When: Monday 24 March 2025 Where: St Hugh’s College
Images of the Sorrowful Virgin, whether in the form of Michelangelo’s Pietà, or Mary at the foot of the Cross on the Isenheim altarpiece are ubiquitous in medieval and early modern culture. Liturgically this was explored through the Stabat Mater, while vernacular writers found in the Marian lament a vehicle through which the Virgin could speak, offering a route for affective engagement with Mary’s suffering. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation inflected the ways in which the Sorrowful Virgin was presented, as devotions such as the Seven Sorrows served as spiritual models for more standardized monastic environments in the post-Tridentine period. Moreover, with colonisation of the New World, Marian devotion took on new emphases.
This interdisciplinary workshop will investigate the Sorrowful Virgin in medieval and early modern culture, in which we aim to engage with some of these questions. The workshop will include a hands-on session with material objects and a performance of an early modern lament. We have entitled this workshop ‘The Sorrowful Virgin’ to encompass the many manifestations of this devotion, from the Seven Sorrows to the Mater Dolorosa and welcome broad interpretations of the theme.
We are looking for proposals for 20-minute papers on all aspects of this devotion in medieval and early modern culture, and encourage submissions from those in the fields of History, Music, Medieval Languages and Literature, Theology, and Art History including but not limited to:
Vernacular poetry
Musical Settings
Performativity
Liturgy
Iconography
Material Culture
Theological development
Affective piety
Reformation
Counter-Reformation
Monastic devotion
Please send proposals of 250 words along with a short bio to Anna Wilmore and Taro Kobayashi by 24th January 2025. We aim to respond by the 1st February.
The Oxford/Groningen 2025 Old Frisian Summer School (OFSS25) will take place in Groningen (Netherlands), 7th-11th July. This will be a fun way to learn Old Frisian in a week, to view original Old Frisian manuscripts and to see the world heritage landscape of old Frisian ‘terps’ or dwelling mounds.
OFSS25 : Old Frisian : A Gem within the OId Germanic Languages.
The OFSS25 should be of special interest to students (UG and PG) and Early Career Researchers of Old English, Old Norse, Old High German or Gothic who are interested in learning Old Frisian. You will be taught grammar and practice translation in hands-on workshops. Invited speakers will give lectures by on the Old Frisian text corpus and history to provide historical and cultural context. Library visits to view the manuscripts are on the programme and a tour around the ‘terps’ will be organised on 12th July.
Questions?? Attend as a taster session a lecture by Johanneke Sytsema (as part of Henrike Lähnemann’s lecture series ‘Topics in Historical Linguistics’) on Strong Verbs Across English, Frisian, Dutch, Low German, High German, an introduction to the crucial place of Frisian in the history of Germanic Languages. Watch the recording from the Taylor Library, room 2, Friday week 5 (21 Feb), 2–3pm
On Friday 8th and Saturday 9th November, the online workshop Epiros: The Other Western Rome was held, platforming twenty-one papers from sixteen universities. As the second phase of a new international project, the workshop investigated the Byzantine successor-state of Epiros (1204–1444). Formed from the Fourth Crusade, this Balkan state existed as an alternative narrative and third Byzantine-Roman context, encompassing a vast variety of peoples of the former empire.
Originally envisioned as a one-day workshop, the programme was expanded to two days to accommodate so many excellent submissions. As a result, we were able to offer panels on, The ‘Post-Komnenian System’, ‘Epiros and Bulgaria’, ‘Epiros and its other Neighbours’, ‘Network Analysis,’ ‘Hybrid Material Culture,’ and more. The workshop’s convenors are hugely grateful for the participation of speakers and attendees, as well as the support of both The Oxford Centre Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR).
An edited volume of papers is planned, and a selection of images below.
The Medieval Women’s Writing Research Group Conference 2024 will be held on 18th June 2024 with the theme of “Exchanging Words” in Room 2 of the Taylor Institution Library both in person (presenters/attendees) and online (attendees).
Tuesday 18 June 2024, 9am – 5pm Online and In-person, Room 2, Taylor Institution Library, Saint Giles’, Oxford OX1 3NA Free but registration required Register here for in-person attendance – Sold out Register here to join the conference online Online registration closes 15 minutes before the start of the event. You will be sent the joining link within 48 hours of the event, on the day and once again 10 minutes before the event starts.
The aim of this conference is to explore the concept of exchange, whether it be textual or material, to, for and between women in the global Middle Ages. As a research group based upon the concept of exchanging ideas, we wish to explore medieval women’s own networks of exchange and transmission, and the influence of this upon both the literature and culture of the period as well as the present day.
We are delighted to present the programme for the day:
9:00-9:30 Registration 9:30-9:45 Welcome and Opening Remarks 9:45-11:15 Session 1 “Scholarly Networks” Katrin Janz-Wenig (SUB Hamburg) & Lenka Panušková (The Czech Academy of Sciences) | Communication Strategies Through Change: Translations, Compilations and Ekphrasis Ved Prabha Sharma (Independent Researcher) | Women Scholars and Knowledge Exchange in Medieval Indian shāstrārth Tradition Tatiana Barkovskiy (University of Cambridge) | A Beguinian Learning Network, or How to Approach ‘Medieval Women Mystics’ as Philosophers 11:15-11:45 Break with Refreshments 11:45-13:15 Session 2 “Relationships With and Between Women” Costas Gavriel (University of Oxford) | Gaining the Queen’s Confidence: The Relationship Between Leonor López de Córdoba and Catherine of Lancaster, Queen of Castile Lucia Akard (University of Oxford) | Talking About Rape and Exchanging Knowledge in Medieval Dijon Meg Greenough (Independent Researcher) | The Wilton Matrix: Mothering in Goscelin of Saint Betin’s Liber Confortatorius 13:15-14:30 Lunch Break Exploring the Taylorian’s Treasures, with Professor Henrike Lähnemann (University of Oxford) 14:30-15:45 Keynote Address Professor Diane Watt (University of Surrey) | Medieval Women Writers: Troubling a Feminist History of British Women’s Writing 15:45-16:15 Break with Refreshments 16:15-17:45 Session 3 “Nuns’ Words” Francesca Maria Villani (University of Bari) | Eloise’s Psalmody: Body and Voice Through the Epistles Jane Bliss (Independent Researcher) | The Nun Changes her Library Book Hilary Pearson (Independent Researcher) | Teresa de Cartagena’s Models of Female Authority 17:45 Closing Remarks 18:00 End of Conference
The research group and the conference are generously funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and their “Critical-Thinking Communities” Initiative.
Putting a halt to in-person events, face-to-face conversations unmediated by a digital screen, and forcing people around the world to re-think how the interacted with each other, COVID-19 also placed a stranglehold on much academic dialogue and conferences experiences. One of the victims of the pandemic era was the Cambridge, Oxford, and London Symposium on Old Norse, Old English, and Latin (COLSONOEL). The last COLSONOEL was due to take place in St. John’s College, University of Oxford in May 2020 but which was sadly cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions.
In 2024 a new committee at the University of Oxford, headed by Natasha Bradley, and comprising of Ashley Castelino, Simon Heller, and Mary Catherine O’Connor, took up the reins to bring this symposium back to life. In the spirit of its return to the world of conferences and academic discourse, the theme of COLSONOEL 2024 was ‘Rebirth, Renewal, Renaissance’. This symposium for post-graduate students and early career researchers was set up as a supportive and welcoming academic environment for presenters to test new ideas and to share their research. And it is in this vein, that COLSONOEL began again and hopes to continue for many years to come.
COLSONOEL 2024 kicked off on a wet and dismal Friday 3rd May in St Hilda’s College in the Garden Room Suite, which transformed into an exciting day of papers and conversations. Exquisite views stretching over Oxford with its dreaming spires rising to the rain-sodden heavens framed the speakers and their presentations at St Hilda’s as we welcomed ten speakers from Oxford, Cambridge, and Birkbeck.
Considering the question of reception and intertextual relationships in the first session, David Bond West opened COLSONOEL with his paper on ‘Rhetorical Storytelling in Bergr Sokkason’s Mikjáls saga’. Moving from Old Norse to Old English, Mingwei Lu examined the relationships between psalms and elegies in the paper ‘“Hu lange wilt þu, Drihten” – A Comparison of Religious Revival in the Old English Psalms and the Old English Elegies’. Leaping forward to the modern era, Emily Dixon asked what it meant to think through soil and landscapes in her paper ‘Rebirth through soil: The earth of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Beowulf and The Wanderer’.
Following this line of movement to earth-centred evidence and thinking about what can be uncovered through archaeology, Katie Beard opened the second session with her investigation into amulets, ‘Armaments as Amulets in Old Norse in Old Norse Literature and Archaeology’. Daisy Bonsall worked through the theme of the conference in thinking about the multiple uses and re-purposing of textiles in Anglo-Saxon England in ‘A Case for Regifting: Reusing Textiles to Create and Renew Connections in Anglo-Saxon England’.
The inter-relationship of life and death and the possibility of comparing through these ontological concerns took centre stage in session three as Alexia Kirov discussed images and themes of birth and death in ‘Re: birth and death – from (pre-)cradle to grave in Early English Literature’. What are the appropriate responses to the death of king and what is the emotional performance a poet may engage in when his king dies? Molly Bovett looked at some of these questions and more in ‘The Death of the King in Hallfreðar saga vandræðaskálds’. Staying in the realm of Old Norse literature but migrating from the historical world of medieval Norway and Iceland to the world of the mythological texts, Kendra Nydam closed the third session with her paper ‘Thrice-burnt, Thrice-born: Revisiting the Fateful Role of Gullveig in Norse Mythology’.
How different medieval historians and societies think about and write about the past formed a key concern of the concluding papers in the fourth and last session of the day. In ‘Reviving the Gothic Past and justifying a Swedish present in the Festum patronorum regni Suecie’ Adrián Rodríguez turned attention to historiographical concerns in fifteenth-century Sweden. Moving one last time from Scandinavia back to medieval England, Emily Clarke gave the closing paper ‘Reforming the Past: History and Antiquarianism in the English Benedictine Reform’.
An intellectually curious atmosphere and friendly environment created a fertile and productive day of discussions in the form of question-and-answer sessions after the papers as well as more informal conversations in the tea breaks and lunch. The COLSONOEL Committee would like to thank everyone who attended this year’s symposium. We would also like to extend a special thanks to our sponsors, Oxford Medieval Studies and TORCH, who made COLSONOEL 2024 possible. We look forward to the return of COLSONOEL 2025.
Poetry needs space. As music relies on its opposing silence; to be recognisable at first sight, poetry needs blanks. Transmitting texts in the Middle Ages was also a matter of space but rather concerned with the cost of writing material and the lack thereof. As a result, single poems were squeezed into the page at the expense of those defining blanks. Inevitably, large collections and vast anthologies densely occupied handwritten folia.
Nowadays, established traditions and criteria rule the process of compiling poetry books. But what was the awareness that ruled these processes in the Middle Ages? This is the topic of the workshop. The broad question is what idea of poetry and poetry books can be gleaned from this process. Is gathering just a necessity, or does it conceal a conscious poetic message? If conscious, what role does the physicality of the manuscript play for the poetic unit?
Medieval poetry books can be either multi-authorial anthologies or single-authorial collections, and many are the ways in which those poetic books could have been formed. Poems of different authors could have been selected around a common theme, or with a chronological criterion; authorial collections could be made by authors themselves, their students, or other members of their circle. These books could contain a macrostructure and, therefore, an overarching narrative; they could reflect a specific time of the author’s activity or summarise a life-long production. The way poems were arranged in ‘big containers’ and transmitted directly affected their readership, reception and their current literary status.
From the perspective of literary theory, the arrangement in medieval manuscripts opens an array of crucial questions: the relationship between the single poem and the poetry book, the way – supposedly different – in which long and shorter compositions were treated and the correspondence between its parts. Furthermore, how much was the idea of a single-thematic unit present in the minds of the compilers? Was this book to be read cover to cover, or something to read out or perform with music? And how does the layout of poetry, including the absence of those defining blanks, impact the reader’s experience?
Within this framework, the workshop focuses on the circulation of poems in the medieval Mediterranean, which is used as a case study to explore medieval literature.
Convenors: Ugo Mondini (University of Oxford) and Alberto Ravani (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Speakers: Marisa Galvez (Stanford University), Niels Gaul (The University of Edinburgh), Marlé Hammond (SOAS University of London), Adriano Russo (École française de Rome)
Programme
Friday, 31st May 2024
9:45 a.m.
Registration
10:15 a.m.
Welcoming address Barney Taylor (Sub-rector, Exeter College) Marc D. Lauxtermann (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages)
Introduction Ugo Mondini (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages) Alberto Ravani (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
10:30 a.m.
First Session Chair: Marina Bazzani (Faculty of Classics)
Marisa Galvez (Stanford University) – From Chansonniers to Whole-World Poetics: The Poetry Book as a Mode of Worlding
11:15 a.m.
Coffee break
11:30 a.m.
Adriano Russo (École française de Rome) – Between Chaos and Order: Dynamics of Formation of Medieval Latin Verse Collections
12:15 p.m.
Lunch
2:30 p.m.
Second Session Chair: TBD
Niels Gaul (University of Edinburgh) – Byzantine ‘Poetry Books’: From Embers and Sparks of Classicising Learning to Tokens of Literati Self-Fashioning?
The 2024 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference, hosted by the Maison Française d’Oxford, took place this past Monday and Tuesday, the 8th and 9th of April.
Since 2005, the OMGC has been an annual forum for graduate scholars from Oxford and beyond to share their research. The two-day conference brought together rising medievalists from Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Canada, France, Switzerland, and the UK and featured panels on divine affectivity, scribes and songs, visual signs, objects and collections, palaeography, and codicology.
Professor Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford) heralded the start of the conference on Monday morning with fanfare from the Oxford Medieval Studies trumpet – an appropriate opening to the conference, which was themed around ‘signs and scripts.’ United by the semiotic theme, participants found unexpected connections between a diverse set of presentations.
Professor Henrike Lähnemann playing her OMS trumpet in the Maison Française d’Oxford auditorium.
Professor Sophie Page (UCL) delivered her keynote presentation “Magic Signs and Censored Scripts in Medieval Europe,” closing the first day of papers. Her keynote delved into the syncretic texts of medieval magic, the efficacy of which required proper ritual performance – careful attention to the details of diagrams, auspicious star and cosmological signs, and specific material components.
Magic circle from the De secretis spirituum planetis in which the practitioner stands to summon planetary angels. Collection of alchemical, technical, medical, magic, and divinatory tracts (Miscellanae Alchemica XII), late 15th century. Wellcome Collection, MS 517, f. 234v.
Professor Page’s keynote dovetailed with Ellen Hausner’s (Oxford) paper on the alchemical images and text of the Ripley Scroll, which communicate a sense of time and space as core alchemical concepts trickle down from divine creation to the corporeal world. Signs and symbols are concentrations of meaning. Even small signifiers (although the scroll is over 2.6 meters long!) can signify immense, cosmological ideas.
As exemplified by Marlene Schilling’s (Oxford) paper on devotion to personified liturgical days in the prayer books of northern German convents, signs and scripts also have the power to lend physicality, visuality, and agency to concepts. Signs and scripts are means of power and community creation and consolidation. Or as Wilhelm Lungar (Stockholm) put it in his paper ‘Communicating Identity on Scandinavian Monastic Seals in the Middle Ages,’ objects like seals, as both historically situated artefacts and texts, mediate representation, identity, and authority.
From left to right: presentations by Elena Lichmanova (Oxford), Wilhelm Lungar (Stockholm), and Corinne Clark (Geneva).
The challenge of interpretation and an embrace of plural perspectives was a through-line for the conference, sparking rich, generative conversation. In her paper, ‘Mirror Writing and the Art of Self Reflection,’ Elena Lichmanova (Oxford) asked why and how offensive phrases like tu es asin[us] (‘you are an ass’) could be included in the thirteenth-century Rutland Psalter and surveyed the ways artists created nuances of meaning by manipulating the direction of script. Corinne Clark’s (Geneva) presentation on the life of St. Margaret considered the symbolism and mixed hagiographic reception of the saint’s battle with a dragon in which she is consumed by the demonic beast, erupting from its abdomen. Both topics inspired collaborative thinking among participants and emphasized the importance of analytical parallax to deepen our understanding of images and texts controversial and cryptic even to contemporaries.
As Megan Gorsalitz (Queen’s University, Kingston) made clear in her presentation on Old English riddles, mindless consumption steals meaning and risks careless, uncritical perpetuation. Signs and scripts require careful reflection of the manifold voices and identities they represent as well as those they conceal.
Detail of illuminated moth in decorated border. Book of Hours of King Charles VIII, 15th century. Utopia, armarium codicum bibliophilorum, Cod. 111, f. 96r.
A moth ate words. It seemed to me / a strange occasion, when I inquired about that wonder, / that the worm swallowed the riddle of certain men, / a thief in the darkness, the glorious pronouncement / and its strong foundation. The stealing guest was not / one whit the wiser, for all those words he swallowed.
Exeter Book Riddle 47
Charlotte Wood (Oxford), Marc Lawson (Trinity College Dublin), and Ilari Aalto (Turku) all grappled with the difficulties of studying oft-overlooked material culture. For Wood, whose paper focused on comb placement in Anglo-Saxon cremations, the significance of deliberately broken comb-ends in Anglo-Saxon burial urns remains elusive but exciting for their potential to tell us more about funerary practices. In his paper on brickmakers’ marks in late medieval Finland, Aalto suggested explanations for marks found in churches, which may simultaneously represent saints as an allusion to brickmakers’ names and act as a remembrance of the artisan embedded in the church. Drawing upon visual culture, written references, and extant examples of early Irish book satchels, Lawson demonstrated the prevalence of book satchels and suggested a more complex understanding of manuscript binding and use in early medieval Ireland.
The conference also featured a comprehensive selection of case studies exploring signs of manuscript creation, composition, authorship, revision, genre, and punctuation. Peter Fraundorfer’s (Trinity College Dublin) paper on a sammelband produced for Reichenau Abbey considered what the text’s language and contents can tell us about its author and intended readership, while Sebastian Dows-Miller (Oxford) took a statistical approach to the relationship between composition and authorship, identifying changes in scribal hand through changes in abbreviation frequency. In her presentation on Carthusian marginalia in The Book of Margery Kempe, Lucy Dallas (East Anglia) discussed the reception and reworking of the text for the monks and Elliot Vale’s paper on CCCC MS 201 problematized modern translations of vernacular works in which poetry and prose blend in structural and punctuation.
Margaret of Antioch emerging from the defeated dragon with the sign of the cross. Book of Hours, 15th century. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. liturg. e. 12, fol. 149v.
Papers by Jemima Bennett (Kent and Bodleian Libraries), Rhiannon Warren (Cambridge), Max Hello (Paris 1 – HiCSA), and Thomas Phillips (Bristol) all focused on the collection, manipulation, recycle, reconstruction, and aesthetics of manuscripts. Bennett’s work on fifteenth-century Oxford bookbinding continued the theme of plural interpretations as she discussed patterns and possible reasoning behind the recycle of manuscript fragments by collectors. Similarly, Phillips focused on recovering lost script from fragments of the Anglo-Saxon Office of St. Alban. Warren and Hello also touched on signs of manuscript manipulation, reuse, and changing aesthetic preferences in their respective presentations on Árni Magnússon’s Icelandic manuscript collection and ornamentation in Merovingian book writing. Complementing the presentations on material culture, the palaeography and codicology sessions reinforced the materiality of manuscripts and fluidity of text.
From left to right: presentations by Max Hello (Paris 1 – HiCSA), Jemima Bennett (Kent and Bodleian Libraries), and Sebastian Dows-Miller (Oxford).
Presentations aside, the congenial atmosphere and enthusiasm of the participants made for constructive knowledge exchange and an enjoyable two days of conversation. From the 2024 OMGC committee, thank you to all who attended. The committee is also excited to announce that the theme for the 2025 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference will be Magic, Rituals, and Ceremonies! Until then, keep an eye on the OMGC blog for posts by this year’s presenters.
The 2024 OMGC committee (Katherine Beard, Ashley Castelino, Emma-Catherine Wilson, Kate McKee, Ryan Mealiffe, Mary O’Connor, and Eugenia Vorobeva) thank our sponsors for making this year’s conference possible.
The 2024 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference was presented in association with the Maison Française d’ Oxford, the Oxford Festival of the Arts, the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (Medium Ævum), the Oxford Faculty of Music, the Oxford Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford Medieval Studies (OMS), and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
Header Image: The White Hart, pub sign (colorized), ca. 1750. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, W.69:2-1938. Photoshopped onto background of Merton Street, Oxford.
Organisers: Antonia Anstatt (University of Oxford, email) and Edmund van der Molen (University of Nottingham, email)
This conference is generously supported by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, the Hagiography Society, the Past & Present Society, and the History Faculty, University of Oxford. In association with Oxford Medieval Studies, it is sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
9 CONFERENCE START, REGISTRATION 9.15am WELCOME 9.30-11 PANEL 1: TRANSGRESSING GENDER Marita von Weissenberg (Xavier University, Cincinnati): Husband-saints and Secular Masculinity as a Tool for Religious Pursuit Caitlín Kane (University of Oxford): Womanly Bridegroom, Manly Bride: Gender Transgression in the Visions of Saint Catherine of Siena Maria Pieschacon-Raffael (Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich): La Pucelle: The Significance of Gender in the (After-)Life of Joan of Arc 11.30-13 PANEL 2: (TRANS)CENDING GENDER Verity Bruce (University of Exeter): Death Becomes They/Them? Christina Mirabilis’ Post-Death Gender State Genevieve Caulfield (University College London): Desire Has No Gender: Styles of Seeing in Franciscan Hagiography Davide Tramarin (University of Padua): Transcending Gender in Mystical Devotion: Images of Christ and St John the Apostle in Late Medieval Germany 14-15.30 Keynote Lecture: Who’s Afraid of Trans and Genderqueer Saints? Alicia Spencer-Hall (University College London) 16-17.30 PANEL 3: QUEERING SAINTHOOD Michael Eber (Georg-August-University Göttingen): Sancta virgo / sicut pater: Homosociality and Gender Transgression in the Latin Lives of St Marina/us Shay Pertler (Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg): Oblita sit sexum: Life and Death of Joseph of Schönau Roan Runge (University of Cambridge): Fúair comartha bandachta ann ([He] Found the Sign of Womanhood There): The Construction of Gender in the Medieval Irish ‘Story of the Abbot of Drimnagh’
SATURDAY 6TH APRIL
9.30-11 PANEL 4: WRITING GENDER Isabel Kimpel (Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich): Famula Christi et Mulier fortis: The Writings of Caesarius of Heisterbach on Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia Georgie Crespi (University of Reading): ‘We’re All Born Naked, and the Rest is Drag’: The Concept of Drag in ‘Christina of Markyate’ and ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ María del Carmen Muñoz Rodríguez (University of Seville): In ure lauerdes luue: The Spaces of Female Sanctity in the Middle English ‘Seinte Iuliene’ 11.30-13 PANEL 5: VISUALISING GENDER Rosalind Phillips-Solomon (University of York): ‘Miraculous Aged Virgin’ or Quintessential Virgin Martyr? Late Medieval Imaginings of Saint Apollonia Sarah Wilkins (Pratt Institute, New York): A Preaching Woman: Mary Magdalen in Late Medieval Italian Art Elisabet Trulla Serra (Trinity College Dublin): Gender Configuration in Byzantine Art Through Saint Mary of Egypt 14-15.30 PANEL 6: FAMILIAL AND SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIPS Jessica Troy (Independent Scholar): Unequal Treatment: The Power Struggle of Medieval Chaste Couples Laura Moncion (University of Toronto): ‘Be My Spouse’: Spiritual Partnership in the Life of Pirona the Recluse Michaela Granger (Catholic University of America, Washington DC): ‘And It Was Accounted to Him (or Her?) as Righteousness …’: The Value of Childrearing in the Construction of Late Medieval Sanctity 16-17.30 PANEL 7: MODERN PERSPECTIVES Dannelle Gutarra (University of Warwick): Medieval Sainthood and Scientific Racism: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in ‘History of the Female Sex’ by Christoph Meiners Maria Zygogianni (Swansea University): Saint Athanasia of Aigaleo: An Entrepreneur Saint Myrna Nader (American University of Beirut): The Cult of Marina the Monk: Faith, Discourse and Sexuality in Contemporary Lebanon 17.30-18 CLOSING REMARKS 18 CONFERENCE END
Worcester College, Oxford – 12th and 13th January 2024
by Annabel Hancock, Bee Jones, James Cogbill, and Susannah Bain
This workshop grew out of a discussion group the four of us started in Michaelmas term 2022 on ‘Governability across the Medieval Globe’. By ‘governability’ we meant why and how certain people and societies were more or less easily governed, although we had several big discussions about the usefulness of the term. Our conversations kept coming back to the utility of thinking from localities when trying to conceptualise how governance functioned in the central and later Middle Ages, and to how both medieval governance and our analysis of it had to operate across large differences in scale – from local officials and forms to (often unsubstantiated) claims of regional or even universal hegemony.
These questions relate to a great deal of cutting-edge work in medieval history, particularly in terms of new ‘global’ approaches and how we read sources to get at political culture. As a result, we decided to organise a workshop to bring together scholars pushing our understanding forward to assess where we are as a field and where we are going.
We were very fortunate to be offered funding from the Past & Present Society, the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, and the Oxford Medieval Studies Network. This funding allowed us to bring a fantastic set of speakers and respondents to Oxford, including a mix of established, early-career, and doctoral scholars. We wanted to centre discussion and use our eight papers and four responses to stimulate broader conversations on governance in this period. The papers were pre-circulated and speakers summarised their thoughts on the day, which afforded us more time for discussion. Our contributions covered Iberia, France, Germany, China, Egypt, Byzantium, Italy, and north Africa from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, which provided some range in our coverage even though we could not possibly do justice to the entirety of Eurasia across five centuries.
The workshop went absolutely brilliantly: we were delighted with the papers and responses, and we thought that the discussion was stimulating, wide-ranging, and very fruitful. Although not without important questions and possible issues, ‘scales of governance’ emerged as a useful conceptual lens to cut across ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ models of political organisation, drawing attention to sets of local and bureaucratic knowledges and highlighting the critical importance of varied social relationships to governance, both within a given locality and as an imposition upon it by rulers and/or bureaucracies. Governance was also closely related to the socialisation of elite men into certain kinds of authoritative masculinity, and to gendered social relationships between individuals and families. These dynamics are more difficult to access in most of the sources available to us for this period, but they enrich our understanding of how people and communities were actually governed.
Many of the papers highlighted the roles of different kinds of intermediaries situated between their communities and regional rulers. These figures, mediating and translating between knowledges at different scales, in many cases actually did most of the governing in a given locality. In some cases, local players seem to have been torn between evading oversight and control by rulers or larger political units on the one hand, and maintaining and strengthening their own power and position in their community on the other, including in some cases by steepening local hierarchies in their own favour. Recognising this led us to a discussion of how important it is to consider how formal or informal governance in a particular locality was, and hence the importance of processes of ‘formalisation’ of power through bureaucracies, regulations, and the imposition of officials.
Through the papers and discussions, we gained glimpses of medieval people of all social strata operating across different scales to get things done, such as Arabic-speakers leveraging their expertise in privileged documentary practices in twelfth-century Toledo or non-noble property-owners in thirteenth-century Carcassonne appropriating the language and frameworks of royal justice and official historical memory. Medieval people were in many cases capable of appropriating the language of their rulers and the procedures of governing institutions, and were not afraid to buy into the claims of rulers where it suited their own purposes, even while avoiding control from above in other ways.
We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the funders of the workshop, as well as to all the speakers, respondents, and other participants.
26th International Graduate Conference of the Oxford University Byzantine Society: Transgression in Late Antiquity and Byzantium
24th-25th February 2024, Oxford
We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the 26th Annual Oxford University Byzantine Society International Graduate Conference on the 24th – 25th February, 2024. Papers are invited to approach the theme of ‘Transgression’ within 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.
‘Seduced by love for you, I went mad, Aquilina … she, smouldering, not any less love-struck than me, would wander throughout the house … love alone became her heart’s obsession … Her tutor chased me. Her grim mother guarded her … they scrutinised our eyes and nods, and colouring that tends to signal thoughts … soon both of us began to seek out times and places to converse with eyebrows and our eyes, to dupe the guards, to put a foot down gingerly, and in the night to run without a sound. Our fiery hearts ignite a doubled frenzied passion, and so an anguish mixed with love rages … Boethius, offering aid, pacifies her parents’ hearts with “gifts” and lures soft touches to my goal with cash. Blind love of money overcomes parental love; they both begin to love their daughter’s guilt. They give us room for secret sins … yet wickedness, when permitted, becomes worthless, and lust for the deed languishes … so a sanctioned license stole my zeal for sinning, and even longing for such things departed. The two of us split up, miserable and dissatisfied in equal measure …’
Maximianus, Elegies, 3 (adapted tr. Juster)
The Late Antique and Byzantine world was a medley of various modes of transgression: orthodoxy and heresy; borders and breakthroughs; laws and outlaws; taxes and tax evaders; praise and polemic; sacred and profane; idealism and pragmatism; rule and riot. Whether amidst the ‘purple’, the pulpits, or the populace, transgression formed an almost unavoidable aspect of daily life for individuals across the empire and its neighbouring regions. The framework of ‘Transgression’ then is very widely applicable, with novel and imaginative approaches to the notion being strongly encouraged. In tandem with seeking as broad a range of relevant papers as possible within Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, some suggestions by the Oxford University Byzantine Society for how this topic might be treated include:
· The Literary – deviance from established genres, styles or tropes; bold exploration of new artistic territory; penned subversiveness against higher authorities (whether discreetly or openly broadcasted); dissemination of literature beyond expected limits.
· The Political – usurpers, revolts, breakaway regions, court intrigue, plots and coups; contravention of aristocratic or political hierarchies and their expectations; royal ceremonial and its changes, or imperial self-promotion and propaganda seeking to rupture or distort the truth.
· The Geopolitical – stepping beyond or breaking through boundaries and borders, including invasions, expeditions, trade (whether in commodities or ideas), movements of peoples and tribes, or even the establishment of settlements and colonies.
· The Religious and Spiritual – ‘Heresy’, sectarianism, paganism, esotericism, magic, and more; and, in reverse, all discussion of ‘Orthodoxy’, which so defined itself in opposition to that which it considered transgressive; monastic orders and practices (anchoritic and coenobitic) and their associated canons, themselves intertwined and explicative of what was deemed prohibited; holy fools and other individuals perceived as deviant from typical holy men.
· The Social and Sartorial – gender-based expectations in public and private; the contravention (or enforcement) of status or class boundaries; proscribed or vagrant habits of dress, jewellery, fabrics, etc.
· The Linguistic – transmission of language elements across regional borders or cultures, including loan words, dialectic and stylistic influences, as well as other topics concerning lingual crossover and interaction.
· The Artistic and Architectural – the practice of spolia; the spread and mix of architectural styles from differing regions and cultures; cross-confessionalism evident from the layout or architecture of religious edifices; variant depictions of Christ and other holy figures; iconoclasm.
· The Legal – whether it be examination of imperial law codes and their effectiveness or more localised disputes testified to by preserved papyri, all discussion concerning legal affairs naturally involves assessing transgressive behaviour and how it was viewed and handled.
· It could even be that your paper’s relevance to ‘Transgression’ consists in its breaking out from scholarly consensus in a notable way!
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 Monday 27th November 2023. 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 for a remote audience. Accepted speakers should expect to participate in person.
