Tag: internship

Two Weeks in Wonderland

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29/10/2025

09:21

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Around Oxford, report

“OH, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice […]

– Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

Going back to Germany after my two-week adventure in Oxford, I, just like Alice, felt as if waking up from a magical dream. It is not an overstatement to say that the city has bewitched me and, trust me, you don’t have to be a huge Harry Potter geek (which I nevertheless am) to fall under its spell. No wonder the city served as inspiration for Lewis Carroll‘s most famous novel. Instead of a White Rabbit with a big pocket watch, it was Henrike Lähnemann with her trumpet whose call I followed. Prof. Lähnemann kindly invited me to the XML summer school taking place yearly at St Edmund Hall and to spend another week as her intern at the Sommerakademie of the German Scholarship Foundation

Saint Margaret’s Well in Binsey featuring as
“Treacle Well“ in Alice in Wonderland

“CURIOUSER and curiouser!”

– Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

There‘s no better way to describe my time in Oxford. From the start, the theme of my visit was “Looking behind closed doors“. I arrived just in time for the Oxford Open Doors, which take place each year in September and allow the public a sneak peek into Oxford’s Colleges. For me that meant: see as much as you can within one day! I think I almost walked 40 000 steps that day, but the visual enrichment made more than up for the physical fatigue.

Shrine of St Frideswide in Christ Church Cathedral

While, outside of Open Doors, you can get into some colleges by simply asking nicely or pretending to be a prospective student, you usually need to pay an entrance fee, which can vary from £2 to up to £20, depending on the colleges prestige and their Harry Potter screen-time. The best way to get inside without having to pay is to go to a college chapel service or evensong. No one can fine you for wanting to go to church and no one will come after you if you walk the grounds a little afterwards. (As long as you don’t step on the grass!) Prof. Lähnemann took us to Christ Church Cathedral on the first day of the Sommerakademie, where we were able to enjoy all the pomp and circumstance of an Anglican church service and the angelic voices of Christ Church’s choir.

As the saying goes “When one door closes, another one opens up“, I spent my second week as part of Prof. Lähnemann’s working group “Opening the Archives“. The object was to create a digital edition of Martin Luther’s pamphlet “Wider die mörderischen und räuberischen Rotten der Bauern“ (1525), which is going to be published in November 2025 in the Reformation Series of the Taylor Editions. Together with her colleague Dr Andrew Dunning, Prof. Lähnemann gave us enlightening insights into the history of bookmaking, the collection of Reformation pamphlets in Oxford, and printing practices in the 16th century. We even dabbled a little in some printing work ourselves at the printing workshop of the Bodleian Library.

Printing Workshop in the ‘schola musicae’ of the Bodleian Library
Duke Humfrey’s Library

At the end of the week, we had not only gained a better understanding of the Reformation and the Peasant’s War, but, thanks to Emma Huber, the German subject librarian and DH lead at the Taylor Institution Library, also made our own transcription and edition as well as curated an exhibition case at the Taylorian.

One of the key lessons I learned during my time in Oxford is to approach all objects with curiosity and to look closely. There is usually a story behind the smallest and most insignificant-seeming thing – whether it be an old shoe scraper or an inconspicuous pencil marking in a book. Our little group was lucky enough to have access to those parts of the University not open to the public, but many of Oxford’s treasures are not kept under lock and key. The “Treasured“ Exhibition at the Weston Library is a great example of that. Free of charge, you can gaze at various precious specimens of the Library’s collection.

But you don‘t even always need to step inside to discover hidden treasures. Simply by walking through Oxford’s streets with attentive eyes, you‘ll see things that seem to come straight from Wonderland: Gargoyles staring down at you in no way less grotesque than Carroll’s grinning cat; or the beak heads around the entrance of St Peter-in-the-East (St Edmund Hall) and St Mary’s in Iffley, which are – to put it once more in Carroll’s words – “indeed a queer-looking party“.

Junius Manuscript at the “Treasured“ Exhibition in the Weston Library
Chevron Ornaments with beak heads at St Peter-in-the-East (St Edmund Hall)
St. Mary’s (Iffley): West entrance with Chevron Ornaments including beak heads

A Mad Tea Party

As Alice learns during her Adventures, it often is not so much about what you do, but who you do it with. It makes a huge difference if you have a tea party with a mad hatter, a March Hare, and a dormouse or with your old aunt Agatha. It’s the people that make an event unforgettable. And that summarizes my summer school experience(s) quite nicely. Especially during the first week at the XML summer school, where I, as a medieval Germanist and foreigner to the digital world, only understood about 30% of what was being taught. However, I met so many fascinating, inspiring people and had interesting discussions, in which new perspectives opened up to me. The same holds for the Sommerakademie of the German Scholarship Foundation: Young people from all different subjects and backgrounds coming together, sharing ideas, knowledge and always a good laugh. That is why I regard tea breaks, lunches and dinners as an essential part of the summer school experience. They give you the chance to connect with other people, socialise, pick up interesting conversations, and, of course, enjoy the excellent food! (In that respect Teddy Hall excelled. But you need to be quick when it comes to pudding, otherwise you might face an empty tray and ask yourself: “WHO stole the tarts?“) Staying on the topic of food and socializing, I would advise everyone to visit the Coffee Mornings at the Weston every Friday at 11:30 am. Alongside tea, coffee and biscuits there is a talk on a different topic every week, so no matter which subject you are coming from, there will be something for you. It is a great opportunity to see some of the unique holdings of Oxford’s libraries and gain an insight into current research projects at the university.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the person who most prominently shaped my Oxford experience: Henrike Lähnemann. One thing is for sure, had I been interning for another Professor, the two weeks would have been less crazy, lacked fun, less memorable. So next time you think you hear the distant call of a trumpet, follow it! It might lead you into Wonderland…

Judith Habenicht is a German and History student at the University in Heidelberg who spent two weeks in Oxford on a placement with Henrike Lähnemann

Performing Medieval Studies

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30/09/2020

17:00

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Around Oxford, blog

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By Konstantin Winters

One year in the Medieval Germanosphere, or: Reflections on the strange, yet fitting relationship between language studies and performance art

When I arrived in Oxford one year ago, as an Erasmus intern taken in by Henrike Lähnemann, professor of Medieval German, I couldn’t have imagined how my weekly schedule and the work habits associated with it would turn out to be in the end.

The languages and dialects associated with the term Medieval German are dead, obviously. They are hypostatized as written text, unchanging and lifeless, and your relationship with them will only ever be a one-sided one, as you silently consult the bulky manuscripts in the depths of a library or their digital counterparts somewhere on a badly programmed web page. That was the way I had always treated Medieval Latin – as a fixed and atemporal entity, being a mere tool to express the lofty and otherworldly conceptual reality of theologians and scholars alike.

This began to change, however, when the acting started. There were only small gestures in the beginning, such as reading out loud the texts you were about to discuss in the Medieval German graduate colloquium. That was the ritual to be done at the beginning of each session, and one would have to just go along with the text to make it work. The relationship between language and acting became clearer when it subtly pervaded social events among medievalists, too. Celebrating a medieval compline in the crypt of Teddy Hall’s own St Peter in the East might not be an intuitive choice, – it is dusty, has the narrowest stairway imaginable and there are spiders everywhere! – but it is an authentic choice. And traditionally having one person dress up as St Nicholas at a get-together on the eve of the fifth of December to moderate the performance of the Christmas carols – while at the same time getting a bit tipsy himself from the good German Glühwein – seems to be rather a symptom of a more general phenomenon than just some spontaneous whim at this point. But: why exactly are we doing this?

Performance art is a new means of expression that literature scholars bring to the academic world. Their objection to the old mode of textual reception is that it doesn’t go beyond the abstract, or better: mediated. They want to put the text to action, to act it out, to take from it its mediate status and make it immediate. It doesn’t do, therefore, to just employ a categorial scheme to analyze a given text because every analysis has always already taken away the immediacy of its content. To perform something is the attempt at a mode of presentation capable of transcending the abstract and affecting its recipients in an immediate manner. It is in this theatrical setting that the scholar becomes a director. Of course it is not an academic theatre in the sense of a replacement of the old, but rather a theatre within academia, coexisting with and complementing the old.

Screenshot of a lecture capture of the Easterplay recordings

Screenshot of a lecture capture of the Easterplay recordings

My year in Oxford continued into January, and Henrike had already planned the next staging. Her Hilary lecture on medieval Easter plays were to be complemented by a two-person performance of the historical screenplay at the end of each session, and I was chosen as the second performer. (Watch the lecture series Easterplays recorded via the university lecture capture system panopto). I didn’t understand most of the textual content as they were written in some long-dead dialects of German I had no idea had even ever existed. Acting it out, however, this changed over the course of the term, as I gradually understood more of it, although in a more intuitive way. Most of the acting dynamics, I felt, didn’t go according to any preconceived plan, but were rather a matter of intuitively playing along. Towards the end of the term I learned about Oxford’s annual Easter play tradition and looked into some of the older performances from earlier years. Guess who was at the forefront every time? Language students. (Watch the Harrowing of Hell in Middle High German on the Mystery Cycle website)

The drama was at the artistic apex of ancient Greece, and no one captured its significance better than Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche, academically raised as a classical philologist, deliberately chose the novel as his genre of philosophical expression. His radical break with classical philosophy was less motivated by its contents, but more by the means of expression used to convey them. Only a gay science, the old organon of poetry-writing, of literary and dramatic art, would be able to express the human condition, the mode of us humans being in the world, without reducing us to the technical language of ossified metaphysics and morals. Fittingly, Nietzsche’s biggest and best known dispute didn’t involve another philosopher or academic in general, but Richard Wagner, the great German opera composer, for the allegedly heavy and exhausting atmosphere the latter created in his operas. Nietzsche himself prefers the light-hearted comedy, visualizing and detailed staging everything in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra to not only convey his philosophical message – which one may not entirely agree with – but also how it should be presented on stage. Sometimes Nietzsche even creates actor-characters within his literature, overtly hinting at its performative nature and complexifying the actor-character-relationship in the process.

Unfortunately, the real Easter play performance was cancelled due to the COVID19-pandemic steamrolling into each and every corner of society. But performance art as a means of exploration didn’t die then. The performances resumed, albeit in a much smaller fashion, by the end of July when it became possible again to meet up in small groups. By then, the very small performances were all recorded, without any live audience. The recording of the Hans Sachs dialogue between a catholic priest and a protestant cobbler involved a genuine medieval text and was recorded in one take over 45 minutes, though, without any warm-up. Performance art doesn’t need much preparation; it is just a matter of spontaneously going with the flow.

Fictional literature is never completely fixed. It think this lesson can be learned from all that. Every new reading creates its object anew; it is never just a bland repetition of something preexisting. Accordingly, performance art is not a scholarly method, let alone a scientific one. It is a reminder of this very incommensurability of all individual readings if you tried to grasp their essence in an abstract sense. In this eternal recurrence of new and unique readings and performances we do not seek to understand, but rather capitulate before the realization that in the end you can only choose to play along.

***

Konstantin Winters is a doctoral student in medieval history and philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf, editing part of the Commentary of the Sentences by William of Ware, a former Oxford student. During the academic year 2019/20, he worked as an Erasmus+ and DAAD funded intern at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.

Listen to Konstantin Winters…