Tag: conference

Call for Papers: Reshaping the World: Utopias, Ideals and Aspirations in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

by

20/10/2021

11:01

Comments Off on Call for Papers: Reshaping the World: Utopias, Ideals and Aspirations in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

opportunities

,

24th International Graduate Conference of the Oxford University Byzantine Society

25th—26th February 2022, in Oxford and Online

‘There is nothing better than imagining other worlds – he said – to forget the
painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized
that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one’.

– Umberto Eco, Baudolino

It is the creative power of imagination that Baudolino described to a fictionalised Niketas Choniates in this dialogue from Eco’s homonymous novel (2000). The creation of idealised imaginary worlds has the power to change the past, the present and the future. When imagination is directed towards more worldly goals, it becomes aspiration and such aspiration can influence policies of reform. When imagination is unrestrained, utopias are born.

The Oxford University Byzantine Society’s twenty-fourth International Graduate Conference seeks to explore the impact utopias, ideals and aspirations had in changing the course of history and, therefore, how imagined or alternative realities shaped the Late Antique and Byzantine world(s), broadly understood.  

Our conference provides a forum for postgraduate and early-career scholars to reflect on this theme through a variety of cultural media and (inter)disciplinary approaches. In doing so, we hope to facilitate the interaction and engagement of historians, philologists, archaeologists, art historians, theologians and specialists in material culture. To that end, we encourage submissions encompassing, but not limited to, the following themes: 

  • Theological and/or philosophical usage of utopias in the depictions of the ideal society, of the afterlife, or to serve a particular worldview; 
  • Political, administrative, martial, economic and religious reforms as embodiments of aspirations or ideals;  
  • Allegory as both a literary and philosophical tool that endowed texts with new and original meanings; 
  • The ‘Byzantine novel’ and utopias: sceneries, characters and endings; 
  • ‘Chivalry’ in Byzantium as a form of utopia, for example in works such as Digenis Akritis; 
  • Language purism as a form of utopia; 
  • Encomia, hagiography and historiography used to cater to and curate idealised images; 
  • Numismatics, for example the depiction of harmonious imperial families on coinage in defiance of ‘reality’; 
  • Gift-giving and exchange of luxury goods to communicate ideals or aspirations; 
  • The performance of ceremony and ritual to suggest the continuity, legitimacy and permanence of imperial power; 
  • The ideal city in various artistic media, for example frescos and manuscript illuminations; 
  • Utopian ideas conveyed through material objects like seals or epigraphs; 
  • Utopia and manuscript culture, for example the ‘perfect book’, illuminations of utopia/dystopia, and ‘idealised’ writing styles; and, 
  • Byzantium as a utopia in the post-1453 imagination.  

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a short academic biography in the third person, to the Oxford University Byzantine Society by Friday 19th November 2021 at byzantine.society@gmail.com. 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, chosen and reviewed by specialists from the University of Oxford. Speakers wishing to have their papers considered for publication should aim to be as close to the theme as possible in their abstract and paper. Nevertheless, all submissions are warmly invited.  

To read the full text of the call for papers, please visit the OUBS website here.

The conference will have a hybrid format, taking place both in Oxford and online. Accepted speakers are strongly encouraged to participate in person, but livestreamed papers are also warmly welcomed. 

CFP: Morality, Exemplarity and Emotion in Medieval Insular Texts

by

07/10/2021

15:38

1 Comment on CFP: Morality, Exemplarity and Emotion in Medieval Insular Texts

events, opportunities

, ,

We invite papers which explore the relationship between morality, exemplarity, and the expression of emotion in medieval Insular texts, c. 700-1500.


The behaviours, ideas, and emotions that medieval writers, translators, and authors present as (im)moral and exemplary naturally fluctuate depending on time, place, genre, and language. Similarly, the textual representation and expression of emotion is culturally, temporally, and socially determined. This conference seeks to explore the nexus of morality, exemplarity, and emotion as presented throughout the medieval Insular world (Ireland and the British Isles), c. 700-c. 1500. In an effort to bring different types of texts into conversation with each other, and to probe generic boundaries, we encourage papers on a range of genres, including religious, heroic, romantic, and historic, written in Latin or the vernacular(s). In particular, we welcome papers which explore how the expression of emotion within texts was used to signal exemplary and/or (im)moral behaviour.


Topics include, but are not limited to, the following suggestions:

  • Methodological approaches to identifying emotion(s) and/or exemplary/moral behaviour.
  • The effectiveness of genre as an interpretive frame when examining morality, exemplarity, and/or emotion.
  • The implications of time, place, language, gender, and/or race on morality, exemplarity and/or emotion(s).
  • The expression of emotion(s) to provoke an affective response to different types of behaviour within texts.
  • Explicit or implicit tensions between morality, exemplarity, and the expression of emotion(s).
  • Moral and/or emotional ambiguity.
  • Emotional and/or moral standards (or transgressions) of behaviour (for religious/lay person, saint, lover, hero, knight, etc).
  • The moral implications for the restraint of emotion.


In addition, we seek participants for a roundtable discussion on:

  • The reception of medieval morality and/or emotions in the classroom, especially issues that arise when teaching texts that include emotionally and/or morally one-dimensional figures.


Please send abstracts of approximately 200 words for a twenty-minute paper and a short bio to Dr Niamh Kehoe (Heinrich Heine Universität) (niamh.kehoe@hhu.de) by the 10th December 2021. If you have any queries, please email Niamh. While we currently anticipate that this will be an in-person event at Heinrich Heine University, we may decide to switch to an online event

Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race® Symposium

by

29/09/2021

12:03

Comments Off on Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race® Symposium

events

, ,


The symposium is being held virtually from October 19-22, 2021 and will include panels, informal coffee talks, an editor roundtable, and 1-on-1 sessions with invited editors. 

Enmity is a sustaining force for systemic racism, a fervent antipathy toward a category of people. Enmity exists at the nexus of individual and group identity and produces difference by desiring opposition and supremacy, imagining separation by force, and willing conflict. Enmity unfolds in different ways in different places, according to local logics of territory, population, language, or culture, even as these geographical divisions are subject to constant change.

This interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Rutgers University, focuses on how premodern racial discourses are tied to cartographical markers and ambitions. The notions of enmity and region provide a dual dynamic lens for tracing the racial repertoires that developed in response to increasingly hostile contention between premodern cultural and political forces. The symposium will invite scholars to take up this intersection between region and enmity, and to examine how belief in difference, or the emergence of polarizing structures and violent practices, configured race thinking and racial practices in ways that are both unique to different territories and that transcend them.

Register for the event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/region-and-enmity-a-raceb4race-symposium-tickets-165791636247

Learn more about RaceB4Race: https://acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race

Call for Papers: Spirits and Spirituality in Medieval Britain and Ireland C. 600 – 1400

by

21/09/2021

18:55

1 Comment on Call for Papers: Spirits and Spirituality in Medieval Britain and Ireland C. 600 – 1400

events, opportunities

, ,

An Interdisciplinary Online Conference at the University of Nottingham.

Wednesdays, 9th, 16th and 23rd March 2022

A medieval illustration of a person praying.

Call for Papers

We invite papers which explore representations of spirits and spirituality in the medieval period from c. 600-1400 in Britain and Ireland, including, but not limited to, the following suggestions:

  • The influence of Eastern and / or Western patristics
  • Representations of spirits and demons
  • Approaches to spirituality
  • How spirits and spirituality are represented in medieval texts, artefacts, art and material culture
  • Alternative spiritualities

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to: eleni.ponirakis3@nottingham.ac.uk by the 30th November 2021.

For more information, please visit: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/spirits-and-spirituality.aspx

Conference Report: Hyggnaþing

by

21/09/2021

17:35

Comments Off on Conference Report: Hyggnaþing

blog

, ,

by Natasha Bradley

Hyggnaþing (‘Meeting of Minds’): A Graduate Conference in Old Norse Studies took place on the 11th of August 2021. A brand-new conference co-organised by Natasha Bradley, a DPhil student at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Ben Chennells, a PhD student at University College London, Hyggnaþing attracted speakers and attendees from across the globe for a one-day online conference exploring all things Old Norse.

Hyggnaþing was created in response to the isolation that has impacted everyone over this past year and a half. With constant lockdowns, library closures, and restrictions on events, postgraduate study has become even more challenging and isolating, with fewer opportunities for students to engage with the academic community. Hyggnaþing was created with connection in mind, providing a virtual space to build networks and share research in a welcoming environment. For this, Hyggnaþing made use of both Zoom and Wonder, a platform which simulates the experience of an in-person meeting and allows for online ‘mingling’.

After some opening remarks from the organisers, the conference began with a panel on the significance of space in saga literature, chaired by Oxford’s own Olivia Elliott Smith. The first paper was by Grace O’Duffy (University of Cambridge), whose paper explored the development of Hǫttr from Hrólf saga kraka, as he progresses from the bone-pile to a masculine ‘ideal’. Then Mary O’Connor (University of Oxford) spoke about courtly space in two Old Norse riddarasǫgur: Ívens saga and Erex saga.

After a quick screen break, the second session of the day, chaired by Sigrun Borgen Wik (Trinity College Dublin), began with a paper from Basil Arnould Price (University of York). Basil’s paper explored the idea of failure as resistance in Grettis saga and Gests þáttr using queer theory. This was followed by a paper from Caroline Bourne (University of Reading), which reassessed the relationship between Scandinavians and the Gower peninsula in South Wales from the tenth century. The panel was concluded with a paper by Giorgia Sottotetti (Háskóli Íslands), who examined small figurines or ‘pocket-idols’ from Iron Age Scandinavia and analysed how they reflect the religious, social, and political changes within the period.

After lunch, Hyggnaþing resumed with a panel on translation, chaired by the co-organiser Natasha Bradley. The first paper, by Katrín Lísa L. Mikaelsdóttir (Háskóli Íslands), analysed the presence of Norwegianisms in medieval Icelandic manuscripts and how their use changes over time. The second paper of the panel was by Davide Salmoiraghi (University of Cambridge). Davide looked at the reception of the Church Fathers in medieval Iceland, examining the spread of the saints’ cult and its influence on the Norse hagiographies. Luthien Cangemi (University College London) concluded the translation panel with her paper on the transition from the concept of Medicina to Physica in Old Norse sources.

Then followed the mid-afternoon virtual coffee break on Wonder. This allowed attendees to mingle together to get to know each other, moving between groups of people to talk. Some attendees continued their discussions about the conference in a more informal setting, and others struck up new discussions about postgraduate life and their own research.

The final panel of the day was chaired by the conference co-organiser Ben Chennells. It explored the receptions and re-castings of Old Norse literature. The first paper, by Grace Khuri (University of Oxford), examined the Victorian novel Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard and its use of Old Norse saga sources. Richard Munro of the University of the Highlands and Islands then presented about how to perform an eddic poem.

The keynote lecture, delivered by Dr Sarah Baccianti, a British Academy Newton International Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, discussed the Old Norse medical charms and healing practices. Exploring material culture and saga literature, Baccianti’s interdisciplinary paper called for a re-evaluation of the distinction between our modern concepts of magic and medicine. The keynote was followed, as with all the panels, by an engaging discussion. An evening social hosted on Wonder concluded the conference.

Hyggnaþing hosted ten speakers, four chairs, and a keynote lecturer, all of whom joined the conference from nine different institutions across the UK and beyond. Seventy-five guests registered to attend, with audience members joining from locations across the globe, from the United States to Australia, to ask questions and make comments that sparked engaging academic discussion. New connections were forged on Wonder and Zoom alike, and the organisers hope that these will be long-lived.

Hyggnaþing is incredibly grateful to Oxford Medieval Studies (OMS), sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) for the funding to cover the costs of the conference. This allowed the registration for the conference to be completely free of charge, creating an accessible and welcoming conference for attendees and helping to foster the thriving academic community, and ‘meeting of minds’, that came together for Hyggnaþing. For more information about the conference, see the Hyggnaþing website: https://hyggnathing.wordpress.com/

(7-8 January 2022) Identity Abroad in Central and Late Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Cambridge(venue TBC))

by

16/07/2021

14:03

Comments Off on (7-8 January 2022) Identity Abroad in Central and Late Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Cambridge(venue TBC))

events, opportunities

*Keynote Speakers: Prof. Miri Rubin (Queen Mary University, London); Prof. Roser Salicrú i Lluch (Institució Milà i Fontanals,CSIC,Barcelona); Prof. Teresa Shawcross (Princeton University)

Life in the central and late Middle Ages was characterised by high levels of mobility and migration. Shifts in political, economic, cultural and religious life encouraged and sometimes forced individuals and groups to move ‘abroad’ permanently or temporarily, to places nearby or further afield.

The position and impact of these ‘foreigners’in societieshas been widely discussed. However, what isless consideredis how theyunderstood and (re)presented themselves. Ourconference aimsto explorethe construction, expression, and practical significance of different forms of social identity among individuals and groups living ‘abroad’ in Europe and the Mediterranean in the period between the eleventh andfifteenth centuries.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers from graduate and early career researchers working across all relevant disciplinesin the Humanities and Social Sciences. By bringing together a variety of different perspectives, the conference not only aims to consider how ‘identity abroad’ functioned in specific contexts, but also to emphasise developments, patterns, and divergences. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Individuals and groups living ‘abroad’, such as merchants, artisans, pilgrims, scholars, diplomats, soldiers, exiles, ethnic and religious minorities, and captives and enslaved people

• Voluntary orforced, temporary orpermanentmigration

•Importance of political allegiance, language, cultural heritage, and faith in identity construction

•Means of identity expression, such as writtenproduction and material culture

•Relations between different ‘foreign’ individuals and groups

• Interaction and assimilation/resistance to assimilation with ‘local’ populations, institutions, and rulers •Impact of gender, socio-economic background, and other types of differences

• Theoretical explorations of the concepts of ‘identity’, ‘foreignness’, and ‘abroad’ in the Middle Ages

Abstracts of 250 words and a short biographical note should be sent to identityabroad22@gmail.com by 12 September 2021. For more information, visit https://identityabroad22.crassh.cam.ac.uk/ and follow @identityabroad on Twitter.

22nd / 23rd April: The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference *Memory*

by

19/04/2021

21:28

Comments Off on 22nd / 23rd April: The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference *Memory*

blog, events, News

, ,

The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference is taking place on Thursday and Friday this week!

To register; https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/memory-17th-oxford-medieval-graduate-conference-tickets-149951710603
To register; email: oxgradconf@gmail.com

OMGC Twitter Handle @OxMedGradConf #OMGC21

Conference Report: Found in Translation

by

29/10/2019

15:29

Comments Off on Conference Report: Found in Translation

Around Oxford, blog, paper

By Diana Denissen

Professor Henrike Lähnemann’s interactive keynote lecture (picture by Henrike Lähnemann)

On Saturday 19 October, I attended the morning of the first conference of the Greene’s Institute, ‘Found in Translation’ (full programme). As the call for papers stated, scholars working in any field of the humanities are often very aware of ‘translation loss’: the precise meaning of important ideas and concepts shifts when translating them from one language into another and the literary language of the original cannot be fully grasped when reading a translation of a text. ‘I am frustrated that my students are not able read important texts in the original language any more’, said one of the conference participants. However, only thinking about translation in negative terms, using words as ‘loss’ or ‘compromise’ is too limiting. The aim of the ‘Found in Translation’ conference was, therefore, to take another, more positive angle and ask what is actually found in translation. In the remainder of this blog, I will briefly describe some recurring themes discussed during the morning of the conference.

A number of participants discussed the orality of medieval narratives and what happens when elements from this oral tradition are transmitted, or rather ‘translated’, to a written tradition. ‘The enclosing of the saga within codicological boundaries’, Brian McMahon named it in his paper. Julie Dresvina pointed to the fact that some stories from an oral culture ‘slip through the cracks’ such as in The Book of Margery Kempe, a text in which Margery Kempe is a ‘compulsive storyteller’. Godelinde Perk’s discussion of Modern Devout Sister Books from the Low Countries, which contain biographies of exemplary members of religious communities, revealed similar elements of orality. In addition to this, Godelinde stressed that her paper, which focussed on Middle Dutch texts for an English-speaking audience was, of course, already an act of translation – and therefore interpretation – in itself. Ilya Sverdlov also pointed to this in his paper on the complex practice of translating Icelandic compound (place) names into English.

Another interesting aspect discussed during the conference was how the present can inform an understanding of the (medieval) past. Julie Dresvina explained how modern day memes helped her to grasp both the centrality and the marginality of medieval misericords (small wooden images on the underside of a folding seat in a church). Sander Vloebergs used modern dance to establish a connection between modern and medieval bodies, transmitting the female saint’s life of Lutgardis of Aywières to contemporary dance: https://artistictheologylab.com/portfolio/videos/.

The morning ended with professor Henrike Lähnemann’s interactive keynote lecture on the impact of Luther’s Bible translation (watch the first part of the keynote on youtube and follow the exercises on the handout). When we were asked to write our ideas about Bible translation on post-it notes, they varied widely, ranging from ‘translating the Bible is impossible’ to ‘we should translate the Bible in as many ways as possible’. According to Luther, translation was a process of ‘letting go of the letters’ (the title quote of the keynote lecture, taken from the Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, fol. b2r) and focussing on a translation that would make sense to a contemporary audience. During her final reflections, Professor Lähnemann stressed that ‘translation is political’. What is found in translation is a world that is more open and more connected. Translations allow for more dialogue and understanding across language boundaries, across space and time, and even across different media.

Thank you to the Greene’s Institute for organizing this wonderful conference.

***

Diana Denissen is a Swiss National Science Foundation post-doc mobility fellow. She works on late medieval religious literature and women’s writing from England and the Low Countries. Her monograph Middle English Devotional Compilations will be out in November of this year. You can follow Diana on twitter under @folioscribbles or on her website.found in translation

Lively discussion during the conference (picture by the Greene’s Institute)

Report on the Dark Archives Conference 2019

by

25/08/2019

12:01

Comments Off on Report on the Dark Archives Conference 2019

conference

,

For the latest iteration in the conference series, cf. https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/arsinquirendi/

A Conference on the Medieval Unread & Unreadable

THE DARKNESS OF THE MEDIEVAL ARCHIVES, the shadows of the library stacks: too vast for countless lifetimes of scholarship to exhaust? And yet, in our internet era, the accelerating machine-processing of centuries of collected medieval materials and data is yielding ever more detailed, extensive maps of the archive’s extent and  features. The goal of completely surveying the archive, down to every folio and character, is not only increasingly viable but irresistible – and at a time when competence in its languages, diplomatics and palaeography is contracting; for this same process promises new revelations, of unprecedented richness and detail, about the medieval world itself.
      Yet the great irony is that on our new map, the Dark Archives, the medieval unread and unreadable, dwarf all that we currently know, and indeed threaten to paralyse fresh research. In quantity, they encompass the great majority of the millions of known folios and associated records, that remain unread, unscanned and scattered across the world. Who will fund their expensive digitization? What should be prioritized? And to what end, when the mass-transcription and record-creation technologies needed to explore them remain unequal to the task?  Most challenging of all may be owning the shift in perspective that the Dark Archives are forcing upon us: the unsustainably small extent of what we term ‘the medieval’, and the uncertainty over what might succeed it.
Join us this September to crystallize and advance the field at Dark Archives, which is bringing together over 50 of its likely academic and commercial key-holders, from archivists and intellectual historians to machine-learning researchers. General registration now open, and full programme published:

Day 1 (10th September): Mapping the Medieval Graphosphere: What Dimensions, How Composed, Whether Habitable?

Day 2 (11th September): Endless Deserts, Oceans and Mountains: Tackling the Metadata Crisis

Day 3 (12th September): Re-Making Medieval History

along with a range of practical workshops on the latest techniques for Dark Archives discovery on 13th September. 

8:30am to 6:00pm

10th September: Mapping the Medieval Graphosphere: What Dimensions, How Composed, Whether Habitable?

   8:30-9:00am     Coffee and Registration

9:00am to 1:05pm

Manuscripts, Extant and Destroyed

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Nigel Palmer
  • Teresa Webber
  • Eltjo Buringh
  • Utrecht University

Keynote Address: Estimates of Manuscript Numbers

  • Jo Story
  • University of Leicester

Insular Manuscripts: how many and what next?

  • Joanna Tucker
  • University of Glasgow

Survival and loss: working with documents from medieval Scotland

  • Ralph Cleminson
  • University of Oxford

Non leguntur: shedding light on Slavonic sources

  • Adrien Quéret-Podesta
  • Petőfi Sándor School

“Textual ghosts” in the oldest Central European historiography

Coffee

  • Daniel Sawyer

@DE_Sawyer

  • University of Oxford

At Knowledge’s Edge: Lost Materials

  • Krista Murchison
  • Leiden University

(Re)collecting the Archive: Recovering Medieval Manuscripts Destroyed During WWII


Video

  • Henrike Lähnemann

@HLaehnemann

  • University of Oxford

Nuns’ Dust

PDF icon nuns dust handout

  • Gustavo Fernández Riva

@Medieval_Gus

  • FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
  • Time Machine Organization

Network Analysis of Manuscripts

Questions

1.00pm to 2pm    Lunch

2:00pm to 4:05pm

Neither Parchment Nor Paper

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Graham Barrett
  • Ellie Pridgeon

@consularchivist

  • University of Leicester

The Writing on the Wall: Medieval Painted Inscriptions

  • Maria do Rosário Morujão
  • University of Coimbra

Dark Seals in Portuguese Archives

  • John Hines
  • Cardiff University

Dark Sides of the Runes

  • David King
  • University of East Anglia

The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi

Questions

Coffee

4:25pm to 6:15pm

Why Exalted, Why Neglected?

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Anthony Lappin
  • Anastasia Shapovalova
  • Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, Paris

Exploring the Medieval Archives in France

  • Monika Opalinska
  • University of Warsaw

Reconstructing medieval English religious culture: forgotten manuscript sources versus digital media

  • Matthew Holford

@matthewholford

The Least Studied Manuscripts in the Bodleian

  • David Rundle

@DrDavidRundle

  • University of Kent

The Unbearable Lightness of the Archive

Questions

6:15pm to 6:50pm

Drinks Reception

9:00am

11th September: Endless Deserts, Oceans and Mountains: Tackling the Metadata Crisis

  • Will Noel

@willnoel

  • Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

Keynote Address: Through a screen darkly: the metadata crisis and the authority of the digital image

9:55am to 1:00pm

Achieving Mass Transcription – Ex Machina? Ex Populo? And How Soon?

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Eltjo Buringh
  • Verónica Romero
  • Universidad Politecnica, Valencia

Interactive-Predictive Transcription and Probabilistic Text Indexing for Handwritten Image Collections

  • Achim Rabus
  • University of Freiburg

Training generic models for handwritten text recognition using Transkribus: Opportunities and Pitfalls

  • Vincent Christlein

@v_christlein

  • Friedrich-Alexander University

Scribal identification and document classification

11.10am to 11.25am Coffee

  • Ben Kiessling
  • University of Leipzig

The Limits to Digitization

  • Roger Louis Martinez-Davila

@rogerlmartinez

  • University of Colorado

Massive Open Online Projects to teach palaeographic skills and to prepare manuscript transcriptions

Thought-Game – Build a Universal Manuscript Transcription Platform – Now !

Participants joining the chair & panelists: 

Michael Sargent

Stewart J. Brookes

Emma Goodwin

PDF icon Download Goodwin Dark Archives Poster.pdf (991.16 KB)

12.45pm to 1.55pm Lunch

1:55pm to 4:50pm

How to Organize the Metadata Once We Have It

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Jo Story
  • Toby Burrows

@TobyBurrows

  • Oxford E-Research Centre

Aggregating provenance metadata to reveal the histories of medieval manuscripts

  • Andrew Hankinson

@ahankinson

  • Bodleian Library
  • International Image Interoperability Framework

Discovery through Data: How IIIF shines a light into the dark archive’

  • Debra Cashion

@dtcashion

  • St Louis University

METAscripta

video

3.20pm to 3.30pm Coffee

  • John McEwan
  • St Louis University

Reflectance Transformation Imaging and Medieval Seals

  • Sarah Fiddyment

@drsfiddyment

  • University of York

Manuscript Palaeoproteomics

video

Thought-Game: Devise a metadata system to satisfactorily describe and relate all written medieval materials – Now!

Participants joining the chair & panelists: 

William Noel

Emma Stanford

Gustavo Fernández Riva

4.50pm to 5pm     Coffee

5:00pm to 6:25pm

What Role Archives? (pt. 1)

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Suzanne Paul
  • Carolin Schreiber
  • München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

Keynote Address: Bringing the Dark Archives to the Light – Medieval Manuscripts in German Collections in the Digital Age

  • Paul Dryburgh

@pablodiablo74

  • The National Archives, Kew

Peering into an impenetrable gloom and the “tyranny” of digital by design: the future of medieval collections at The National Archives (UK)?

Video

Questions

7:30pm to 9:00pm

Conference Dinner at St. Edmund Hall

9:15pm

Compline in the Crypt of St-Peter-in-the-East (St. Edmund Hall)

PDF icon Download Compline-DarkArchives-SEH.pdf (404.39 KB)

Video of Compline in the Crypt

.. and some footage from the rehearsal!

9:00am to 6:00pm

12th September: Re-Making Medieval History

9:00am to 12:00pm

What Role Archives (pt. 2)?

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Pip Willcox
  • Luca Polidoro
  • University of Florence

The Secrets of the Barberini

  • Laura Light

Manuscripts in Private Hands

  • James Louis Smith

@ScrivenerSmith

  • Trinity College Dublin

Pre-Modern Manuscripts and Early Books in Conflict Zones: An Emerging Network and its Goals

  • Christopher Wright
  • Matteo di Franco
  • University of Cambridge

From isolation to integration: making Greek manuscripts readable

  • Dot Porter

@leoba

  • Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

Reading Across A Digitized Collection of Books of Hours

Coffee

Roundtable

Participants joining the chair & panelists: 

Suzanne Paul

@suz_paul

Paul Dryburgh

@pablodiablo74

Elaine Treharne

@ETreharne

Robin Darwall-Smith

Carolin Schreiber

Sarah Fiddyment

12.10pm to 1pm    Lunch

1:00pm to 6:00pm

The Future of Medieval Scholarship: Forms, Substance and Means

1:00pm to 3:10pm

The Edition …

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Daron Burrows
  • Michael G. Sargent
  • City University of New York

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Obfuscation of Manuscript Evidence

video

  • Kyle Ann Huskin

@kylehuskin

  • University of Rochester

Shedding Light on Dark Archives: Principles for Editing Recovered Texts

  • Andrew Dunning

@anjdunning

  • University of Cambridge

Opening medieval books and fragments to students with documentary editing

  • Elizabeth Solopova
  • University of Oxford

An Invisible Giant: Editing Neglected Canonical Texts

Questions

Coffee

3:30pm to 4:45pm

… And Beyond

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Roger Louis Martinez-Davila
  • Mark Faulkner
  • Trinity College Dublin

‘Big Dating’ and ‘Bottom-up periodisation’

  • Sarah Savant

@sarahsavant1

  • Aga Khan University

Finding Meaning in 1.5 Billion Words of Arabic: The KITAB Project and Its Aims

  • Julia Craig-McFeely
  • University of Oxford

‘How dark is my archive?’: What lies behind and beyond the face of Musicology’s online archive, DIAMM

Questions

Coffee

4:55pm to 6:30pm

Medieval Capital

Chair/Respondent: 

  • Richard Ovenden
  • Marc Polonsky
  • The Polonsky Foundation

Digitisation of cultural heritage: a funder’s perspective

  • Maja Kominko

The Arcadia Fund

  • Luciano Floridi
  • University of Oxford

Keynote Address: Semantic Capital. Its Nature and Value

Concluding Debate

9:00am to 5:00pm

13th September: Dark Archives Workshops

  • Verónica Romero
  • Universidad Politecnica, Valencia

Hands-on Workshop on Assistive Technologies to Access the Contents of Handwritten Text Manuscripts

PDF icon Presentation

  • John McEwan

@frangelegetege

  • St Louis University

Imaging Seals on a Budget

12pm to 1pm Lunch

  • Roger Louis Martinez-Davila

@rogerlmartinez

  • University of Colorado

Crowdsourcing Manuscript Transcriptions: Opportunities and Challenges using MOOCs, Social Media, and Emerging Platforms

Link to Website

  • Alexander Zawacki
  • Helen Davies

@MedievalZawacki

@helsinhashtags

  • University of Rochester

Multispectral Imaging: Technologies, Techniques, and Teaching

Full Presentation and Slides

Disiecta membra musicae: conference report

by

27/03/2018

15:04

Comments Off on Disiecta membra musicae: conference report

blog

27 March 2018 TORCH team

Disiecta membra musicae: conference report

Open any book bound before the 18th century and there is a good chance that you will find fragments cut from another book and re-used to support the binding or to protect the pages from the wooden boards. Often this binder’s waste will be taken from printed books, but in many cases the added strength of parchment made it more effective to chop up a medieval manuscript. A remarkable proportion of medieval binding fragments have musical notation on them—music went out of fashion, liturgies were proscribed, and large choirbooks provided a more versatile format for dismembering than a smaller text-book. Very few complete music books have survived intact from the Middle Ages, and so it is small wonder that musicologists have been working on medieval binding fragments ever since the birth of their discipline. A conference at Magdalen College on 19–21 March 2018 brought together almost 50 specialists to discuss the particular problems raised by disiecta membra musicae.

Margaret Bent opened proceedings with a tour d’horizon of the many vicissitudes affecting manuscripts over time. As founding director of one of the first ever manuscript digitisation projects, DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, which in its early days had the specific purpose of gathering images of polyphonic musical fragments, she could demonstrate the range of applications and innovations which have been used to make worn texts visible again, and to connect fragments cut from the same book and now strewn across the world. These techniques reached previously inconceivable levels of sophistication in Julia Craig-McFeely’s presentation on her latest advances in digital restoration.

Several speakers covered the pleasures and pitfalls of gathering information on musical fragments. Paweł Gancarczyk considered polyphonic fragments from late-medieval Bohemia, and the extent to which they can be associated with the Utraquist brotherhoods from which many complete manuscripts survive. Jurij Snoj has systematically searched through all the libraries in Ljubljana, and most other collections across Slovenia, to produce a database listing more than 550 fragments from around 140 manuscripts. A catalogue of a comparable number of sources from Hungary was published in 1981, but many more have come to light since that date, and Zsuzsa Csagány discussed the means of updating the older records for a new database. In the Nordic countries the scale is altogether greater, with some 50,000 fragments now accounted for in databases in Norway, Denmark, Finland and especially Sweden: Sean Dunnahoe provided a helpful overview of what can and cannot be said by means of statistical enquiries of the Swedish database of medieval fragments, MPO (Medeltida Pergamentomslag/Medieval Parchment Cover Database). The biggest project to date, building on the success of the Swiss manuscripts website e-codices, is Fragmentarium, deftly presented by its director Christoph Flüeler.

It was through e-codices that Susan Rankin came across images of an unusual 10th-century fragment used as a wrapper for documents and preserved in the Swiss nunnery of Müstair. In its format and content it relates to no other manuscript, and thereby raises important questions about the assumptions we make when assigning other fragments to particular types of book which happen to survive in complete form elsewhere. David Hiley took a similar line in discussing fragments of saints’ offices, which might have been attached as easily to codices of saints’ Vitae as to antiphoners. In the case of notated songs, Helen Deeming demonstrated that fragments sometimes assumed to be witnesses to a widespread tradition of song anthologies in medieval England are just as likely to have come from miscellanies of prose and verse.

Reinhard Strohm took a seemingly incongruous collection of musical materials in MS 5094 of the Austrian National Library, and demonstrated that there may in fact be more connections between them than first meets the eye. Other presentations included Daniele Sabaino on the annotations to a charter in Ravenna which may well constitute the earliest musical setting of a text in the Italian language. Karl Kügle discussed a newly discovered group of polyphonic fragments in the binding of a manuscript in the Landeshauptarchiv of Koblenz, and the extent to which the binder may have deliberately chosen particular leaves from his pile of binding materials on grounds of the appropriateness of their texts. Christian Leitmeir introduced us to the complex and idiosyncratic programme of dismemberment and rebinding undertaken by Amplonius Rating de Berka in forming his library, preserved to this day in Erfurt. David Catalunya reconsidered the position of ars antiquapolyphony in Castile, in the light of several recently discovered fragments, and later demonstrated his considerable talents as a performer on the clavisimbalum as part of the ensemble Tasto Solo, which provided a superb concert in the evocative darkness of Magdalen chapel under the direction of Guillermo Pérez, interspersing keyboard arrangements from the Faenza codex with madrigals and ballate by Jacopo da Bologna, Landini and others.

The symposium The Study of Medieval Music Manuscript Fragments ca. 800–1500, organised by Giovanni Varelli, took place on 19 to 21 March 2018 in Magdalen College. The full programme is available on the ‘events’ page of the Oxford Medieval Studies Programme. The full booklet with abstracts and further links can be downloaded here.

This conference report was written by Nicolas Bell (Nicolas.Bell@trin.cam.ac.uk).