The Oxford Medieval Studies Trinity Term lecture on Thursday, 4 May was a careers talk with a twist, featuring an exhibition in the St Edmund Hall Old Library as well as coffee and cake! Alison Ray (Archivist, St Peter’s College) and Heather Barr (Graduate Trainee Library Assistant, St Edmund Hall) were delighted to share their experiences of working in archives and libraries to attendees and how they make use of their skills as medievalists in their present roles.
You can watch back the careers talk in the video below and check out the handy list of resources for further information on working in archives, libraries and the wider heritage sector:
GLAMorous Work: Resources
Archives Listserv: Jobs, training, current events and issues, professional discussion
A fantastic day was had by all at the third Medieval Mystery Cycle held on Saturday, 22 April that took place across the Front Quad and St Peter-in-the-East churchyard of St Edmund Hall. Actors, directors, singers and designers staged six plays dating from between the 12th and 16th centuries. Retelling Biblical stories from the Nativity to the Last Judgement, the cast expertly performed in medieval and modern languages, including Latin, Middle English and Middle High German.
Master of Ceremonies Jim Harris (left) and the Choir of St Edmund Hall (right)
Master of Ceremonies Jim Harris (Teaching Curator, Ashmolean Museum) delighted everyone as audience guide and play narrator with linking verse composed by David Maskell, and we were treated to Peter Abelard’s ‘O quanta qualia’ sung by the Choir of St Edmund Hall led by College Chaplain the Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano.
Piers Plowman with tackling the seven deadly sins (left) and the Virgin and Christ Child of the Nativity scene (right)
Group ‘Swonken ful harde’ performed first with extracts from Piers Plowman in Middle English, that saw Piers taking on the seven deadly sins through the visions of Will the Dreamer. Following in Middle English, The English Faculty wonderfully performed the Chester Nativity and Salutation with a humorous interpretation of Roman Emperor Octavyan as King Charles III in time for the Coronation!
Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays 2023
God announces judgement in the Slaughter of the Innocents (left) and Mary Magdalene steals a member of the audience (right)
Marguerite de Navarre’s 16th-century French play of the Comédie des Innocents was performed by group ‘Les perles innocentes’ with singing by Lucy Matheson (read a report by director Elisabeth Dutton), with the dark scenes of the Slaughter of the Innocents countered by a comically scheming Herod and angels supplying chocolates to the audience. We were then treated to a charity coffee and cake stall in the break by the Oxford German Society in support of the German Red Cross. This was followed by a fantastic adaptation of the Carmina Burana Bavarian Passion play by the ‘Sorores Sancte Hildae’ group in Latin and German, with audience participation!
Professor Henrike Lähnemann and trumpet leading the angels (left) and a gleeful Lucifer capturing lost souls for Hell (right)
The unofficial award for best costume design went to the Medieval Germanists who performed the Harrowing of Hell in Middle High German with English narration, that saw a troupe of winged angels and Lucifer herd an imaginative array of lost souls to the Crypt’s Hellmouth. The day closed with Past and Present Teddy Students delivering a high-energy staging of a modern English version of the Last Judgment with St John of Patmos being guided by an exacerbated angel through comic visions of the battle between Christ and Satan for souls.
St John of Patmos and his visions of Heaven and Hell in the Last Judgement
We are particularly grateful to Professor Lesley Smith and Professor Henrike Lähnemann, co-directors of Oxford Medieval Studies, the driving force behind the Mystery Cycle, Michael Angerer, Graduate Convenor for the Mystery Cycle, and to the Fellows and Principal of St Edmund Hall, for once again agreeing to host our medieval madness!
This concluding lecture reflects on the problems and possibilities of comparative legal history before moving on to the differences and similarities in patterns of England, France, and north Italy in the period c.1160-1270.
This lecture explores the ways in which deliberate legal change came to have unintended effects, especially on substantive law. It considers the interplay of legal learning, legal reasoning, and legal change. In so doing, it ponders Sir Henry Maine’s view of substantive law being secreted in the interstices of procedure.
Students will learn about Old Frisian language, text corpus, culture and history in the context of Old Germanic languages. Linguistic comparisons will be drawn between Old Frisian and the other (West) Germanic languages. Settlement history of Frisians in Britain, Old Frisian Law and Literature and Old Frisian manuscripts will be discussed in lectures. Library visits will focus on the Old Frisian manuscripts in Oxford. The OFSS will close with a social day in Oxford. The OFSS is about learning to read Old Frisian and to place Old Frisian in a wider linguistic, literary and historical context.
Who is the summer school for?
The summer school is aimed at students, PhD candidates and early career researchers with an interest in (Old) Germanic languages who want to familiarise themselves with Old Frisian.
What will the day programme look like?
There will be two lectures in the mornings and a translation workshop or library visit in the afternoons. The programme will cover the Old Frisian grammar in lectures by experts in the field and in translation workshops. Students will read Old Frisian texts in the afternoon workshops with help of modern handbooks and learn about the Old Frisian text corpus
By the end of the week, students should be able to translate a medium level Old Frisian text with the help of handbooks and have gained a good level of knowledge of the place and importance of Old Frisian within the Old Germanic language family
A visit to the Bodleian Library will enable students to view the Old Frisian manuscripts that are kept at Oxford.
Prof Andreas Deutsch, Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch, Heidelberg
Dr Peter-Alexander Kerkhof, Frisian Academy, Ljouwert/Leeuwarden
Prof Simon Horobin, University of Oxford
Dr Rafael Pascual, University of Oxford
Mr Hilbert Vinkenoog (YouTube channel History with Hilbert)
Mr Anne Popkema MA, Groningen University
Dr Johanneke Sytsema, University of Oxford
What does it cost?
In person fees: £350 (Early bird rate £300 if booked by May 1st)
Hybrid fees: £150.00
Fees for in person attendance will include
Tuition and workshops
Study materials
Coffee/tea
Daily 3-course lunch
Saturday social activities
Library visits
Conference dinner
Hybrid fees will include access to all streamed lectures and electronic access to the grammar and dictionary during the week.
Accommodation:
Participants can book accommodation in student halls belonging to St Edmund Hall (email address susan.mccarthy@seh.ox.ac.uk first come first served) or find accommodation in another college in Oxford via https://www.universityrooms.com/
For further information about the Summer School please contact: oldfrisian@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk (for all interested) or ofss@rug.nl (for students of Groningen University)
The Fair Field of Folk. Piers Plowman: A Potted Adaptation of the B Text When: 11 February 2023, to be repeated partially during the Medieval Mystery Cycle 22 April 2023 Where: St Edmund Hall, Queen’s Lane, OX1 4AR Oxford
Director: Eloise Peniston
Trailer filmed and edited by Natascha Domeisen, music by Alexander Nakarada
Welcome to our mervelous sweven, the Middle English prose B text of Piers Plowman dramatized and brought to stage by an eclectic mix of English students, medievalists, business students, historians, even a mathematician! Starring
😴 Sòlas McDonald as Will the Dreamer
😜 Jonathan Honnor as Piers Plowman/False Tongue
⛪ Clare-Rose McIntyre as Holy Church
✝️ Chantale Davies as Theology/Priest
🤔 Rei Tracks as Conscience
🌾 Alexane Ducheune as Mede’s Handmaid
👑 Kate Harkness as The King
💃 Eloise Peniston as Envy/Lady Mede
💰 Sabrina Coghlan-Jasiewicz as Simony/Pride
😡 Sonny Pickering as Wrath
👩⚖️ Zelda Cahill-Patten as Civil Law/Covetousness
With original music by Anna Cowan (harp) and Rachael Seculer-Faber; ceremonial trumpet: Henrike Lähnemann, special advice: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. Supported by Oxford Medieval Studies and St Edmund Hall
Video filmed and edited by Natascha Domeisen, cover image by Duncan Taylor
Plot summary
The play follows a man named Will, who falls asleep beside a stream on a May morning in Malvern Hills with a succession of dreams, beginning with a tower on a hill, a dungeon, and a fair field of folk. On his quest for Truth, Will meets a host of allegorical personifications, wandering through the marriage and later trial of Lady Mede, the confession of the Seven Sins, the Crucifixion, and the Harrowing of Hell. In the midst of all, Piers Plowman emerges, taking only momentary repose from his plough to guide Will towards Truth and, rather scandalously, chastise members of the clergy.
Scenes
Introduction from Holy Churche and Mede Holy Churche and Mede will explain what to expect from our play.
Prologue The bugle breaks through the air, and the dulcet tones of our bard and piper will lead you to a May Morning on Malvern Hills
Holy Churche and Will Will searches for Truth, imploring guidance of Holy Churche. Truth is, of course, that one must Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best.
Lady Mede Mede, the incarnation of financial reward, bribery, corruption, arrives.
Marriage of Mede False and Mede attempt to marry but the King requests their presence at the court, as False is not deemed a suitable husband for the noble lady.
Trial of Mede Mede pleads her case, explaining the importance of ‘mede’ or reward in the world at large.
Seven Deadly Sins Pride, Lechery, Envy, Wrath, Covetousness, Gluttony, and Sloth come and confess their sins.
Piers Plowman Piers Plowman arrives and agrees to show the field of folk where Truth is, if they help him plough his half acre.
Tearing of the Pardon Truth sends a pardon for Piers, however it is discovered not to be a real pardon at all. Piers tears it in two and interprets the Latin better than a priest ever could.
Background
Piers Plowman is an allegorical text that exists in different versions. The A text is the incomplete earliest version, the B text is the most broadly translated and edited, while also being highly scandalous, and the C text is highly censored, notably failing to mention the Peasants Revolt and the Tearing of the Pardon, which our performance presents.
The B text can be approximately dated to 1388, and has quite the volatile position in history, especially in relation to the peasant’s revolt and heresy. While locked inside Maidstone Castle, John Ball penned his radical Letter to Essex Men, citing Piers Plowman and Robin Hood as comrades in the fight. In short, Piers Plowman is a working class hero, a Billy Bragg if you will, representing the right of common man. The concept of class struggle is deeply entrenched into the text, carrying the relics of the Domesday Book serfdom, to the climbing taxes in the midst of the 100 years war, the dwindling population as the Black Death roamed the country. All of these tensions boiled over on the 30th of May, 1381, as John Bampton arrived in Essex to collect unpaid poll taxes. In consideration of 1990 Poll Tax riots, the UK Miners’ Strikes in 1984, and the recently unveiled Strike Laws, clearly class struggle repeats itself. With a ploughman at the helm, the voice of the working people is vital in the text. With all that in mind, sit back, relax, and enjoy the chaos. God spede þe plouȝ!
Director’s Story
Read a full version of Eloise Peniston’s reflection on her blog. Elise writes: I first discovered Piers Plowman at a bus stop. I was characteristically lost with a dead phone and only a charity shop book to keep me company. While no one murmured ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness’, at me, I was acutely aware of being in the presence of the literary as I thumbed through the wind-swept pages. I was intensely confused, which, at the age of fifteen, I supposed was the hidden intention of all literature. With the charmed hand of A. V. C. Schmidt to guide me, I followed Will fallling asleep. I remember after being “found” an hour later how I, rather breathlessly, recounted the events of the B text to my mother as she, mid-flap, chastised me about reckless spontaneity and the need for charged phones.
At that bus stop, I knew that, by the fortuity of an Oxfam find, I had discovered something wonderful, but I had no idea that seven years later, I would be scavenging liripipes and slit-mittens in an attempt to bring this dream-vision to life. Now, I often take that humble copy with me to Malvern Hills, and it is positively crammed with pressed, may-morning flowers. However, little did I know then how deeply entrenched this text was in the public sphere or about the literary and literal rebellions that have emerged beneath the mouldboard.
From the pen of a man who described Piers Plowman as “not worth reading”, Gerard Manley Hopkins perfectly captured the flesh-good of the text:
And features, in flesh, what deed he each must do – His sinew-service where do.
He leans to it, Harry bends, look. Back, elbow, and liquid waist In him, all quail to the wallowing o’ the plough: ‘s cheek crimsons; curls Wag or crossbridle, in a wind lifted, windlaced – See his wind – lilylocks – laced; Churlsgrace, too, child of Amansstrength, how it hangs or hurls Them – broad in bluff hide his frowning feet lashed! raced With, along them, cragiron under and cold furls – With-a-fountain’s shining-shot furls. Harry Ploughman G. M. Hopkins
This particular poem encapsulates the essence of Piers Plowman: pure inscape, or as Stephen Medcalf calls it, an “extraordinary combination of roughness and a delicate magic.” It is incredibly difficult to describe what happens in Piers Plowman but “churlsgrace” is certainly the perfect descriptor for the essence of the text. A mere ploughman knows the way to Truth and is gracious enough to guide the reader, in return for help in plowing and sowing a half-acre.
Piers Plowman is ultimately a text that encourages mental labour, in a field, at a bus stop, or even in the gardens of St Edmund Hall…
We invite you to toil with us at Teddy Hall. From a tower on toft, a trumpet shall hail the dream, before the gentle plucking of a harp will guide you to sleep. Come and set forth on a dream-pilgrimage, exploring political satire, social upheaval, and spiritual crisis. We hope to see you soon in the fair field. God spede þe plouȝ!
We are pleased to announce the Hilary Term Lecture of the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC). The lecture will take place on WED 1 March, 5-6.30 (UK time) in the Memorial Room at The Queen’s College in the University of Oxford.
Our speaker will be Yannis Assael, Intelligence Research Scientist at Google DeepMind
Title: Predicting the past with deep neural networks
Abstract: Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. To address these challenges we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how recent advances in the field of Deep Learning can assist and expand a historian’s workflow, and highlight the importance of joint interdisciplinary research.
We’d like to draw your attention to the first of the TOSCA seminars, details below!
‘Please use the postcode’: navigating the past, present, and future conservation needs of the Hereford Mappa Mundi
-who: Andrew Honey, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford and Conservation Inspector to the Mappa Mundi Trust
-when: Thursday 2 February 2023, 4.30–6pm (GMT)
-where:Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, Weston Library and online via Zoom
-This talk will examine the conservation needs of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, chart the effects of some of the historic repairs and cleaning campaigns carried out in the past, explain the ingenious methods used to mount the map, and outline future conservation needs, as well as presenting some discoveries from recent conservation inspections.
Where: St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building When: Thursdays 5.15 p.m.
Convenors: Elena Lichmanova (elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk) and Gervase Rosser
The Oxford Medieval Visual Culture Seminar series is exploring visual aspects of medieval knowledge: from anatomy to alchemy, from geometry to the concepts of time and space. We hope that the programme may appeal to audiences beyond those studying the medieval period and art history, so please do share it with anyone who might be interested.
Week 2, 26 January Sarah Griffin Lambeth Palace Library, London From Hours to Ages: Time in the Large-scale Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris (1296- c.1352) Anya Burgon Trinity Hall, Cambridge In a Punctum: Miniature Worlds in Late Medieval Art and Literature
Week 4, 9 February Lauren Rozenberg University College London In the Flat Round: Brain Diagrams in Late Medieval Manuscripts Sergei Zotov University of Warwick Christian Motifs in Fifteenth-Century Alchemical Iconography
Week 6, 23 February Jack Hartnell University of East Anglia Visualising Wombs and Obstetrical Fantasies in Late Medieval Germany
Week 8,9 March Mary Carruthers New York University, All Souls College, Oxford Envisioning Thinking: Geometry and Meditation in the Twelfth Century
We very much look forward to seeing you in the Hilary Term!
Old Norse Poetry in Performance: Inheritance and Innovation Following its covid-induced hiatus, the third iteration of the triennial Old Norse Poetry in Performance conference will take place at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, on the 21st and 22nd of June 2023. Building on the successes of the conferences in 2016 and 2019 – which resulted in the recent publication of Old Norse Poetry in Performance (2022), a collection of essays edited by the previous organisers Brian McMahon and Annemari Ferreira – the intention of this conference remains, as before, to platform and develop the network of scholars and practitioners mutually interested in the poetic performance traditions of medieval Scandinavia.
With the theme ‘Inheritance and Innovation’, the 2023 programme aims to reflect even more completely the diversity in the performance traditions of the Old Norse source material, the scholarly traditions within the field, and the new, interdisciplinary perspectives being developed today. To this end, this conference will maintain the format of its previous iterations, showcasing academic research, practical performances, and the possibilities offered by combining the two.
The organisers invite proposals for 20-minute papers and/or performances, which might cover, but need not be limited to, the following:
• Comparative approaches to eddic, skaldic, and rímur performances
• Legacies of performance traditions
• The ‘beyond-the-page’ approach to source texts
• The effects of translation on performance
• Legacies of scholarly traditions
• Interdisciplinary adaptations of Old Norse poems
Proposals should be no more than 300 words and should be sent to oldnorsepoetryinperformance@gmail.com, accompanied by a brief biographical note, by midnight on 17th February 2023.
For more information, please visit the conference website , or contact the organisers, Inés García López, Clare Mulley, Richard Munro, and Ben Chennells, at the email address given above.
