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Michaelmas term has officially begun! Oxford is looking beautiful in the October sun, the libraries are once again full, and our programme of events is now fully underway. To mark the start of term, here is some advice chosen specially for our new MSt students:

Magistris adsidete, aperite libros, perspicite litteras, intellegite sensus illarum!
[Sit with your teachers, open your books, study the text, understand its meaning! Ep. 27]

Of course, this advice does not only apply to those on taught degree courses. Being a researcher does not proclude anybody from sitting and studying together, and in fact our many seminars and reading groups are an excellent place to do just that. To help you navigate them all, I have attached a pdf version of this term’s Medieval Booklet to this week’s email for your convenience. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to it: I know I speak for all of us when I say that I am excited for all of the many medieval things in store for us!

One particular event to draw your attention to this week: we at the OMS team invite you to the Medievalist Coffee Morning this Friday, 10:30-11.30am for a Mini Medieval Roadshow. If you don’t know where this takes place, check the Friday announcements below. This is a great chance to meet your OMS team for this year (including some brand new faces!), advertise your seminar / reading group, or just enjoy some free coffee and biscuits. We’d love to see you there. On to the announcements for this week:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Call for Participants: Song and lyric workshop with Ardis Butterfield, 3rd November, 3–5pm: Ardis Butterfield will be visiting Oxford this term and not only give the OMS Michaelmas Lecture on 31 October but has also kindly agreed to take part in a workshop on medieval lyric and song. This will take place in Lecture Room 4, New College on 3^rd November, 3–5pm. We are looking for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers who are working on a medieval song or lyric text that they would like to discuss in the workshop with Professor Butterfield. All that is required is to provide an edition of the text of the song or lyric, ideally with a translation and edition of the music (if there is any). The workshop will be an informal opportunity to workshop songs/lyric texts together and benefit from Professor Butterfield’s expertise. If you would like to contribute a song/lyric, please send your suggestion to <joseph.mason@new.ox.ac.uk> by Friday 14^th October. You are very welcome to attend the workshop without bringing along a text to discuss. If you wish to attend, please RSVP to <joseph.mason@new.ox.ac.uk> by Friday 28^th October for catering purposes.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 10th October:

• The Medieval History Seminar takes place at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College and on Teams (Teams link here). This week’s speaker will be John Watts  (Corpus), ‘Political Economy and the Wars of the Roses’. 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 Old Norse Reading Group meets at 5.30-7.30pm. Please email Ashley Castelino (ashley.castelino@lincoln.ox.ac.uk) to be added to the mailing list.

Tuesday 11th October:

• The Medieval English Research Seminar takes place at 12.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Nicola McDonald (York), ‘Doing Justice: Who Read Middle English Romance and Why Does it Matter?’. The paper will be followed by lunch with the speaker. All welcome!
• GLARE (Greek and Latin Reading Group) takes place at 4-5pm at Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College. Please meet at Jesus College Lodge. This week’s text will be Aristotle, Poetics. All welcome to attend any and all sessions. For more details and specific readings each week, or to be added to the mailing list, email john.colley@jesus.ox.ac.uk or jenyth.evans@seh.ox.ac.uk.

• The Medieval French Research Seminar takes place at 5pm at the Maison française d’Oxford (www.mfo.ac.uk). Presentations begin at 5.15pm. This week’s seminar will be a doctoral student research showcase. For more information and to be added on the seminar’s mailing list, contact sophie.marnette@balliol.ox.ac.uk 
  
• The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar takes place at 5pm at Charles Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College. The theme for this term is ‘Women’. This week’s speaker will be Luisa Ostacchini (Exeter): The World of the ‘Old English Martyrology’: Carthage and the case of St Perpetua’s sword. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar.

Wednesday 12th October:

• The Medieval German Graduate Seminar meets for an organising session on ‘Dietrichs Flucht’ at 11:15am in Somerville College – ask at the Lodge for directions. If you want to be added to the mailing list for this term’s seminar, please email henrike.laehnemann@mod-langs.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 (michael.stansfield@new.ox.ac.uk) for further details and the Teams link.
• The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar takes place at 5pm at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles. This week’s speaker will be Claudia Rapp (Vienna), The Oxford conundrum: Cyril Mango and Byzantine elitism, or: what about popular culture?.

Thursday 13th October:

• The Invisible East Lecture takes place at 5pm online. The speaker will be Reza Huseini, A Day in Late Antique Bactria. Register for the webinar here; the lecture is in Persian.
• The Celtic Seminar will take place at 5.15pm via Zoom and at the Council Chamber, National Library of Wales. This week’s speaker will be Imanol Larrea Mendizabal (Soziolinguistika Klusterra), The Etxepare Basque Institute Alan R. King Professor in Residence: “Hizkuntza ohiturak aldatzeko ikerketa soziolinguisikoa Euskal Herrian: hainbat esperientzia” (Ymchwil Sosioieithyddol a newid arferion iaith: profiad Gwlad y Basg). Please note that this is a Basque language seminar with translation into Welsh. Please contact david.willis@jesus.ox.ac.uk if you need a link.

Friday 14th October:

• The Medievalist Coffee Morning takes place at 10:30-11.30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!). This week will be a Mini Medieval Roadshow: please do come along to meet the team and to advertise your events / seminars! There will be manuscripts on show!
• The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm at St Hilda’s College, in the Julia Mann Room. This week, please meet at the lodge and arrange swipe-card access. The text will be extracts from the Chronicle of Langtoft; pdf will be provided. For access to the text and further information, please email: stephanie.hathaway@gmail.com or jane.bliss@lmh.oxon.org.

OPPORTUNITIES:

• CFP: The Schoenberg Symposium this year is on the theme of TRANSLATING SCIENCE, and we are seeking proposals for 5 minute lightning talks to be posted to YouTube as part of the event. Translating Science considers the networks of exchange, transmission, and translation of natural knowledge evident in manuscript culture in the pre- and early modern periods. We will examine in particular the role of the manuscript book in the translation of natural knowledge across linguistic, regional, disciplinary, and epistemic boundaries. Proposals should be relevant to the theme of TRANSLATING SCIENCE and must be 5 minutes long or shorter. The deadline for submitting proposals for a lightning talk is Friday, October 14: submit your proposals using this form: Lightning talk submission form. Applicants will be notified by October 21. Videos must be submitted to SIMS by November 7. For more information see the Symposium page or email dorp@upenn.edu.

Finally, some advice for this week from Alcuin:

Videte librorum thesaura; considerate ecclesiarum decorem, aedificiorum pulchritudinem

[“Look at the treasures of your library, the beauty of your churches, the fairness of your buildings!, Ep. 27]

I take this to mean: enjoy how beautiful Oxford looks in the autumn sun! May you all have an enjoyable week appreciating the treasures of our libraries, communities and seminars.

Here we are, at the beginning of a new term, and a new academic year. It gives me great pleasure to extend a warm welcome to those of you new to our Medievalist community at Oxford! You are now part of a network of over 200 medievalists across a wide range of disciplines and faculties. This weekly Medieval Matters Newsletter is you first port of call for all of Oxford’s rich and diverse medieval happenings, from CFPs and job opportunities to weekly seminars and reading groups.
I am thrilled to be returning as your Communications Officer for this year. Unfortunately we are running short on uplifting Old English wisdom, so this year I will be providing you with wisdomous tidbits from Alcuin of York (c. A.D. 732 to 804). As a polymath who taught and studied an exceptionally wide curriculum on both sides of the English channel and promoted education as a goal in and of itself, Alcuin embodies everything that we celebrate here at OMS. Here to get us started is his call for people to make good use of his work collecting sources:

Ne pereat labor noster in librorum collectione
[Don’t let the work I did building up the library go to waste!, Ep. 167]

This is a particularly relevant call for this week’s email, as I have been carefully compiling a ‘library’ of all of Oxford’s medieval seminars, events, reading lists and opportunities, for your perusal: the Medieval Booklet is now available! You can browse it at your leisure here. Please make good use of it: do not let my work go to waste! I will attach a “hard copy” to next week’s email, so if you have any last-minute changes or additions, please email them to me during this week.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• St Edmund Hall Old Library Exhibition: Poem, Story, and Scape in the work of Kevin Crossley Holland’. This exhibition explores the work of Kevin Crossley-Holland (Honorary Fellow and 1959, English), prize-winning children’s author, translator, poet, librettist, editor and professor. Kevin engages creatively with language and poetry, place, history and legend. He captivates us by telling stories deeply rooted in past cultures, which he remakes to be compellingly contemporary and relevant. For this exhibition, Kevin has generously loaned items from his private collection to add to material from St Edmund Hall’s Archives and Special Collections. The exhibition will run from Friday 8 September – Monday 31 October. Visit by arrangement with the Librarian: library@seh.ox.ac.uk or 01865279062. Public opening on Monday 24 and Friday 28 October 10am-4pm.
• Booking is now open for Oxford Latinitas 2022/23 online classes in both Latin and Ancient Greek. The Autumn Term runs from 10th October to 2nd December, and classes are available at all levels in both languages; bookings may also now be made for two terms or for the whole year. Students new to Oxford Latinitas (or new to our courses in either language) will have a short diagnostic call with one of our teachers in order to make sure they are placed in the right group. Full details and link to application sign-up can be found here.
• Booking is now open for the Oxford Latinitas Septimana Latina Hiemalis, to be held at Palazzola, Rome, from 3rd-9th December 2022. Whatever your current level of Latin, from beginner to advanced, this week offers you the opportunity to make real progress towards fluency, while enjoying like-minded company in a beautiful location. Full details and link to application sign-up can be found here.
• Medieval Postdoctoral Network: The Medieval Postdoctoral Network is a small group of postdocs, new and returning, who work on various aspects of medieval studies. We meet once a month to discuss the development of our work, set goals, and share skills and tips which may be helpful for Early Career Researchers. All are welcome – please email Rebecca Menmuir (r.menmuir@qmul.ac.uk) or Julie Mattison (j.r.mattison@rug.nl) to be added to the mailing list.
• The Medievalist Coffee Morning is back! We kick off properly next week with a Mini-Medieval Roadshow. Join us at 10.30-11.30am next Friday, 14 October to meet all of the OMS Team and to hear more about events, seminars and reading groups taking place this term! If you would like to present your event/seminar etc, please do come along to advertise it! There might actually be manuscripts…

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 3rd October:

• The Invisible East Lecture takes place at 4pm in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Lecture 1. The speaker will be Jonathan L. Lee, The History of the Armenian Community of Afghanistan. More information here.

Thursday 6th October:

• The Invisible East Lecture takes place at 5pm online. The speaker will be Majid M. Mahdi, Islamisation, a closer look. Register for the webinar here.

Friday 7th October:

• The Medievalist Coffee Morning takes place at 10:30-11.30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!).

OPPORTUNITIES:

• CFP: The German Historical Institute Medieval History Seminar invites proposals from all areas and periods of medieval history and is not limited to historians working on German history or German-speaking regions of Europe. All methodological approaches are welcome. Applications from neighbouring disciplines are welcome if the projects have a distinct historical focus. The seminar is bi-lingual and papers and discussions will be conducted both in German and English. Participants must have a good reading and listening comprehension of both languages. Successful applicants must be prepared to submit a paper of approximately 5,000 words by August 15, 2023. They are also expected to prepare and present a commentary on the papers of another session. For full details, see our blog post.
• Claudio Leonardi FELLOWSHIP for a critical edition of a medieval latin text (deadline November 7, 2022): The scholarship offered is aimed at the purpose of supporting research on medieval Latin culture and texts and especially to produce critical editions. The scholarship, in the amount of €30,000.00 is for one year from January 1, 2023. The critical edition produced will be published by the publisher SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo (www.sismel.it) after passing the usual peer-review procedures. The fellow agrees to present his/her research during the General Assembly of S.I.S.M.E.L. (Florence, April 1, 2023) and to give three lectures at S.I.S.M.E.L. during the term of the fellowship. Applications, addressed to the president of S.I.S.M.E.L, must be received by e-mail at presidenza@sismelfirenze.it no later than 10. 00 on November 7, 2022.
• Call For Papers – Contesting Authenticity in Literature, 1200-1700. Proposals are warmly welcomed for this two-day conference, which aims to bring together speakers from across languages, disciplines, and period boundaries. The conference will explore literature which engages with ‘contesting authenticity’ in some way: pseudotexts, forgeries, imitations, narrative authenticity, the practice of contesting authenticity, and many more interpretations of the conference scope. The conference will take place on 30-31 March 2023 at Senate House, University of London; speakers will present in-person. A limited number of bursaries will be available for speakers and attendees. The Call For Papers and further conference information can be found at: https://authenticity2023.wordpress.com/.

I started this email by extending a welcome to our new members, so it seems fit to end on a ‘welcome back’ for those returning. For those of you returning to Oxford, whether from summer holidays or from careers elsewhere, we are delighted to have you back! If you (like me) managed to get less work done over the summer vac than you had hoped, some reassuring words:

Fervor mensis Augusti desidem, non voluntatis efficatia pigrum efficit
[It is the heat of August that has made him idle, not his desire to be lazy, Ep. 119]

Now we are in the cold of October, I am sure we will all get lots of productive research done! I am so looking forward to seeing many of you at events and seminars throughout the term. Wishing you all a successful and enjoyable term, filled with exciting research discoveries and the joys of medievalist community.

After two years as Oxford Medieval Studies’s first dedicated social media officer, Llewelyn Hopwood shares his experiences and a few tips and tricks about social media usage in academia.

Before starting this role, I had only a basic knowledge of Facebook and Twitter, and only really for personal use. However, as it was the summer of Covid-19, everyone and everything had gone online, and suddenly an online network was the only network; an online profile was your only profile. I therefore threw myself into the world of social media for academia by applying for this job, which allowed me to kill two birds with one stone: to do my bit in keeping this vital network of Oxford medievalists alive and well and to learn a thing or two about how to use social media for academic engagement. Here, then, organised by platform, is a summary of what OMS got up to online over these past two years, why you should have a go at this job, and what to expect from it.

FACEBOOK

History: In September 2020, we set up a brand-new Facebook page for OMS. With around 300 likes, its growth has been less dramatic than Twitter’s. However, particular advantages remain.
Longer posts: Tweets have a character limit and Instagram requires an image. Therefore, if you have something to advertise or an announcement to make that is particularly text-heavy, that is the time to post on Facebook. A condensed version should be posted elsewhere.
Events: Facebook is still the best home for advertising events. Although Twitter and Instagram posts are good at publicising the advert, the central advert itself is better off as a Facebook event as there you can include much more information and its internal functions allow this information to be clearly organised for your audience. The events function also allows you to get a rough idea of how many attendees to expect.
Scheduling: As above.

INSTAGRAM

History: OMS’s Instagram account was another new venture, launched around six months ago, and again boasts some 300 followers.
Images: Instagram is, of course, built for posts with images. For OMS, this is a good place to post summaries of big events, such as the Oxford Mystery Cycle, with a picture deck or perhaps even a collage made with a suitable app, e.g. PicCollage.
Live/Story: The Instagram Live or Story functions are both good ways to lives stream or live post pictures of events. This has not yet been used to its full potential.

YOUTUBE

History: OMS’s YouTube channel was yet another post-lockdown initiative, largely created in order to stream online and hybrid lectures and post them for posterity. During the past two years, organising the streaming itself has come under the remit of the Events Coordinator, which you can find more about in outgoing Events Coordinator Tom Revell’s recent post.

LINK IN BIO

If you have accounts on two or more social media platforms, it is a good idea to consolidate them in one place. This is where sites like Beacons and Linktree – also known as a ‘Link in Bio’ tool – come in handy. This is a single hub that houses further links to your various platforms in order to save space in your description box, stopping it from being cluttered with links. OMS’s Beacons page houses links to its Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram accounts as well as the term booklet and its principal website, which is home to this blog and which recently moved from its previous location on TORCH’s website.

YOUR TURN

The post asks for roughly an hour a week of your time, sometimes more during term time, less during vacations. I would encourage anyone with any knowledge and interest in social media to consider this role. But the most important criterion is an enthusiastic desire to bring together the fantastic network of medievalists that Oxford Medieval Studies fosters. As well as the technical know-how about social media that you will gain directly from this post, you will also indirectly find yourself learning about advertising, marketing, networking, and even graphic design and publishing. Go for it!

Llewelyn Hopwood is a DPhil student in Medieval Welsh poetry at Corpus Christi College, Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Faculty of English’s graduate journal, Oxford Research in English, and the Welsh materials resident on the University of Liverpool’s Human Remains project.

Main image credit: Leaf from a Beatus Manuscript: the Fourth Angel Sounds the Trumpet and an Eagle Cries Woe, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leaf_from_a_Beatus_Manuscript-_the_Fourth_Angel_Sounds_the_Trumpet_and_an_Eagle_Cries_Woe_MET_DT304319.jpg (CC0 1.0)

Free, open to all.

When? – Monday 11 October 2021, 1 pm to 3:30 pm

Where? – Weston Library, Blackwell Hall (public foyer)

Members of the Oxford Scribes and printers from the Bodleian Bibliographical Press race to produce a page of text. Settle the 500-year-old question – which is faster?

Weblink: http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/theconveyor/events-from-the-bodleian-centre-for-the-study-of-the-book-autumn-2021/

_{Header: Collage of work by Ruskin School of Art graduates and researchers}