A medieval event a day keeps the blues away – meet week 5 head-on with another set of seminars and events! As always, you can find a complete copy of the Oxford Medieval Studies Booklet here. Any last-minuted changes will be updated in the weekly blogpost and in the calendar, both accessible via https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/.
This week, on the 13th and 14th of November, the Crafting Documents project, alongside the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures, is hosting the ‘Heritage Science and Manuscript Conference‘. Registration is free, and the full programme of events is available here.
Monday
- French Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 10:30, Weston Library (Horton Room)
- Italian Research Seminar – 1:00, Taylorian Room 2. Ryan Pepin will be speaking on ‘‘Dietro la memoria non può ire’: Copyists’ Slips in the Textual Tradition of the Commedia‘.
- Introduction to Arabic Palaeography – 2:00, Khalili Research Centre
- Carmina Burana: Graduate Text Seminar – 5:00, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College.
- Medieval History Seminar – 5:00 with drinks reception to follow, All Souls College. Tom Johnson (Oxford) will be speaking on ‘The Inscription Economy in Fifteenth-Century England’.
Tuesday
- Medieval English Research Seminar AND Medieval French Seminar – 12:15, Margaret Thatcher Centre, Somerville. Juluan Mattison (U of Georgia) will be speaking on ‘What is an English book? French Scribes, Scripts and Texts in England’
- Latin Palaeography Manuscript Reading Group – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room)
- Medieval Church and Culture Seminar – 5:00, Harris Manchester College. Nancy Thebaut (Catz) will be speaking on ‘Gender, Nature, and the Limits of Art: A Close Reading of ‘Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba’, a Late Medieval Tapestry at the Met Cloisters‘.
- Old Norse Research Seminar – 5:00, New Seminar Room, St. John’s College. Caz Batten (Pennsylvania) will be speaking on ‘Unmaking a Man: The Contested Bodies of the Völundr Legend’. Drinks to follow.
- Old English Graduate Reading Group – 5:15, location TBC, contact Hattie Carter
Wednesday
- John Lydgate Book Club – 11:00, Smoking Room (Lincoln College).
- Medieval German Graduate Seminar on the Constance Chronicle – 11:15, Somerville College.
- Older Scots Reading Group – 2:30, Room 30.401 in the Schwarzman Centre.
- Medieval Latin Documentary Palaeography Reading Group – 4:00, online.
- Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar – 5:00, Ioannou Centre. Marlena Whiting (Groningen) will be speaking on ‘Hodology, Wayfinding, and Geographical Knowledge in Late Antique Pilgrimage Accounts’
Thursday
- Middle English Reading Group – 11:00, Beckington Room (Lincoln College).
- Environmental History Working Group – 12:30, Room 20.421 in the Schwarzman Centre. Ryan Mealiffe will be speaking on ‘What are White Storks (Ciconia ciconica) Doing in High and Late Miedieval Calendars’?
- Celtic Seminar – 5:00, hybrid. Simon Rodway (Aberystwyth) will be speaking on ‘Gwlithod Blewog a Mygydau Barddol: Golwg Newydd ar Garchariad Aneirin yn y Tŷ Deyerin’
- Medieval Visual Culture Seminar – 5:00, St. Catherine’s College. Carly Boxer (Bucknell University) will be speaking on ‘Abstract Figures and Bodily Change: Giving Form to Unseen Things in Late Medieval England’
- Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music – 5:00, online. Elina Hamilton, Peter Lefferts and Elzbieta Witkowska-Zaremba will be speaking on ‘Theinred of Dover (fl. c. 1300): A New Context for him in Fourteenth-Century Music Theory’
- Compline in the Crypt – 9:30pm, St Edmund Hall.
Friday
- Medievalist Coffee Morning – 10:30, Visiting Scholars Centre (Weston Library). All welcome, coffee and insight into special collections provided.
- Exploring Medieval Oxford through Surviving Archives – 2:00, Weston Library (Horton Room).
- Oxford Medieval Manuscript Group: Library Visit (Merton) – 5:00. Sign-up required.
Saturday
- Workshop and Vespers for St Edmund. -14:00, St Edmund Hall Chapel. Open to all, no singing experience required. For registration, follow this link.
Opportunities
- Call for readers: For a Multilingual Medieval Compline in the Crypt on 20 Nov, 9.30pm, Henrike Lähnemann is looking for versions of the Our Father in as many medieval languages as possible. Old High German, Middle High German, Old English, and Middle English have been assigned but any further languages are welcome! Contact her if you have a version and are willing to read it.
- CfP: Shaping the Word – the Form and Use of Biblical Manuscripts in the Early Medieval West. Deadline 17th Nov 2025.
- Colloquium: ‘Journals, Past, Present and Future’, hosted by The Review of English Studies. More info and registration here.
- Register before 30 November for Ars Inquirendi – Querying the Pre-Modern in the Age of Large Multimodal Models
- Register for MEMRN Winter Conference 2025 13-16 November via Eventbrite HERE.
- Call for Committee Members for the Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference.
- Medium Ævum Essay Prize welcomes applications. Deadline 1 December 2025.
- Data Visualization in the Humanities: Nodegoat Open Workshop.
- CfP: Locational Lives: Medieval Experience in Town and Country. Deadline 5th Jan 2026.
- CfP: Character Groupings in Classical and Medieval Art and Literature at the University. Deadline 5th Jan 2026.
- Mortimer History Society Essay Prize. Deadline: 15th February 2026.