Tag: conference

Feminaminals

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08/05/2026

12:05

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Call for papers Representations of Women and/as Animals in Literature, Arts, and Other Media

University of Oxford, Oriel College, 14-16 April 2027
Keynote speakers: Prof Chloë Taylor (University of Alberta) and Dr Kaori Nagai (University of Kent)
Roundtable with Queer Kinship Network led by Prof Charlotte Ross (University of Oxford)
Organising committee: Dr Fanny Clemente (University of Oxford), Dr Greta Colombani (independent scholar), Dr Cécile Bishop (University of Oxford)

FEMINANIMALS is a three-day international conference investigating representations of women as non-human animals and of the relationship between women and non-human animals in literature, arts, and other media across languages, from medieval to contemporary times. The last decades have witnessed an explosion of theoretical discourses directed towards a critique of humanism and a re-evaluation of humans’ interactions with the non-human world and wider ecosystem. Since the 1970s such a focus has found a privileged expression in ecofeminist theories, which have started to interrogate and deconstruct the history-long, negatively connoted association of women with non-human animals and to denounce the fundamental links between the oppression of women and that of non- human nature simultaneously perpetrated by the patriarchal system. From the ecofeminist manifestos of the 1990s (Gaard 1993, Gruen 1993, Plumwood 1993, Adams and Donovan 1995), the field of inquiry examing the deleterious intersections of anthropocentric and androcentric attitudes has been prolifically expanded and enriched by a notable array of theoretical standpoints adopting diverse disciplinary perspectives and an increasingly intersectional approach, that is, bringing to the fore of the analysis other categories of oppression that ought to be necessarily considered alongside gender and species, such as race, sexuality, class, physical abilities. Recent contributions to the field include Alaimo and Hekman 2008, Decka 2012, Adams and Gruen 2014, Gaard 2017, Vakoch and Mickey 2017, Braidotti 2022, and Taylor 2024. Theoretical discourses on the intersected nature of different systems of oppressions have been productively applied to the study of literature and other arts. Some of the above-mentioned works already include references to or analysis of literary and artistic sources (Taylor 2024); other contributions directly postulate, for instance, the benefits of intertwining ecofeminism and literary criticism (Gaard and Murphy 1998, Vakoch and Mickey 2019, and Vakoch 2023). Increasingly moving away from a privileged Anglo-American-centred perspective, moreover, scholarship is embracing more comprehensive assessments of literary and artistic portrays of nature, non-human animals, and humans’ relationship with them. Following in the footsteps of such recent contributions, dialoguing with different theoretical approaches and exploring different media, FEMINANIMALS seeks to enrich and foster ongoing discussions around the connections and intersections between our changing constructions of womanhood and animality by looking at representations of women as non-human animals and of the relationship between women and non-human animals, from medieval to contemporary times, assessing the significance and implications of those representations against the backdrop of diverse historical and cultural contexts. Across time and space, literature, arts, and other media have been pervaded by portrayals of women as/and animals, from the moralistic, religiously informed intertwining of gender and species in medieval bestiaries, exempla such as the cuento XXXV “La mujer brava” in Don Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor or works like Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio (ca. 1365) describing women as an “animale imperfetto” to the countless retellings and translations of the legend of the half-human half-snake Melusine in widely circulating texts like Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine (ca. 1393) and its adaptations in the following centuries, from the woman-animal erotic unions and shapeshifting in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century supernatural tales Liaozhai zhiyi by Pu Songling to the numerous poems dedicated to wild, exploited, or domesticated animals by Romantic and Victorian women authors such as Anna Letitita Barbauld’s “A Mouse’s Petition” (1773) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “To Flush, My Dog” (1843), from Odette’s transformation into a swan in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake (1877) to visual depictions of woman-animal entanglements like Oskar Kokoschka’s painting Mädchenakt auf galoppierendem Schimmel in Weiherlandschaft (1905) and the surrealist works of Leonora Carrington who herself identified as a “female human animal”. The manifold associations between women and non-human animals continue to be prominent in recent times, enriched by new media and perspectives, with meaningful examples including Clarice Lispector’s novel A paixão segundo G.H (1964) centring on the unsettling encounter of the female protagonist with a cockroach, Marie Darrieussecq’s satirical tale of a woman’s metamorphosis into a female pig in Truismes (1996), the Africanfuturist speculative fiction of Nnedi Okorafor who endows the heroine of Who Fears Death (2010) with the magical ability to turn into a vulture and dedicated her novella Binti (2015) to a jellyfish, and the central place that the porous borders between women and animals occupy in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s cinema, particularly in Attenberg (2010) and her short film The Capsule (2012). What can these pervasive representations of women as/and animals in different cultures and historical periods tell us about the complexities and intersections of shifting notions of gender and species, the fraught line between humanity and animality, and the entwined practices of domination and othering to which women and animals have been subjected? How can we look at such a variety of literary and artistic sources with the benefit of decades of theoretical perspectives that have tackled the historical, philosophical, social, cultural, and political implications of the multifaceted association of women and non-human animals? In what crucial ways can an interdisciplinary, comparative, and temporally wide approach help us think about and rethink this fundamental pairing today, as we continue to navigate, experience, suffer, and/or reclaim it against the backdrop of a dramatic environmental crisis, a deterioration of our relationship with nature and other living creatures, and a new rising tide of sexism that is infiltrating the virtual and real-life world? The conference aims to foster new conversations around these questions by inviting scholars to examine representations of women as/and animals across languages and cultures, from medieval times to the present day. We encourage proposals considering works belonging to different media and genres, focusing on canonical as well as non-canonical authors and artists, and dialoguing with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, such as human-animal studies, posthumanist studies, new materialism studies, ecofeminist studies, animal studies, critical animal studies, animality studies, gender studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, queer studies, psychoanalytic and post-structural studies, affect theory, and other relevant fields of inquiry.

Papers may explore topics including, but not limited to:

  • women-animals metamorphoses
  • women-animals hybrids
  • women, animals, and the body
  • women, animals, and sexuality
  • women, animals, and gender
  • women, animals, and race
  • women, animals, and class
  • women, animals, and motherhood
  • metaphors of women as animals
  • women, animals, and language
  • kinship between women and animals
  • women, animals, and ethics and aesthetics of care
  • women, animals, and the environmental crisis
  • women, animals, and science
  • women, animals, and spirituality
  • women, animals, and folklore
  • women writers/artists and animals
  • trans women and animals
  • women, animals, and the male gaze

The conference is part of a wider project including a cultural programme of public events that will take place at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in April 2027 and will consist in:

  • a writers roundtable with authors Naomi Booth, Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ, Helen Jukes, and Helen Macdonald;
  • a screening of H is for Hawk (2025) preceded by conversation with director Philippa Lowthorpe.

More information on the cultural programme, confirmed dates, and how to register will follow. All conference participants are very welcome to extend their stay in Oxford to attend the events. Please note that the conference will take place in person in Oxford with no possibility for hybrid participation. There will be no conference fee. All presentations should be in English and last no longer than 20 minutes. Proposals, including title, abstract (250 words max), and short bio (150 words max), must be submitted via email in a single Word document to Dr Fanny Clemente and Dr Greta Colombani by 15 July 2026. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 30 July 2026. Please feel free to contact the organisers Dr Fanny Clemente and Dr Greta Colombani at any point for inquiries and further information. 

Image: The siren from the Merton Bestiary https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Serena

New Directions in Old English Prose: Conference Report

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20/04/2026

12:03

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Over the course of two days, this international conference highlighted emerging directions in the study of the field. Hosted at the University of Oxford as part of Prof. Francis Leneghan’s AHRC-funded projected Writing Pre-Conquest England: A History of Old English Prose, the event brought together a diverse cohort of international senior scholars, early career researchers, and postgraduates. 25 papers were presented and over 60 delegates were in attendance. The features of the texts under study were remarkably broad, moving beyond traditional literary analysis to explore objects, inscriptions, glosses, and prefaces. By employing methodologies rooted in syntax, style, semiotics, and the history of gendered literacy, the contributors demonstrated that Old English prose remains a site of dynamic intellectual enquiry.

A significant theme that unified the sessions was a re-evaluation of the prose canon. For much of the twentieth century, the study of Old English prose was dominated by a teleological focus on the “great books” of the Alfredian era and the late tenth-century homiletic traditions of Ælfric and Wulfstan. This conference, however, placed these established corpora into dialogue with less canonical and a range of pre- and post-Alfredian materials. By integrating marginalia and vernacular glosses, historically sidelined in favour of “complete” or “literary” texts, the sessions highlighted the regional and linguistic diversity of the early medieval period of English literature.

Related to this reassessment of the canon was a shift away from a West-Saxon centred perspective toward a more nuanced dialectal landscape. Scholars explored the importance of the Northumbrian and Mercian traditions and interlinear glossing further emphasised the extent to which Old English prose reflects localised and context-sensitive literacy practices rather than a single uniform prose standard.

The inclusion of papers on women readers (and the possibility of female authorship) and the re-evaluations of wisdom within texts further expanded the scope of prose study. This social-historical approach suggests that “New Directions” in the field are not only about identifying new materials, but also about asking new questions of the texts we already possess.

As an undergraduate student, I found this bird’s-eye view of the field particularly illuminating. Many of the texts discussed, such as early Mercian prayerbooks and Northumbrian glosses, sit outside the standard undergraduate curriculum, yet the conference gave these materials space and challenged the traditional bounds of prose study. For the next generation of scholars, these “New Directions” offer an invitation to pursue fresh angles within the Old English corpus, ensuring that the work of the ROEP project will continue to shape future research in the field.

Libby Histed, Harris Manchester College

Peterborough Chronicle, first page

Conference: New Directions in Old English Prose

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18/03/2026

08:39

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University of Oxford – 30 March 2026

L1 Lecture Theatre 10.300 Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG, Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford

Registration is now closed for this event, which is sold out.

Day 1: 30th March 2026

08.30–9.00: Welcome and Registration

09.00–10.30: Session 1: Early Prose (chair: Tom Revell)

Samuel Cardwell (University of Nottingham), ‘The Earliest English Sentence? Old Northumbrian psalm glosses in MS Pal. Lat. 68‘

Maura McKeown (University of Oxford), ‘The Four Senses of Scripture and the Vespasian Psalter Glosses‘

Emily Kesling (University of Bergen), ‘The Old English Exhortation to Prayer and the “Mercian Prefacing Tradition”‘

10.30–11.00: Tea and coffee break

11.00–12.00: Session 2: Putting Prose in its Place (chair: Helen Appleton)

Christine Rauer (University of St Andrews),  ‘Assigning Mercian Texts to Places and Individuals‘

Tristan Major (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies), ‘Old English Prose at Winchester, c. 940–c. 1100‘

12.00–12.15: Comfort break

12.15–13.00: Keynote 1 (chair: Francis Leneghan): 

John Hines (University of Cardiff), ‘Syntax, Style and Semiotics: How Anglo-Saxon Inscriptions help to frame and define Old English Prose‘

13.00–14.00: Lunch break [sandwich lunch provided] 

14.00–15.30: Session 3: New Contexts for Alfredian Prose (chair: Amy Faulkner)

Nagore Palomares (University of the Basque Country), ‘Weaving the Vernacular: Tracing Frankish Influences in Old English Texts‘

Alice Jorgensen (Trinity College Dublin),  ‘Gesceadwisnes in the Alfredian Prose Translations‘

Eleni Ponirakis (University of Nottingham/UCL/University of Oxford),  ‘Swa swa leof on treowum: Eriugena and the Alfredian Solioquies‘

15.30–16.00: Tea and coffee break 

16.00–17.30: Session 4: Repurposing Prose (chair: Jasmine Jones)

Courtnay Konshuh (University of Calgary),  ‘Missing Ealdormen: Editing Chronicle Prose‘

Claudio Cataldi (University of Palermo),  ‘Rewriting Christianisation in King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries‘

Gabriele Cocco (University of Bergamo),  ‘From Cloak to Allegory: Christian Adaptations in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre‘

17.30–17.45: Comfort break

17.45–18.30: Keynote 2 (chair: Niamh Kehoe):

Luisa Ostacchini (University of Oxford), ‘Thinking Global, Acting Local: The Old English Martyrology’s Worldview and Mercian Prose Composition‘

18.30: Drinks Reception and Book Celebration

20.00: Conference Dinner

Day 2: 31st March

09.00–10.30: Session 5: Prose beyond the Pulpit (chair: Francis Leneghan)

Stefan Jurasinski (SUNY Brockport), ‘Beyond Wulfstan: The Homiletic Element in Old English Legislation‘

Anine Englund (University of Oxford), ‘Revisiting the Old English Soul-and-Body Homilies‘

Elaine Treharne (Stanford University), ‘Women Readers (and Writers?) of Old English Prose‘

10.30–11.00: Tea and coffee break

11.00–12.00: Session 6: Inclusion and Exclusion, Then and Now (chair: Hannah Bailey)

Juliet Mullins (University College Dublin), ‘Ignored and Obscured: “Behind the Scenes” of Ælfric´s Lives of Saints‘

Rebecca Stephenson (University College Dublin), ‘Weeding out the Danes: An examination of gardening metaphors in Latin and Old English prose texts describing Viking attacks and/or religious conversions‘

12.00–12.15: Comfort break

12.15–13.00: Keynote 3 (chair: Amy Faulkner):

Daniel Anlezark (University of Sydney),  ‘West Saxon Prose from Alfred to Ælfric‘

13.00–14.00: Lunch break [sandwich lunch provided] 

14.00–15.30: Session 7: Wulfstan’s Style (chair: Rachel A. Burns)

Winfried Rudolf (University of Göttingen), ‘Wulfstan’s Autograph Homily on Baptism and Its Echoes‘

James Titterington (University of Oxford), ‘Prose in Progress: Tracing Wulfstan’s Intellectual Development through Autograph Evidence‘

Thomas A. Bredehoft (Chancery Hill Books), ‘Wulfstan’s Prose‘

15.30–16.00: Tea and coffee break

16.00–17.30: Session 8: Saints and Sinners (chair: Niamh Kehoe)

Claudia Di Sciacca (University of Udine),  ‘Gūþ-Lāc vs Se Ealda Fēond? New Directions in the Demonology and Angelology of Gulthlac’s Old English Prose Tradition‘

Susan Irvine (University College London), ‘The Bridge as a Penitential Motif in Old English Prose‘

Corinne Clark (University of Oxford), ‘Fashioning fragmentation in the Corpus Christi MS 303 Life of St. Margaret‘

17.30: Close

Organising committee: Helen Appleton (Oxford), Rachel A. Burns (Oxford), Amy Faulkner (UCL), Niamh Kehoe (Oxford), Francis Leneghan (Oxford)

Contact: Francis Leneghan

Header image: Peterborough Chronicle

Medieval Germany Workshop

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16/03/2026

10:25

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conference, Medieval Matters, opportunities

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29 May 2026, German Historical Institute in London
Organised by the German Historical Institute London and the German History Society

Programme

Commentators: Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford) & Christian Jaser (Kassel)
Convenors: Thomas Kaal (GHIL) and Marcus Meer (UCL)

9.30 Session 1 (Chair: Thomas Kaal)

  • Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford): The Nuns’ Letters – Work-in-Progress
  • Temitope Fagunwa (Lüneburg): From ‘‘Moors Are Not Blacks’’ to Mohr Muss Weg: Identity and Misrepresentation in Europe
  • Erik Pauls (Berlin), The Typus of the ‘Heretic’ and its Function in Historical Thinking

11.00 Coffee & Tea

11.30 Session 2 (Chair: Marcus Meer)

  • Christian Jaser (Kassel): Digital Edition of Medieval Accounting Records (Examples from Munich and Vienna in the Early 15th Century)
  • Thomas Billard (Paris/Konstanz) Accountability: Critical Study of the recording of Accounting Documents in Urban Areas of the Southern Empire (Basel, Nördlingen, Nuremberg, 14th–15th centuries)
  • Arik Solomon (Be’er- Sheva): Beyond the City Walls: Persistence and Permeability in the Expulsion of Jews from Merseburg

13.00 Lunch

14.00 Session 3 (Chair: Thomas Kaal)

  • Anna Wilmore (Oxford): ‘Ich bin din gespile’: Play as Paradigm in Mechthild of Magdeburg
  • Tina Druckmüller (Cologne): From Another Perspective: Hildegard of Bingen on the Origin of the Soul

15.00 Session 4 (Chair: Gabriele Passabi)

  • Carolin Victoria König (Oxford): The Interrelation of Image and Text and the Popularity of Sebastian Brant’s ‘The Ship of Fools’
  • Hila Manor (Jerusalem): Measured Marvels: Ingenuity and Artistic Exchange in Nuremberg around 1500

16.00 Coffee & Tea

16.30 Session 5 (Chair: Marcus Meer)

  • Ole Bunte (Bielefeld): Narrating War: A Cultural History of War in 15th Century East Central Europe
  • Laura Potzuweit (Kiel), The Baltic Sea as a Room of Diplomacy? The Kalmar Union, the Teutonic Order, and other Key Players as a Late Medieval Communication Network

17:30 End

19:00 Conference Dinner

Students and researchers interested in medieval German history are very welcome to attend and listen to the presentations. There is no charge for attendance, but pre-booking is essential due to limited capacity. If you would like to attend as a guest, please contact Kim König.

The Call for Papers

This one-day workshop on the history of medieval Germany (broadly defined) offers an opportunity for researchers from Europe and the wider English-speaking world to meet at the German Historical Institute in London. Participants will be able to discuss their work in a relaxed and friendly setting and to learn more about each other’s research.

Proposals for short papers of 10–15 minutes are invited from researchers at all career stages with an interest in any aspect of the history of medieval Germany. Participants are encouraged to present work in progress, highlight research questions and approaches, and point to yet unresolved challenges of their projects. Presentations will be followed by a discussion.

Participation is free of charge and includes lunch and dinner. The GHIL and the GHS will also provide a contribution towards travel expenses. Accommodation costs cannot be reimbursed. Support is available for postgraduate and early career researchers: up to £150 for travel within the UK (excluding London) and up to 300€ for an economy round trip from Europe. Please indicate your interest in travel support in your application.

We look forward to reading your proposals. Please send your submission—which must include a title, an abstract of c.2000 words, and a biographical note of no more than c.1000 words—to Thomas Kaal: t.kaal@ghil.ac.uk. Questions about all aspects of the workshop can also be sent to Marcus Meer: m.meer@ucl.ac.uk.

Borders, Boundaries and Barriers: Real and Imagined in the Middle Ages

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28/02/2026

07:21

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20 and 21 April 2026 in Oxford

Lineup_Borders_Boundaries_BarriersDownload
Panels_Borders_Boundaries_BarriersDownload

From the Call for Papers

Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers have become increasingly prominent themes in historical scholarship. Over the last decade, these concepts have been the focus of sustained scholarly interest, drawing especially upon theoretical frameworks and (trans-)national contexts. There is, therefore, a pressing need to examine how these constructs have shaped the lived experiences of historically marginalised groups, as well as how they were perceived, defined, and engaged with by those groups.

This conference seeks to reorient discussions around borders, boundaries, and barriers by foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of marginalised groups and considering how these divisions were perceived fromthe peripheries of societies. Rather than treating these concepts as abstract or solely geopolitical, we will explore the ways in which they have operated — both historically and historiographically — as tools of exclusion and differentiation.

Organised by Natasha Jenman (University of Oxford), Naomi Reiter (QMUL), and Dean A. Irwin (University of Lincoln/OCHJS), the conference will focus on individuals, religious groups, social groups, societal constructions, and natural phenomena. Participants are invited to explore the role played by evolving borders, boundaries, and barriers in the medieval world as part of group identities; and how groups used them to their advantage. Likewise, it will consider the extent to which borders, boundaries and barriers have been imposed upon the medieval world by modern scholars. Possible topics for consideration include, but are not limited to:

  • Legal jurisdictions
  • The natural and the supernatural worlds
  • Socio-economic strata
  • Ritual and religion
  • Space, time, and the environment
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Disability
  • Transgression, delinquency, and the grey middle space

This conference adopts a broad chronological and geographical approach with submissions from all historically-related disciplines being welcome. The conference will take place on 20 and 21 April 2026 in Oxford. To submit, please send a title, abstract (c. 250 words), and a bio (c. 100 words) to: bordersboundariesbarriers@gmail.com. Any questions should be directed to the same e-mail address.
The organisers hope to be able to offer a limited number of bursaries for students and those on low income. Please indicate in your proposal whether you would like to be considered for
one of these if this becomes possible.

Image ref: Latin Psalter (13th-15th C), f.9 – BL Add MS 28681,



Ars Inquirendi – Querying the Pre-Modern in the Age of Large Multimodal Models

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26/11/2025

20:53

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Call for Papers

Register at https://form.jotform.com/252734707575364 to attend the conference and workshops (online or in person ) and to view the videos

NB: All times on the programme are GMT / UK Time

Join leading pre-modernists and technologists from around the world at Ars Inquirendi, 4th-7th December 2025 (online / St Edmund Hall, Oxford ), to explore how Large Multimodal Models like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini – massive, humanly conversant assimilations of learning – are transforming pre-modern studies, and how to use them in your own research.

Format: the first three days are entirely online. Presentations will be pre-released in late November via the Oxford Medieval Studies website, with the live sessions devoted to discussion, and held in the UK afternoon to maximize participation from around the world. The hybrid workshops on Days 3 & 4 are live.

***

Day 1 (Thursday, 4th December) – A New Age of Pre-Modern Inquiry. In his opening keynote, Maurizio Forte unfolds how AI is transforming the conditions of archaeological knowledge, enabling archaeologists to rethink, reconstruct and even simulate the pre-modern world. From the evolution of ancient societies to the relations of minds and artifacts, humans and environments, he surveys emerging techniques such as agent-based reconstruction of cultural transitions, and neuroaesthetic analyses of gaze and visual attention. The following panel, Creating Research Machines with LMMs, gathers varied technologists and humanists to compare how they are already building working research systems using LMMs – and how even modest inputs can yield disproportionately large results.

12.30pm GMT (we will be replaying the day’s pre-recorded presentations on the conference zoom channel)
2.30pm GMT
Stephen Pink, Henrike Lähnemann
and Anthony J. Lappin		Welcome
2.40pm GMT Maurizio Forte (Duke)Opening Keynote (live): Rethinking the Past: An AI Perspective in Archaeology
Abstract: Archaeology, traditionally reliant on material traces and contextual interpretation, is now engaging AI to simulate the evolution and transformation of ancient societies, to generate new scenarios, and to study the relationships between minds and artifacts, humans and environments. This keynote offers a methodological overview of emerging research questions and applications across different periods, from agent-based reconstructions of cultural transitions to machine learning and neuroaesthetics applied to the analysis of gaze, attention, and affordances in art and architecture. Together, these approaches demonstrate that AI is not only a technical instrument but also a new epistemic partner. By integrating computation with contextual interpretation, AI enables us to rethink both the past itself and the conditions of archaeological knowledge in the twenty-first century.
3.45pm GMT Respondent:  Roger Martinez-Dávila (University of Colorado)Response and Questions on Keynote and the following talks (pre-released on 28th November):
Mark Faulkner & Elisabetta Magnanti (TCD), Evaluating LLM Performance on NLP Tasks for Old English: Towards Philological Benchmarks
Register to Watch Now !
Stephen Pink, The Graphom Project: A Preliminary Atlas of Pre-Modern Written Sources  



Register to Watch Now !
5.15pmBreak
5.30pm GMT
Chair: Maurizio Forte (Duke)		Roundtable. Creating Research Machines with LMMs, I All participants above, with Laura Morreale (Harvard), Achim Rabus (Freiburg)
End c. 7pm GMT 

***

Day 2 (Friday, 5th December) – LMMs and / as the Archive. Our first panel exposes the unprecedented opportunities and challenges for using the technology with archival materials and records – how can one document and trust LMM records in the same fashion as those generated by people? The second panel asks what it means for LMMs themselves to be the archive. Almost automatically, such models infer a pre-modern Graphosphere: the Old World’s totality of scratched, daubed, written, and otherwise inscribed artifacts, extant and destroyed. Yet only a fraction of what survives is imaged, let alone readable by LMMs —and that survival itself is only a fraction of what once existed. How can an LMM usefully know the pre-modern? From there, we turn to what a realised Graphosphere might enable by mapping what exists and is missing: from guiding the allocation of scant human and financial resources, and correcting long-term historical biases; to opening wholly new fields of scholarship.

12.30pm GMT (we will be replaying the day’s pre-recorded presentations on the conference zoom channel)
2.30pm Chair: Stephen PinkResponse and Questions on the following talks (pre-released on 28th November):
Madeline Rose (TCD) (Re-) Structuring the Catalogue: Limitations and Design Strategy for Applying LLMs to Medieval Manuscript Catalogues
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Achim Rabus (Freiburg): Visual Language Models and Traditional HTR for Multilingual Handwritten Text  
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Dmitri Sitchinava (Potsdam), ‘Birchbark letters: the case of complex fragmented texts calling for LLM reconstruction’
Register to Watch Now !
4pmBreak
4.30pm – 6pm GMT. Chairs: Anthony J. Lappin and Roger Martínez-DávilaRoundtable. LMMs as Archive All participants above, joined by Peter B. Kaufman (MIT), Laura Morreale (Harvard), and Elaine Treharne (Stanford)
Imagine a pre-modern graphosphere: an LMM-inferred reconstruction of the totality of the Old World’s scratched, daubed, written, and otherwise inscribed artifacts  –  extant and destroyed  – before the dominance of movable type. LMMs are already, almost automatically, inferring such a thing. Yet its likely centrality to future research also exposes the profound inadequacy of the current pre-modern LMM archive – that is, of the material on which these models train. This “archive” differs radically from an LMM’s usual training data. It is not the totality of printed matter (excluded by our definition of the pre-modern), nor of born-digital texts and images to which LMMs typically enjoy unfettered access. Instead it consists of the tiny fraction of extant pre-modern materials that have been transcribed or even just imaged – although most writing remains untranscribable by machine – in every case mediated by twenty-first-century technology and data forms. And the extant archive is only a fraction of what once existed. The first part of the panel examines this predicament: how the structure of digital availability shapes what AI can usefully “know” of the pre-modern world, and how technologies such as machine transcription are working to improve that structure. The second part turns to the opportunities even at this foundational phase: how LMMs can help map what exists and what is missing, guide digitisation priorities for funders, correct long-term biases in the historical record, and lay the ground for new insights, such as tracing the evolution – or polygenesis – of ideas and cultures across regions of the Old World and beyond.  

****

Day 3 (Saturday, 6th December) – Emergent Properties. We explore the unpredictable behaviours that appear as LMMs become more complex – above all, their apparent intellectual and aesthetic creativity. In his keynote, Roger Martínez-Dávila presents an AI-powered simulation of a fifteenth-century Castilian city, Plasencia, which resolved a civic dispute through an unforeseen strategy—one unattested in the sources yet historically plausible. The following panel broadens the discussion to ask what these behaviours mean for history, interpretation, and knowledge itself.

11am-1.45pm GMT (lunch provided)
Peter Broadwell, Simon Wiles (Stanford) & Katherine McDonough (Lancaster)
Introduction to Computational Map Studies with MapReader		Workshop (live: online / Doctorow Hall, St Edmund Hall).
Explore MapReader, a powerful toolkit for analysing historical maps – ideal for anyone interested in spatial humanities, cartography, or visual datasets.
1.45pm GMT . Tour of St Edmund Hall
led by Henrike Lähnemann
The rest of the day’s programme is entirely online
1.45pm GMT(we will be replaying the day’s pre-recorded presentations on the conference zoom channel)
Roger Martinez-Dávila (University of Colorado)
Keynote. When Players Rewrite History: Gameworlds, LMMs, and Alternative Medieval Scenarios

Available to watch now.
Keynote will be replayed at 2.30pm GMT.

Register to Watch Now !
Abstract: In this keynote I’ll present Virtual Plasencia v4.0: The Medieval Vines of Three Religions, an AI-powered simulation of a fifteenth-century Castilian city, modeling its social, religious, and economic networks. In a course test run, a student team resolved a dispute involving a senorial lord, civic council, and bishop in an unforeseen way—one not attested in primary sources—yet arrived at the same result. Their novel strategy hints at a plausible but unrecorded historical pathway. I’ll analyse this surprise and propose that AI simulations like Virtual Plasencia v4.0 function not as rigid reconstructions, but as speculative spaces where LMM-driven agents can explore trajectories beyond the constraints of archival silence.
3.30pm GMT Respondent: Anthony J. LappinResponse and Questions to Keynote and Following Talks (pre-released 28th November)
Anthony Harris (Cambridge)
Using Generative AI for Medieval Studies Research (I)
( live ) 
Peter Broadwell, Simon Wiles (Stanford) & Katherine McDonough (Lancaster)
AI Models for Transcription and Exploration of Historical Maps and Other Troublesome Materials
Register to Watch Now !
Damon Wischik (Cambridge), Agentic AI and Homoiconic Coding 
Register to Watch Now !
4.45pmBreak
5pm-7pm GMTRoundtable. The Future of Pre-Modern Inference Studies
All participants above, with Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University), Peter B. Kaufman (MIT), Tom Revell (Oxford), Daniele Nardi (Sapienza), Pablo Acosta-García (UAB)

****

Day 4 (Sunday, 7th December) – Workshops. A hands-on continuation of Day 1’s theme, hybrid online / in-person workshops at St Edmund Hall, Oxford invite all participants to begin building and experimenting directly in their browsers. From promptotyping to map-based AI exploration and automated manuscript transcription, tutors guide attendees through the practicalities of integrating LMMs into their research.

1pm GMT
Anthony Harris (Cambridge)
Using Generative AI for Medieval Studies Research (II)
In this self-guided hands-on workshop attendees will have an opportunity to try out some of the things discussed by Dr Harris in the Saturday session –  ask questions, get feedback on problems with suggested solutions, and look at problem areas such as avoiding hallucinations, keeping research data confidential from the general model, and more advanced prompt engineering.  
Note, it is very important that delegates attending the session:
i. have a paid version of either ChatGPT (EDU is OK but the full version is preferred), Copilot for Office 365, Google Gemini, Claude or Perplexity.
ii. should have already logged into one or more of these Generative AI Sessions and have entered the prompt  ‘Give me a list of ten rhyming words of three syllables that do not end with Y’.
3.45pm GMT
Ben Kiessling (Université Paris Sciences et Lettres)
Unpacking Large Language Models: Design, Limitations, and Solutions for Humanities Research
Although LLMs have transformed text analysis, they remain optimised for the modern, leaving the pre-modern underserved.  Learn how LLMs are constructed, and how the chosen parameters intersect, and often conflict, with common scholarly practice. The session concludes with practical strategies for overcoming such limitations.
End 6.30pm GMT 

The conference is organised in collaboration with Dr Stephen Pink; Prof. Henrike Lähnemann, Oxford Medieval Studies; Dr  Anthony John Lappin at the University of Stockholm; and the Plus Ultra Collective—a network of 40+ international scholars advancing intercultural studies and the digital humanities. If you have any further queries, please email us at arsinquirendi@gmail.com

Heritage Science and Manuscripts Conference: Programme

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26/10/2025

13:31

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Around Oxford, conference

,

New directions in the study of written artefacts from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages.
Organised by the Crafting Documents project (AHRC-DFG) and co-sponsored by the Centre for Manuscripts and Text Cultures, University of Oxford.
13-14 NOVEMBER 2025, SHULMAN AUDITORIUM. THE QUEEN’S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Register for free here

9:30 Arrival and registration (coffee and tea available for all attendees)
9:45 Welcome
Julia M. H. Smith (Crafting Documents co-PI, All Souls College, University of Oxford)
Martin Kauffman (Head of early and rare collections, Special Collections, Bodleian Library)
Dirk Meyer (Director of the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures, The Queen’s College, Oxford)
10:00 Brent Seales (University of Kentucky): UnLost: uncovering lost knowledge from the ancient library of Herculaneum
10:50 Richard Gameson (Durham University): The Hereford palimpsest psalter
11:40 Jess Hodgkinson (University of Leicester)
Insular manuscripts and their readers: using photometric stereo imaging
to study drypoint writing
12:30 Lunch Break
TECHNOLOGIES TO RETRIEVE WRITING
(Chair Lesley Smith, Harris Manchester College, Oxford)
INKS AND PARCHMENT
(Chair Martin Kauffman, Bodleian Library)
2:30 Kristine Rose-Beers (University Library Cambridge)
Early Islamic manuscripts on parchment: surface preparation and
practice-based research
3:20 Andy Beeby (Durham University)
On the variation in the density of writing as seen by multi and hyper-spectral
imaging: looking over the scribe’s shoulder
4:10 Coffee and tea break
5:00 Ira Rabin (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung)
Ana de Oliveira Dias (University of Oxford)
Ink analysis of early medieval relic labels
Wine reception sponsored by the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures,
The Queen’s College, Oxford
(6:00 – 7:00)DAY 2
MATERIAL SCIENCE AND HERITAGE RESEARCH
9:30 Alberto Campagnolo (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven)
Approaches to heritage science for manuscripts in the Digital Humanities
10:20 Michael Marx, Institut für Studien der Kultur und Religion des Islam
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt / Institute of Advanced Studies Jerusalem
Results of carbondating of early Qurʾānic manuscript and their implications for
our understanding of the history of the Qurʾān
11:10 Coffee and tea break
11:40 Matthew Collins (University of Copenhagen/University of Cambridge)
Proteomics analysis of parchment samples
12:30 Colloquium pause
(Chair Dirk Meyer, The Queen’s College, Oxford)
4:00 Coffee and tea
4:30 Tessa Webber (Trinity College, University of Cambridge)
Early medieval written artefacts: a palaeographical perspective
5:00 Round table discussion
BROADER PERSPECTIVES
(Chair Julia Smith, All Souls College, University of Oxford)

Heritage Science and Manuscripts programmeDownload

Call for Committee Members – Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference

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08/10/2025

12:46

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opportunities

The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference (OMGC) is one of the highlights of the graduate academic calendar every year. Over two days, this interdisciplinary conference brings together graduate students from the UK and around the world to present their research on a wide variety of topics from across the Middle Ages. Read a review of the 2025 conference. If you think you might be interested in becoming a committee member and gaining experience organizing conferences, please send an expression of interest to oxgradconf@gmail.com. The committee is also excited to announce that the theme for the 2026 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference will be Sounds and Silence! Until then, keep an eye on the OMGC website and social media (Bluesky / Twitter) for updates on this year’s conference.

Medieval Insular Romance Conference

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23/08/2025

15:27

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Around Oxford, conference

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OXFORD, 8–10 APRIL 2026

Plenary speakers: James Simpson and Carolyne Larrington

Registration is now closed for the Medieval Insular Romance Conference 2026 at St Hugh’s College Oxford.

We are delighted to have a rich programme with about 50 speakers, addressing many aspects of the conference’s title, ‘Moving Medieval Romance’. The programme is available to view here: MIR26 Programme on Canva We look forward to seeing everyone in Oxford in April. For anyone who has registered but is not speaking, we’ll send out further information early in the week beginning Monday 23 March.

A limited number of rooms at St Hugh’s College are available for MIR 2026 registered delegates via this link: universityrooms.com/en-GB/eventcode?ec=KX52757&vid=sthughs Other accommodation in Oxford colleges is available via https://www.universityrooms.com

The conference organizers are Lucy Brookes (Merton College, Oxford) lucy.brookes@ell.ox.ac.uk and Nicholas Perkins (St Hugh’s College, Oxford) nicholas.perkins@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk

Illustration: Cristabel and her baby are cast out to sea; from Eglamour of Artois, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 261, fol. 39v. Creative commons licence: CC-BY-NC 4.0

Penn’s LJS 267, De ludo schacchorum seu de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium, fol. 4r

Making the Medieval Archive: Celebrating Elizabeth A. R. Brown at Penn

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11/08/2025

09:27

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events, Medieval Matters, News

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September 12, 2025, 10:00am–7:00pm

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadephia
And online via Zoom

On September 12, 2025, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania will host a day-long symposium commemorating Elizabeth (Peggy) A. R. Brown’s extraordinary legacy in the field of Medieval Studies. The event will also mark the official launch of the Elizabeth A. R. Brown Medieval Historians’ archive, a new initiative at Penn Libraries to collect the professional papers of scholars of the Middle Ages and of associated professional organizations. The goal of the symposium is to honor Peggy’s legacy and gift by celebrating research on her area of specialty, namely Medieval France.

The symposium will consist of three panels of short papers devoted to subjects featured in Peggy’s work: Source and Archive; Politics and Kingship; and Liturgy and Sacred Image.

The day will also include an introduction to the research possibilities and historical interest of the medievalists’ archive at Penn, presented by the inaugural Elizabeth A.R. Brown Archivist, an endowed position in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. The day will conclude with reminiscences by friends, students, and mentees, and a reception for all attendees.

Co-organized by Nicholas Herman (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Penn) and Ada Kuskowski (Department of History, Penn). Closing reception generously sponsored by the New York Medieval Society.

See here for event details, program, and abstracts.
For Registration, click here.
Donations to the Elizabeth A. R. Brown Medieval Historians’ Archivist Fund can be made here.
Public messages honoring Peggy Brown’s contributions to the field of medieval studies can be left here.