Tag: medieval matters

Medieval Matters: Week 2

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16/10/2023

11:22

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News

,

I hope everyone is now settled back into the rhythm of term and is enjoying the start of the new academic year. Thank you to all who came to Meet the Medievalists last week: it was lovely to see so many of you in person. A letter from the Epistolae project highlights the difficulty of finding friends, and the joys that finally finding them can provoke:

Diu quaesivimus. Et confidimus, quia invenimus in te illum amicum, quem cupivimus et optavimus et speravimus.
[Long have we sought, and now we believe that we have found in you the friend whom we have wished, prayed, and hoped for.]
A letter (719-22) from Eangyth, abbess

If the past week has whetted your appetite for more medieval social events, or if you are still searching for the medievalist friend / colleague / collaborator you have been wishing and hoping for, you are in luck: this week features both the Oxford Medieval Society Welcome Drinks and Pub Quiz (Thursday) and the Medieval Coffee Morning (Friday). We hope to see many of you there!

This week’s blog post is written by Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach (Faculty of Music), on her new book, Medieval Sex Lives. The book is not only by an Oxford academic, but focuses on an Oxford manuscript, Bodleian Library MS Douce 308. To discover what the book is about, what inspired Prof. Leach to write it, and to find a discount code for 30% off, please view the blog post here. Prof. Leach also recently recorded a 1-hour programme on BBC R3 which aired on Guillaume de Machaut – it’s available on BBC sounds for the rest of October via https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qvs4.

Please see below for the week’s announcements, events, and opportunities.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • For the latest booklet updates, please consult the online copy here, which will be updated throughout the term. Please note in particular that the Medieval Archeology Seminar was omitted from the pdf copy of the booklet distributed last week. The seminar takes place on Mondays of even weeks at 3pm, Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures is also hosting events, in weeks 3 and 5, that now appear in the booklet. And the link to sign up for the Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music has now been included.
  • The Impact Report of the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages (OSRJL) is online – a fascinating overview of now two years of studying languages from Judaeo-Arabic to Yiddish.
  • Form and Function in Medieval Manuscripts: The Medieval Church and Culture seminar meets on Tuesday of 2nd week, 5pm, Bodleian Library, for a session with Dr Martin Kauffmann, Head of Early and Rare Collections.  Numbers are limited, so we all get close to the manuscripts, but there are still a few places left.  Email lesley.smith@history.ox.ac.uk.
  • New Dante Reading Group: Wednesdays, 17:30-19:00. Whether you are a dedicated Dante scholar or someone who has never gotten round to picking up the Comedy, the new Dante Reading Group is for you! Each week, we will be reading through and discussing a canto of the Divine Comedy in a relaxed and informal setting, delving into Dante’s language and imagination in manageable chunks. It is open to those with or without a knowledge of Italian, the reading being sent out in the original and in translation. Refreshments, both alcoholic and otherwise, will be provided! To register or ask any any questions, please email charles.west@regents.ox.ac.uk 
  • Oxford Medieval Society invites you to an evening of Welcome Drinks and a Pub Quiz! Join us at 6pm on Thursday 19th October, at the Old Law Library, All Souls College. Entry is £5, which includes not only drinks and nibbles, but also membership of the Society. Come and meet fellow medievalists and test your medieval trivia!”

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 16th October:

  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. A friendly venue to practice your Latin and palaeography on a range of texts and scripts over the year. Sign up to the mailing list to receive weekly updates and Teams invites. 
  • Queer and Trans Medievalisms: A Reading and Research Group meets at 3pm at Univ. All extremely welcome! This week’s discussion will centre Transpoetics. (Jos Charles’ feeld (2018) and Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s Of Mongrelitude (2017) with medieval lyrics(13th-15th c)). To join the mailing list and get texts in advance, or if you have any questions, email rowan.wilson@univ.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Archeology Seminar meets at 3pm at the Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. This week’s speaker will be John Blair, ‘Powerful women, dangerous women: female ritual equipment in England and the Rhineland, 550-700‘.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Sumner Braund (History of Science Museum, Oxford) ‘A Measure of Monastic Reform? New saints, ancient saints, and the re-forming of monastic communities in late 10th-century England‘. The seminar will also be available via Teams: the Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). Alternatively, it can be accessed via this link. If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Old Norse Reading Group meets at 5.30-7pm. We’ll be translating a range of exciting Old Norse texts! To join the mailing list, email ashley.castelino@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.

Tuesday 17th October:

  • The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12.15 in Lecture Theatre 2. This week’s speaker will be Victoria MacKenzie, ‘Imagining Margery and Julian: a reading and Q and A’. There will be a sandwich lunch provided afterwards. All welcome!
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm at The Weston Library. This week is a special Manuscript Showcase at the Weston Library. Please note that numbers are limited to a maximum of 20; please email Lesley Smith (lesley.smith@history.ox.ac.uk) to take part.

Wednesday 18th October:

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15, at Somerville College. We are discussing Konrad Fleck’s ‘Flore und Blancheflur’, starting with an introduction to the prologue by Marlene Schilling and a presentation on the Trier Floyis fragment by Nikolaus Ruge. Further information via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
  • The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets at 4-5pm on Teams. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Please contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies 66 St Giles and online via Microsoft Teams by clicking here. This week is a special OCBR lecture. This week’s speaker will be Adrian Jusupovic (The Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), ‘Byzantine Princess Ruling Rus‘.
  • The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Giosuè Fabiano (Courtauld Institute of Art), ”Illuminavit hunc diem’: Natural Lighting, Liturgical Time and Frescoes in late Medieval Italian Churches’. For queries, contact Elena Lichmanova (elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk).
  • Dante Reading Group meets at 5.30-7pm in St Anne’s College, Seminar Room 11. The group is open to those with or without a knowledge of Italian, the reading being sent out in the original and in translation. Refreshments, both alcoholic and otherwise, will be provided! To register or ask any any questions, please email charles.west@regents.ox.ac.uk 

Thursday 19th October:

  • The Medieval Hebrew Reading Group meets at 10-11am in Catherine Lewis Lecture Theatre, Clarendon Institute, and online via Zoom. In order to attend this reading group via Zoom, please register here. This reading group is an opportunity to practice reading directly from images of medieval Hebrew manuscripts in an informal setting. All skill levels are welcome! There will be coffee, tea and cake afterwards in the Common Room of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies for those attending in person. For further information, please email joseph.ohara@ames.ox.ac.uk.
  • As part of the Oxford International Song Festival, Henrike Lähnemann will present a programme of singing from Bodleian medieval manuscripts at St Edmund Hall, including a visit to the Norman crypt under St-Peter-in-the-East, 10am and 11:15am; both slots are currently sold out but we hope to record it.
  • The Environmental History Working Group meets at 12.30-2pm, in the History Faculty, Gerry Marton Room. This week’s speaker will be Ryan Mealiffe, “Clay Accumulators (Pigs and Piggy Banks): Intersections of Material Culture, Environment, and Symbolism in Majapahit Java and the Early Medieval West”. For further information, please contact ryan.mealiffe@wolfson.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Digital Editions Community of Practice Group meets at 1-2pm in the Taylor Institution Library Room 2. Each session will include a brief talk, followed by an opportunity for discussion. Hot water, tea, coffee, milk and biscuits will be provided. Please feel free to bring your own lunch (and a mug for the hot drinks!). This week’s speaker will be Lucian Shepherd, The Digital Documentation Process initiative.
  • The Medieval Women’s Writing Reading Group meets at 3-4pm in Lincoln College Lower Lecture Room. This week’s reading will be Epistolary networks around Hildegard of Bingen. Please email katherine.smith@lincoln.ox.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list and get texts in advance, or to find out more.
  • The Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music meets at 5-7pm, online via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Sam Barrett (University of Cambridge): ‘Newly Discovered Aquitanian Polyphony from c. 1100’. The discussants will be Andreas Haug (University of Würzburg) and Margot Fassler (University of Notre Dame). If you are planning to attend a seminar this term, please register using this form. For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have questions, please just send an email to all.souls.music.seminars@gmail.com. Please note, this address will now be the main point of contact for these seminars.
  • The Celtic Seminar meets at 5.15pm, in the History of the Book Room, English Faculty, and online via Teams. Please contact david.willis@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk if you need a link to join online. This week’s speaker will be Chantal Kobel (DIAS), ‘Secret writing and abstruse language in medieval Irish lawyers’ books’.
  • Oxford Medieval Society Welcome Drinks and Pub Quiz take place at 6pm in the Old Law Library, All Souls. Entry is £5 on the door, which includes the cost of drinks.

Friday 20th October:

  • The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.

Saturday 21st October:

  • Gifts and Books Day at the Weston library. Come to a special day celebrating the Gifts and Books Exhibition! Entrance is free, just drop in between 10.30-3.30pm. Highlights include a tour of Gifts and Books with exhibition curator, Dr Nicholas Perkins, discover how books transform lives with charity Give a Book: Prison Reading Groups, and enjoy 10% discount on the Gifts and Books exhibition book on the day in the Bodleian shop.

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Master Class: Digital Scholarly Editing (#mcdse2024) The master class takes place from 19th to 23rd February 2024 in Saarbrücken, at Saarland University. Participation is free of charge. The master class will provide you with theoretical and practical knowledge on digital scholarly editing und gives you the opportunity to discuss your own (digital) scholarly edition with peers and known experts. The language of instruction is English. Please check the school page (https://www.i-d-e.de/aktivitaeten/schools/masterclass-2024-saarbruecken/) for further details.
  • Assistant Professor of English (Medieval Literature): The Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University is seeking applicants for a full-time, tenure-track faculty position (#123400) in Medieval Literature (Old and Middle English) at the rank of assistant professor. The start date for this position is August 1, 2024.The successful candidate is expected to teach general education courses in composition and literature, undergraduate courses in medieval British Literature, and graduate courses in Old and Middle English and other medieval topics. Research specialization may be in either period. To see the full listing, go to: https://joblist.mla.org/job-details/8055/assistant-professor-of-english-medieval-literature-/?kw=middle+tennessee+state#top-pagination.

I hope you are enjoying the return of all of our seminars and reading groups. It has been such a joy to see so many old and new faces! Here is some appropriate wisdom from the Epistolae project on the joys of medievalist community:

ut dicitur: quid dulcius est, quam habeas illum, cum quo omnia possis loqui ut tecum?
[As is said: “What is sweeter than to have some one with whom you can talk of everything as with yourself?”]
A letter (719-22) from Eangyth, abbess
With apologies to Eangyth, I can certainly think of something sweeter than having “some one”: namely, having a whole community “with whom you can talk of everything as with yourself”! It is easy to forget just how lucky we are at Oxford to have such a huge collection of medievalists. I wish you a week of community, shared talks, and collaborative joy!

[Medievalists suitably excited by their colleague’s latest research discovery: one of the many advantages of having medievalist friends!]
St John’s College MS. 61, f. 37 v. 
By permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian

Medieval Matters: Week 1

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09/10/2023

14:04

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Around Oxford, News

,

On behalf of everyone here at OMS, I’d like to wish you a huge welcome (or welcome back) to Oxford Medieval Studies! Whether you are returning from your vac, or joining us for the first time, we are thrilled to have you here. This newsletter, and the medieval booklet (attached as a reduced-sized pdf to this week’s email, or viewable in full glory online here) will serve as your guide to all things medieval happening in and around Oxford.

In 2023/24, I will be taking the opportunity to feature extracts of letters from the Epistolae project, headed by Professor Joan Ferrante and based at Columbia University. Epistolae catalogues letters to and from medieval women. This open-access work was pioneering in digital humanities, feminist scholarship and open-access dissemination. In 2022, Epistolae was preserved as a static project and is now published by Columbia University Libraries. Featuring quotations from these letters is intended not only to link Oxford’s medievalists to an exciting resource outside of Oxford, but also to provide an inspirational and aspirational model for exciting interdisciplinary, boundary-pushing, open-access and digital humanities work. The values of the project align strongly with what OMS is trying to achieve as an international and interdisciplinary community invested in digital outreach, and I hope you enjoy reading the weekly quotations as much as I have enjoyed selecting them.  To learn more about the Epistolae project, see this youtube video.

On the same note, but turning closer to home: in 2023/24 each email will be accompanied by an image from the extremely newly digitised St John’s College MS 61, which is now available thanks to hard work by Sophie Bacchus-Waterman (Special Collections Photographer) and the Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Service.

Over the past ten years, OMS has become one of the largest communities of medievalists worldwide. There is a phenomenal breadth and diversity of research taking place at Oxford, and a wide range of exciting creative practice and public engagement activities. This year at OMS, we are hoping to feature one blog post each week to highlight the range of work going on, and to draw attention to the range of work that goes on here. We have a range of exciting blog posts coming up for you in future weeks, but this week we are starting with a blog post on blogging itself! Have a look for lots of helpful tips on using blogging to share your medieval research with a broader audience.

Please see below for the week’s announcements, events, and opportunities:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Meet the Medievalists: Join us on Tuesday 10th October at 5pm at Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College for a social start to the year! This will include an announcement for the
  • OMS Small Grants scheme MT23 which is now open! The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. For full details, see our blog post or meet us at Meet the Medievalists to see what small grant recipients did last year!
  • New Journal: We are pleased to announce the publication of a new journal, Manuscript and Text Cultures, from the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures, Oxford. The Centre is an academic hub for interdisciplinary activities related to the study of pre-modern manuscript and epigraphic traditions from around the world. Issues 1 & 2 of the journal are now available. Issue 2, Navigating the Text: Textual Articulation and Division in Pre-Modern Cultures can be read online at https://mtc-journal.org
  • New Book Publication: Jane Bliss is pleased to announce the publication of Douglas Gray’s last book From Fingal’s Cave to Camelot. Jane writes: ‘After Gray’s death, I was given access to his files and, since I knew what he was working on, produced two books. The first, Make We Merry More and Less, is available from Open Book Publishers in the normal way. This one was published by me privately.’ For the pdf, please contact (jane.bliss@lmh.oxon.org). Print copies are also available: Jane will send a copy on receipt of 17 pounds plus postage (to cover the printing costs).

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 9th October:

  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. A friendly venue to practice your Latin and palaeography on a range of texts and scripts over the year. Sign up to the mailing list to receive weekly updates and Teams invites.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Andrew Jotischky (RHUL) ‘Graze, Forage, Cook: authenticity and authority in medieval monastic reform‘. The seminar will also be available via Teams: the Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). Alternatively, it can be accessed via this link. If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.

Tuesday 10th October:

  • The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12.15 in Lecture Theatre 2. This week’s speaker will be David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania), National Epics [nationalepics.com]: The Elusive Case of England. There will be a sandwich lunch provided afterwards. All welcome!
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm at Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College. This week is ‘Meet the Medievalists’ – a special social event, with introduction to Oxford Medieval Studies (OMS). Come for a cuppa and hear what’s in store with OMS this term. All are welcome!
  • The Medieval French Research Seminar will meet at the Maison Francaise d’Oxford on Norham Road. Drinks will be available from 5pm; presentations start at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Laura Endress (Zurich) ‘Missing links or contaminated witnesses? Exploring the manuscript tradition of the Suite-Vulgate du Merlin‘. All are welcome! For more information or to be added to the seminar maillist, please contact helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk.

Wednesday 11th October:

  • All Souls Library Open Day for Oxford Students will be held at 10-12 and 1-5pm at All Souls, Catte Street Entrance. Come and see the Library and apply to be a Reader. No food and drink, but for today only, photography is allowed! No booking needed, but you will need to bring your University Card to get in through the entrance.
  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15am, at Somerville College. In Michaelmas Term, we are going to discuss the forthcoming study edition by Christine Putzo of Konrad Fleck’s ‘Flore und Blancheflur’. We will meet in Almut Suerbaum’s office in Somerville College. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann. This week we will have a shorter organisational meeting.
  • The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets at 4-5pm on Teams. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Please contact Michael Stansfield (michael.stansfield@new.ox.ac.uk) for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies 66 St Giles and online via Microsoft Teams by clicking here. This week’s speaker will be Stratis Papaioannou (National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens), ‘Portraits of the Reader during the Middle Byzantine Period’.

Thursday 12th October:

  • The Medieval Hebrew Reading Group meets at 10-11am in Catherine Lewis Lecture Theatre, Clarendon Institute, and online via Zoom. In order to attend via Zoom, please register here. This reading group is an opportunity to practice reading directly from images of medieval Hebrew manuscripts in an informal setting. All skill levels are welcome! There will be coffee, tea and cake afterwards in the Common Room of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies for those attending in person. For further information, please email joseph.ohara@ames.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Germanic Reading Group meets at 4pm, online via Zoom. Please contact Howard Jones Howard.Jones@sbs.ox.ac.uk to request the handouts and to be added to the list. This week’s reading will be OHG Otfrid extracts (Howard Jones leading).
  • The Celtic Seminar meets at 5pm, online via Zoom. Please contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk for the link. This week’s speaker will be Martin Crampin (CAWCS), ‘Emblems of the Past: saints, stained glass and early medieval antiquitie’.
  • The Oxford Bibliographical Society meets for a lecture at 5.15pm in the Weston Library lecture theatre. This week’s speaker will be  William P. Stoneman (formerly Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Harvard University’s Houghton Library), ‘A Golden Collector of the Golden Age’: Charles Walker Clark (1871-1933) and his library of incunables’. The talk is hosted jointly with the Bodleian’s Centre for the Study of the Book. We will also be streaming the talk on Zoom; if you would like to get the link, do please get in touch with sarah.cusk@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Old Occitan Literature Workshop meets at 5-6pm at St Hugh’s College, 74 Woodstock Road, Office A4. The topic of this week’s meeting will be ‘Is this… Fin’amor?’ (Jaufre Rudel (1125-48): Vida, “Lanquand li jorn son loc en mai”; Bernart de Ventadorn (1147-70): Vida, “Can vei la lauzeta mover”). To sign up, or for any other queries, email Kate Travers: katherine.travers@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk. 

Friday 13th October:

  • The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
  • The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm, in the Julia Mann Room, St Hilda’s College, and Zoom. Please let us know if you would like to attend, either in person or on Zoom; reminders including the Zoom link will be sent to those who have expressed interest. To register interest, or for more information, please contact Jane Bliss jane.bliss@lmh.oxon.org and/or Stephanie stephanie.hathaway@gmail.com.

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Codicology Workshops: 25 October, 15 November and 29 November, 1:30-3pm, Horton Seminar Room, Weston Library. This series of workshops using the Bodleian Special Collections is aimed at Oxford University postgraduate students who wish to learn more about the history of the book, with a particular focus on its construction and materiality. Sessions will cover various aspects of medieval and early modern codicology, from ink to binding, from page to provenance. The originality of this series lies in the fact that the sessions are taught by Bodleian curators, researchers and conservators, bringing together their expertise and different approaches to the book. Sessions focus on inks and pigments, writing surfaces, bindings, decoration and provenance, and are offered in Medieval Studies, History and English. For more information and to register: bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
  • Teaching with manuscripts. Monday 4 Dec. (week 9), Horton Room, Weston Library, 2-3.30pm. This workshop is for anyone involved in small-group teaching who is considering incorporating medieval manuscript material in their classes. We will cover the practicalities of arranging classes and selecting material and explore what works and doesn’t work in the classroom. Contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk to register.
  • Call for Social Media Contributions: Are you passionate about medieval studies and public engagement? Would you like to share your research with a wider audience? Oxford Medieval Studies is looking for volunteers at any and all career stages to share fun medieval facts and stories or the most interesting parts of their research in one-minute video clips that will be posted across all our social media channels. Get in touch with ashley.castelino@lincoln.ox.ac.uk for more details.

It is always such a joy to welcome everyone back to Oxford, but also see new faces. Whether you have been here many years or just a few days, here is some wisdom from the Epistolae project as we start the term (and year):

quamdiu vigilatis, aut lectione aut […] aliqua utili cogitatione sive intentione sit occupatum
[as long as you are awake, keep your heart busy always and everywhere with reading or […] some useful reflection or intention]
A letter (1094) from Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury to Matilda of Wilton

I wish you all a productive and reflective term, and look forward to appearing in your inboxes every week with the latest Medievalist happenings. May you have a week filled with reading and / or useful reflection, and may your heart be ‘busy always’ during this academic year!

[A busy Medievalist always keeps their copy of the Medieval Booklet close to hand]
St John’s College MS. 61, f. 40 r. 
By permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian
 

Medieval Matters: Welcome Back!

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02/10/2023

14:37

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News

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It is now 0th week, which means that the new academic year has officially begun! We have so much in store for you this year at OMS, but whilst we wait for full term to begin, this week will bring a look back over everything that happened in 2022/23. Our impact report for 2022/23 is now published! I hope this will whet your appetites for things to come, and start the year off right by celebrating the amazing strength of our interdisciplinary community!

When I first joined OMS as a new postdoc in 2021, I was immediately struck by the tremendous scope of Oxford’s medieval community. Two years have passed, and I am still continually delighted and surprised by the great range of offerings we have, and the great diversity of work going on at Oxford. In 2022/23, there were an astounding 39 different medieval seminars, societies and reading groups, ranging from the Celtic Seminar to the Invisible East Seminar to Queer and Trans Medievalisms. There were eleven different language-specific groups (from Anglo-Norman to Old Norse); work ranging from the post-classical (Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar) to the immediate present day (Medieval Misuse Reading Group); and an incredible disciplinary range including archaeology, heraldry, history, literatures and languages, manuscript studies, music, numismatics, theology, and visual culture. Every year, there are new contributions, and one of the greatest joys of this work has been seeing new reading groups and societies blossom into long-standing mainstays of the weekly newsletter. 


But don’t just take my word for it: here are some statistics that highlight the astounding size and reach of our work. Over 850 people receive the Medieval Matters newsletter every week, and last year we had over 1,300 different visitors to the blog. Our reach extends far beyond Oxford itself: last year we had significant numbers of blog hits from the USA, Australia, Spain, Poland, Germany, China, France and Singapore. We have accounts on Twitter (currently at a strong 5823 followers), Facebook (914 followers), Instagram (654 followers), Mastodon (503 followers), YouTube (266 subscribers), TikTok (160 followers), and Threads (106 followers). Actual engagement is more difficult to judge and varies quite widely across platforms and their respective ever-changing algorithms but our most popular TikTok, which was Alison Ray talking about transferable skills in an archivist career, has 127 likes and 2001 views as of today, and our most viewed YouTube video appears to be James McGrath’s Bodleian Coffee Morning on Mandaean manuscripts, with 618 views. 

All of this is to say: medieval studies is flourishing at Oxford. As Communications Officer, my primary job is to bring together this enormous, vibrant community to foster interdisciplinary communication and to spotlight the very many happenings across the university (and beyond!). I am also extremely lucky to be able to work alongside both Oxford’s most long-serving academics and its very youngest, newest researchers. My role is twinned with work for the Humanities Division mentoring the Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies MSt students, and it has been a consistent joy to see so many bright young medievalists bringing new and exciting interdisciplinary approaches to our community. 

I hope you enjoy the impact report, which sums up the wealth of offerings and scholarship that happened at Oxford last year. It has been an honour to be at the helm of this, and I look forward to continuing to be your guide for 2023/24.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Medieval Booklet Michaelmas Term 2023. The first draft of the booklet is now available for viewing! To get a sneak peek at everything happening this term, please click here. If you have forgotten to send in your submission, please send it in before next Friday, when the final pdf version will be uploaded ready for distribution with Medieval Matters Week 1.
  • Medieval Blog Submissions. This year we are hoping to feature a greater range of blog posts to highlight Oxford’s vibrant medievalist community. We would like to have one blog post per week, and are currently looking for volunteers for MT. If you have a project / book release / manuscript that you would like to highlight, please do contact me. The OMS blog is seen by medievalists in and outside of Oxford and is a great place to showcase the achievements of our medieval community.
  • New Graduate Students / Staff Members. If you are the convenor of a medieval-focussed MSt/MPhil, have new DPhil students, know of new medieval staff members or are hosting visiting scholars, please send me a list of all of their email addresses so that I can sign them up for the mailing list. Alternatively, please distribute the following self-service link to allow them to sign up: https://web.maillist.ox.ac.uk/ox/subscribe/medieval-news.

SAVE THE DATE:

Tuesday 10th October:

  • Oxford Medieval Studies Social and Steering Group: We warmly invite you to join us for medievalist revelry to welcome in the new academic year, kindly hosted by the Medieval Church and Culture seminar. Further details to follow!

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • CFP: The Medieval Translator. Translation, Memory, and Politics in the Medieval World – To be hosted by the Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, 17-21 June 2024. We invite submissions that address these themes and related topics in the context of the medieval world. Papers may be given in English, French or Portuguese, and should be twenty minutes long. Please send a 500-word abstract, an essential bibliography and a brief curriculum vitae by 15 October 2023 to: medtransl_lisbon2024@letras.ulisboa.pt . For full details, please see the blog post here.
  • Assistant/Associate Professor of Medieval Literature & Language (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): The English Department at the University of Tennessee invites applications for a tenure-track assistant or associate professor in medieval literature and language, capable of teaching courses in both the Old English and Middle English periods, with a research specialization in either field. We particularly welcome candidates with interest in one or more of the following areas: digital humanities, medical humanities, and the global Middle Ages. (Deadline: November 1, 2023) https://apply.interfolio.com/130790
  • Assistant Professor of Classics in Medieval Latin & Digital Manuscript Studies (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): The Department of Classics has been authorized to make an appointment in Latin language and literature at the rank of tenure-track Assistant Professor. The expertise sought is Medieval Latin with a special interest in digital manuscript studies. This faculty member will teach undergraduate students in our department as well as train graduate students in UT’s Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The successful candidate will have strong promise of scholarly achievement, demonstrated excellence in teaching Latin, as well as the ability to teach Medieval and Classical Latin, paleography, and digital manuscript studies, and to contribute to our departmental curriculum of large and small courses in classical civilization, literature, or mythology. (Deadline: October 31, 2023) https://apply.interfolio.com/130669
  • Assistant Professor in Early Modern French Studies (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): The Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Tennessee flagship campus in Knoxville is seeking applications for a full-time, 9-month tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor in early modern French studies, with a focus on the 18th century, to begin August 1, 2024. To broaden our programs, innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to the field, such as Transatlantic studies, diaspora studies, medical humanities, and/or environmental humanities, are especially welcome. Expertise in theater is also desirable. (Deadline: November 1, 2023) https://apply.interfolio.com/131961
  • Assistant Professor in the History of Gender and/or Sexuality (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): The History Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor appointment in history with a focus on gender and/or sexuality from any world region or chronological period. Scholars whose research and teaching will complement the department’s current areas of strength are urged to apply. The position has a 2/2 teaching load. The successful candidate will teach introductory-level survey courses as well as upper division and graduate courses in the candidate’s area of expertise. (Deadline: October 1, 2023) https://apply.interfolio.com/130760
  • Assistant Professor in the History of Early Modern or Modern East Asia (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): The Department of History at the University of Tennessee invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professorship in the History of Early Modern or Modern East Asia (since 1500) outside of China. The research specialty is open and may treat any country or region within that scope. Applicants working in borderlands, cross-cultural contact, environment, migration, or science and medicine are encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will teach an undergraduate world history survey (1500 CE-present) and offer upper division and graduate courses in the area of specialty to complement our current strengths. (Deadline: October 15, 2023) https://apply.interfolio.com/130738
  • Associate Professor or Professor of Old Norse (St John’s College / English Faculty, Oxford): St John’s College and the Faculty of English invite applications from suitably qualified candidates for a Tutorial Fellowship and Associate Professorship in Old Norse, to be appointed with effect from 1 September 2024 or as soon as possible thereafter. The successful candidate will be both an Official Fellow and Tutor in English at St John’s, and a member of the Faculty of English. For full details, please click here.
  • Official (Tutorial) Fellowship in English at The Queen’s College and Associate Professorship or Professorship of Literature in English: The Queen’s College and the Faculty of English are seeking to recruit an Official (Tutorial) Fellow in English and Associate Professor or Professor of Literature in English to start on 1st September 2024 or as soon as possible thereafter. Applications are invited from well-qualified candidates with research expertise in the field of literature in English in the period from 1450-1550. This may include specialisms in areas such as medieval and early Tudor drama, early Scottish literature, women’s writing, or Henrician court literature. We also encourage applicants with comparative and global interests. The Faculty and College are strongly committed to encouraging diverse and inclusive approaches to literary study. For full details, please click here.

Finally, some wisdom from the Epistolae project on my hopes for the year as the Communications Officer:

Epistolam non ficta, sed fideli caritate et firma tibi a me missam suscipere, legere, audire atque exaudire dignare.
[Deign to receive, read, listen to and take notice of this letter which I am sending to you not with feigned but with faithful and strong charity]
A letter (1102-03) from Matilda of Scotland, queen of the English to Anselm of Canterbury

I interpret this to mean: may all of your emails be received, read, listened to, and answered with charity! Wishing you a week of charitable email replies, and I look forward to sending you our first full Medieval Matters of the year next week.

[A Medievalist looks at once back on the successes of the year just passed, and forward to the exciting year to come!]
St John’s College MS. 61, f. 47 v. 
By permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian
 

Conference ‘Articulation of Silence from a Gendered Perspective’

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25/09/2023

12:20

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The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (https://cmtc.queens.ox.ac.uk) will host the international conference ‘Articulation of Silence from a Gendered Perspective’ on the 26th, 27th, and 28th of September.

The main objective of this conference is to investigate the articulation of silence in text and manuscript cultures in different premodern traditions (https://mtc-journal.org/index.php/mtc) (Greece, Medieval Europe, China, Japan, Korea, India, ancient Egypt and the Middle East), from a (global?) gendered perspective. We define here ‘silence’ as an expression of the act of the non-articulation in texts and manuscripts of different genres and written on different kinds of material carriers, and invite papers that ‘unmute the muted’ or ‘hear the unheard’. By adopting a gendered perspective in the study of silence, we encourage scholars to be attentive to the silence of both individuals and groups that belong to the non-dominant social, political, and intellectual class in their respective cultures. The conference aims to bring together a diverse group of speakers, including both junior researchers and experienced scholars, coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, with the goal of fostering a lively interdisciplinary debate on the topic.

The conference will take place in the Lucina Ho Room of the China Centre from 9.30am to 5pm on the 26th, from 10am to 7pm on the 27th, and from 9am to 1pm on the 28th.

Conference ‘Articulation of Silence from a Gendered Perspective’
University Oxford, China Centre, Dickson Poon Building, Canterbury Rd, Oxford OX2 6LU September 26th–28th 2023

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Silencing of the voices of ‘the others’ as expressed in the texts
  • Female strategies to control the male narrative and male voices, and vice-versa
  • Strategies of the texts in prioritising the male over the female voices
  • Cases of disregard or disrespect of female and other voices, turning them into silence
  • The materiality of voicing gendered silence
  • The material contexts of gendered silence
  • Reception strategies of dealing with queer voices in manuscriptsThe conference aims to bring together a diverse group of speakers, including both junior researchers and experienced scholars, coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, with the goal of fostering a lively interdisciplinary debate on the topic.Our aim is that the papers presented at the conference will be published in the 2025 spring volume of the journal Manuscript and Text Cultures.Organizers: Dirk Meyer (University of Oxford), Lisa Indraccolo (Tallinn University), Stefka G. Eriksen (University of Oslo)

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

26TH SEPTEMBER
9:30 –10:00 OPENING SPEECHES AND INTRODUCTION (Meyer/Eriksen/Indraccolo)

10:00 –10:15: COFFEE BREAK

10:15–12:00 FIRST SESSION: SILENCE AND THE BODY Chair: Dirk Meyer (University of Oxford)

Stefka G. Eriksen (University of Oslo)

“Women Controlling the Narrative in Old Norse Culture: Silencing the Male Voice and Obstructing the Male Gaze”

Andreas Serafim (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun)
“Making silence speak: Body behaviour and kinaidia in ancient literature”

12:00 –14:00 LUNCH BREAK

14:00–15:45 SECOND SESSION: SILENCE AND MATERIAL CULTURE Chair: Stefka G. Eriksen (University of Oslo)

Elizabeth Frood (University of Oxford)
“She is spoken for: self-presentation and presenting female selves in ancient Egyptian temple statues”

Vincent Debiais (EHESS Paris)
“Gendered Silence & Gendered Images in the Latin West”

15:45–16:15: COFFEE BREAK 16:15: 17:00 ROUND-UP DAY 1

27TH SEPTEMBER
10:00–11:45 THIRD SESSION: SILENCE AND THE AUTHORIAL SELF Chair: Dirk Meyer (University of Oxford)

Elsa Kueppers (Ruhr University Bochum)
“Beyond the Inner Room: Records of (Imagined) Journeys by Chosŏn Korean Women”

Julia Rüthemann (EHESS, Paris)
“Female silence and authorship in late medieval courtly first-person narratives”

11:45–14:00 LUNCH BREAK

14:00–15:45 FOURTH SESSION: SILENCE, LITERARY CULTURE AND THE CANON Chair: Lisa Indraccolo (Tallinn University)

Dirk Meyer (University of Oxford)
“You are (not) muted: gendered power structures of silence in the Shī manuscripts of Ānhuī University”

Jennifer Guest (University of Oxford)
“Silence in the Pillow Book: the power of missing texts in the early medieval Japanese court”

15:45–16:15: COFFEE BREAK

16:15 –17:45 FIFTH SESSION: SILENCE AND TRANSGRESSION Chair: Stefka G. Eriksen (University of Oslo)

Lisa Indraccolo (Tallinn University)
“Girls Gone Bad – ‘Evil women’ and the gendered use of silence as a control tool in early China”

Kate Crosby (University of Oxford)

“Unheard, unseen and central: the long shadow cast modern Theravada by early struggles with female agency”

17:45-19:00 ROUND-UP DAY 2

28th SEPTEMBER
9:00–10:45 SIXTH SESSION: SILENCE AND DISOBEDIENCE/DISSENT Chair: Dirk Meyer (University of Oxford)

Thomas Crone (IKGF Erlangen–Nürnberg)
“Silence as a Sign of (Male) Powerlessness? The Case of the Western Han Manuscript Wang Ji 妄稽 (Ms. Baseless)”

10:45–11:15 COFFEE BREAK
11:15 –13:00 FINAL ROUND-UP DISCUSSION

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BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Stefka G. Eriksen (University of Oslo)

“Women Controlling the Narrative in Old Norse Culture: Silencing the Male Voice and Obstructing the Male Gaze“

A popular motive in medieval literature encompasses the meeting between a woman and a man, when, for various reasons, the woman either demands of the man that he does not tell anyone about her (she controls his voice/ demands silence of him), or she does not allow him to see her (she controls his gaze/ makes him non-seeing). This motive gets realized in a number of Old Norse translations too from the middle of the thirteenth century, such as some of the short stories of the Strengleikar-collection (based on lais of Marie de France), or Old Norse translations of romances by Chrétien de Troyes and Partalopi saga (based on Partonopeu de Blois). In this paper, I will investigate how the topic of female control of the male voice and gaze is adapted to the Old Norse cultural context, by comparing the Old Norse translations to their European sources and to other indigenous Old Norse texts containing similar motives. A secondary main question in this investigation will be whether speaking/ non-speaking and seeing/ non-seeing may be seen as parallel affordances or handicaps in medieval culture and whether they were related to gender differently.

Andreas Serafim (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun)

“Making silence speak: Body behaviour and kinaidia in ancient literature”

This paper puts forward the argument that kinaidia, roughly referring to passive homosexuality and effeminate deportment, is reflected in nonverbal and inarticulate body markers that most succinctly describe self, what one does (akin to the theories of S. de Beauvoir) to be. The purpose of the paper is threefold: first, to explore passages that have been largely underexamined in scholarship (e.g. Archilochus fr. 327 and 328 which are notable in presenting a kinaidos as having the embodied and moral markers of a bad prostitute); second, to exploit textual (Book of Physiognomy, 4th century AD) and non-textual sources (the Kroisos Kouros and the discus- thrower by the sculptor Myron) to present a physiognomic vignette of the hoplite, which stands in sharp contrast to that of a kinaidos, as argued in Aeschines 2.150-151; and third, to substantiate the claims that involuntary and unconscious bodily reactions indicate kinaidic identity. Diogenes Laertius 7.173 and Dio Chrysostom 33.53-54 make, specifically, the case that sneezing reveals kinaidia because of uncontrolled embodied performance, especially regarding sound, gesticulation, and stature. The silent human body has its own ways to speak volumes about the sex and gender of individuals.

Elizabeth Frood (University of Oxford)

“She is spoken for: self-presentation and presenting female selves in ancient Egyptian temple statues”

She is gracious. She is hospitable. She is grieving. And, most usually, she is silent. These are conventional characterisations of elite women in Egypt’s New Kingdom and early Third Intermediate Period (ca. 1539 – 715 BCE) as incorporated into the monumental display of their male relatives or, very rarely, into their own separate memorials. This paper explores the implications of such self-fashioning, particularly through temple statues and the voices that are occasionally ascribed to women on them. Although these representations in image and text were almost certainly designed and composed by men, in itself deepening women’s silence, they may offer ways to reconsider the material, performative presence of some (statue) individuals in temple environments. This is especially the case in the early first millennium BCE when possibilities for independent female self-presentations were expanding.

Vincent Debiais (EHESS Paris)

“Gendered Silence & Gendered Images in the Latin West”

Art from the Western Middle Ages has transformed silence into images. This visual singularity, which transfers something that cannot be heard into something that can be seen, is linked to the fact that silence, in the context of the Christian culture of asceticism and prayer, is both a social practice of speech control and a theoretical principle allowing the revelation and expression of realities that escape verbal language. These figures of silence in medieval art use color, geometry, or ornament, but they are also embodied in human figures who describe the experience of silence or participate in its regulation, especially within the monastery. In this paper focusing on images produced in monastic context in the Latin West between the 9th and 14th centuries, we will try to show that the gender of painted or sculpted figures denotes certain properties or qualities of silence and that they seek to make them resonate with the social environments to which they are intended. We will thus question the possible specificities of the silence of the monk and the nun, and the way in which it was put into image, analyzing the distortions, incongruities and theological or practical discourses produced on the gender of silence during the Middle Ages.

Elsa Kueppers (Ruhr University Bochum)

“Beyond the Inner Room: Records of (Imagined) Journeys by Chosŏn Korean Women”

This presentation explores the nexus of travel and writing, illustrating how these components constituted a transcending of boundaries—both spatial and societal—for elite women during the later Chosŏn Dynasty (16th-19th c.). Facing increasing societal restrictions rooted in the Confucian state ideology, these women were relegated to a secluded life within the “inner room” (kyujung 閨中), emblematic of the private sphere. However, there is evidence that many of these women yearned to venture beyond these confines, as vividly reflected in their records of imagined and actual journeys. As autonomous continuations of their journeys, the written accounts inscribe the women’s unique lived experiences with heightened significance and submit them into the literary space traditionally reserved for men. This makes them a testimony to a twofold trespassing: first, leaving the confines of the private sphere, and second, breaking silence by articulating these experiences in literature. Examining the self-narratives of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, Nam Ŭiyudang, and Kim Kŭmwŏn, the presentation seeks to illuminate how these authors maintained the delicate balance between the societal expectations for female silence and seclusion and the authentic expression of their voices.

Julia Rüthemann (EHESS, Paris)

“Female silence and authorship in late medieval courtly first-person narratives”

In late medieval first-person narratives about love, a text group spread throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages, it is usually a male author-narrator who tells his love experience with a young woman, authorizing him as lover and as author. His beloved appears as silenced love object out of reach with a symbolic value as in the Roman de la Rose (13th century) or – even if she functions as a co-creater of the text (as in the Roman de la Poire, 13th century) ‒ as textual projection ofthe male author. Moreover, at times, the beloved is super-posed with the allegory of love, being a mediating abstract principle that inspires the author to create poetry rather than a human person with her own voice. First, the paper aims to examine the link between female silence, allegory and authorship in love narratives by broadening the perspective on underlying medieval conceptions about language. The paper will then discuss the case of Christine de Pizan (1365-ca. 1430), a female author writing in French. When adopting the first-person stance and writing about love, it becomes obvious that she grapples with the function attributed to the female in courtly first-person narratives. She develops several creative strategies to be in the position of a female author: distancing herself from courting and stressing her role of the widow while telling the love stories of others or speaking from the position of allegory while breaking it open. When it comes to telling a love experience, not everyone is able to say “I” and be an author, or not in the same way ‒ depending on gender.

Dirk Meyer (University of Oxford)

“You are (not) muted: gendered power structures of silence in the Shī manuscripts of Ānhuī University”

A most common phrase of the years 2020/2021 was ‘you are muted’ (or: ‘you are on mute’), followed closely by ‘unmute yourself’. The two sentences display an intriguing power structure, one where the muted finds themselves in a subordinate position to the unmuted, but nonetheless, one where the muted does have the power, within limits, to unmute themselves. Many songs of the Shī 詩 (Songs) of the States (guó 國) in China of antiquity present a similar power dynamic. Often this dynamic is gendered. More so in the Ānhuī University Manuscripts (Ān Dà Shī) of the fourth century BC than in the Máo recension of the Western Hàn (202 BC–AD 9), we find an overbearing male narrative voice which is leaving little or no room for the female to articulate a response. But the female experience generally finds a way to re-frame the often- objectifying male gaze, which then affords power to the female to take the initiative. In this article, we analyse the strategies taken in some Shī-songs of the Ān Dà Shī to reframe the male perspective, so the female experience comes to voice even if the female persona of the song remains ‘muted’.

Jennifer Guest (University of Oxford)

“Silence in the Pillow Book: the power of missing texts in the early medieval Japanese court”

The Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi), an eclectic collection of lists and personal anecdotes by the Heian lady-in-waiting Sei Shōnagon (active c. 1000CE), has often been read in terms of its presumed silences. At one level, there is its refusal to give voice to tragedy: its central figure is Shōnagon’s patron, Empress Teishi, who was ultimately sidelined by rivals and died young — but against the backdrop of a literary culture that usually elevated poignant and melancholy themes,Shōnagon wrote nothing directly about Teishi’s sad fate or the decline of her court salon. At other levels, there are the gaps Shōnagon leaves in her depiction of court life, and her use of strategic silence as a storytelling technique, with many anecdotes centred on a missing poem or allusion. This talk explores another intersecting set of silences: the recurring concern with lost or unvoiced texts that runs throughout the Pillow Book, connecting stories about memory, loyalty, and the social uses of literary knowledge. In linking these various layers of silence, I will consider how both the absence and the silent presence of certain texts can be related to the author’s position as a woman, and specifically a lady-in-waiting, suggesting how the experience and performance of texts was gendered in the Heian court, and what creative possibilities this allowed.

Lisa Indraccolo (Tallinn University)

“Girls Gone Bad – ‘Evil women’ and the gendered use of silence as a control tool in early China”

Collection of stories of virtuous types, including women, often with a strong moralizing undertone, are a rather flourishing literary genre in China since ancient times (Kinney 2014). Filial daughters, deferential wives, devoted daughters-in-law, wise and attentive mothers: these are the roles prescribed for women in early China (ca. 6th cent. B.C.–2nd cent. A.D.) that they are required to embrace and in which they are expected to thrive at different stages of their lives, setting an example for future generations (Holmgren 1981; Nylan 2002). However, there is another side to this coin. Intellectually gifted, witty, shrewd and unconventional figures of unapologetically deviant, “problematic” women are also present in the literature (Fracasso 2005). As consequence for breaking social boundaries and conventions, they are typically silenced and presented in a bad light, accused of being promiscuous and corrupting men who have the disgrace of crossing their paths (Hinsch 2012). Often – but not invariably – deprived of a voice of their own, in the received literature they are blamed and condemned without appeal – a case in point being for instance the famous dialogue between Confucius and Lady Nánzi 南子 reported in the Confucian Analects (Lúnyǔ 論語) (Milburn 2010), the content of which remains shrouded in mystery. However, despite being silenced, some of these charismatic figures still play a fundamental role in the intellectual and literary landscape of the period. Also, certain sources are deliberately ambiguous, or at least somewhat less critical, when describing these “evil women,” some of whom are actual historical figures, and even allow the possibility for them to speak up for themselves. Through the analysis of selected cases of “evil women” drawn from pre-imperial and early imperial received sources, the present paper explores the ideological, moralizing and rhetorical use of silence to control women’s behaviour in early China.

Kate Crosby (University of Oxford)

“Unheard, unseen and central: the long shadow cast over modern Theravada by early struggles with female agency”

The attitudes towards women voiced in the early Buddhist canon are inconsistent. Sure, they are capable of enlightenment. Yet after the Buddha reluctantly allows women to become nuns, he then declares that their inclusion will wreak havoc, halving like a disease the lifespan of the religion that he has spent years designing to ensure its longevity. Sure, lust is an unwholesome mental state, a problem in the beholder not the beheld. Yet the monastic-centric texts at the same time convey women as dangerous temptresses ‘even when dying’. This paper provides some examples of how this background continues to set the tone in Theravada practice, and how it has obscured for both practitioners and scholars, the centrality of female agency, both actual and symbolic, in traditional Theravada literary and meditation practices.

Thomas Crone (IKGF Erlangen–Nürnberg)
“Silence as a Sign of (Male) Powerlessness? The Case of the Western Han Manuscript Wang Ji

妄稽 (Ms. Baseless)”

Wang Ji is a Western Han (202–9 BCE) narrative poem obtained by Peking University in 2009, along with several other looted bamboo manuscripts. The text depicts the eponymous and explicitly fictional wife Wang Ji (literally, “Baseless” or “Unattested”) and her jealousy of the concubine/secondary wife/female slave (qie 妾) Yu Shi 虞士. Although the poem caters to the notion common at the time that women should only express dissent and criticism if it was for the benefit of their male counterparts, a closer look reveals that the domestic hierarchies and role distribution displayed by the narrative of the Wang Ji poem draw a significantly different picture. As I will argue in my paper, the silence of Wang Ji’s in-laws and husband towards her initially polite and later increasingly violent forms of protest indicates an intellectual helplessness and social powerlessness that rarely surfaces in traditionally transmitted texts from the same period. Compared to many traditional narratives, in which marriages and domestic life are generally characterized by female loyalty and obedience, Wang Ji represents an odd and provocative counter-example, highlighting the potentially adversarial nature of gender relations during the early Han era.

Medieval Matters: Week 8

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12/06/2023

10:55

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Here we are at the end of the academic year! It seems like just yesterday that I was sending the first email of Michaelmas. Thank you to everyone who has organised seminars and reading groups, given papers, hosted events and conferences, and contributed to our rich community at Oxford. It’s been the busiest OMS year on record, and it’s been so wonderful to see our medievalist community thriving. In the words of Alcuin:

Nihil laudabilis est in homine, quam sapientiae decus et caritatis affectus
[Nothing is more praiseworthy in a person than the glory of wisdom and the goodwill of love, Ep. 290]

According to this, Oxford’s medievalists are very praiseworthy indeed! We would like to celebrate our community in an annual record publication, recounting the highlights of the year. All events included in the newsletters will be included as a matter of course, but if you have published a book, held a special event, or given a special paper, or would just like to send a paragraph about your seminar/reading group, we would love to hear from you! See our blog post for more information. All submissions must be received by August 20th.

We have a bumper list of events this week. For a list of all events taking place after the end of this week, please see the end of the events section:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Celebrating OMS 2022/23: Call for Submissions: The OMS Record will be completed in time for the new academic year, both online and in (limited) print format. We welcome all submissions detailing events or book releases from the academic year 2022/23. Please send submissions to luisa.ostacchini@ell.ox.ac.uk. All submissions must be received by August 20th 2023.
  • CAT – Conversations Across Time: What do horses, medievalists, black hole orbits, boardrooms, and quantum computers have in common? Inspired by the Medieval Mystery Plays, artist in residence at the Physics Department Pam Davis has developed an art-piece ‘Conversations Across Time’ which links medieval theatre, women in science, and Quantum future. Free tickets for the performances in the unique Beecroft Building (Physics) on June 15th, 17:30-18:30, June 16th, 17:30-18:30, June 17th, 14:30-15:30, and June 17th, 17:30-18:30 available via the website https://www.citizensai.com/.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 12th June:

  •  The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Jack Dooley (Royal Holloway, University of London), Between the self and the other: the case of the gasmouloi in Late Byzantium, and the respondent will be Dr Yannis Stouraitis. To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.   
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford and Andrew Dunning is meeting as usual via Teams from 1-2pm. This term we will read some satirical poetry from a thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Bekyngton anthology’ (Bodl. MS. Add. A. 44). Sign up for the mailing list to receive updates and the Teams invite, or contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for more information.
  • The Queer and Trans Medievalisms Reading and Research Group meets at 3pm at Univ College, 12 Merton St Room 2. This week’s theme is The medieval hyena: Emma Campbell, ‘Visualizing the Trans-Animal Body’. All extremely welcome! To join the mailing list and get texts in advance, or if you have any questions, email rowan.wilson@univ.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Emilia Jamroziak (Leeds), ‘Understanding the cult of saints in the late medieval Cistercian order‘. The seminar will also be available remotely via Teams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Oxford Interfaith Forum meets online via Zoom at 6pm. Professor Katherine Southwood, Senior Fellow of the Oxford Interfaith Forum, Associate Professor in Old Testament, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow in Theology and Religion at St John’s College, Oxford, will be leading a session on ‘Metaphor, Illness, and Identity: Psalms 88 and 102‘ as part of the Psalms in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group.To register, please click here.

Tuesday 13th June:

  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Peter Kidd (freelance researcher), ‘Tracing the Provenance of a Medieval Manuscript: from start to finish‘. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar! As an appetizer, have a look at the latest blog post RECEPTIO Redux.

Wednesday 14th June:

  • The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. We meet in person in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall, this week with the topic: Apocalypse! Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
  • The Old High German Reading Group at 11-12 in 41 Wellington Square, 2nd floor (Henrike Lähnemann’s office). This week’s text will be Wessobrunner Gebet. It will be an opportunity to read and analyse some simpler OHG texts and give people the chance to read the oldest form of German if they’ve not been exposed to it before. It will be very informal, and all are welcome. Led by William Thurlwell william.thurlwell@wolfson.ox.ac.uk – contact him for updates.
  • The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s seminar will be a Special OCBR lecture by James Howard-Johnston (emeritus, Corpus Christi), ‘The Last Great War of Antiquity: Course and Consequences’. You can also join the seminar remotely via Teams, click here.

Thursday 15th June:

  • The Medieval Women’s Writing Reading Group meets at 3-4pm at Lincoln College: meet at the lodge. This week’s theme will be Hierarchies: ecclesiastical, non-ecclesiastical and “alternative” hierarchies of power used and created by medieval women. Please email katherine.smith@lincoln.ox.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list and get texts in advance, or to find out more.
  • The Piers Plowman in Context discussion group will be led by Kantik Ghosh in the Main Quad Boardroom at Univ from 4:30-5:30pm. For this last session we will be discussing Passus XX of the B-text, in relation to some texts by Bonaventura, Aquinas, and Pecock, available online through this link. All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley (jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk) with any questions.
  • The Invisible East Group is co-hosting a webinar with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies online at 5pm. The speaker will be Prof Geoffrey Khan, University of Cambridge, ‘The Arabic documents from early Islamic Khurasan‘. Registration and more information at this link. 
  • The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5.15-6.45pm at St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Sara Lipton, Stony Brook University: ‘Blood Piety and Anti-Judaism in an Early Fourteenth-century Illuminated Prayer Book from Liège‘. For further information, contact Elena Lichmanova (elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk).
  • WOOPIE (Oxford Old English Work in Progress Seminar) meets at 5.15-6.30pm in the Ferrar Room, Hertford College. This week’s speaker will be Mar Gutiérrez Ortiz (University of Seville), ‘Isidore’s Etymologies, A Source for Boniface’s Classification of Metrical Feet in the Caesurae uersuum‘.
  • The Oxford Interfaith Forum meets online via Zoom at 6pm. Professor Matthew Milliner, Senior Fellow of the Oxford Interfaith Forum, and Professor of Art History at Wheaton College, USA, will be leading a session on ‘The Tao of Mary: Images of the Virgin in the Church of the East‘ as part of the ART in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group. To register, please click here.

Friday 16th June:

  • The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
  • Exhibition Launch: Early Modern Monsters At 5pm, History of the Book students from MML and the MSc Digital Scholarship are jointly launching the digital editions and a Monster Exhibition in the Taylor Institution Library, Main Hall (with the exhibition open in the Voltaire Room from now until 26 June). The focus will be on early modern monstruous birth pamphlet but there will also be medieval monsters and their modern successors to marvel at.

SUMMER EVENTS:

Monday 19th June:

  • Distance: Medieval and Modern Languages Conference will take place at 9am-6pm in the Taylor Institution Library. For the full programme, see our blog here.
  • The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Rachel Catherine Patt (Princeton University), From Pliny’s Potter to Proclus’ Vision: Tracing the Role of Pothos in Byzantine Visual Culture, and the respondent will be Dr Maria Lidova. To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.   
  • The Oxford Interfaith Forum meets online via Zoom at 6pm. Ilana Tahan OBE, Lead Curator of Hebrew and Christian Orient Collections, The British Library, will be leading a session on ‘British Library Hebrew Treasures Reveal Interfaith Narratives: The Sana’a Pentateuch‘ as part of the International Interfaith Reading Group on Manuscripts in Interfaith Contexts. To register, please click here.

Wednesday 21st June/ Thursday 22nd June:

  • The Joint Oxford-Princeton Conference: State Documents from the Medieval Islamicate World takes place from 21st June 8.45am to 22nd June 5pm at Trinity College, Oxford. For full details, click here. To attend the colloquium, please register using the form at this link. Participation is free of charge, but advanced registration is requested.

Thursday 13th July:

  • WOOPIE (Oxford Old English Work in Progress Seminar) meets at 5.15-6.30pm in the Lange Room, St Cross College. This week’s speaker will be Rachel Burns (Oxford), ‘“I will open my mouth in parables”: A new biblical context for early medieval English riddles’.

For those of you moving on to new things outside Oxford, I’d like to wish you luck in your endeavours on behalf of all of us at OMS. If you would like to stay in contact via the mailing list, please let me know so that I can update your details. For everyone else, I look forward to returning to your inboxes in October – I am remaining in post as communications officer for 2023/24:

Sequenti vero anno certius aliquid de nobis audies vel videbis
[You will see me next year, or hear more definite news of me, Ep. 17]

It has been an honour and a pleasure to be your guide to the year’s medieval happenings. At a time when humanities are in decline, it’s been such a joy to see our community flourishing and thriving. On behalf of everyone at OMS, I’d like to extend a huge thanks to everyone for making this such a wonderful year. Wishing you a restful and productive summer, and I will see you again in October!

[Medievalists sailing off on Summer adventures. Bon voyage, and see you next year!]
Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 86 v.
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian

Celebrating OMS 2022/23: Call for Submissions

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12/06/2023

09:25

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News, opportunities

,

As we wrap up the year, we here at OMS have been reflecting on the amazing accomplishments of Oxford’s medievalists in the last year. 2022/23 saw even more seminars and reading groups than ever before, covering an extremely diverse range of languages, themes, and ideas. We have also seen a considerable number of publications, special lectures, and practice-as-research events, like the Medieval Crafternoon and Mystery Plays.

Beginning this year, we will be creating an annual record publication to sum up the year’s events and spotlight the wonderful achievements of Oxford’s Medievalist community. This will be a place to celebrate major publications, highlight new and ongoing seminars/reading groups, and remember the special events that were held in the academic year.

If you have something to celebrate, we would love to hear from you! Submissions on the following would be much appreciated:

  • Book publications (monographs or edited volumes) by Oxford Medievalists in 2022/23 with a short summary or abstract (no more than 250 words).
  • Write-ups of special lectures, conferences, or events hosted at Oxford. If you have pictures of your event in progress, these would be particularly gratefully received! (no more than 500 words).
  • A paragraph about your reading group / seminar series, and what you did in 2022/23. We are particularly keen to hear from those who started new reading groups/seminars in the academic year 2022/23 (no more than 250 words).

Please send submissions to luisa.ostacchini@ell.ox.ac.uk. All submissions must be received by August 20th 2023. The OMS Record will be completed in time for the new academic year, both online and in (limited) print format.

Medieval Matters: Week 7

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05/06/2023

09:49

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As we move into seventh week, the term and indeed the whole academic teaching year is beginning to wrap up. It has been an extremely busy year with more medieval events than ever before. It’s been a particular delight to see so many new seminars and events joining our roster this year, and to see the range of Oxford Medieval Studies expanding ever further. That being said, our busy programme is the product of extremely hard work, and I’m sure that many of us (especially our MSt students, currently working on their dissertations) are feeling rather tired. For those who need a little motivation to keep up the good work until the end of term, here is some advice from Alcuin:

non incipiens sed perseverans in finem salvus erit
[It is not the person who begins who will be saved, but the one who perseveres to the end, Ep. 276]

Some of our seminars have now finished for the year, but others are “persevering” to the end of the term! For your guide to everything happening this week, please see below:

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 5th June:

  • The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Peter Boudreau (McGill University), Keeping Time in Byzantium: Temporal Imagery and Thought in the Calendars of Later Byzantium. To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.   
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford and Andrew Dunning is meeting as usual via Teams from 1-2pm. This term we will read some satirical poetry from a thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Bekyngton anthology’ (Bodl. MS. Add. A. 44). Sign up for the mailing list to receive updates and the Teams invite, or contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for more information.
  • The Invisible East Group is hosting a seminar at 3pm in the Spalding Room, FAMES, Pusey Lane. This week’s speaker will be Prof Edmund Herzig, University of Oxford, ‘Closing a bank account in early 18th century Isfahan‘. More information at this link
  •  The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Sara Lipton (Stony Brook/All Souls), ‘Iconography Against the Grain: Looking at and Learning from Art in the High Middle Ages‘. The seminar will also be available remotely via Teams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.

Tuesday 6th June:

  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Samuel Oliver (Queen’s), Envisioning Beguines’ ideas of community after the Council of Vienne, with a special focus on  the Vita et Revelationes of Agnes Blannbekin. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
  • There will be a reconstruction of the Night Office in 15th-Century Oxford in New College Chapel at 9pm prepared by Henry Parkes. Come along to experience of listening to the Office for Thomas Becket! More information and a glimpse of the manuscripts on which this is based in this blogpost.

Wednesday 7th June:

  • The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. We will meet in person in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
  • The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Asli Niyazioglu (Exeter College), ‘Ottoman Istanbul’s Talismanic Antiquities’. You can also join the seminar remotely via Teams, click here.

Thursday 8th June:

  • The Discussion Group: Governability across the medieval globe meets at 12.30 in the Sainsbury Common Room in Worcester College. Everyone welcome: staff, students and researchers, of all historical periods. We encourage you to bring lunch along. This week’s topic is ‘Plants and animals 🐄🌳’.
  • The Piers Plowman in Context discussion group will be led by Helen Barr in the Main Quad Boardroom at Univ from 4:30-5:30. This week’s session will be on Passus XIX of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to the Wycliffite ‘On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’ (available through this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LSWHJAX2abXPsd_9PwC-540qcBTXrucB) and Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale. All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley (jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk) with any questions

Friday 9th June:

  • The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
  • The Germanic Reading Group meets at 4pm on Zoom. To receive the materials and be added to the mailing list, please contact howard.jones@sbs.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm at the Julia Mann room, St Hilda’s College and online. This term we are reading extracts from Hue de Rotelands’s Protheselaus. Please contact Jane Bliss and/or Stephanie Hathaway to let us know if you can come in person (so we know whom to expect), also to obtain copies of the texts, and for the Zoom invitations.

Finally, some more wisdom from Alcuin on the importance of staying focussed even as the term draws to a close (always a difficult task):

non segniter labora
[don’t work half-heartedly! Ep. 18]

Wishing the best of luck to all of our graduate students finishing up dissertations or taking exams in the next few weeks. For everyone else: may you work whole-heartedly this week!

[Never wake a sleeping medievalist in seventh week]
Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 80 v.
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian

Medieval Matters: Week 6

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29/05/2023

12:49

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It’s another beautiful sunny bank-holiday Monday here in Oxford. The parks are looking especially lovely, and provide a particularly lovely break from work. Indeed, Alcuin tells us that we can find lots of examples for good behaviour in nature. In particular the bee, famed for its careful selection of good pollen, might be a useful model for research:

Sicut apis sapientissima, omnia, quae honestatis sunt, discendo probate; et quae optima esse videntur, eligendo retinete
[By learning confirm what is important, and by choosing keep hold of whatever seems good – just like the wisest bee. Ep. 72 ]

It’s easy to follow such advice given that there are so many wonderful seminars, reading groups and events for you to examine and learn from this week. The great difficulty is, of course, choosing which to attend: Alcuin unfortunately did not give us any advice on how to select seminars when all of them ‘optima esse videntur’! Please see below for the many wonderful things happening in Oxford this week:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Rethinking Lyric Communities in Premodern Worlds will take place at Christ Church Research Centre, Oxford, on 20-21 June. This symposium is part of the collaborative research project Rethinking Lyric Communities, which had its first two workshops in Oxford and Berlin last year. This third instalment will focus on questions of lyric and community in premodern times in both European and Middle Eastern worlds. Bringing contemporary lyric theory into dialogue with medieval and early modern studies, the fundamental questions we intend to explore are: what is it that makes the lyric particularly shareable? How was it actually shared? And what kind of community formation did it enable or envision? This is a hybrid event. To receive the link, please write to Nicolas Longinotti by Thursday 15 June 2023: n.longinotti@fu-berlin.de. For more information and the full programme, please click here.
  • The Night Office in 15th-Century Oxford: on Tuesday 6th June at 9pm in New College Chapel, New College Choir will enact a short-form Night Office as it might have been known in 15th-century Oxford, to explore how this nowforgotten liturgy worked in performance. In southern England from the late 14th century on, Tuesdays were commonly given over to the veneration of St Thomas Becket. This service recreates a ‘commemorative’ Tuesday Becket office, as precribed in late medieval books of the Sarum Use—many of which survive in Oxford libraries.
  • Medieval Mystery Play Recordings are now available! If you missed the Medieval Mystery Plays or just want to relive the fun of them, you can now watch the recordings on our blog. For a taster of the medievalist merriment, please see the trailer here. Huge thanks to Natascha Domeisen for her hard work filming and editing these.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 29th May:

  •  The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will not meet today, but resumes next week.
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford and Andrew Dunning is meeting as usual via Teams from 1-2pm. This term we will read some satirical poetry from a thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Bekyngton anthology’ (Bodl. MS. Add. A. 44). Sign up for the mailing list to receive updates and the Teams invite, or contact matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or andrew.dunning@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for more information.
  • The Queer and Trans Medievalisms Reading and Research Group meets at 3pm at Univ College, 12 Merton St Room 2. This week’s theme is Animal magics: The Mabinogion, fourth branch (Mab uab Mathonwy). All extremely welcome! To join the mailing list and get texts in advance, or if you have any questions, email rowan.wilson@univ.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be José Maria Andres Porras (St Hugh’s) ‘Violence, Blood, and Vendetta: A Girardian Interpretation‘. The seminar will also be available remotely via Teams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.

Tuesday 30th May:

  • The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12:00 in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. This week’s speaker will be Euan Roger (National Archives), Life Records and The National Archives.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Lucas Dorschel (St Hugh’s), Recontextualizing the Donestre: Queer Cannibalism in the Wonders of the East Manuscripts, c. 1000-1125. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
  • The first lecture of the New CMTC Lecture Series: Provenance Unknown will take place at 5.15-7pm in the Memorial Room, Queen’s College. The speaker is Alexander Herman (Institute of Art and Law, London), Don’t Turn That Page! The Legal Risks of Dealing in Unprovenanced Manuscripts. You can also join the lecture online via Zoom: to register for the link, please click here. Sign-ups will close at 10,00am on Tuesday 30th May. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to provide a Zoom link if you email us after this time. If you have not received a link by 12.00noon on 30th May, please email Gabriele Rota (gabriele.rota@queens.ox.ac.uk).

Wednesday 31st May:

  • The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. This week Magdalena Butz will present findings from her doctoral thesis on the transformation of religious knowledge into vernacular storytelling. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
  • The Old High German Reading Group will not meet this week.
  • The Old French Reading Group takes place at 4-5pm at St Hilda’s College (meet by the lodge) on Wednesdays of Even Weeks in association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). We welcome readers of Old French of all abilities. For further information, please email alice.hawkins@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk or irina.boeru@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk
  • The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Cristina Rognoni (Università degli Studi di Palermo), ‘The Greek monastery of S. Salvatore di Bordonaro (Messina, Sicily, 12th century): a short history and a long tradition’. You can also join the seminar remotely via Teams, click here.

Thursday 1st June:

  • The Environmental History Group meets at 12-2pm in the Gary Martin Room, History Faculty. This week’s speaker will be G. J. Morgan, “The Hagiocene: ‘the Age of the Saints’ and environmental thought”. We try to keep discussions informal, and we encourage anyone at all interested in these kinds of approaches to join our meetings, regardless of research specialism or presumed existing knowledge. For those interested in joining the group, you can join our mailing list by getting in touch with us at environmentalhistoryworkinggroup-owner@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Pursuit of Musick. The Taverner Consort at 50 will take place at 3-4pm at the Taylor Institution Library, Room 2. Andrew Parrott will be in conversation with Henrike Lähnemann on musical life in medieval and early modern Europe. This is a celebration of 50 years of the Taverner Consort and Andrew Parrott’s The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings & Art c1200–1770, a uniquely colourful compendium of almost everything to do with pre-modern musical life. The lecture will take as its starting point how the examples on music in the everyday life of medieval and early modern Germany can be used as a teaching tool and will also discuss questions of translation of premodern sources. All original source material is open access available on the publication website, e.g. https://www.taverner.org/everyday-life. For more information, see our blog here.
  • The Medieval Women’s Writing Reading Group meets at 3-4pm at Lincoln College: meet at the lodge. This week’s theme will be Holiness and sainthood: forms of holiness and sainthood, and their effect on authority both by women and for women. Please email katherine.smith@lincoln.ox.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list and get texts in advance, or to find out more.
  • This week’s Piers Plowman in Context discussion group will be led by Mishtooni Bose in the Main Quad Boardroom at Univ from 16:30-17:30. This week’s session will be on Passus XV of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to the short contexts available through this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ecmqwQpuxmxbEn7e9Pu0uFCMVONSCdRC All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley (jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk) with any questions.
  • The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5.15-6.45pm at St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Michelle Brown University of London, Visual Exegesis and its Deployment in Insular Illumination. For further information, contact Elena Lichmanova (elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk).

Friday 2nd June:

  • The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.

Saturday 3rd June:

  • A one-day-only exhibition: Maleficia: Magic, Witchcraft, & Astrology will take place at New College. We will be displaying some manuscripts, mostly astrological texts, along with a number of early modern printed books, mostly witchcraft treatises. The exhibition will be in New College’s Lecture Room 4 and is open to the public.

Of course, just as there are good examples to be found in nature, Alcuin reminds us that there are bad ones too:

Nec mirum, si tarditas aselli sustineat in dorso flagellum
[It’s not surprising if a lazy donkey gets a whip across his back! Ep. 98]

I take this to mean that it’s important not to get overly carried away with walks in University Parks when there is still plenty of work to do before the end of term! Nonetheless, I hope that you all get to enjoy some sunshine today, and wish you a week of being ‘like the wisest bee’ in your learning and teaching!

[Medievalists taking Alcuin’s advice and choosing which seminars seem to them to be best]
Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 75 v.
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian

Medieval Matters: Week 5

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22/05/2023

11:48

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Last weekend medievalists from around the world gathered at Oxford to celebrate the life and scholarship of Nigel F. Palmer (1946-2022), Emeritus Professor of German Medieval Literary and Linguistic  Studies . Many thanks to all who came along, gave papers, and organised the wonderful library exhibition. As part of the proceedings, Dr Alan Coates gave a special presentation on Nigel Palmer’s Books in the Bodleian at the Weston medievalists’ coffee morning. If you missed the presentation, you can view this on our blog here and further contributions on the programme of the symposium. Here is some wisdom from Alcuin on the importance of remembering those who teach and inspire us:

numquam eruditionis vestrae […] obliviscimini magistrum
[Never forget the teacher of your wisdom Ep. 34]

We have many wonderful opportunities this week to be taught and to teach wisdom. See below for the full programme:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • The OMS Small Grants Application for Trinity Term ’23 is now open! The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. The activity should take place between the beginning of Trinity term 2023 and end of the summer vacation. The closing date for applications is Friday of Week 5 of Trinity Term (= 26 May); decisions will be made promptly after the closing date. For more details and the application form, click here.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 22nd May:

  •  The Byzantine Graduate Seminar will meet at 12:30-14:00 via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Emily Chesley (Princeton University), Collateral Damage: Eastern Women’s Experiences in the Roman-Persian Wars, 4th-6th c. To register, please contact james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.  
  • No Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group this week!  
  •  The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Lucy Parker (Wadham) ‘Monks, martyrs, and masculinity: authority and gender in early Islamic Palestine’. The seminar will also be available remotely via Teams. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Oxford Interfaith Forum meets online via Zoom at 6pm. Rabbi Joshua Stanton, Director of the Leadership Formation at the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and Rabbi of East End Temple in Manhattan, NY, USA, will be leading this session of the Psalms in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group. To register, please click here.

Tuesday 23rd May:

  • The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 12:00 in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. This week’s speaker will be Peter Buchanan (University of Cambridge), ‘Medieval Multiversality: Modalities in 14th Century Poetry‘.
  • The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC) at The Queen’s College (Oxford) is hosting a “Work in progress” colloquium at 3.30–5pm in the Memorial Room, The Queen’s College and online via Zoom. The speakers will be Marius Del Core (Pisa/Oxford), ‘Omitti possunt. Evidence for abridgement and athetesis in Plautine manuscripts‘ and Stefano Milonia (Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples), ‘Super and Contra. Conversion and resemantisation of mediaeval French lyric in the Ludus super Anticlaudianum’. Please register here (whether you are planning to attend in person or online).
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at the Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College, with tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Julia Schroeder (Lincoln), ‘Bokes Unbrad’:  ecclesiastical court records in late medieval England. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
  • The Medieval French Research Seminar will meet at 5pm for drinks, with the presentation starting at 5:15pm, at the Maison Francaise d’Oxford on Norham Road. This week’s speakers will be Micah Mackay and Anna Wilmore, ‘Song? Poem? Both?: The Late Medieval Lyric in Context’. For more information, to be added to the seminar maillist, or for the Teams link to join a seminar remotely, contact helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk.

Wednesday 24th May:

  • The Medieval German Seminar will meet at 11:15-12.45pm at St Edmund Hall Old Library. In Trinity Term, we are continuing to discuss Heinrich von Neustadt’s texts, focussing on ‘Von Gottes Zukunft’. We will meet in person in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. This week we will be discussing the tradition of the 15 signs of the Last Judgement within the text led by Anja Peters and Timothy Powell. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
  • The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets on Teams at 4-5pm. We are currently focusing on medieval documents from New College’s archive as part of the cataloguing work being carried out there, so there will be a variety of hands, dates and types. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker will be Jean-Claude Cheynet (emeritus, Sorbonne Université), ‘Women’s Seals in Byzantium’. You can also join the seminar remotely via Teams, click here.

Thursday 25th May:

  • Wendy Scase from Birmingham is leading this week’s Piers Plowman in Context discussion group, which meets in the Main Quad Boardroom at Univ from 4:30-5:30. This week’s session will be on Passus XIII of the B-text, which we’ll be discussing in relation to Richard Fitzralph’s Defensio Curatorum, available through this link. Attendees are encouraged to choose a brief section of the Defensio to talk about. All welcome! Email Jacob Ridley (jacob.ridley@univ.ox.ac.uk) with any questions.

Friday 26th May:

  • The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
  • The Germanic Reading Group meets at 4pm on Zoom. To receive the materials and be added to the mailing list, please contact howard.jones@sbs.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm at the Julia Mann room, St Hilda’s College and online. This term we are reading extracts from Hue de Rotelands’s Protheselaus. Please contact Jane Bliss and/or Stephanie Hathaway to let us know if you can come in person (so we know whom to expect), also to obtain copies of the texts, and for the Zoom invitations.

Fifth week is notorious in Oxford for being the point in the term when everyone feels rather tired and low in spirits. Hopefully the sun is helping to keep everyone’s spirits high: Oxford does look beautiful in the sun! As for the tiredness, Alcuin has a prescription for us all:

fessae mentis acumen levioris lectionis interpositio saepe reficit
[The interposition of lighter reading often restores the sharpness of a tired mind, Ep. 300]

In addition to this advice, I offer that the interposition of Medievalist socialising may also prove restorative: please do come along to our coffee mornings if the sharpness of your mind is in need of some restoration! In the meantime, I wish you all a week of lighter reading and sunshine.

[Medievalist feeling a little flat in Week 5]
Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 36 r.
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian

Literary, religious and manuscript cultures of the  German-speaking lands:  a  symposium  in memory of Nigel F. Palmer (1946-2022) 

by

15/05/2023

14:25

6 Comments on Literary, religious and manuscript cultures of the  German-speaking lands:  a  symposium  in memory of Nigel F. Palmer (1946-2022) 

Around Oxford, events

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Friday 19 – Saturday 20 May 2023

To celebrate the life and scholarship of Nigel F. Palmer, Professor of  German  Medieval Literary and Linguistic  Studies at the University of Oxford, the academic community honoured his memory with a symposium, which brought together colleagues from around the world. Their presentations spoke to the wide spectrum of Nigel’s intellectual interests, which ranged extensively within the broad scope of the literary and religious history of the German- and Dutch-speaking lands, treating Latin alongside the vernaculars, the early printed book alongside the manuscript, and the court and the city alongside the monastery and the convent.

Friday, 19 May 2023 

10:30-11:30         Weston Library, Visiting Scholars Centre

  • Presentation of incunables and blockbooks linked with Nigel F. Palmer in the Bodleian Library by Alan Coates.

13:00-13:45             Taylor Institution Library. Main Hall

  • Welcome and introduction. Video by Jeffrey Hamburger in honour of Nigel Palmer

14:00-15:00             Taylorian Main Hall: Chair: Racha Kirakosian

  • Henrike Manuwald, ‘German-language pericopes between retelling, exegesis and prayer: the case of the Begerin Prayer Book’
  • Martina Backes and Barbara Fleith, Extraordinary or conventional? Überlegungen zu einem un­ge­wöhnlichen Bildmotiv im Begerin-Gebetbuch

14:00-15:30             Weston Library. Horton Room: Chair: Henrike Lähnemann

  • Erik Kwakkel, ‘The problem of dating medieval manuscripts’.  Recording.
  • Victor Millet and Lorena Pérez Ben, ‘‘Fragmentology’ around Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein’.  Recording.

16:00-17:30             Taylorian Main Hall: Chair: Almut Suerbaum

  • Ben Morgan, ‘Critiquing critique: how Erich Fromm’s reading of Meister Eckhart can transform contemporary conceptualisations of human flourishing’
  • Freimut Löser, ‘Latest news on Nigel Palmer’s Meister Eckhart’
  • Racha Kirakosian, ‘Philology meets visionary practice’

16:00-17:30             Weston Library: Chair: Martin Kauffmann

  • Andrew Honey, ‘‘I believe they were fixed in some low places in the Church, Chapell or House’: further investigations into the glue stains of Douce 248, a blockbook Biblia pauperum of c.1465-1470’. Recording.
  • Geert Warnar, ‘The Roman van Limborch in a European framework’. Recording.
  • Luise Morawetz, ‘Gregory the Great in Old High German: the newly discovered glosses of MS. Canon. Pat. Lat. 57’.

Saturday, 20 May 2023

A small exhibition of medieval German manuscripts used by Nigel Palmer for teaching Palaeography and History of the Book was on display in the Voltaire Room of the Taylor Institution Library, including the two manuscripts from Erfurt Charterhouse Taylor Institution Library MS. 8° Germ. 1 and MS. 8° Germ. 2 (comment by Balázs Nemes).

10:00-11:30             Taylorian Main Hall: Chair: Annette Volfing

  • Elke Brüggen, ‘Parzival-Lektüren im komplexen Zusammenspiel von Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentierung’
  • Daniela Mairhofer, ‘Almost lost in transmission: the peculiar case of a Staufer song’
  • Nikolaus Henkel, ‘Liturgie im Schulunterricht um 1500. Der Osterhymnus ‚Salve festa dies‘ des Venantius Fortunatus und seine deutsche Reimpaarübersetzung’

10:00-11:30             Taylorian Room 2: Chair: Stephen Mossman

  • Adam Poznański and Reima Välimäki, ‘Petrus Zwicker’s Cum dormirent homines: transmission history and prospects for a critical edition of a popular anti-heretical treatise’
  • Linus Ubl, ‘Palm(er)ing material culture – medieval German manuscripts in the
    National State Library of Israel’
  • Astrid Breith, ‘Locked away for love – the Vita Wilbirgis inclusae and the manuscript holdings of St. Florian (Upper Austria)’

13:00-14:30             Taylorian Main Hall: Chair: Sarah Bowden

  • Jonas Hermann, ‘What gives? Marquard von Lindau and the ›Buch von geistlicher Armut‹’
  • Anne Winston-Allen, ‘Sibilla von Bondorf’s art of reform’
  • Edmund Wareham Wanitzek, ‘Soror in Christo dilectissima: Learning and exchange in the correspondence of Nikolaus Ellenbog and his sister Barbara’

13:00-14:30             Taylorian Room 2: Chair: Elizabeth Andersen

  • Peter Rückert, ‘Bücher zwischen Kloster und Hof. Neues zur literarischen Topographie in Württemberg’
  • Monica Brinzei and Giacomo Signore, ‘The rise of ars moriendi at the University of Vienna before the printing press’
  • Nigel Harris, ‘“Nach dem text und etwen nach dem sin”. Heinrich Haller und das Cordiale de quattuor novissimis des Gerard van Vliederhoven’

15:00-16:30             Taylorian Main Hall: Chair: Christine Putzo

  • Ralph Hanna, ‘On exempla: “Hoc contra malos religiosos”‘
  • Peter Tóth, ‘The early history of the Meditationes Vitae Christi: quotations and references’
  • Hans-Jochen Schiewer, ‘Kollektive Autorschaft und Baukastenprinzip. Geistliche Literatur dominikanischer Provenienz um 1300’

15:00-16:30             Taylorian Room 2: Chair: Lydia Wegener

  • Sarah Griffin, ‘Unfolding time in a late medieval German concertina-fold almanac (SPKB, Libr. pict. A 92)
  • Youri Desplenter, ‘Newly discovered interlinear Middle Dutch translation of the Psalms (c. 1300?). Analysis and contextualization within the Middle Dutch and medieval Psalm translations’
  • Wybren Scheepsma, ‘Laudate dominum in sanctis eius: a Limburg sermon with French roots’

17:00-19:00 Old Library of St Edmund Hall

Followed by speeches in honour of Nigel F. Palmer

  • The Pro Principal of St Edmund Hall, Rob Whittaker. Recording.
  • A performance of a medieval poem by Ruth Wiederkehr, Monika Studer, Claudia Lingscheid-Andersen and Racha Kirakosian
  • Words of memory by Eva Schlotheuber and in dialogue by Hans-Jochen Schiewer and Michael Stolz

The event was supported by the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, the Meister-Eckhart-Gesellschaft, SSMLL, Oxford Medieval Studies and St Edmund Hall. Here a link to the call of papers; please contact Henrike Lähnemann if you have any comments on the content of this page.