Is this your first term in Oxford or have you been here for years? Are you visiting? Or perhaps planning on applying for our Medieval Studies programme?
Philip Flacke completed an internship in Oxford in Trinity 2024, and he’s prepared an important list of 10 rules for Oxford you’d regret not knowing:
This video was filmed by Henrike Lähnemann in the courtyard of the old university library in Göttingen, next to the statue of the philosopher and scientist and aphorist Lichtenberg and adjacent to the repurposed Paulinerkirche. Fun fact: Göttingen had close links to Oxford as founded by one of the King Georges of England and Hanover!
Once upon a time a scholar stepped onto a ship with a saga in hand; it sounds like the recipe for a bad joke, or a half-forgotten tale scribbled in the margins of manuscript come down from the Middle Ages. But this is how a modern-day saga starts, my saga of teaching Old Norse literature and culture aboard the Tecla, begins.
As a second-year DPhil in Old Norse at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of English, my closest encounter with ships and seafaring prior to this year were the terse accounts of Norse voyages and the not infrequently sparse descriptions of ships in the medieval Icelandic sagas. My imagination could skim across the waters of the North Atlantic with Egill Skallagrímson, Óláfr Tryggvason, or Eiríkr hinn rauði but my body was rooted in Oxford. The Turville-Petre room to be exact.
When the opportunity came to travel as a guest lecturer in Old Norse literature and culture aboard a 1915 traditional Dutch herring drifter, I dropped my pens and grabbed (my metaphorical) sailing boots to join a voyage which would span almost the breadth of the North Atlantic an embark on an adventure through these storied landscapes.
Figure 2 The Tecla, Greenland
Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor
Over a six-week period from the beginning of September to the middle of October 2024 the Tecla sailed from Nuuk, Greenland to Ullapool, Scotland, a voyage of over two thousand nautical miles. This was not only a journey through space, but also a journey backwards through time. Sailing from the western end of the North Atlantic to its eastern fringes, the Tecla retraced routes once taken by Norse sailors and traders who plied these waters over a thousand years ago as they sailed from Greenland eastwards to Iceland and on to Norway or south to Scotland.
The first region the Tecla sailed through, Greenland, was one of the last places to be settled by the Norse. The Vinland sagas tell how Greenland was first discovered and settled by Eiríkr hinn rauði and his followers, but they also recount the first Norse voyages to North America under Eiríkr’s son Leifr and his daughter Freydís. Over the course of the Tecla’s voyage, the sagas, the works of Arí inn fróði, and the Icelandic annals were just some of my literary companions as I lectured on topics ranging from how and why the Viking Age began, the history of the Greenlandic settlements and later on, the Icelandic settlements as we approached Iceland, how the Norse built their houses and farmed, the myths, Christianisation, the laws, how society was organised, weapons, and ships.
The Greenlandic settlements are also the only Norse settlements which did not survive into the modern era and so much of the discussion onboard during this part of the voyage centred on the environmental and population factors which may have caused the decline of these communities. Witnessing this landscape from the perspective of sailing through it gave me a sense of its hostility to human inhabitation and the fragility of medieval and modern settlements along its coasts.
During this leg of the sailing trip, I had two rare experiences of teaching. The first of these came at the end of the first week of travelling. After seven days of brutal winds, fog, and cold rains, the weather finally cleared enough to move out from the inshore passages and set the sails. The sun blazed from clear skies and the ice cap sat almost at the water’s edge amidst grey gravel banks deposited by the receding glaciers on the coastline while the wind whistled through the stay sail and mizzen sail. The Tecla was skimming the water’s surface and finally, I understood the joy of sailing.
For this day’s lecture, I decided on a change of scenery. I typically gave lectures in the salon where the guests and I could shelter from the weather and I had a the use of a projector. However, I realised that few things beat being outside on a sailing boat when the weather is on your side. And what is more, even fewer things beat sitting on a traditional sailing ship with a saga in hand talking about Norse history while the Greenlandic coast slides by.
Figure 3 Me, sailing and teaching outside aboard Tecla as sail down the Greenlandic coast
Photo Credits: Jorrit Harrsema
The second, and very much surreal, teaching experience during the Greenlandic leg came when the Tecla anchored off Hérjólfsnes and everybody on board went ashore. Hérjólfsnes is a very small headland jutting out into the waters at the mouth of a fjord system close to Greenland’s southern tip. The remains of a longhouse built around a thousand years alongside some smaller buildings including the remains of a chapel built later litter the bare headland. According to the sagas, Hérjólfr Barðarson was amongst the first settlers to Greenland and Hérjólfsnes has been identified as the location of his farm. Unlike the more touristic and developed Eiriksfjorðr, Hérjólfsnes stands bare of tourist trails, modern glass heritage centres, and queues of tourists. The headland is extremely beautiful, but also well positioned along sailing routes, and it is easy to see why it was chosen for a farm site. Located at the edge of a fjord, ships could stop by bringing goods and news as they travelled north to the Western Settlement or could refuel before making the crossing to Iceland or perhaps Norway.
The farm has been left more or less untouched for a thousand years. It is exposed to the raw elements of the weather with nothing but a little sign and an archaeological site plan to indicate its importance. Standing at the threshold of the longhouse I could finally bring to life how longhouses were built how people may have lived and farm in a place like Hérjólfsnes. To be able to stand in such an important archaeological site is a rare experience of history and it is only by stepping into places life Hérjolfsnes that I truly gained a sense of how special these places are.
Figure 4 Herjólfsnes, Greenland
Photo Credits: Willemijn Koenen
During the second leg of the voyage and with a new group of passengers, I turned the focus of my lectures to the Norse settlements on the other side of the Atlantic: Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, and Hebrides. These islands too are their share of stories and so my attention was turned to the worlds of Færeyinga saga, Orkneyinga saga, and the many references to travellers from these islands in the Icelandic Family sagas. With the exception of Faroes, these islands are places with long histories of settlement before the arrival of the Norse. The pattern of Norse settlement here therefore varies immensely from the history of the farmsteads in Greenland and Faroes which were unoccupied before the Norse made their homes there. The islands off the coast of Scotland have been inhabited for at least 4500 years and the traces of these earlier communities are scattered across the landscape. Stone circles, howes, brochs, wheelhouses, and barrows create a landscape imprinted with human touches reaching down through history. In many places, the Norse built their houses on top of these earlier sites and so these places offer a window into how the Norse negotiated and co-existed with the people who came before.
Figure 5 Kallur Lighthouse, Kalsoy, Faroes
Photo Credits: Gijs Sluik
The first stop after Iceland was Faroes. This small group of islands, standing out in the Atlantic about halfway between Norway and Iceland, was home to Norse communities from about 800 AD. On the island of Straumoy I moved my lecture theatre once again into the open air and took the group to Kvivík, an excavated longhouse with an adjacent cow-byre. This was once a high-status settlement dated to 1000 AD and gives a sense of what an important farm in Faroes might have looked like.
Figure 6 Kvívik, Streymoy, Greenland
Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor
A few days later, we arrived in Shetland into Burrafirth on Unst. In the neighbouring bay, Haroldswick, there is a reconstruction of a longhouse, and a longship modelled on the Skidbladner. Ships were the lynchpin of Norse expansion and the Viking Age and it was here that I had the perfect teaching materials to show Norse technological innovations in shipping and to explain why these ships were so successful for raiding and travel. Although they are a far remove from modern ships and experiences of travel like on the Tecla, the reconstructed ship on Unst serves to highlights the dangers and risks of this kind of travel but also the successes of Norse ship-building.
On Mainland, Shetland I took the group to Jarlshof. Jarlshof was first inhabited about 2500 years ago when the first broch was built there. Late on, Pictish wheelhouses were built on top of the earlier brochs and then even later, the Norse built longhouses at the same site. The site offers multiple layers of time through its excavated sections and illustrates the different ways people thought about architecture and living in the same place in the landscape. Bringing the group to Jarlshof was important in highlighting the way in which the Norse settlers took over earlier sites of importance in communities but also to show how they imprinted their culture and power structures onto the lands they settled.
Figure 7 Longhouse, Haroldswick, Unst, Shetland
Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor
St Magnus, an earl of Orkney, was killed by his kinsmen in a feud, and later canonised as a saint. His cult quickly spread across Orkneys and Shetland during the medieval period and the traces of his importance to people’s lives are reflected in the numerous churches dedicated to Magnus throughout these isles. In Orkney, on the isle of Egilsay, Magnus was betrayed and murdered by his cousin Hakon Paulsson and the island became a local pilgrimage site attracting visitors for centuries. It was to Egilsay that we too made a journey to the island from where the Tecla was docked on Rousay. Switching from my previous classrooms of longhouses and ships, the remains of St Magnus’ church became my latest classroom. Amidst the grey walls of the holy site where people once learned about the word of God, I taught about the history of Christianity in the Orkneys and the life of St Magnus as it is found in Orkneyinga saga.
Figure 8 St Magnus Church, Egilsay, Orkney
Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor
The Hebrides were the last group of isles to pass through before the Tecla arrived at her final port in Ullapool. By the time the Norse arrived in the Hebrides these islands were heavily Gaelicised by the Irish kingdom of Dal Ríada. The Norse anchored fleets in the Hebrides for raids south into the Irish Sea and control of the islands was frequently contested by the Norse of Dublin and Man and the Norse in the Orkneys. One of the most important sources of evidence for Norse occupation in Scotland are the placenames. Shetland and Orkneys are almost entirely dominated by Scandinavian place-names whereas the Hebrides have a wide mixture of Gaelic and Norse place-names. Travelling through these islands, I delved into the theories of why the Norse did not culturally dominate the Hebrides as they did elsewhere in the Scottish isles and explained some of the theories about the early patterns of Norse raiding and occupation in this area.
Standing aboard the Tecla, a traditional sailing ship, with a saga in hand in the North Atlantic is a rare experience of history and of seeing the world the Norse explored and inhabited a thousand years ago. As an Old Norse DPhil student, to teach Norse history and to share a little of my passion as we sailed through the North Atlantic was an even rarer gift and perhaps a stranger saga of modern times that is only possible thanks to Tecla, her crew, and her captain. Sailing while teaching with sagas was a new experience for me working in public engagement but it is something that I have found great joy in and look forward to finding more ways to bring my work and the wonders of the medieval Icelandic sagas to audiences beyond academia.
Main photo:The Tecla, Prince Christian Sund, Greenland. Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor
Week 8 is finally upon us, and a final round of events. As always, a PDF version of the booklet can be found here. Keep an eye on your inboxes over the vac – I will be sending out an email asking for contributions to next term’s booklet. Recruitment for the Medieval Mystery Cycle on 26 April 2025 is going into a new phase with the appointment of Antonia Anstatt and Sarah Ware as Co-Heads of Performance – contact then with questions.
Wishing you a lovely Christmas with this recording of ‘Nowel’ from Bodleian Library, MS. Arch. Selden B. 26, fol. 14v.
EVENTSTHIS WEEK
Monday
French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
Medieval Archaeology Seminar – 3pm at the Institute of Archaeology. Stephen Rippon (University of Exeter) will be speaking on ‘Excavations at Ipplepen’.
OMS Tea Talks – 4.30 in New Seminar Room, St John’s College. Tea and biscuits provided.
Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Alicia Smith (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘Harlot/Saint: Tracking the Figure of Thais Meretrix in Medieval Manuscript Compilations.’
Old Norse Reading Group – 5.30pm in the English Faculty Graduate Common Room.
Tuesday
The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
Medieval Poetry Reading Group – 4.30pm in the Colin Matthew Room, Radliffe Humanities Building.
Medieval Church and Culture – tea from 5.00pm (talk starts at 5.15) in the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Machester College. Phil Booth (St Peter’s) will be speaking on ‘Egypt from the Ancient Mediterranean to the Middle Medieval East: A Seventh-century Chronicle Between Worlds’.
Wednesday
Reading Jews in Late Antiquity – 10am in Room 207 of The Clarendon Institute. The theme for this week is Violence against Jews and Jewish Violence.
Medieval German Seminar: Konrad von Megenberg ‘Buch der Natur’ – 11.15am at Somerville College. To be added to the Teams group for updates, please email Almut Suerbaum.
Medieval Women’s Writing – Chat with an Expert – 1pm in the VHH Seminar Room, Lincoln College. Rachel Delman (Heritage Partnerships Coordinator) will be talking about ‘Medieval Women’s Stories in Heritage & Community Settings’.
Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm online. To join, please email Michael Stansfield.
Inaugural Dorothy Whitelock Lecture – 5pm in in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building . Gale Owen-Crocker will be speaking on ‘Social History and False Friends: From Anglo-Saxon Wills to the Bayeux Tapestry via Material Culture’
Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Zdenka Stahuljak (UCLA) will be speaking on ‘Methodologies of Commensuration: Poetry, History, and Knowledge’.
Thursday
Italian Late Medieval and Early Modern Palaeography Course (1400-1800) – 10pm in the Chough Room, Teddy Hall.
Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute. For more information, please email Joseph O’Hara.
Greek and Latin Reading Group – 3pm in the Stapledon Room, Exeter Collge. The text this week is Alexander (Plutarch, Life of Alexander 7–8, 62–65).
Medieval Visual Culture Seminar – 5pm in the Arumugam Building, St Catz. Ben Tilghman (Maryland, USA) will speak on ‘What Art Does When It’s Doing Nothing: Stillness, Perdurance, and Agency in Medieval Art’
Medieval and Renaissance Music Seminar – 5pm online (register here). Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (Independent scholar) will be speaking on ‘A.I., Similarity, and Search in Medieval Music: New Methodologies and Source Identifications’.
Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
Middle English Reading Group – 3pm in the Beckington Room, Lincoln College.
The Germanic Reading Group – 4pm online. This week, the focus will be on Old English: Extracts from the Life of St Chad (Nelson leading).
OPPORTUNITIES
CHASE-DTP funded PhD opportunity between MEMS Kent and Westminster Abbey to investigate medieval manuscript fragments in the Abbey’s archives, application deadline 17 February 2025. More info here.
4-year funded Collaborative Doctoral Award(CDA), co-supervised between the University of Nottingham and the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford: ‘Digital Approaches to Medieval Chant and Local Religious Heritage’. Deadline 13 January 2025: more information here.
The Medieval Academy of America’s Graduate Student Committee seeks new committee members for the 2025-2027 term. Submit self-nomination forms here.
Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2025 CfP – seeking 20 minute papers from graduate students on the theme of ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’, for a conference held 24th and 25th of April, 2025. More info here.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeking an assistant professor specializing in visual or material cultures between c. 700 and 1750 CE. More Info here.
The Central European University are advertising a number of funded PhDs and Masters – see the blog post here.
University College Dublin are advertising a funded PhD in Early medieval political and/or intellectual culture (c.500-c.1000 CE) which will be supervised by Dr Megan Welton. See the blog post here.
An opportunity has arisen to translate Alice in Wonderland into Old Norse – The translator would own the copyright and receive a royalty for copies sold. Those interested should email Sarah Foot.
PRAGESTT German Studies Student Conference will take place on the 21st and 22nd March 2025 at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) – please see https://pragestt.ff.cuni.cz/en/home/
The Oxford University Byzantine Society has issued a Call for Papers for their 27th International Graduate Conference, held on the 1st-2nd March 2025, in Oxford and Online. More information can be found here.
The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures invites graduate students from across the globe to submit to the annual Medium Ævum Essay Prize. Deadline 2 December. More information can be found here.
Check out this handy guide to how to blog – including a call for authors for the OMS blog – by Miles Pattenden.
By Caroline Croasdaile in conversation with Mickey Alice Kwapis,Contemporary Artist and Jewellerof Meaningful Material
Medieval Material
A small piece of stone, a snippet of fabric, a tiny lock of hair. All of these materials would be just as at home within a hollow late medieval pendant, as in a sentimental locket made weeks ago. What is it about these things, detritus in any other context, that makes them more precious than their gold or jewelled containers? Why have people throughout time collected and enclosed these materials as special, religious, magical, or memorial in containers that they wear close to their bodies?
These are some of the questions that are explored in my D.Phil. dissertation entitled, Wearable Containers of Meaningful Things: English Late Medieval and Early Modern Jewellery to Enclose, Conceal, and Enshrine. It is in this project that I examine artefacts like pendants and rings, and the changes this unique type of object undergoes, particularly in light of the Reformation. While medieval examples of these objects have widely been labelled ‘reliquaries’, the startling variety of their contents includes coins, hair, plant matter, textile, stone, or textual amulets. The diversity of their contents has opened the door for a wider consideration of what exactly is a ‘relic’, and what ‘relic-making’ or memory-making practices medieval people engaged in. Not everyone had access to the body parts or materials of saints in the late medieval period, which were often closely guarded in the treasuries of churches. However, medieval people could draw on the blessings of priests, tokens obtained through pilgrimage, or the ritual of prayer to create or enhance special materials to be worn in aid of devotion or to protect the body. During my research, I was struck by the stark similarities that present-day sentimental jewellery holds with these medieval artefacts. While their contexts of belief may be different, many of the types of materials contained are the same, and are similarly capable of capturing big ideas, world-views, and emotions, within tiny interior spaces.
Pendant containing a drop of blood caught on a tiny piece of tissue paper. By Mickey Alice Kwapis. Photo courtesy of Mickey Alice Kwapis.
The Hockley Pendant, British Museum: 2012,8046.1, English, c.1500-1550, gold, 3x25mm. Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS): ESS-2C4836. The engravings on this hollow pendant depict devotion to the bleeding wounds of Christ. Its edges are inscribed with the names of the three magi, which were recited or used in magical charms. This pendant was found to contain unprocessed flax stem pieces. It was recovered near Hockley, Essex.
Mickey Alice Kwapis is an American artist living in Chicago who specialises in the creation of jewellery, stained glass, taxidermy, and cyanotypes. Her work explores aspects of death, grief, and the natural world. As part of her practice she makes tiny precious lockets, which can be used to contain almost any kind of meaningful material for her clients, who send or provide her with these fragments from their lives. She has kindly agreed to answer some questions I have posed to her in Q&A format regarding her locket pendants. While we cannot query the original makers of medieval objects, her thoughts on her own work provide a useful point of entry for thinking about the enduring and very human act of curating meaningful material, and the desire to carry and wear these things on the body within objects of jewellery.
Q&A:
What first inspired you to begin making pendants that serve as containers for meaningfulmaterial(s)?
When I was 22 my Aunt Beth passed away unexpectedly. I had already been making jewellery using glass vessels containing things like squirrel teeth, mouse tails, and dandelion seeds so as the funeral services were wrapping up it just felt natural to grab a few different flowers to dry for eventual use in my work. I ended up making a locket for each of the women in our family so they could have something to hold onto.
Are you interested in, or have you looked to historical examples for inspiration for making this kind of object? If so, do you have a favourite historical piece, period, or influence?
I really enjoy looking at Edwardian and Victorian-era mourning jewellery, mostly containing hair, on eBay. They aren’t hugely historically significant pieces on their own, but each one was handcrafted to celebrate someone’s love, life, or both and I think that’s incredibly beautiful. I grew up Catholic so I’m fascinated by stationary and wearable reliquaries. As a kid I loved learning about the Ancient Egyptians’ mourning and burial rituals including canopic jars. The influence of Egyptian art on the Victorians especially, and now the revival of the Victorian mourning tradition in modern times, follow a thread through human history of wanting to remember those we have lost through preserving them in some tangible way.
What are some of the materials, common or unusual, that people have sent you to be included in pendants?
Most commonly I receive orders for memorial jewellery made with cremated remains, pet hair, and human hair — after all, they’re literally parts of our loved ones so they are obvious choices when it comes to honouring their lives. Some of the less traditional materials I have gotten to use in mourning lockets include broken Fiestaware, a drop of blood on tissue, dyed eggshells from Easter eggs, the bristles of a paintbrush, pottery glaze powder, and a plethora of other incredible materials truly unique to those being remembered. I have helped women celebrate their friendship with a matching set of lockets with sugar from their favourite diner, made pieces for brides containing pieces of their bouquets and lost sequins from their dresses, and honoured hardships with soil reliquaries from sold family homes and pieces of brick from a house fire. Getting to make each one is an honour beyond words.
What are the key steps that go into crafting these lockets, and what are some challenges that this medium presents? What skills as an artist do you draw on?
The hardware for each locket is made using the lost wax casting process and once finished, the materials are secured beneath precision-fit watch crystals that I had specially manufactured to fit my lockets. I took my first metalsmithing class at 14 and have just been building on that skill set ever since so it feels like second nature at this point. When it comes to handling each client’s materials, some require special PPE — especially powdered materials like pigments.
Do you have a memorable or surprising background story or narrative that someone has shared with you about why they have chosen a certain material for inclusion in a locket?
I love the stories behind every single request I get, because the stories are just as personal as the materials being used. Many of them are bittersweet so I’ll share one that’s not: I received an order for a locket containing sand, for an Egyptologist who had recently returned from an archaeological dig. She didn’t bring the sand home on purpose (as it’s highly frowned upon to take materials from dig sites) but it’s impossible to live in a tent in the desert for weeks at a time and not track at least a little bit of sand everywhere you go. Once she was back home in the US, she found sand inside the lining of her suitcase while unpacking and decided to send it my way.
Have you made lockets for your personal use and ownership, and are you comfortable sharing what these are and what they mean to you?
The first ones I made were in memory of my Aunt Beth, with flowers from her funeral. After my Great-Grandma Mickey passed in 2020 I made myself a locket containing soil and sand from three different places on Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit where we spent lots of time in our respective formative years as well as time together. Not too long after, I dropped a mug that had belonged to my Uncle John, who died by suicide but is still listed as a missing person — there was no funeral, no body to say goodbye to. I had the mug repaired using traditional kintsugi practices but the artist did not need the smallest shards of ceramic that broke off and I couldn’t bear to throw them away so I kept them and made a locket with that. I also have lockets containing a fossil my mom found on the beach, and one with a tiny gummy bear that reminds me of my dad, fishing flies and raw sapphires from a trip to Montana I took with a friend. My beloved cat Phil just passed away and I plan to make a locket with his soft orange fur under one lens and his white fur under the other. When you see me in public, I make jingling noises from my jewellery. I’m basically a walking advertisement for my work at this point.
The lockets that you produce are visually accessible, but intended to remain sealed. This is in contrast to the other forms of lockets both contemporary and historical. What led to this choice?
Many modern jewellery makers utilize epoxy resin to contain materials like hair or ash, but it is a relatively new technology. This material can begin to yellow quite quickly and it also permanently alters the sentimental material, making it unrecoverable. My lockets, through sealed closed, function as containers for the free-moving materials inside and in theory could be smashed or cut open to recover the materials should the owner ever wish to do something else with them.
Ash and tooth in sterling silver. By Mickey Alice Kwapis. Photo Courtesy of Mickey Alice Kwapis
How do you understand the role of memory and its connection to material in your work?
Our memories of the past are a big part of what informs who we become in the present day, and the people or things we have lost or experienced along the way are also part of us. Having a piece of memorial jewelry that can be worn day-to-day helps remove our lost memories from the abstract and brings them into the present in a tangible form.
Hundreds of years from now if an archaeologist, museum, or curious collector were to find one of your lockets what is something you would want to tell them about your work to help them understand it?
Humans across millennia have collected and saved sentimental things, and I would hope that centuries or millennia from now we are not so disconnected from each other and ourselves that we can’t recognize the merit of a sentimental object. I think if anyone knew the back story of any single one of my pieces, from the history of the material itself to its meaning and impact on the person who commissioned it, the archaeologist would have the same feeling that I get making my work and looking at it now. After all, memory is something that ties all of us together.
Agnus Dei Pendant, English, c.1400-1540, gilt silver, PAS: GLO-43B24A. This pendant was found to contain, ‘fragments of a woven fabric’ and ‘thick layers of fine white strands that are most likely hair’. There is evidence for a broken-off attachment loop on the upper edge. Recovered in Gloucestershire. Rights Holder: Bristol City Council, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.
Links to the website and work of Mickey Alice Kwapis:
Croasdaile, Caroline, 2025, Wearable Containers of Meaningful Things: English Late Medieval and Early Modern Jewellery to Enclose, Conceal, and Enshrine, Oxford: University of Oxford (D.Phil. Thesis, forthcoming)
Further Reading:
Cherry, John, 1994, The Middleham Jewel and Ring, York: Yorkshire Museum.
Husband, Timothy B., 1992, ‘The Winteringham Tau Cross and Ignis Sacer’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal, vol. 27, pp. 19-35.
Jones, Peter Murray and Lea T. Olsan, 2000, ‘Middleham Jewel: Ritual, Power, and Devotion’, Viator, vol. 31, pp. 249-290.
Much like Bob Dylan, we have all spent the last week Blowin’ in the Wind: here are this week’s medieval events to help you through. As always, a PDF version of the booklet can be found here.
A reminder that this Friday – 5pm at St Edmund Hall – there will be an event for those interested in this year’s Medieval Mystery Plays. All are welcome, even (/ especially) if you are unsure how to get involved.
EVENTSTHIS WEEK
Monday
French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Fouzia Farooq Ahmed (All Souls / Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad) will be speaking on ‘Gender Ventriloquism in Medieval India: the Writings of Amir Khusro’. Drinks to follow.
Tuesday
The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
Medieval Church and Culture – 5.15pm (coffee from 5pm) in the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Machester College. Edward Shawe-Taylor (St Cross) will be speaking on ‘The Qur’an of Mūsā b. Bughā: Reassembling a Lost Egyptian Manuscript’.
Medieval French Research Seminar – 5.15pm at the Maison Française d’Oxford. The theme this week is ‘Otherworld Objects between [REF] and [FIC]’.
Wednesday
Reading Jews in Late Antiquity – 10am in Room 207 of The Clarendon Institute. The theme for this week is: Eating and Sharing Meals with the Religious Other.
Medieval German Seminar: Konrad von Megenberg ‘Buch der Natur’ – 11.15am at Somerville College. To be added to the Teams group for updates, please email Almut Suerbaum.
Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm online. To join, please email Michael Stansfield.
Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Alberto Rigolio (Durham) will be speaking on ‘The Rise of the Memrā in Syriac Literature’.
Prof Dr Hermann Parzinger, President of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, lecture at 17.15. at the Weston Library on the history of the Prussian Heritage Foundation along with the importance of sustainability and the contemporary, post-colonial responsibilities and challenges faced by the heritage sector. A drinks reception will follow.The sign up is here.
Thursday
Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute. For more information, please email Joseph O’Hara.
British Archaeological Association Post-Graduate Online Conference – 12.20pm online. Register here.
Greek and Latin Reading Group – 3pm in the Stapledon Room, Exeter Collge. The text this week is ‘on writing Lives’ (Tacitus, Annals 4.34).
Torch Talk: ‘Locating Silences: The Status and Agency of Women in the Delhi Sultanate’ – 4pm in St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter.
Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies seminar – 5.15pm at Jesus College and online. Tanguy Solliec (LACITO, CNRS, Paris) will be speaking on ‘Breton Dialect Variation: An Opportunity to Reflect on the Emergence and Formation of a Language’.
Compline in the Crypt (in English) – 9.30pm in the Crypt of St-Peter-in-the-East (!), the library church of St Edmund Hall.
An Introduction to Greek Manuscript Culture – 2pm in the Horton Room, Weston Library. First come, first served: email almut.fries@classics.ox.ac.uk for more info.
Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
Middle English Reading Group – 3pm in the Beckington Room, Lincoln College.
Medieval Mystery Plays Meeting of the Minds Workshop – 5pm at St Edmund Hall. More information here.
Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group – 5pm in the Mure Room, Merton College. Eleanor Jackson (British Library, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts) will be speaking on ‘Medieval Women in Their Own Words: Curating the British Library Exhibition’.
Anglo-Norman Reading Group – 5pm in the Farmington Institute in Harris Manchester College. For more information, please contact Jane Bliss (jane.bliss@lmh.oxon.org).
OPPORTUNITIES (new items highlighted)
CHASE-DTP funded PhD opportunity between MEMS Kent and Westminster Abbey to investigate medieval manuscript fragments in the Abbey’s archives, application deadline 17 February 2025. More info here.
Head of Performance sought for Medieval Mystery Plays to pull the strings for the 2025 performance of the Medieval Mystery Plays. Henrike Lähnemann and Lesley Smith, the Co-Directors, are looking for an enthusiastic, creative and, above all, well-organised graduate student or postdoc. There will be a reward of £300. See here the advertisement.
4-year funded Collaborative Doctoral Award(CDA), co-supervised between the University of Nottingham and the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford: ‘Digital Approaches to Medieval Chant and Local Religious Heritage’. Deadline 13 January 2025: more information here.
The Medieval Academy of America’s Graduate Student Committee seeks new committee members for the 2025-2027 term. Submit self-nomination forms here.
Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2025 CfP – seeking 20 minute papers from graduate students on the theme of ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’, for a conference held 24th and 25th of April, 2025. More info here.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeking an assistant professor specializing in visual or material cultures between c. 700 and 1750 CE. More Info here.
The Central European University are advertising a number of funded PhDs and Masters – see the blog post here.
University College Dublin are advertising a funded PhD in Early medieval political and/or intellectual culture (c.500-c.1000 CE) which will be supervised by Dr Megan Welton. See the blog post here.
An opportunity has arisen to translate Alice in Wonderland into Old Norse – The translator would own the copyright and receive a royalty for copies sold. Those interested should email Sarah Foot.
PRAGESTT German Studies Student Conference will take place on the 21st and 22nd March 2025 at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) – please see https://pragestt.ff.cuni.cz/en/home/
The Oxford University Byzantine Society has issued a Call for Papers for their 27th International Graduate Conference, held on the 1st-2nd March 2025, in Oxford and Online. More information can be found here.
The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures invites graduate students from across the globe to submit to the annual Medium Ævum Essay Prize. Deadline 2 December. More information can be found here.
Check out this handy guide to how to blog – including a call for authors for the OMS blog – by Miles Pattenden.
Monday morning can mean but one thing: Medieval Matters is here to grace your inboxes once again. As always, a PDF version of the booklet can be found here.
Rumbling in the distance, early work begins on the Medieval Mystery Cycle 2025. At 5pm on Friday 29 November 2024, at St Edmund Hall, there will be an event to bring together actors, directors, musicians and those interested in texts and props. All are welcome, especially those who are unsure how to get involved. Tea and cake provided. More information about the event, and the Cycle in general, can be found on the blog post here which also advertises the exciting (and paid) role of ‘Head of Performance’ for a current graduate student – see below under ‘opportunities’.
EVENTSTHIS WEEK
Monday
French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
Medieval Archaeology Seminar – 3pm at the Institute of Archaeology. Rebecca Tyson, U. of Bristol will be speaking on ‘Navigating the Norman invasion of England in 1066: A Maritime Environmental Perspective’.
Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Moreed Arbabzedah (Jesus Oxford) will be speaking on ‘New Perspectives on Gerald of Wales’.
Old Norse Reading Group – 5.30pm in the English Faculty Graduate Common Room.
Tuesday
Medieval English Research Seminar – 12.15pm at Lecture Theatre 2 of the St Cross Building. Nicholas Watson (Harvard) will be speaking on ‘Vernacular Theology in Thirteenth-Century Oxford: Robert Grosseteste and his Circle’.
The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
Medieval Poetry Reading Group – 4.30pm in the Colin Matthew Room, Radliffe Humanities Building. The theme this week is Light without Sun or Moon: The Poetry of Kabīr.
Medieval Church and Culture – tea from 5.00pm (talk starts at 5.15) in the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Machester College. Conrad Leyser (Worcester) will be speaking on ‘The Rule of Augustine Revisited’.
Wednesday
Reading Jews in Late Antiquity – 10am in Room 207 of The Clarendon Institute. The theme for this week is Late Roman Legislative Codices and Jews.
Medieval German Seminar: Konrad von Megenberg ‘Buch der Natur’ – 11.15am at Somerville College. To be added to the Teams group for updates, please email Almut Suerbaum.
Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm online. To join, please email Michael Stansfield.
Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Lucia Orlandi (Paris/Rome) will be speaking on ‘Recent Research on Baptism and Baptisteries in Late Antiquity’.
History of Art Research Seminar – 5pm in the History Faculty Lecture Theatre. Nancy Thebaut (Oxford) will be speaking on “Queering Medieval Art at The Met Cloisters”.
Michaelmas Term 2024 Lecture of the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures – 5.15pm in the Memorial Room, The Queen’s College. Christopher Whittick will be speaking on ‘“I Found it in a Skip” – Provenance and Priorities in British Archives’.
Thursday
Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute. For more information, please email Joseph O’Hara.
Italian Late Medieval and Early Modern Palaeography Course – 10am inthe Chough Room, Teddy Hall.
Medieval Anglo-Jewish Texts and Histories – 2pm-5.30pm in the Catherine Lewis Lecture Theatre, Clarendon Institute. This group convenes once a term to read together unpublished Hebrew and Latin documents from Medieval England as sources for the history of the Jews before the expulsion of 1290.
Greek and Latin Reading Group – 3pm in the Stapledon Room, Exeter Collge. The text this week is Theseus and Romulus (Plutarch, Lives).
Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies seminar – 5pm online.Marion Löffler (Cardiff) will be speaking on ‘“Desert wilds of India Africa”: Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Eisteddfod competitions and Empire, 1834–1853’.
The Politics of Memory: The Reimagination of Medieval India (Panel Discussion) – 5pm in St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter.
Medieval Visual Culture Seminar – 5pm in the Arumugam Building, St Catz. Alixe Bovey (The Courtauld Institute of Art) will be speaking on ‘Visual Storytelling in 14th-century London: Subtexts, Pretexts, Contexts’.
Medieval and Renaissance Music Seminar – 5pm online (register here). Lucia Marchi (University of Trento) will be speaking on ‘The Long Life of the Trecento Repertory’.
David Patterson Lectures – 6pm in the Catherine Lewis Lecture Theatre, Clarendon Institute. Dr Dean Irwin (University of Lincoln) will be speaking on ‘Jews and Christians as Neighbours in Medieval English Towns’.
Crafting the Book Lecture – 1pm in the Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre at the Weston Library. Sara Charles and Eleanor Baker will be speaking. For more information, see here.
Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
Crafting the Book Practical Workship – 2.15pm and 4pm in the Bodleian Bibliographical Press (FULLY BOOKED).
Middle English Reading Group – 3pm in the Beckington Room, Lincoln College.
The Germanic Reading Group – 4pm online. This week, the focus will be on Gothic extracts of Nehemia, led by Morgan. Contact Howard Jones if you would like the zoom link and handout.
UPCOMING
The LGBTQ+ History Hackathon is happening on November 29th 2-5.30pm at the History Faculty. Register here.
OPPORTUNITIES (new items highlighted)
Head of Performance sought for Medieval Mystery Plays to pull the strings for the 2025 performance of the Medieval Mystery Plays. Henrike Lähnemann and Lesley Smith, the Co-Directors, are looking for an enthusiastic, creative and, above all, well-organised graduate student or postdoc. There will be a reward of £300. See here the advertisement.
CfP for a thematic session at NAPS 2025 titled ‘Scripture and the Arts in Clement of Alexandria‘. Deadline for abstract submissions is November 18th: use this form.
4-year funded Collaborative Doctoral Award(CDA), co-supervised between the University of Nottingham and the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford: ‘Digital Approaches to Medieval Chant and Local Religious Heritage’. Deadline 13 January 2025: more information here.
The Medieval Academy of America’s Graduate Student Committee seeks new committee members for the 2025-2027 term. Submit self-nomination forms here.
Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2025 CfP – seeking 20 minute papers from graduate students on the theme of ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’, for a conference held 24th and 25th of April, 2025. More info here.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeking an assistant professor specializing in visual or material cultures between c. 700 and 1750 CE. More Info here.
The Central European University are advertising a number of funded PhDs and Masters – see the blog post here.
University College Dublin are advertising a funded PhD in Early medieval political and/or intellectual culture (c.500-c.1000 CE) which will be supervised by Dr Megan Welton. See the blog post here.
An opportunity has arisen to translate Alice in Wonderland into Old Norse – The translator would own the copyright and receive a royalty for copies sold. Those interested should email Sarah Foot.
PRAGESTT German Studies Student Conference will take place on the 21st and 22nd March 2025 at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) – please see https://pragestt.ff.cuni.cz/en/home/
The Oxford University Byzantine Society has issued a Call for Papers for their 27th International Graduate Conference, held on the 1st-2nd March 2025, in Oxford and Online. More information can be found here.
The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures invites graduate students from across the globe to submit to the annual Medium Ævum Essay Prize. Deadline 2 December. More information can be found here.
Check out this handy guide to how to blog – including a call for authors for the OMS blog – by Miles Pattenden.
Four weeks have passed: four weeks remain. In the words of Elton John: ‘I guess that’s why they call it the blues’. To cheer our ailing souls, this week’s Medieval Matters is brimming with upcoming events and a particular concentration of new opportunities. As always, a PDF version of the booklet can be found here.
EVENTSTHIS WEEK
Monday
French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10.30am in the Weston Library. Those interested should email Laure Miolo.
Medieval History Seminar – 5pm at All Souls College. Gregory Lippiatt (University of Exeter) will be speaking on ‘Bogomils or Bogeymen?: Heresy between East and West in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’. NB. this week, the talk takes place in the Hovendon Room (All Souls).
Tuesday
Medieval English Research Seminar – 12.15pm at Lecture Theatre 2 of the St Cross Building. Jenyth Evans (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘”Enucleator venio, non pugnator”: The Uneven Authority of Pseudohistories in Gerald of Wales’.
The Latin Palaeography Reading Group meets 2-3.30pm. Please email Laure Miolo for more information.
Old Norse Research Seminar – 5pm in Seminar Room L, English Faculty. Alison Finlay (Birkbeck) will be speaking on ‘From Iceland to the World: Translating Flateyjarbók’: all welcome, drinks to follow.
Medieval Church and Culture – 5.15pm (coffee from 5pm) in the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Machester College. Eunice Yu (Wolfson) will be speaking on ‘Harmonising Paradox in Early Modern Venice: Collecting and Constructing National Identity in Print’.
The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures: ‘Work in Progress’ Colloquium – 5.15pm in the Memorial Room, Queen’s College. Julia Lorenz (Merton College, Oxford) will be speaking on ‘Konrad of Würzburg’s “Herzmaere”: An Instruction on How (Not) to Love’, and Dr Alan Darmawan (SOAS, London) will be speaking on ‘Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures’.
Medieval French Research Seminar – 5.15pm at the Maison Française d’Oxford. The theme this week is ‘Researchers at Work: Serendipity and Surprise’
Wednesday
Reading Jews in Late Antiquity – 10am in Room 207 of The Clarendon Institute. The theme for this week is – The Emperor and the Jews
Medieval German Seminar: Konrad von Megenberg ‘Buch der Natur’ – 11.15am at Somerville College. To be added to the Teams group for updates, please email Almut Suerbaum.
Book at Lunchtime, 1-2pm: Henrike Lähnemann in conversation with Lyndal Roper and Nancy Thebaut will present ‘The Life of Nuns’ as part of the TORCH series. You can join the waiting list for the live event at the Radcliffe Humanities Building or watch it live streamed. Register here.
Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries: An Introduction to Collections and Catalogues – 2pm in the Horton Room, Weston Library. An introduction to the medieval European manuscript collections at the Bodleian Library and the print and online catalogues in which they have been described from the 17th century onwards.
Medieval Latin Document Reading Group – 4pm online. To join, please email Michael Stansfield.
Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5pm in the Ioannou Centre. Max Lau (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘The Rebirth of Byzantine Anatolia in the Twelfth Century’.
Thursday
Medieval Hebrew Reading Group – 10am in the Clarendon Institute. For more information, please email Joseph O’Hara.
Greek and Latin Reading Group – 3pm in the Stapledon Room, Exeter Collge. The text this week is Claudius (Tacitus, Annals 13.3).
Medieval Women’s Writing Research Group – 1pm online. Aafreen Rashid (South Asian University, New Dehli) will be speaking on ‘Framing Feminist Strategic Discourse: Begum Jahanara and the Exchange of Letters During the War of Succession in Mughal India (1657-59)’. Sign up here.
Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies seminar – 5.15pm at Jesus College and online.Elisa Cozzi (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘From Dánta Grá to Dante: Irish–Italian genealogies, 1350–1850’.
Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln & Magdalen Archives – 2pm in the EPA Centre (Museum Road) Seminar room 1. Please contact Laure Miolo for more information.
Middle English Reading Group – 3pm in the Beckington Room, Lincoln College.
Anglo-Norman Reading Group – 5pm in the Farmington Institute in Harris Manchester College. For more information, please contact Jane Bliss (jane.bliss@lmh.oxon.org).
UPCOMING
To register for the ‘Crafting the Book’ one-day workshop, held on 22 November at the Bodleian Bibliographical Press, please follow this link.
The LGBTQ+ History Hackathon is happening on November 29th 2-5.30pm at the History Faculty. Register here.
OPPORTUNITIES (new items highlighted)
CfP for a thematic session at NAPS 2025 titled ‘Scripture and the Arts in Clement of Alexandria‘. Deadline for abstract submissions is November 18th: use this form.
4-year funded Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA), co-supervised between the University of Nottingham and the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford: ‘Digital Approaches to Medieval Chant and Local Religious Heritage’. Deadline 13 January 2025: more information here.
The Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic 2025 is now open to abstract submissions from current postgraduates or those who have recently completed postgraduate study. The theme is ‘Sickness and Health’. More information here.
The Medieval Academy of America’s Graduate Student Committee seeks new committee members for the 2025-2027 term. Submit self-nomination forms here.
Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2025 CfP – seeking 20 minute papers from graduate students on the theme of ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’, for a conference held 24th and 25th of April, 2025. More info here.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeking an assistant professor specializing in visual or material cultures between c. 700 and 1750 CE. More Info here.
The Central European University are advertising a number of funded PhDs and Masters – see the blog post here.
University College Dublin are advertising a funded PhD in Early medieval political and/or intellectual culture (c.500-c.1000 CE) which will be supervised by Dr Megan Welton. See the blog post here.
An opportunity has arisen to translate Alice in Wonderland into Old Norse – The translator would own the copyright and receive a royalty for copies sold. Those interested should email Sarah Foot.
PRAGESTT German Studies Student Conference will take place on the 21st and 22nd March 2025 at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) – please see https://pragestt.ff.cuni.cz/en/home/
The Oxford University Byzantine Society has issued a Call for Papers for their 27th International Graduate Conference, held on the 1st-2nd March 2025, in Oxford and Online. More information can be found here.
The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures invites graduate students from across the globe to submit to the annual Medium Ævum Essay Prize. Deadline 2 December. More information can be found here.
Check out this handy guide to how to blog – including a call for authors for the OMS blog – by Miles Pattenden.
The inaugural ADAM (Addressing Difficult Aspects of the Medieval) workshop took place from the 23rd–24th September 2024 at St. John’s College, University of Oxford.
The programme on Monday 23rd began with a 90-minute discussion of the ‘Möndull-Ingibjörg’ episode from Göngu-Hrólfs saga. The committee selected this episode as it contains references to sexual assault, physical disability, and race.
We distributed the text in an English translation several weeks before the workshop. In the session we discussed: the ‘sanitisation’ of sexual violence and racial insensitivity through translation; the difficulty in mapping contemporary understandings of rape, race, and disability onto the past; the scholar’s positionality in their approach to these topics. The conversation soon moved beyond the text to consider these issues in academia at large. Positionality was particularly controversial, with delegates discussing their discomfort in studying topics without lived experience – ‘am I the right person to be speaking about this?’ – and the potential advantages and disadvantages to foregrounding one’s own experience in academic work. The conversation led us to consider how research grounded in lived experience might complement that which is not, and how scholars of different positionalities might collaborate.
This opening discussion was followed by two paper sessions, the first of which was on ‘Facing the public: What do people want from history?’ and the second on ‘Ethnic identities: interrogating nationhood and colonialism’. Among the papers, we heard considerations of: the risk of harassment faced by women scholars; museological representations of slavery; racial erasure in the interpretation of a Middle English lyric; and the miscategorisation of the ‘Ruthanian’ language along contemporary national lines.
These sessions were followed by a keynote presentation from Professor Corinne Saunders (University of Durham). Professor Saunders gave an instructive account of her movement from her doctoral thesis, to her seminal monograph on ‘Rape and Ravishment’; an academic path she did not anticipate as a postgraduate. She was aware of the pressure upon scholars who ‘fall into’ the study of topics such as these to equip themselves both academically and psychologically. She also noted that a project can become more ‘difficult’ due to external factors, such as when COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd coincided with the final stage of a project on ‘breathlessness’.
The following day began with a group tour with the Uncomfortable Oxford social enterprise. In our scheduled discussion afterwards, delegates were especially taken by the tour’s engagement with the history of antisemitism in the city and the location of a number of University landmarks atop significant Jewish sites. We discussed the University’s reticence when addressing difficult histories and the insufficiency of the ‘plaque response’, whereby a commemorative plaque is erected in a way that might be easily overlooked or dismissed. Delegates debated the best way to supplement such a response so that these aspects of institutional history sit alongside prevailing, comfortable narratives.
Two sessions followed under the banner of ‘Sexual interactions’, the first considering ‘Power structures and interpersonal relationships’ and the second ‘Violence, affect, and audience’. Dividing this topic into two allowed delegates to engage with medieval representations of sexual material that frustrate contemporary categories. We heard papers on the study of: conjugal violence in court reports of 15th-century Freising; how best to teach the phenomenon of the ‘raping hero’; and ‘compassion fatigue’ in scholars dealing with artistic representations of Lucretia’s rape by Tarquinius.
The workshop concluded with a panel on ‘Redefinitions: Moving beyond structures’, which dovetailed with our recurrent discussions of terminology and the lack of overlap between contemporary language and historical concepts. Papers were presented on the inadequacy of contemporary disability theory in appraising medieval medical text, and the applicability of queer theory to the interpretation of cross-dressing in a monastic context. The workshop concluded with an hour-long discussion, in which we restated our need to wrangle with contemporary language and its misalignment with the categories of the past, as well as to continuously re-evaluate ‘best practice’ in addressing these difficult topics, both in the classroom and in scholarship.
We canvassed for anonymous feedback from our delegates following the workshop and the response has been uniformly positive, with comments emphasising the value of the workshop environment for rigorous and respectful debate. Our delegates have offered a number of suggestions for the network’s development and we now look towards implementing a mailing list and website to provide resources for scholars, organising an edited collection of papers from the workshop, and arranging an open conference at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. We have also been invited to collaborate with Corinne Saunders in her work at The Affective Experience Lab, University of Durham.
We are most grateful to OMS for the financial support.
Adam Kelly (University of Oxford), Grace O’Duffy (University of Oxford), Elliot Worrall (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures invites graduate students from across the globe to submit to the annual Medium Ævum Essay Prize. The Prize is open to post-graduates and those recently graduated with a higher degree. The value of the prize is £500 , while entry declared proxime accessit will be awarded £100. The winning essay and other entries of sufficient quality and promise may be considered for publication in Medium Ævum.
Please submit an essay of no more than 8,000 words, on a topic in the range of interests of Medium Ævum, by 12:00 midday (GMT) Monday 2nd of December, 2024.
We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the 27th Annual Oxford University Byzantine Society International Graduate Conference on the 1st-2nd March 2025. Papers are invited to tackle the ‘environment’ of the Late Antique and Byzantine world (very broadly defined). For the call for papers, and for details on how to submit an abstract for consideration for the conference, please see below.
In recent decades, the global community has taken more and more of an active and serious interest in the environment and climate system in which we live. Scholars of Byzantium and Late Antiquity have likewise begun to apply environmental lenses to their research, and have come away with a number of new and exciting perspectives. From scientific analysis of the climatic shifts that occurred throughout the period on both macro and micro scales, to revisionist views of already well-trodden events, these new perspectives are greatly contributing to our field.
The framework of ‘the environment’ here can be applied very broadly, touching on any aspect of the natural world, with novel and imaginative approaches to the notion being strongly encouraged. Some suggestions by the Oxford University Byzantine Society for how this topic might be treated include:
The Analytical – Pollen analysis, dendrochronology, ice cores, and everything in-between; the historical significance of this data and what it can tell us
The Political and Economic – Climate’s impact on internal and external politics, adaptions in trade and policy, effects on particular military campaigns
The Cultural – Changes in attitudes and output as a result of shifting climates, nature’s representation and role in literature
The Societal – Movement of people and changes to the social order as a result of climatic change; variations in the impact of climate change depending on class or occupation, regional adaptations to specific micro-climates
The Religious – Responses to unusual weather events and interpretations of changing climates by different religious communities; religious attitudes towards nature and man’s place in it
The Artistic and Architectural – Environmentally-focused artwork and its uses; the use of landscapes both natural and man-made; changes in design or materials in response to changing climates
The Archaeological – Changing use of the land during periods of climatic shift; abandonment and re-settlement due to changing weather or specific events
The Historiographical – How environmental factors have evolved over time in scholarship
Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, with a short academic biography written in the third person, to the Oxford University Byzantine Society at byzantine.society@gmail.com by Friday 29th November 2024.
Papers should be twenty minutes in length and may be delivered in English or French. As with previous conferences, selected papers will be published in an edited volume, peer-reviewed by specialists in the field. Submissions should aim to be as close to the theme as possible in their abstract and paper, especially if they wish to be considered for inclusion in the edited volume. Nevertheless, all submissions are warmly invited.
The conference will have a hybrid format, with papers delivered at the Oxford University History Faculty and livestreamed online for a remote audience. Accepted speakers should expect and plan to participate in person.
