Category: News

As we move into seventh week, the term and indeed the whole academic teaching year is beginning to wrap up. It has been an extremely busy year with more medieval events than ever before. It’s been a particular delight to see so many new seminars and events joining our roster this year, and to see the range of Oxford Medieval Studies expanding ever further. That being said, our busy programme is the product of extremely hard work, and I’m sure that many of us (especially our MSt students, currently working on their dissertations) are feeling rather tired. For those who need a little motivation to keep up the good work until the end of term, here is some advice from Alcuin:

non incipiens sed perseverans in finem salvus erit
[It is not the person who begins who will be saved, but the one who perseveres to the end, Ep. 276]

Some of our seminars have now finished for the year, but others are “persevering” to the end of the term! For your guide to everything happening this week, please see below:

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 5th June:

• The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Peter Boudreau (McGill University), Keeping Time in Byzantium: Temporal Imagery and Thought in the Calendars of Later Byzantium. To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.   
• The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford and Andrew Dunning is meeting as usual via Teams from 1-2pm. This term we will read some satirical poetry from a thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Bekyngton anthology’ (Bodl. MS. Add. A. 44). Sign up for the mailing list to receive updates and the Teams invite, or contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for more information.
• The Invisible East Group is hosting a seminar at 3pm in the Spalding Room, FAMES, Pusey Lane. This week’s speaker will be Prof Edmund Herzig, University of Oxford, ‘Closing a bank account in early 18^th century Isfahan‘. More information at this link
•  The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Sara Lipton (Stony Brook/All Souls), ‘Iconography Against the Grain: Looking at and Learning from Art in the High Middle Ages‘. The seminar will also be available remotely via Teams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.

Tuesday 6th June:

• The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Samuel Oliver (Queen’s), Envisioning Beguines’ ideas of community after the Council of Vienne, with a special focus on  the Vita et Revelationes of Agnes Blannbekin. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
• There will be a reconstruction of the Night Office in 15th-Century Oxford in New College Chapel at 9pm prepared by Henry Parkes. Come along to experience of listening to the Office for Thomas Becket! More information and a glimpse of the manuscripts on which this is based in this blogpost.

Wednesday 7th June:

• The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. We will meet in person in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
• The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
• The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Asli Niyazioglu (Exeter College), ‘Ottoman Istanbul’s Talismanic Antiquities’. You can also join the seminar remotely via Teams, click here.

Thursday 8th June:

• The Discussion Group: Governability across the medieval globe meets at 12.30 in the Sainsbury Common Room in Worcester College. Everyone welcome: staff, students and researchers, of all historical periods. We encourage you to bring lunch along. This week’s topic is ‘Plants and animals 🐄🌳’.
• The Piers Plowman in Context discussion group will be led by Helen Barr in the Main Quad Boardroom at Univ from 4:30-5:30. This week’s session will be on Passus XIX of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to the Wycliffite ‘On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’ (available through this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LSWHJAX2abXPsd_9PwC-540qcBTXrucB) and Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale. All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley (jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk) with any questions

Friday 9th June:

• The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
• The Germanic Reading Group meets at 4pm on Zoom. To receive the materials and be added to the mailing list, please contact howard.jones@sbs.ox.ac.uk.
• The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm at the Julia Mann room, St Hilda’s College and online. This term we are reading extracts from Hue de Rotelands’s Protheselaus. Please contact Jane Bliss and/or Stephanie Hathaway to let us know if you can come in person (so we know whom to expect), also to obtain copies of the texts, and for the Zoom invitations.

Finally, some more wisdom from Alcuin on the importance of staying focussed even as the term draws to a close (always a difficult task):

non segniter labora
[don’t work half-heartedly! Ep. 18]

Wishing the best of luck to all of our graduate students finishing up dissertations or taking exams in the next few weeks. For everyone else: may you work whole-heartedly this week!

It’s another beautiful sunny bank-holiday Monday here in Oxford. The parks are looking especially lovely, and provide a particularly lovely break from work. Indeed, Alcuin tells us that we can find lots of examples for good behaviour in nature. In particular the bee, famed for its careful selection of good pollen, might be a useful model for research:

Sicut apis sapientissima, omnia, quae honestatis sunt, discendo probate; et quae optima esse videntur, eligendo retinete
[By learning confirm what is important, and by choosing keep hold of whatever seems good – just like the wisest bee. Ep. 72 ]

It’s easy to follow such advice given that there are so many wonderful seminars, reading groups and events for you to examine and learn from this week. The great difficulty is, of course, choosing which to attend: Alcuin unfortunately did not give us any advice on how to select seminars when all of them ‘optima esse videntur’! Please see below for the many wonderful things happening in Oxford this week:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Rethinking Lyric Communities in Premodern Worlds will take place at Christ Church Research Centre, Oxford, on 20-21 June. This symposium is part of the collaborative research project Rethinking Lyric Communities, which had its first two workshops in Oxford and Berlin last year. This third instalment will focus on questions of lyric and community in premodern times in both European and Middle Eastern worlds. Bringing contemporary lyric theory into dialogue with medieval and early modern studies, the fundamental questions we intend to explore are: what is it that makes the lyric particularly shareable? How was it actually shared? And what kind of community formation did it enable or envision? This is a hybrid event. To receive the link, please write to Nicolas Longinotti by Thursday 15 June 2023: n.longinotti@fu-berlin.de. For more information and the full programme, please click here.
• The Night Office in 15th-Century Oxford: on Tuesday 6th June at 9pm in New College Chapel, New College Choir will enact a short-form Night Office as it might have been known in 15th-century Oxford, to explore how this nowforgotten liturgy worked in performance. In southern England from the late 14th century on, Tuesdays were commonly given over to the veneration of St Thomas Becket. This service recreates a ‘commemorative’ Tuesday Becket office, as precribed in late medieval books of the Sarum Use—many of which survive in Oxford libraries.
• Medieval Mystery Play Recordings are now available! If you missed the Medieval Mystery Plays or just want to relive the fun of them, you can now watch the recordings on our blog. For a taster of the medievalist merriment, please see the trailer here. Huge thanks to Natascha Domeisen for her hard work filming and editing these.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 29th May:

•  The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will not meet today, but resumes next week.
• The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford and Andrew Dunning is meeting as usual via Teams from 1-2pm. This term we will read some satirical poetry from a thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Bekyngton anthology’ (Bodl. MS. Add. A. 44). Sign up for the mailing list to receive updates and the Teams invite, or contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for more information.
• The Queer and Trans Medievalisms Reading and Research Group meets at 3pm at Univ College, 12 Merton St Room 2. This week’s theme is Animal magics: The Mabinogion, fourth branch (Mab uab Mathonwy). All extremely welcome! To join the mailing list and get texts in advance, or if you have any questions, email rowan.wilson@univ.ox.ac.uk.
• The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be José Maria Andres Porras (St Hugh’s) ‘Violence, Blood, and Vendetta: A Girardian Interpretation‘. The seminar will also be available remotely via Teams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.

Tuesday 30th May:

• The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12:00 in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. This week’s speaker will be Euan Roger (National Archives), Life Records and The National Archives.
• The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Lucas Dorschel (St Hugh’s), Recontextualizing the Donestre: Queer Cannibalism in the Wonders of the East Manuscripts, c. 1000-1125. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
• The first lecture of the New CMTC Lecture Series: Provenance Unknown will take place at 5.15-7pm in the Memorial Room, Queen’s College. The speaker is Alexander Herman (Institute of Art and Law, London), Don’t Turn That Page! The Legal Risks of Dealing in Unprovenanced Manuscripts. You can also join the lecture online via Zoom: to register for the link, please click here. Sign-ups will close at 10,00am on Tuesday 30th May. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to provide a Zoom link if you email us after this time. If you have not received a link by 12.00noon on 30th May, please email Gabriele Rota (gabriele.rota@queens.ox.ac.uk).

Wednesday 31st May:

• The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. This week Magdalena Butz will present findings from her doctoral thesis on the transformation of religious knowledge into vernacular storytelling. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
• The Old High German Reading Group will not meet this week.
• The Old French Reading Group takes place at 4-5pm at St Hilda’s College (meet by the lodge) on Wednesdays of Even Weeks in association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). We welcome readers of Old French of all abilities. For further information, please email alice.hawkins@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk or irina.boeru@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk
• The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
• The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Cristina Rognoni (Università degli Studi di Palermo), ‘The Greek monastery of S. Salvatore di Bordonaro (Messina, Sicily, 12th century): a short history and a long tradition’. You can also join the seminar remotely via Teams, click here.

Thursday 1st June:

• The Environmental History Group meets at 12-2pm in the Gary Martin Room, History Faculty. This week’s speaker will be G. J. Morgan, “The Hagiocene: ‘the Age of the Saints’ and environmental thought”. We try to keep discussions informal, and we encourage anyone at all interested in these kinds of approaches to join our meetings, regardless of research specialism or presumed existing knowledge. For those interested in joining the group, you can join our mailing list by getting in touch with us at environmentalhistoryworkinggroup-owner@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
• The Pursuit of Musick. The Taverner Consort at 50 will take place at 3-4pm at the Taylor Institution Library, Room 2. Andrew Parrott will be in conversation with Henrike Lähnemann on musical life in medieval and early modern Europe. This is a celebration of 50 years of the Taverner Consort and Andrew Parrott’s The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings & Art c1200–1770, a uniquely colourful compendium of almost everything to do with pre-modern musical life. The lecture will take as its starting point how the examples on music in the everyday life of medieval and early modern Germany can be used as a teaching tool and will also discuss questions of translation of premodern sources. All original source material is open access available on the publication website, e.g. https://www.taverner.org/everyday-life. For more information, see our blog here.
• The Medieval Women’s Writing Reading Group meets at 3-4pm at Lincoln College: meet at the lodge. This week’s theme will be Holiness and sainthood: forms of holiness and sainthood, and their effect on authority both by women and for women. Please email katherine.smith@lincoln.ox.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list and get texts in advance, or to find out more.
• This week’s Piers Plowman in Context discussion group will be led by Mishtooni Bose in the Main Quad Boardroom at Univ from 16:30-17:30. This week’s session will be on Passus XV of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to the short contexts available through this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ecmqwQpuxmxbEn7e9Pu0uFCMVONSCdRC All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley (jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk) with any questions.
• The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5.15-6.45pm at St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Michelle Brown University of London, Visual Exegesis and its Deployment in Insular Illumination. For further information, contact Elena Lichmanova (elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk).

Friday 2nd June:

• The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.

Saturday 3rd June:

• A one-day-only exhibition: Maleficia: Magic, Witchcraft, & Astrology will take place at New College. We will be displaying some manuscripts, mostly astrological texts, along with a number of early modern printed books, mostly witchcraft treatises. The exhibition will be in New College’s Lecture Room 4 and is open to the public.

Of course, just as there are good examples to be found in nature, Alcuin reminds us that there are bad ones too:

Nec mirum, si tarditas aselli sustineat in dorso flagellum
[It’s not surprising if a lazy donkey gets a whip across his back! Ep. 98]

I take this to mean that it’s important not to get overly carried away with walks in University Parks when there is still plenty of work to do before the end of term! Nonetheless, I hope that you all get to enjoy some sunshine today, and wish you a week of being ‘like the wisest bee’ in your learning and teaching!

Last weekend medievalists from around the world gathered at Oxford to celebrate the life and scholarship of Nigel F. Palmer (1946-2022), Emeritus Professor of German Medieval Literary and Linguistic  Studies . Many thanks to all who came along, gave papers, and organised the wonderful library exhibition. As part of the proceedings, Dr Alan Coates gave a special presentation on Nigel Palmer’s Books in the Bodleian at the Weston medievalists’ coffee morning. If you missed the presentation, you can view this on our blog here and further contributions on the programme of the symposium. Here is some wisdom from Alcuin on the importance of remembering those who teach and inspire us:

numquam eruditionis vestrae […] obliviscimini magistrum
[Never forget the teacher of your wisdom Ep. 34]

We have many wonderful opportunities this week to be taught and to teach wisdom. See below for the full programme:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• The OMS Small Grants Application for Trinity Term ’23 is now open! The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. The activity should take place between the beginning of Trinity term 2023 and end of the summer vacation. The closing date for applications is Friday of Week 5 of Trinity Term (= 26 May); decisions will be made promptly after the closing date. For more details and the application form, click here.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 22nd May:

•  The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Emily Chesley (Princeton University), Collateral Damage: Eastern Women’s Experiences in the Roman-Persian Wars, 4th-6th c. To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.  
• No Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group this week!  
•  The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Lucy Parker (Wadham) ‘Monks, martyrs, and masculinity: authority and gender in early Islamic Palestine’. The seminar will also be available remotely via Teams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
• The Oxford Interfaith Forum meets online via Zoom at 6pm. Rabbi Joshua Stanton, Director of the Leadership Formation at the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and Rabbi of East End Temple in Manhattan, NY, USA, will be leading this session of the Psalms in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group. To register, please click here.

Tuesday 23rd May:

• The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12:00 in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. This week’s speaker will be Peter Buchanan (University of Cambridge), ‘Medieval Multiversality: Modalities in 14th Century Poetry‘.
• The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC) at The Queen’s College (Oxford) is hosting a “Work in progress” colloquium at 3.30–5pm in the Memorial Room, The Queen’s College and online via Zoom. The speakers will be Marius Del Core (Pisa/Oxford), ‘Omitti possunt. Evidence for abridgement and athetesis in Plautine manuscripts‘ and Stefano Milonia (Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples), ‘Super and Contra. Conversion and resemantisation of mediaeval French lyric in the Ludus super Anticlaudianum’. Please register here (whether you are planning to attend in person or online).
• The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Julia Schroeder (Lincoln), ‘Bokes Unbrad’:  ecclesiastical court records in late medieval England. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
• The Medieval French Research Seminar will meet at 5pm for drinks, with the presentation starting at 5:15pm, at the Maison Francaise d’Oxford on Norham Road. This week’s speakers will be Micah Mackay and Anna Wilmore, ‘Song? Poem? Both?: The Late Medieval Lyric in Context’. For more information, to be added to the seminar maillist, or for the Teams link to join a seminar remotely, contact helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk.

Wednesday 24th May:

• The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. We will meet in person in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. This week we will be discussing the tradition of the 15 signs of the Last Judgement within the text led by Anja Peters and Timothy Powell. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
• The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
• The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Jean-Claude Cheynet (emeritus, Sorbonne Université), ‘Women’s Seals in Byzantium’. You can also join the seminar remotely via Teams, click here.

Thursday 25th May:

• Wendy Scase from Birmingham is leading this week’s Piers Plowman in Context discussion group, which meets in the Main Quad Boardroom at Univ from 4:30-5:30. This week’s session will be on Passus XIII of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to Richard Fitzralph’s Defensio Curatorum, available through this link. Attendees are encouraged to choose a brief section of the Defensio to talk about. All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley (jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk) with any questions.

Friday 26th May:

• The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
• The Germanic Reading Group meets at 4pm on Zoom. To receive the materials and be added to the mailing list, please contact howard.jones@sbs.ox.ac.uk.
• The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm at the Julia Mann room, St Hilda’s College and online. This term we are reading extracts from Hue de Rotelands’s Protheselaus. Please contact Jane Bliss and/or Stephanie Hathaway to let us know if you can come in person (so we know whom to expect), also to obtain copies of the texts, and for the Zoom invitations.

Fifth week is notorious in Oxford for being the point in the term when everyone feels rather tired and low in spirits. Hopefully the sun is helping to keep everyone’s spirits high: Oxford does look beautiful in the sun! As for the tiredness, Alcuin has a prescription for us all:

fessae mentis acumen levioris lectionis interpositio saepe reficit
[The interposition of lighter reading often restores the sharpness of a tired mind, Ep. 300]

In addition to this advice, I offer that the interposition of Medievalist socialising may also prove restorative: please do come along to our coffee mornings if the sharpness of your mind is in need of some restoration! In the meantime, I wish you all a week of lighter reading and sunshine.

Last week we hosted the fabulous OMS Trinity Term Lecture by Alison Ray and Heather Barr: a careers talk with a twist! Many thanks to Alison and Heather for a wonderful evening, and thanks to everyone who came along. Here’s some careers-based wisdom from Alcuin, in honour of the occasion:

Unus quisque proprii laboris mercedem accipiet
[Each person will receive appropriate reward for their own work, Ep. 88]

If you missed the talk, don’t fear: you can catch up via our blog! You can view the Trinity Term Lecture, along with a handy list of resources for further information on working in archives, libraries and the wider heritage sector, kindly written by Alison, here: GLAMorous work: Medievalist Pathways in Archives and Libraries. Alison has also kindly written up the highlights of the Medieval Mystery Plays, so if you missed the festivities (or just want to relive them), please click here! We also have a wonderful Report by Elisabeth Dutton, Université de Fribourg, on the staging of the Comédie des Innocents, by Marguerite de Navarre: click here to read all about it! For the week’s offerings, please see below.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Save the date! Dies Latinus et Graecus: ‘Quid antiqui de antiquis censuerint’: We are delighted to announce that the Oxford Ancient Languages Society, with the support of Oxford Latinitas, will be running a Dies Latinus et Graecus on Saturday 20 May, in the Ship Street Centre, Jesus College. Please save the date! The broad theme of the day will be what the ancients had to say about (even earlier) ancient figures, texts, and events, and in general exploring antiquity through its own critical resources. To register interest, please fill out this form. Any questions may be directed to nicholas.romanos@worc.ox.ac.uk or aron.szocs@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk.
• Registration for Literary, religious and manuscript cultures of the  German-speaking lands, the  symposium  in memory of Nigel F. Palmer (1946-2022)  which takes place on 19/20 May finished last week; please contact Henrike Lähnemann if you would still like to attend some sessions. There will be the opportunity for Oxford-based medievalists to see books related to Nigel Palmer both at the Friday coffee morning on 19 May and in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall on 20 May from 5pm.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 8th May:

•  The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Valeria Annunziata (La Sapienza Università di Roma), Challenging Authorities: How and Why Byzantine Scholars Emended Classical and Authoritative Texts . To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. 
• The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford and Andrew Dunning is meeting as usual via Teams from 1-2pm. This term we will read some satirical poetry from a thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Bekyngton anthology’ (Bodl. MS. Add. A. 44). Sign up for the mailing list to receive updates and the Teams invite, or contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for more information.
• Please note that the Medieval History Seminar will not take place this week.

Tuesday 9th May:

• The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12:00 in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. This week’s speakers will be Jane Griffiths (Wadham College, Oxford) and Laura Varnam (University College, Oxford), ‘Her Wordhoard: Unlocking Creativity in Academic Practice‘.
• The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Sara Lipton (Stony Brook, NY), ‘The Law Was Like a Book of Pictures’: a sermon by Philip the Chancellor on Jewish and Christian Ways of reading and perceiving‘. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
• The Medieval French Research Seminar will meet at 5pm for drinks, with the presentation starting at 5:15pm, at the Maison Francaise d’Oxford on Norham Road. This week’s speakers will be Ramani Chandramohan, Alice Hawkins, and Robert Ley – ‘Within and Beyond: Scribal, Textual and Narrative Voices in Medieval French Epic and Romance‘. For more information, to be added to the seminar maillist, or for the Teams link to join a seminar remotely, contact helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk.

Wednesday 10th May:

• The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. This week Luise Morawetz will offer a short presentation on her project editing the Old High German glosses in Bodleian Library, MS. Canon. Pat. Lat. 57 – have a look at her work-in-progress edition.
• The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
• The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Federico Montinaro (Universität Tübingen), ‘The edition of the Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 879-80: an interim report’. To join remotely via Teams, click here.
• The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC) at The Queen’s College (Oxford) is hosting the Trinity Term Lecture at 5.15–6.45pm, in the Memorial Room, The Queen’s College and online via Zoom. The lecture will be by Jean-Luc Fournet (Collège de France, Paris), ‘The End of a Script and the Beginning of Myth. Hieroglyphs and the Greeks’. Please register here (whether you are planning to attend in person or online).

Thursday 11th May:

• The Discussion Group: Governability across the medieval globe meets at 12.30 in Seminar Room A in Jesus College. Everyone welcome: staff, students and researchers, of all historical periods. We encourage you to bring lunch along. This week’s topic is ‘Gender’.
• Laura Ashe is leading this week’s Piers Plowman in Context discussion group, which meets in the Butler Room at Univ (please note the change of college room) from 4.30-5.30. This week’s session will be on Passus VII of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to the short contextual passages in this PDF. All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley with any questions.
• The Oxford Interfaith Forum meets online via Zoom at 6pm. Professor Adele Berlin, Robert H. Smith Professor Emerita of Hebrew Bible at the University of Maryland, USA, will be leading this session on Exile and Restoration in the Psalms. To register, please click here.

Friday 12th May:

• The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
• The Germanic Reading Group meets at 4pm on Zoom. To mark the publication of his new book, Prosody in Medieval English and Norse, Nelson Goering will lead this session on Laȝamon’s Brut. To receive the materials and be added to the mailing list, please contact howard.jones@sbs.ox.ac.uk.
• The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm at the Julia Mann room, St Hilda’s College and online. This term we are reading extracts from Hue de Rotelands’s Protheselaus. Please contact Jane Bliss and/or Stephanie Hathaway to let us know if you can come in person (so we know whom to expect), also to obtain copies of the texts, and for the Zoom invitations.

I hope you are all enjoying your second bank holiday weekend! Though Alcuin thought it was important to work hard to receive your just rewards, he also acknowledged that taking a break was sometimes necessary:

Qui placido in puppi carpebat pectore somnum,
Exurgens uentis imperat et pelago
[With a quiet heart he snatched some sleep in the ship’s stern; waking, he commanded the wind and sea. Oratio in Nocte.]

I take this to mean: snatch some sleep on this bank holiday so that you can accomplish great things the rest of the week! Wishing you all a week of good work, good rest, and the rewards that you deserve!

Happy May Morning! The May Morning celebrations in Oxford traditionally mark the official arrival of Spring. If you were up early celebrating at Magdalen Bridge, I hope that you had a wonderful time. Here is some wisdom from Alcuin regarding mornings, whether literal or more metaphorical:

Mane, florentibus per aetatem studiis, seminavi in Brittania
[In the morning of my life, with my spirit flowering during that time, I sowed the seeds of learning in Britain. Ep. 8]

May your May Morning be filled with the seeds of learning! To help you along the way, here are some wonderful events happening this week:

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 1st May:

• The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Paul Ulishney (University of Oxford), The Crisis of the Chalcedonian Episcopate in Egypt, c. 652-c. 710. To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. 
• The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford and Andrew Dunning is meeting as usual via Teams from 1-2pm. This term we will read some satirical poetry from a thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Bekyngton anthology’ (Bodl. MS. Add. A. 44). Sign up for the mailing list to receive updates and the Teams invite, or contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for more information.
• The Queer and Trans Medievalisms Reading and Research Group meets at 3pm at Univ College, 12 Merton St Room 2. This week’s theme is Creaturely lais: Marie de France, Bisclavret and Yonec. All extremely welcome! To join the mailing list and get texts in advance, or if you have any questions, email rowan.wilson@univ.ox.ac.uk.
•  The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Tom Johnson (York) ‘Reckoning and Economic Life in Late-Medieval England‘. The seminar will also be available remotely via Teams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.

Tuesday 2nd May:

• The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12:00 in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. This week’s speaker will be Jeremy Smith (University of Glasgow), Reinventing medieval English liturgy: the lives and afterlives of The Lay Folks’ Mass Book.
• The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Virginia Bainbridge (freelance researcher), ‘Taking advantage? Syon Abbey and regime change in the Wars of the Roses’. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!

Wednesday 3rd May:

• The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. We will meet in person in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. This week we will be discussing the prologue. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
• The Old High German Reading Group at 11-12 in 41 Wellington Square, 2nd floor (Henrike Lähnemann’s office). It will be an opportunity to read and analyse some simpler OHG texts and give people the chance to read the oldest form of German if they’ve not been exposed to it before. It will be very informal, and all are welcome. Led by William Thurlwell william.thurlwell@wolfson.ox.ac.uk – contact him for updates
• The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
• The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Nikolas Vryzidis (Aristoteleio Panepistimio, Thessaloniki), ‘Transitional threads: Textiles in the late medieval Balkans, 14th-16th centuries’.

Thursday 4th May:

• The Environmental History Group meets at 12-2pm in the Rees Davies Room, History Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Jake Hatton, “‘Land for Improvement’: extraction and ecosystem in mid-18th century Nova Scotia”. We try to keep discussions informal, and we encourage anyone at all interested in these kinds of approaches to join our meetings, regardless of research specialism or presumed existing knowledge. For those interested in joining the group, you can join our mailing list by getting in touch with us at environmentalhistoryworkinggroup-owner@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
• The Searobend Masterclass and Focus Group for Linked Metadata for English Language Texts, 1000-1300 will take place at 2-5pm at the Weston Library. This event will showcase the project’s sources and methods, including a masterclass on Bodley 340+342, and an introduction to linked open data, knowledge graphs, and metadata structure. It aims to gather feedback from undergraduates, postgraduates, and early career researchers, which will influence the size, structure and scope of the project’s final website interface, scheduled to launch in July 2024. Tea and coffee break will be provided. Participants will need to bring a laptop. To register, sign up on EventBrite: https://tinyurl.com/56b8z8e6 For more information, please contact Matthew Holford (matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk), Colleen Curran (ccurran2@tcd.ie), or Mark Faulkner (mark.faulkner@tcd.ie).
• The Medieval Women’s Writing Reading Group meets at 3-4pm at Lincoln College: meet at the lodge. This week’s theme will be Female foremothers: imitating and building on the authority of past women. Please email katherine.smith@lincoln.ox.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list and get texts in advance, or to find out more.
• Simon Horobin is leading this week’s Piers Plowman in Context discussion group, which meets in the Butler Room at Univ (please note the change of college room) from 4:30-5:30pm. This week’s session will be on Passus V of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to the following short contexts: the section on ‘Sloth’ from the Book of Vices and Virtues; sermon 11A from Lollard Sermons; and the section ‘De Invidia’ from Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale; all available through this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ecmqwQpuxmxbEn7e9Pu0uFCMVONSCdRC?usp=share_link All welcome! Email jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk with any questions.
• The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5.15-6.45pm at St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Richard Gameson (Durham University), British Medieval Illuminators’ Blues. For further information, contact Elena Lichmanova (elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk).
• The Oxford Medieval Studies Trinity Term Lecture will take place at 5:30-6:30pm in St Edmund Hall, Old Library. Alison Ray (Archivist at St Peter’s) and Heather Barr (Library Trainee at St Edmund Hall) will be speaking on “GLAMorous work: Medievalist Pathways in Archives and Libraries”. Join us for a careers talk with a twist and with coffee and cake PLUS the chance to see an exhibition in the Old Library and handle some of the special collections!

Friday 5th May:

• The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.

Of course, whilst being up at 5am to welcome in the seeds of learning is all very well and good, there’s also a lot to be said for enjoying a bank-holiday lie-in! Alcuin, of course, also has some wisdom for those less inclined towards early mornings:

pia compassione fessum concedat requiescere
[With compassionate sympathy, let the tired rest, Ep. 198]

Wishing you all a week of rest and learning in equal measure!

Welcome back to Oxford, and to the Oxford Medieval Studies Trinity Term programme! We have so many exciting things in store for you this term, and I’m really looking forward to once again being your guide for all of Oxford’s Medieval Matters. In the words of Alcuin:

nos semper suspensi de reditu tuo
[I will be continually in suspense until your return, Ep. 64]

To kick the term off to a triumphant start, we have two very special events. Firstly, the Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference: Names and Naming, takes place on April 20th and 21st, both Online & In-Person at Ertegun House, Oxford. Secondly, this Saturday, April 22nd, join us for the annual Medieval Mystery Plays at St Edmund Hall! This is sure to be a day of merriment and festivity, and a chance to celebrate the diverse languages, departments and medievalists of our community. For the short programme, see the pdf attached to this week’s email, and please see the event listings below for further details.

The full OMGC and Mystery Play programmes can be found here, along with a sneak-peek at some of the offerings in the draft of this term’s Medieval Booklet. If you have not sent in your booklet submissions yet, please do so ASAP to ensure inclusion in time for the full release on Monday.

The full newsletter will begin again on Monday, but for now, a sample of the delights in store upon our return to term time:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• SAVE THE DATE: 26 APRIL (Wednesday week 1 of Trinity Term), 5pm UK time: In celebration of the release of vol. 2 of the Journal of Manuscript and Text Cultures (MTC) by the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC), which takes an explicitly experimental approach of involving digital tools for the presentation of research in manuscript cultures, CMTC are holding a round table 26 APRIL (Wednesday week 1 of Trinity Term), 5pm UK time at the Memorial Room of The Queen’s College, Oxford. The topic of the round table will be digital publishing and future research in manuscript studies. The round table will be chaired by Richard Ovenden, OBE, Professorial Fellow and Bodley’s Librarian. More information to follow.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Thursday 20th April:

• The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2023: Names & Naming takes place at 9-6pm, both online and at Ertegun House. Attendance is free, but you must register in advance. To register to attend, either online or in person, please visit the conference website here.
• A Special Lecture for the Churches Conservation Trust will take place at 1pm, online via Facebook Live. Shelley M. Williams will be presenting at this lecture, which will consider how the twelve signs of the zodiac were incorporated into ecclesiastical architecture between c. 1100-1250 CE. To attend, please click this link.

Friday 21st April:

• The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2023: Names & Naming takes place at 1-6pm, both online and at Ertegun House. Attendance is free, but you must register in advance. To register to attend, either online or in person, please visit the conference website here.

Saturday 22nd April:

• The Medieval Mystery Plays take place at 12-3:30pm at St Edmund Hall. Join us on this merry multilingual journey featuring plays dating from between the 12th and the 16th century! This highlight of the Oxford medieval calendar offers a variety of plays in different medieval and modern languages, staged at several stations in the beautiful grounds of St Edmund Hall. Cycles of plays retelling stories from the Bible were a popular form of entertainment in the Middle Ages, which we are only too happy to revive for modern audiences. Admission is free and you are welcome to turn up at any time. For more details about the programme, please see our blog post here.

OPPORTUNITIES:

• “Noblesse Oblige? Barons and the Public Good” Network: Last Call for Associate Membership! Though there might be another call next year, if you wish to take part in this year’s conference and associated events, please email max.lau@worc.ox.ac.uk with your CV and a brief cover letter. Full details can be found at https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/2023/03/05/new-ahrcnetwork-noblesse-oblige/ and https://noblesseoblige.exeter.ac.uk/.”
• Three-year Senior Researcher Position at the University of Oslo, Deadline May 14th: A three-year Senior Researcher position in medieval studies has been just announced at the University of Oslo with the application deadline on May 14th. The job will be available  from the fall of 2023. The position is funded by the ERC Advanced Grant project 101018645 MINiTEXTS “Minuscule Texts: Marginalized Voices in Early Medieval Latin Culture (c. 700–c.1000),”. A more detailed description of this position and the application requirements are provided at the job announcement at https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/242179/senior-researcher-in-medieval-studies.
• 10 funded PhDs opportunities within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network “From Antiquity to Community: Rethinking Classical Heritage through Citizen Humanities” (AntCom): Interested applicants will find information on the training program, on each fellowship as well as details on specific requirements and the application process on the consortium’s website: https://antcom.eu/call-for-applications/. For further questions you are welcome to contact the project’s PI Aglae Pizzone (pizzone@sdu.dk).
• The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies is excited to hire a new postdoctoral research scholar in premodern critical race studies. This position is open to PhDs in language, history, religion, philosophy, classics, or related humanistic fields. The postdoctoral research scholar will join our ongoing Mellon Foundation-funded RaceB4Race initiative for a two-year appointment starting Fall 2023 at a stipend salary of $75,000/fiscal year. More information and how to apply can be found at our website.

I will return to your inboxes on Monday with the Medieval Booklet and the Week 1 events. In the meantime, we hope to see many of you on Saturday for the mystery plays. For those of you contributing to the plays, some words of wisdom from Alcuin:

modo vero viriliter fac et fortiter!
[Play your part powerfully and bravely! Ep. 72]

Wishing you all a week of power and bravery in all of your medieval endeavours!