18.45 Keynote lecture Prof. David d’Avray (UCL / Jesus College, Oxford) Comparative diplomatic: papacy and English royal government
This blog post and book display in the Voltaire Room between 3 and 10 May is a showcase of the excellent range of books on Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature held at the Taylorian. The display accompanies the launch of new digital editions of three versions of an Old Norse-Icelandic saga,Hrómundar saga Greipssonar, in the Taylor Editions series, and the release of an open access study of the saga’s transmission history,Lost but not forgotten: The saga of Hrómundur and its manuscript transmission, by Katarzyna Anna Kapitan.
To limit the number of books on physical display, the exhibit was structured around three themes: Icelandic Language and Literature in Oxford, The Story of Hrómundur, and Legendary Sagas. All items on display are from the holdings of the Taylor Institution Library, unless otherwise specified on the label.
Panel 1: Icelandic Language and Literature in Oxford
The first book on the Icelandic language published in Oxford appeared in 1688. It was a reprint of the 1651 Copenhagen edition of the first early modern grammar of Icelandic by Runólfur Jónsson (d. 1654), an Icelander educated at the University of Copenhagen. At Oxford, the first formal lectureship in Old Icelandic was established in 1884, to which Guðbrandur Vigfússon (1827–1889) was appointed. Guðbrandur, born and raised in Iceland moved to the UK to supervise the completion of the Icelandic–English dictionary, initiated by Richard Cleasby (1797–1847). He was awarded an honorary M.A. degree by Christ Church in 1871. In Guðbrandur’s memory, the Vigfusson Readership in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities was established at Oxford, and in 1976 the first woman was elected to this readership, Ursula Dronke, née Brown (1920–2012). Ursula held a professorial fellowship at Linacre College and is best known for her work on the Poetic Edda. In her early days, she was a fellow at Somerville College, where she wrote her B.Litt. thesis on The Saga of Thorgils and Haflidi (Ice. Þorgils saga og Hafliða), the published version of which is on display here along with some of Guðbrandur’s most important works.
Recentissima antiquissimæ linguæ septentrionalis incunabula [The Most Recent Cradle of the Most Ancient Northern Language] by Runólfur Jónsson Language: Latin Publication place and date: Oxford, 1688 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library 9.E.9.B(2)
An Icelandic-English Dictionary by Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon Language: Icelandic and English Publication place and date: Oxford, 1874 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library REP.M.113
An Icelandic Prose Reader by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Frederick York Powell Language: Icelandic and English Publication place and date: Oxford, 1879 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library RHO 053 r.9
Panel 2. The Story of Hrómundur
The story of Hrómundur existed already in the Middle Ages. According to an Old Norse-Icelandic saga, The Saga of Thorgils and Haflidi (Ice. Þorgils saga og Hafliða), which is a part of the thirteenth-century Sturlunga compilation, the story of Hrómundur was recited for entertainment at a wedding feast at Reykhólar in the year 1119.
The famous passage reads as follows: Hrólfur from Skálmarnes told a story about Hröngviður the Viking and King Ólafur and the mound-breaking of Þráinn the berserk and Hrómundur Gripsson, with many verses in it. This story was used to entertain King Sverrir, and he declared that such lying sagas were most amusing. Although men can trace their genealogies to Hrómundur Gripsson, Hrólfur himself had composed this saga.
On display are two Oxford editions of the saga: the 1878 edition of Sturlunga saga by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and the 1952 edition of Þorgils saga og Hafliða by Ursula Dronke (née Brown).
2.1 The first volume of Sturlunga saga, edited by Guðbrandur Vigfússon Language: English and Icelandic Publication place and date: Oxford, 1878 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library (RHO) 053 r. 35
2.2 The edition of Þorgils saga og Hafliða by Ursula Brown Language: English and Icelandic Publication place and date: Oxford, 1952 Shelfmark: Bodleian Library 27855 e.57
The medieval Saga of Thorgils and Haflidi (Ice. Þorgils saga og Hafliða) mentions that some Icelanders could trace their genealogies to Hrómundur. This refers to the account in The Book of Settlements (Ice. Landnámabók), the medieval work describing the settlement of Iceland in the 9th century.
In Landnámabók, Hrómundur is presented as a native of Telemark in Norway and a great-grandfather of Ingólfur and Leifur, the first settlers of Iceland.
Despite the references to Hrómundur and his saga in medieval sources, no known manuscript of the medieval saga has survived. The story, as we know it today, is a seventeenth-century adaptation of a medieval poem. In scholarship, it is classified as one of the legendary sagas, a group of entertaining narratives describing the legendary past of Scandinavia. Early modern historians, such as the Icelander employed at the Danish court, Thormodus Torfæus (1636–1719), were interested in the contents of legendary sagas as historical sources. Therefore, Torfæus included Hrómundar saga in his list of ancient Icelandic monuments of literature published in his Succession of Rulers and Kings of Denmark (Lat. Series dynastarum et regum Daniæ) from 1702.
2.3 The book of the settlement of Iceland, translated by Thomas Ellwood Publication place and date: Kendal, 1898 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library ICE.2.D.THO.1
2.4 The map of Iceland published as a part of Thomas Ellwood’s translation Publication place and date: Kendal, 1898 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library ICE.2.D.THO.1
2.5 The facsimile edition of the Landnámabók manuscripts, with an introduction by Jakob Benediktsson Publication place and date: Reykjavík, 1974Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library M94.L35
2.6 Series dynastarum et regum Daniæ [Succession of rulers and kings of Denmark] by Thormodus Torfæus. Language: Latin Publication place and date: Copenhagen, 1702 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library 110.D.3(I)
Panel 3. Legendary Sagas
Legendary sagas (Ice. fornaldarsögur) are a group of Old Norse-Icelandic prose narratives dealing with the early history of mainland Scandinavia, before the unification of Norway and the settlement of Iceland in the 9th century. Among the best-known examples of legendary sagas is The Saga of the Völsungs (Ice. Völsunga saga), which has a famous counterpart in the Middle High German epic poem Nibelungenlied; The Saga of Rolf Kraki (Ice. Hrólfs saga kraka), which narrates material related to the Old English poems Beowulf and Widsith; and The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok (Ice. Ragnars saga loðbrókar), which gained international fame thanks to the TV series Vikings. The Icelandic name fornaldarsögur, assigned to this group of texts, is derived from Fornaldar sögur Nordrlanda, the title of the 1829–1830 edition of select Icelandic sagas by the Danish philologist Carl Christian Rafn (1795–1864). The composition of Rafn’s work was highly indebted to the work conducted by his predecessors, especially the Swedish philologist Erik Julius Björner (1696–1750) and the Danish linguist Peter Erasmus Müller (1776–1834). On display here are important volumes of legendary sagas edited by all three of them.
3.1 Nordiska kämpa dater [Deeds of Nordic Heroes], edited by Erik Julius Björner Language: Icelandic, Swedish, and Latin Publication place and date: Stockholm 1737 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library 108.I.14
3.2 The second volume of Sagabibliothek [Saga Library] by Peter Erasmus Müller Language: Danish Publication place and date: Copenhagen 1818 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library 106.D.6
3.3 The second volume of Fornaldar sögur Nordrlanda [Ancient Sagas of the Northern Lands], edited by Carl Christian Rafn Language: Icelandic Publication place and date: Copenhagen 1829 Shelfmark: Taylor Institution Library N.S.12.ADDS.F.24
Poetry needs space. As music relies on its opposing silence; to be recognisable at first sight, poetry needs blanks. Transmitting texts in the Middle Ages was also a matter of space but rather concerned with the cost of writing material and the lack thereof. As a result, single poems were squeezed into the page at the expense of those defining blanks. Inevitably, large collections and vast anthologies densely occupied handwritten folia.
Nowadays, established traditions and criteria rule the process of compiling poetry books. But what was the awareness that ruled these processes in the Middle Ages? This is the topic of the workshop. The broad question is what idea of poetry and poetry books can be gleaned from this process. Is gathering just a necessity, or does it conceal a conscious poetic message? If conscious, what role does the physicality of the manuscript play for the poetic unit?
Medieval poetry books can be either multi-authorial anthologies or single-authorial collections, and many are the ways in which those poetic books could have been formed. Poems of different authors could have been selected around a common theme, or with a chronological criterion; authorial collections could be made by authors themselves, their students, or other members of their circle. These books could contain a macrostructure and, therefore, an overarching narrative; they could reflect a specific time of the author’s activity or summarise a life-long production. The way poems were arranged in ‘big containers’ and transmitted directly affected their readership, reception and their current literary status.
From the perspective of literary theory, the arrangement in medieval manuscripts opens an array of crucial questions: the relationship between the single poem and the poetry book, the way – supposedly different – in which long and shorter compositions were treated and the correspondence between its parts. Furthermore, how much was the idea of a single-thematic unit present in the minds of the compilers? Was this book to be read cover to cover, or something to read out or perform with music? And how does the layout of poetry, including the absence of those defining blanks, impact the reader’s experience?
Within this framework, the workshop focuses on the circulation of poems in the medieval Mediterranean, which is used as a case study to explore medieval literature.
Convenors: Ugo Mondini (University of Oxford) and Alberto Ravani (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Speakers: Marisa Galvez (Stanford University), Niels Gaul (The University of Edinburgh), Marlé Hammond (SOAS University of London), Adriano Russo (École française de Rome)
Programme
Friday, 31st May 2024
9:45 a.m.
Registration
10:15 a.m.
Welcoming address Barney Taylor (Sub-rector, Exeter College) Marc D. Lauxtermann (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages)
Introduction Ugo Mondini (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages) Alberto Ravani (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
10:30 a.m.
First Session Chair: Marina Bazzani (Faculty of Classics)
Marisa Galvez (Stanford University) – From Chansonniers to Whole-World Poetics: The Poetry Book as a Mode of Worlding
11:15 a.m.
Coffee break
11:30 a.m.
Adriano Russo (École française de Rome) – Between Chaos and Order: Dynamics of Formation of Medieval Latin Verse Collections
12:15 p.m.
Lunch
2:30 p.m.
Second Session Chair: TBD
Niels Gaul (University of Edinburgh) – Byzantine ‘Poetry Books’: From Embers and Sparks of Classicising Learning to Tokens of Literati Self-Fashioning?
Where: Wolfson College Buttery When: Friday, April 26 2024 at 1.15.
David Wiles (Emeritus Professor of Drama, University of Exeter) is performing the pseudo-Senecan Roman history play Octavia in the exuberant rhetorical language of the 1561 translation by Thomas Nuce with a group of players from Iffley and the University of Oxford.
Octavia, daughter of Claudius, wife of Nero – Imogen Lewis
Agrippina, wife and killer of Claudius, now dead – Laurence Nagy
Nero, son of Agrippina, now Emperor, killed his mother – Abigail Pole
Poppaea, mistress of Nero – Priya Toberman
Octavia’s nurse – Laura Laubeova
Seneca – Alex Marshall
Prefect – Andrew Stilborn
Messenger– Ivana Kuric
Chorus of Roman citizens – members of the company
Violin – Jessica Qiao
Director – David Wiles
Production sponsored by the Ancient World Research Cluster, Wolfson College Oxford.
Performance filmed by Henrike Lähnemann at Iffley Church Hall on April 21st.
The tragedy of Octavia is a unique example of the Roman history play, and survives because it was bound up with the tragedies of Seneca. The chorus, unlike those of Seneca, is engaged in the action as it rises up in rebellion against Nero. We are performing the play in the student translation of c.1561. Elizabeth had recently come to the throne, and in a polarised world the performance of religious plays seemed increasingly problematic. It was logical to turn to the classics, but the question arose, how to render Seneca in an equivalent English. It was not a matter of searching out what the words meant, but rather of forging a language with an equivalent rhetorical force, which in the Erasmus age meant a more copious language. The translator, Thomas Nuce, had an ear for performance, and did not attempt to find any pedantic metrical equivalence for the Latin. We have stripped the text down to a half-hour version, and have relished playing with the rhythms, rhymes and alliteration. Parsing the Latinate grammar was often a challenge.
The story was scarcely a safe choice in 1561. It tells how Nero cast off his first wife, Octavia, whom he had married for domestic reasons, and contracted a love match. Henry VIII had likewise terminated a dynastic marriage, to the great displeasure of his people, and the fruit of that love match had just come to the throne.
We are a mixed cast of students and community players, and on four occasions have worked on mediaeval plays for the festival at St Edmund Hall. The present production was put together for the annual conference of the Classical Association in Warwick on 24 March. If you are interested in participating in a production at St Edmund Hall in 2025, please contact David Wiles d.wiles@exeter.ac.uk.
The 2024 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference, hosted by the Maison Française d’Oxford, took place this past Monday and Tuesday, the 8th and 9th of April.
Since 2005, the OMGC has been an annual forum for graduate scholars from Oxford and beyond to share their research. The two-day conference brought together rising medievalists from Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Canada, France, Switzerland, and the UK and featured panels on divine affectivity, scribes and songs, visual signs, objects and collections, palaeography, and codicology.
Professor Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford) heralded the start of the conference on Monday morning with fanfare from the Oxford Medieval Studies trumpet – an appropriate opening to the conference, which was themed around ‘signs and scripts.’ United by the semiotic theme, participants found unexpected connections between a diverse set of presentations.
Professor Henrike Lähnemann playing her OMS trumpet in the Maison Française d’Oxford auditorium.
Professor Sophie Page (UCL) delivered her keynote presentation “Magic Signs and Censored Scripts in Medieval Europe,” closing the first day of papers. Her keynote delved into the syncretic texts of medieval magic, the efficacy of which required proper ritual performance – careful attention to the details of diagrams, auspicious star and cosmological signs, and specific material components.
Magic circle from the De secretis spirituum planetis in which the practitioner stands to summon planetary angels. Collection of alchemical, technical, medical, magic, and divinatory tracts (Miscellanae Alchemica XII), late 15th century. Wellcome Collection, MS 517, f. 234v.
Professor Page’s keynote dovetailed with Ellen Hausner’s (Oxford) paper on the alchemical images and text of the Ripley Scroll, which communicate a sense of time and space as core alchemical concepts trickle down from divine creation to the corporeal world. Signs and symbols are concentrations of meaning. Even small signifiers (although the scroll is over 2.6 meters long!) can signify immense, cosmological ideas.
As exemplified by Marlene Schilling’s (Oxford) paper on devotion to personified liturgical days in the prayer books of northern German convents, signs and scripts also have the power to lend physicality, visuality, and agency to concepts. Signs and scripts are means of power and community creation and consolidation. Or as Wilhelm Lungar (Stockholm) put it in his paper ‘Communicating Identity on Scandinavian Monastic Seals in the Middle Ages,’ objects like seals, as both historically situated artefacts and texts, mediate representation, identity, and authority.
From left to right: presentations by Elena Lichmanova (Oxford), Wilhelm Lungar (Stockholm), and Corinne Clark (Geneva).
The challenge of interpretation and an embrace of plural perspectives was a through-line for the conference, sparking rich, generative conversation. In her paper, ‘Mirror Writing and the Art of Self Reflection,’ Elena Lichmanova (Oxford) asked why and how offensive phrases like tu es asin[us] (‘you are an ass’) could be included in the thirteenth-century Rutland Psalter and surveyed the ways artists created nuances of meaning by manipulating the direction of script. Corinne Clark’s (Geneva) presentation on the life of St. Margaret considered the symbolism and mixed hagiographic reception of the saint’s battle with a dragon in which she is consumed by the demonic beast, erupting from its abdomen. Both topics inspired collaborative thinking among participants and emphasized the importance of analytical parallax to deepen our understanding of images and texts controversial and cryptic even to contemporaries.
As Megan Gorsalitz (Queen’s University, Kingston) made clear in her presentation on Old English riddles, mindless consumption steals meaning and risks careless, uncritical perpetuation. Signs and scripts require careful reflection of the manifold voices and identities they represent as well as those they conceal.
Detail of illuminated moth in decorated border. Book of Hours of King Charles VIII, 15th century. Utopia, armarium codicum bibliophilorum, Cod. 111, f. 96r.
A moth ate words. It seemed to me / a strange occasion, when I inquired about that wonder, / that the worm swallowed the riddle of certain men, / a thief in the darkness, the glorious pronouncement / and its strong foundation. The stealing guest was not / one whit the wiser, for all those words he swallowed.
Exeter Book Riddle 47
Charlotte Wood (Oxford), Marc Lawson (Trinity College Dublin), and Ilari Aalto (Turku) all grappled with the difficulties of studying oft-overlooked material culture. For Wood, whose paper focused on comb placement in Anglo-Saxon cremations, the significance of deliberately broken comb-ends in Anglo-Saxon burial urns remains elusive but exciting for their potential to tell us more about funerary practices. In his paper on brickmakers’ marks in late medieval Finland, Aalto suggested explanations for marks found in churches, which may simultaneously represent saints as an allusion to brickmakers’ names and act as a remembrance of the artisan embedded in the church. Drawing upon visual culture, written references, and extant examples of early Irish book satchels, Lawson demonstrated the prevalence of book satchels and suggested a more complex understanding of manuscript binding and use in early medieval Ireland.
The conference also featured a comprehensive selection of case studies exploring signs of manuscript creation, composition, authorship, revision, genre, and punctuation. Peter Fraundorfer’s (Trinity College Dublin) paper on a sammelband produced for Reichenau Abbey considered what the text’s language and contents can tell us about its author and intended readership, while Sebastian Dows-Miller (Oxford) took a statistical approach to the relationship between composition and authorship, identifying changes in scribal hand through changes in abbreviation frequency. In her presentation on Carthusian marginalia in The Book of Margery Kempe, Lucy Dallas (East Anglia) discussed the reception and reworking of the text for the monks and Elliot Vale’s paper on CCCC MS 201 problematized modern translations of vernacular works in which poetry and prose blend in structural and punctuation.
Margaret of Antioch emerging from the defeated dragon with the sign of the cross. Book of Hours, 15th century. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. liturg. e. 12, fol. 149v.
Papers by Jemima Bennett (Kent and Bodleian Libraries), Rhiannon Warren (Cambridge), Max Hello (Paris 1 – HiCSA), and Thomas Phillips (Bristol) all focused on the collection, manipulation, recycle, reconstruction, and aesthetics of manuscripts. Bennett’s work on fifteenth-century Oxford bookbinding continued the theme of plural interpretations as she discussed patterns and possible reasoning behind the recycle of manuscript fragments by collectors. Similarly, Phillips focused on recovering lost script from fragments of the Anglo-Saxon Office of St. Alban. Warren and Hello also touched on signs of manuscript manipulation, reuse, and changing aesthetic preferences in their respective presentations on Árni Magnússon’s Icelandic manuscript collection and ornamentation in Merovingian book writing. Complementing the presentations on material culture, the palaeography and codicology sessions reinforced the materiality of manuscripts and fluidity of text.
From left to right: presentations by Max Hello (Paris 1 – HiCSA), Jemima Bennett (Kent and Bodleian Libraries), and Sebastian Dows-Miller (Oxford).
Presentations aside, the congenial atmosphere and enthusiasm of the participants made for constructive knowledge exchange and an enjoyable two days of conversation. From the 2024 OMGC committee, thank you to all who attended. The committee is also excited to announce that the theme for the 2025 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference will be Magic, Rituals, and Ceremonies! Until then, keep an eye on the OMGC blog for posts by this year’s presenters.
The 2024 OMGC committee (Katherine Beard, Ashley Castelino, Emma-Catherine Wilson, Kate McKee, Ryan Mealiffe, Mary O’Connor, and Eugenia Vorobeva) thank our sponsors for making this year’s conference possible.
The 2024 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference was presented in association with the Maison Française d’ Oxford, the Oxford Festival of the Arts, the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (Medium Ævum), the Oxford Faculty of Music, the Oxford Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford Medieval Studies (OMS), and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
Header Image: The White Hart, pub sign (colorized), ca. 1750. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, W.69:2-1938. Photoshopped onto background of Merton Street, Oxford.
Organisers: Antonia Anstatt (University of Oxford, email) and Edmund van der Molen (University of Nottingham, email)
This conference is generously supported by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, the Hagiography Society, the Past & Present Society, and the History Faculty, University of Oxford. In association with Oxford Medieval Studies, it is sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
9 CONFERENCE START, REGISTRATION 9.15am WELCOME 9.30-11 PANEL 1: TRANSGRESSING GENDER Marita von Weissenberg (Xavier University, Cincinnati): Husband-saints and Secular Masculinity as a Tool for Religious Pursuit Caitlín Kane (University of Oxford): Womanly Bridegroom, Manly Bride: Gender Transgression in the Visions of Saint Catherine of Siena Maria Pieschacon-Raffael (Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich): La Pucelle: The Significance of Gender in the (After-)Life of Joan of Arc 11.30-13 PANEL 2: (TRANS)CENDING GENDER Verity Bruce (University of Exeter): Death Becomes They/Them? Christina Mirabilis’ Post-Death Gender State Genevieve Caulfield (University College London): Desire Has No Gender: Styles of Seeing in Franciscan Hagiography Davide Tramarin (University of Padua): Transcending Gender in Mystical Devotion: Images of Christ and St John the Apostle in Late Medieval Germany 14-15.30 Keynote Lecture: Who’s Afraid of Trans and Genderqueer Saints? Alicia Spencer-Hall (University College London) 16-17.30 PANEL 3: QUEERING SAINTHOOD Michael Eber (Georg-August-University Göttingen): Sancta virgo / sicut pater: Homosociality and Gender Transgression in the Latin Lives of St Marina/us Shay Pertler (Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg): Oblita sit sexum: Life and Death of Joseph of Schönau Roan Runge (University of Cambridge): Fúair comartha bandachta ann ([He] Found the Sign of Womanhood There): The Construction of Gender in the Medieval Irish ‘Story of the Abbot of Drimnagh’
SATURDAY 6TH APRIL
9.30-11 PANEL 4: WRITING GENDER Isabel Kimpel (Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich): Famula Christi et Mulier fortis: The Writings of Caesarius of Heisterbach on Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia Georgie Crespi (University of Reading): ‘We’re All Born Naked, and the Rest is Drag’: The Concept of Drag in ‘Christina of Markyate’ and ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ María del Carmen Muñoz Rodríguez (University of Seville): In ure lauerdes luue: The Spaces of Female Sanctity in the Middle English ‘Seinte Iuliene’ 11.30-13 PANEL 5: VISUALISING GENDER Rosalind Phillips-Solomon (University of York): ‘Miraculous Aged Virgin’ or Quintessential Virgin Martyr? Late Medieval Imaginings of Saint Apollonia Sarah Wilkins (Pratt Institute, New York): A Preaching Woman: Mary Magdalen in Late Medieval Italian Art Elisabet Trulla Serra (Trinity College Dublin): Gender Configuration in Byzantine Art Through Saint Mary of Egypt 14-15.30 PANEL 6: FAMILIAL AND SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIPS Jessica Troy (Independent Scholar): Unequal Treatment: The Power Struggle of Medieval Chaste Couples Laura Moncion (University of Toronto): ‘Be My Spouse’: Spiritual Partnership in the Life of Pirona the Recluse Michaela Granger (Catholic University of America, Washington DC): ‘And It Was Accounted to Him (or Her?) as Righteousness …’: The Value of Childrearing in the Construction of Late Medieval Sanctity 16-17.30 PANEL 7: MODERN PERSPECTIVES Dannelle Gutarra (University of Warwick): Medieval Sainthood and Scientific Racism: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in ‘History of the Female Sex’ by Christoph Meiners Maria Zygogianni (Swansea University): Saint Athanasia of Aigaleo: An Entrepreneur Saint Myrna Nader (American University of Beirut): The Cult of Marina the Monk: Faith, Discourse and Sexuality in Contemporary Lebanon 17.30-18 CLOSING REMARKS 18 CONFERENCE END
Weds 28th Feb, 5.15, The Memorial Room, The Queen’s College
Fruits of the poisonous tree: unprovenanced artefacts and the ethics of consuming archaeological knowledge
Yağmur Heffron, UCL
Opening with a juicy (if cautionary) tale of archaeological mystery and scandal, this lecture will invite the audience to engage in entirely imaginary and possibly fantastical thought experiments around whether it can ever be possible to extract, rescue, or salvage information from suspiciously unprovenanced artefacts – especially those in private collections – in an ethical manner. The purpose of these experiments is to tease out the complex interrelationships between personal and professional gain, conflicts of interest, and power dynamics surrounding the consumption of archaeological knowledge, in order to test if the latter can be satisfactorily isolated. How much are researchers willing to sacrifice to make the fruits from a poisonous tree safe to eat?
The ethics of publishing unprovenanced manuscripts is a hotly contested issue, with scholars becoming more and more polarised on each side of the debate. This new lecture series aims to find new ways of approaching the topic, going beyond ‘for and against’ to explore the challenges presented by these texts in nuanced ways. Our aim is to stimulate considered debate with an audience varied in both background and opinion, finding ways forward to bridge the divide. All are welcome.
