Marriages, Unmarriages, and Subjectivities: A Roundtable Discussion with Sara McDougall and Hannah Skoda

The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce our first event of Trinity Term 2022, a Roundtable Discussion with Professors Sara McDougall and Hannah Skoda

We invite all interested parties to attend the event on Thursday 26th May at 13:00-14.30, in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College. Participants will be able to ask questions and engage in discussion with Professor McDougall and Professor Skoda on a shared area of their research, Marriages, Unmarriages, and Subjectivities

Professor Sara McDougall is Associate Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York) and coordinator of the Medieval Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Specialising in legal history, her research focuses primarily on women and crime in medieval France and explores topics such as gender, marriage, religion and illegitimacy. Her publications include Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800-1230 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Professor McDougall is in Oxford this term as an Astor Visiting Lecturer.  

Professor Hannah Skoda is Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History at St. John’s College, Oxford, and specialises in the cultural and social history of the later Middle Ages. She has particular interests in education, conflict, ownership, slavery and constructions of deviance in late medieval Europe. Her monograph Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 (Oxford University Press, 2013) won the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s 2014 Best First Book Prize, in which year she was also awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize to explore nostalgia in the fourteenth century. 

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions at oxfordmedievalsociety@gmail.com

We look forward to seeing you there!

Medieval Matters: Week 3

It is with very great sadness that I have to pass on the news that Nigel F. Palmer, Emeritus Professor of German Medieval and Linguistic Studies, Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, FBA, died yesterday, Sunday 8 May 2022. Lesley Smith and Henrike Lähnemann write: Nigel Palmer was one of those scholars defining medieval studies. He was everywhere in Oxford – always in the Library, attending seminars, always asking fundamental questions – but he also reached out across the world to colleagues in Germany and far beyond. He was also one of the kindest and most generous friends and colleagues. He treated everyone with the same respect and good humour, whether they be visiting professor, or first-year student. Oxford without Nigel will never be the same. Details of the funeral for family and close friends at the end of the month and plans for a celebration of his academic and personal life for spring next year will be announced later. Tributes and cards for his widow, Sue Palmer, can be sent to St Edmund Hall via mail or Henrike Lähnemann via email.

Please see below for the week’s events:

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 9th May:

  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Silvio Roggo (Cambridge), ‘Justin II and the Miaphysites. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. Sign up here for the mailing list to receive details of each week’s sessions: https://web.maillist.ox.ac.uk/ox/info/medieval-latin-ms-reading. Contact Matthew Holford, Andrew Dunning Tuiija Ainonen for further details.
  • The Medieval Commentary Network meets at 4pm at Research Centre, Christ Church (in the thatched barn at the top of Christ Church Meadow, behind the tourist shop). This week’s speaker is Maria Czepiel, ‘From curiosa to criticism: Benito Arias Montano and Encyclopedism in Sixteenth-Century Biblical Commentary‘. Drinks and nibbles will be provided after the lecture.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Julia Crick (KCL), ‘Staffing the Conquest: Mobility, Stasis, and Scribal Work in England, 1066-1100‘. 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 10th May:

  • The Oxford Numismatic Society meets at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Dr. Jeremy Piercy – ‘Just a name on a coin: What epigraphy can tell us about labour organisation and social networks in Pre-Conquest England‘. For further information please contact the secretary: giorgia.capra@new.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 3: St Augustine’s and Christchurch, 950–1091. Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speakers are Harriet Strahl (Oriel), ‘Emotions in the Aftermath of the Wreck of the White Ship‘, and Nia Moseley-Roberts (Jesus), ‘An Immortal Work’: ideas of scribal labour at Witham Charterhouse c. 1200‘.

Wednesday 11th May:

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in St Edmund Hall, Old Library. We are going to discuss Seuse’s ‘Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit’, chapter 6 this week. For more information, please email henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker is Anca Dan (CNRS, Paris Sciences & Lettres), ‘Kosmokrator: the origins of the iconographic tradition, between East and West‘.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Carl Phelpstead (University of Cardiff), ‘“If you will listen patiently”: conversion, conversation and cosmopolitanism in Old Icelandic sagas of Apostles’ (chaired by Gareth Evans). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.
  • The CMTC Festival: Launch of the Journal Manuscript and Text Cultures takes place at 5.15-7pm in Memorial Room, The Queen’s College.

Thursday 12th May:

  • The Middle High German Reading Group meets at 10am at Somerville College Productivity Room (Margery Fry). This term’s topic is ‘Maeren’. If you have any questions or want to participate, please send an e-mail to melina.schmidt@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College – meet at Jesus lodge. This week’s text is Suetonius, Life of Tiberius 34-36. Contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
  • The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place at Trinity College (Levine Room 5) at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Étienne de la Vaissière (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), ‘Manichaean Roads‘. Follow the link to the Zoom meeting.
  • The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 4: From Neumes in campo aperto to Neumes on Lines (at Christchurch, Canterbury). Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.
  • The Old English Reading Group takes place at 5.30pm. For more information and to receive the text in advance email eugenia.vorobeva@jesus.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Oxford University Heraldry Society meets online at 6.30pm. This week’s speaker is David Broomfield, ‘The Heraldry of Eton College‘. To receive the link to attend, please email secretary@oxford-heraldry-org.uk.

Friday 13th May:

  • The Medievalist Coffee Morning takes place at 10.30pm in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!)
  • The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5pm in Taylorian Room 2 and on Zoom. This term, Luca Crisma (EPHE, Paris) will lead reading of the Anglo-Norman Letter of Prester John. For texts, joining instructions, and further information, please email Stephanie Hathaway or Jane Bliss.

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Revoicing Medieval Poetry – May-June 2022: Call for participants. Revoicing Medieval Poetry will offer a workshop-conversation space for researchers, artists and practitioners who are engaged in exploring how, why, and to what effects medieval poetry is translated, reused, and resourced in twentieth- and twenty-first-century creative practices. Confirmed speakers include Caroline Bergvall, Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Becca Drake, and Clare A. Lees. We hope you will join us at one or more of our four workshops! Read the full CPF here, and register your interest here.
  • The Oxford Trobadors return to the stage on Sunday 5th June, at the Sheldonian Theatre, at 6 pm. Tickets from www.ticketsoxford.com / 01865 305305. £12, £25, £50. Medievalists may like to know that the Oxford Trobadors are returning to the Stage again after the lockdowns. The concert will include performances of several medieval trobadors and trobairitz, including Arnaut Daniel, Peire Vidal, Bernard de Ventadorn, Jaufre Rudel and Marcabru, as well as some modern Occitan songs. The concert has been arranged as a fusion event with leading Bengali musicians in the UK, who perform in a tradition that derives from a trobador-like song tradition very similar to that of the Occitan trobadors. Students: a sponsor has made some complimentary tickets available for registered students in medieval studies. Email denis.noble@balliol.ox.ac.uk if you wish to apply for a complimentary ticket. Include your college and stage of study in your email.
  • Registration is now open for the Freedom & Work in Western Europe c.1250-1750 conference, organised by the FORMSofLABOUR project (led by Prof Jane Whittle) and hosted in Exeter on 6-8 July 2022. Full programme and registration here. The conference will explore the historical relation between freedom and work across different forms of labour, cultures, legal systems and time periods. Please send any questions to FORMSofLABOUR@exeter.ac.uk.

Finally, some wisdom from the Old English Dicts of Cato, in honour of Nigel, who was a friend to many on the mailing list:

Help ægðer ge cuðum ge uncuþum þær þu mæge.
[Help both friends and strangers, wherever you can]

[Medievalists helping one another with difficult research problems]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 6v.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Elefant

Medieval Matters: Week 2

May is here, and with it, the long-awaited return of May Day celebrations in Oxford. Whether you managed to attend the May Morning revelries or not, here is some celebratory wisdom for the occasion, from the Durham Proverbs:

Hwilum æfter medo menn mæst geþyrsteð.
[Sometimes people are thirstiest after drinking mead]

What the anonymous poet forgot to mention, of course, is the accompanying Proverb: ‘sometimes people are happiest after drinking tea‘. You may put this theory to the test at our newly reinstated Medievalist Coffee morning, which takes place on Friday at the Weston Library – all are welcome!

It is only second week, but we have already had many wonderful events – so many, in fact, that you may have missed some! Luckily, you can catch up with how things went on our blog. We kicked term off, of course, with the Mystery Plays – read here Dr Alison Ray’s post about how the plays went, and here Prof. David Wiles’ reflections on the experience of directing a medieval play in French. Last week we enjoyed Caroline Danforth’s fabulous OMS Lecture on Paper, Linen, Silk, and Parchment – Material Fragments from an Extinguished Convent : many thanks to all who tuned in! For those who missed it, you can now watch the recording on the OMS Youtube channel. As for future events, we have a wonderful schedule this week:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Save the date: The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce a public lecture by Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davies on Thursday 9th June 2022. Dr Cooper-Davies will speak on the topic of “Christine de Pizan: Guilty Feminist?”. The lecture will take place in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College, 13:00-14.30.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 2nd May:

  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Yan Zaripov (Oxford), ‘Literary Imitation (mimesis) in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Case of Theodore Prodromos’. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. Sign up here for the mailing list to receive details of each week’s sessions: Contact Matthew Holford, Andrew Dunning or Tuija Ainonen for further details.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Rebecca Rist (Reading), ‘When is a Pope an Anti-Pope? The Medieval Papacy and the Concept of Schism’. 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 3rd May:

  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Lucia Akard (Linacre), ‘Cultures of Rape and Resistance in 15th Century Dijon
  • The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 1: Sound and its Capture in Anglo-Saxon England. Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.
  • The Medieval French Research Seminar will take place at 5.15pm at Maison Francaise, MFO Auditorium and Online. This week’s speaker is Emma Campbell (University of Warwick): ‘Translanguaging and Multimediality in Philippe de Thaon’s Medieval “French” Bestiaire‘. Please email helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk for video-conference link for remote joining.

Wednesday 4th May:

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in St Edmund Hall, Old Library. We are going to discuss Seuse’s ‘Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit’. For more information, please email henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker is Marie-France Auzépy (emerita, Université Paris 8), ‘The siege of Constantinople in 717-718: the embarrassing memory of a triumph‘.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Emily Corran (UCL), ‘Polemicising doubt in late medieval England: adaptations of Latin casuistry in Wyclif, Dives and Pauper and Margery Kempe’ (chaired by Kantik Ghosh). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.

Thursday 5th May:

  • The Middle High German Reading Group meets at 10am at Somerville College Productivity Room (Margery Fry). This term’s topic is ‘Maeren’. If you have any questions or want to participate, please send an e-mail to melina.schmidt@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College – meet at Jesus lodge. This week’s text is Aristophanes, Clouds, 223-75. Contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
  • The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place at Trinity College (Levine Auditorium) at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Thomas Benfey (Oxford), ‘The Qom Documents and Their Post-Sasanian Context: Change and Continuity in Early Islamic Iran’. Zoom meeting link.
  • The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 2: A Community of Scribes at Worcester. Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.

Friday 6th May:

  • The Medievalists Coffee Morning makes its triumphant return! Meet at 10.30-11.30am at Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!). The coffee mornings feature the opportunity to meet other Medievalists as well as a) coffee, tea, and biscuits, b) access to the roof terrace, c) sneak previews of new acquisitions. Here a link to the last week’s presentation of newly acquired Artists Books. All welcome!

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Conference: Orosius Through The Ages: 25th-27th May. Booking is essential and will be open until 4 May. The conference will take place in person at Senate House, London, and on Zoom. If you will be attending partly in person and partly online please email valerie.james@sas.ac.uk with the dates when you will be attending in person. If no in person places remain, please book to attend online instead.
  • Call for participants. Revoicing Medieval Poetry will offer a workshop-conversation space for researchers, artists and practitioners who are engaged in exploring how, why, and to what effects medieval poetry is translated, reused, and resourced in twentieth- and twenty-first-century creative practices. Confirmed speakers include Caroline Bergvall, Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Becca Drake, and Clare A. Lees. We hope you will join us at one or more of our four workshops! Read the full CPF here and register your interest here.
  • Doctoral Funding Opportunity: an ARHC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship between the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Kent and the Bodleian in Oxford to work on manuscript fragments. Full details are here. Deadline is 26th May.

Finally, some further wisdom from the Durham Proverbs regarding coffee mornings:

Eall on muðe þæt on mode.
[All in the mouth that’s in the mind.]

I take this to mean: great biscuits promote great scholarship. May your week be filled with both!

[A Medievalist wonders whether greatness of biscuit directly corresponds to greatness of scholarship]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 1v.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Leun

Public Lecture – Christine de Pizan

The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce a public lecture by Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis on Thursday 9th June 2022.

Dr Cooper-Davis will speak on the topic of “Christine de Pizan: Guilty Feminist?”.

The lecture will take place in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College, 13:00-14.30.

About the speaker: Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, and the author of Christine de Pizan: Life, Works, Legacy (Reaktion Press, 2021). Her DPhil thesis explored text-image relations in de Pizan’s works, and a resulting monograph is currently under contract with ARC Humanities Press.

Please direct any queries to oxfordmedievalsociety@gmail.com.

Image credit: British Library MS Harley 4431, f.259v (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

Medieval Matters: Week 1

Trinity term has arrived! I hope that everyone has been enjoying the warmer weather and arrival of Spring. We welcomed the beginning of term with the spectacular Mystery Plays last Saturday. On behalf of OMS, I’d like to extend a huge thank-you to all medievalists across Oxford who took part in the Plays whether as actors or spectators: we had 89 active participants and 320 registered attendants in person plus up to 150 simultaneous views on the live-stream! For those of you who missed out, you can catch up on all the action online – the recordings will be edited but are already watchable, warts and all, via the St Edmund Hall youtube channel; pics of the day are accessible via the hashtag #OxfordMysteries on twitter.

As we all return to term and to Oxford, some wisdom from the Old English Maxims:

Muþa gehwylc mete þearf, mæl sceolon tidum gongan.
[Every mouth needs food; meals must come at the correct time.]

Though technology doesn’t allow me to send you food of the traditional type, I bring you a whole smorgasbord of feasts for the mind in the form of the Trinity Term Medieval Booklet. Please do peruse it and whet your appetites for all of the exciting offerings that we have this term. For now, this is what is happening this week:

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 25th April:

  • The Book at the Bodleian: Whence, Where, Whither? takes place at 11am-6pm in the Lecture Theatre, Weston Library and also streamed live. Visit the webpage for further information.
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. Sign up here for the mailing list to receive details of each week’s sessions: https://web.maillist.ox.ac.uk/ox/info/medieval-latin-ms-reading. Contact Matthew Holford, Andrew Dunning or Tuija Ainonen for further details.
  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Jack Sheard (Royal Holloway), ‘Byzantium and the Black Sea, c.1000-1204′. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Richard Purkiss (Lincoln/RAI), ‘The limits of the Danelaw’. 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 26th April:

  • The Trinity Term OMS Lecture takes place at 5pm, online via the OMS youtube page. This term’s lecture is by Caroline Danforth, and will be on the subject of ‘Paper, Linen, Silk, and Parchment – Material Fragments from an Extinguished Convent‘.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Lucy Pick (University of Chicago) ‘Parables and Commandments:  a Jewish text in Latin

Wednesday 27th April:

  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker is Baukje van den Berg (Central European University), ‘Twelfth-Century Scholars on the Moral Value of Ancient Poetry‘.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Hannah Bower (University of Cambridge), ‘“And bi þe bodi he him hent, | And al to peces here torent”: violent fragmentation and productive uncertainty in The Seven Sages of Rome’ (chaired by Marion Turner). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.

Thursday 28th April:

  • The Middle High German Reading Group meets at 10am at Somerville College Productivity Room (Margery Fry). This term’s topic is ‘Maeren’. If you have any questions or want to participate, please send an e-mail to melina.schmidt@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College – meet at Jesus lodge. This week’s text is Catullus 5, 85 and 101. Contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
  • The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place at Trinity College (Levine Room 5) at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Nadine Viermann (Durham), ‘In and out of Constantinople: Early-seventh-century coronation rituals in context’.
  • The Old English Reading Group takes place at 5.30pm. For more information and to receive the text in advance email eugenia.vorobeva@jesus.ox.ac.uk.

Friday 29th April:

  • The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5pm in Taylorian Room 2 and on Zoom. This term, Luca Crisma (EPHE, Paris) will lead reading of the Anglo-Norman Letter of Prester John. For texts, joining instructions, and further information, please email Stephanie Hathaway or Jane Bliss.

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Oxford-Cambridge student conversations on ‘Cross-Cultural Entanglements’. We are a group of students from Oxford and Cambridge interested to cross-cultural entanglements in the medieval and Early Modern Period. Building on a successful first meeting, we are aiming at expanding the network to include as many students as possible. The idea is to meet once a month on Tuesday to exchange ideas and discuss both sources and articles. Anyone interested into this theme should feel free to join this group, whose meeting will be online, monthly. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, send an e-mail to nicola.carotenuto@history.ox.ac.uk
  • CFP: Hyggnathing. Following on from last year’s sucess, Hyggnathing returns this year for a fully online one-day conference for graduate students of Old Norse. We hope that the online format will allow students to join regardless of their financial situation (in-person conferences are expensive!) and geographical location. For full details, please visit the OMS blog.

Finally, as we embark upon Trinity Term, some wisdom from the Old English Rune Poem:

ᛋ [sigel] se-mannum symble biþ on hihte
[The sun is always a hope for seafarers]

May the sun in Oxford similarly bring some hope to scholars! I wish you all a happy and productive first week in the April sunshine!

[A Medievalist whets their appetite with the many offerings of the Trinity Term booklet]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 7r.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Serra

Medicine and Healing: The 18th Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference

The 2022 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference organising committee is pleased to announce the programme for Medicine and Healing.

Medicine and Healing: The 18th Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference

21st-22nd April, online and in-person at Ertegun House, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LD.

Sponsored by the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme in the Humanities, Oxford Medieval Studies, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature.

Organising Committee: Katherine Beard, Ashley Castelino, Corinne Clark, James Cogbill, Nia Moseley-Roberts, Diana Myers, Grace O’Duffy, Caleb Prus and Eugenia Vorobeva.

To register for online or in-person attendance, please visit our website.

Programme

THURSDAY 21st APRIL

9:30-9:55 Registration (in-person)

9:55-10:00 Opening Remarks

10:00-11:30 Session 1: Charmed (chair: Katherine Beard)

  • Grace Pyles, ‘The Medicinal Unicorn Horn in the European Middle Ages’
  • Emer Kavanagh, ‘Shape and Form: The Use of Sympathetic Magic in Irish Charming Tradition’
  • Radka Pallová, ‘Humane Treatment? Animal Bodies in Alexander of Tralles’

11:30-12:00 Break with refreshments

12:00-13:30 Session 2: Call the Midwife (chair: Diana Myers)

  • Ailie Westbrook, ‘‘Mulieribus non est dicendum’: Mediated Knowledge in Women’s Health in Medieval Denmark’
  • Shir Blum, ‘Appositusque Iuvat Mulierem Parturientem: the Material Variety of Amulets as Obstetrical Aides’
  • Rachel Chenault, ‘Experiencing Childbirth: The Search for Female Voices, 1000-1200 C.E.’

13:30-14:30 Lunch

14:30-15:30 Session 3: The Seventh Seal (chair: James Cogbill)

  • Ben Hatchett, ‘‘A suitable medicine against all crimes’: John of Rupescissa’s Purgative Plague’
  • Stephen Pow, ‘Was Bubonic Plague behind the Epidemic that Affected the Mongol Army in China in 1259?’

15:30-16:00 Break with refreshments

16:00-17:00 Keynote Address 1

  • Dr Hannah Bower, ‘Locating Authority in Medieval Medical Writing: Playing with Presence and Absence’

17:00 Drinks Reception

19:00 Conference Dinner (optional)

FRIDAY 22nd APRIL

9:30-10:15 Medicine & Healing at Oxford: Manuscript & Social Session (with refreshments)

10:15-11:15 Session 4: Being Human (chair: Caleb Prus)

  • Melanie Socrates, ‘Impatient Medicine: Agency and Urgency in Middle English Medical Works’
  • S. Doğan Karakelle, ‘Knowing Horses and Thyself: Spiritual Healing and Rulership Practices in Ottoman-Turkish Veterinary Manuals 1400-1600’

11:15-11:45 Break with refreshments

11:45-13:15 Session 5: Inside Out (chair: Corinne Clark)

  • Ruth Rimmer, ‘Healing Through Lists in Lacnunga
  • Colette Sarjano Utama McDonald, ‘A Stitch Through Time: the Besloten Hofjes at Mechelen, Alberto Burri, and Judith Scott’
  • Madeleine Killacky, ‘Challenging the Monopoly of 16th-Century Anatomical Knowledge through Pop-up Paper Figures’

13:15-14:15 Lunch

14:15-15:45 Session 6: Sister Act (chair: Eugenia Vorobeva)

  • Magdalena Buszka, ‘Saint Barbara of Medieval French Mystery Plays – Healer of Bodies and Souls’
  • Hólmfríður Sveinsdóttir, ‘The Use of Lead Tablets and Anatomical Votives in Medieval Healing Practices: Case studies from the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo’

15:45-16:15 Break with refreshments

16:15-17:15 Keynote Address 2

  • Professor Emilie Savage-Smith, ‘Modern Myths and Medieval Medicine’

17:15-17:20 Closing Remarks

Image: Medieval dentistry, from the fourteenth-century Omne Bonum of James le Palmer (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

Medieval Coffee Mornings are back!

Medievalists Coffee Mornings back from 22 April @bodleiancsb. Every Friday 10:30-11:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library. Access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road. All bodcard holders welcome!

  • Tea
  • Roof terrace
  • Sneak preview of new acquisitions

@oxmedstud grads: Apply NOW to Chris Fletcher for title of “bibliobarista” to help & pick items for discussion!

Medieval Matters: Eastermonað to us cymeð

Term has ended, Spring is finally here, and Easter is just on the horizon! Hopefully you are enjoying the sunshine, wherever you are. To celebrate, I come to your inbox with CFPs, Save-the-dates, and, of course, some Old English wisdom! First of all, some wisdom about the importance of rest and relaxation, taken from Maxims I:

Hy twegen sceolon tæfle ymbsittan þenden him hyra torn toglide
forgietan þara geocran gesceafta
[Two must sit at a game board together until their troubles slip away, forgetting sad events.]

I hope that your Easter break is filled with such joys! Onto the Medieval offerings:

Save the Date:

  • The Oxford Medieval Mystery Cycle 2022 – 23 April 2022, 12noon to 5:30pm. A cycle of medieval mystery plays performed by various groups around St Edmund Hall. A multilingual medieval experience not to be missed! All welcome (free of charge)! At 12 noon, the chapel bell will ring for Creation to commence in the Old Dining Hall. From there the story of mankind will unfold, with the Old Testament being acted out in the Front Quad and the New Testament in the churchyard around St Peter-in-the-East. For full information see https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/mystery-cycle or the flyer attached to this week’s email.
  • Please send me your Trinity Term Medieval Booklet Submissions by April 13th.

Events:

  • 24th-25th March: Adapting Violence in/from ‘Classic’ Texts: A 2-day free workshop hosted by the University of Bern, organised by Amy Brown (University of Bern) and Lucy Fleming (New College, Oxford). This interdisciplinary event brings together specialists in literature, retelling, and feminist practice to consider how adaptations of texts considered ‘classic’ handle, re-inscribe or re-imagine violence. Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto) will give the opening keynote, with a respondent plenary from Maria Sachiko Cecire (Bard College) and an author talk from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Last Queen. More information here. Register here.
  • 26th March: FREE online lecture from the Church Monuments Society. The first of this year’s Spring online lecture series will take place at 5pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Dr Christina Faraday, ‘The Eloquent Dead: Elizabethan and Jacobean Monuments in Gonville and Caius College Chapel, Cambridge‘. To receive the Zoom link, please register here.
  • 26th-27th March: Cultures of Exchange: Mercantile Mentalities Between Italy and the World (1100-1500). Attendance is free. Register here to receive access to Zoom links and conference materials.

Opportunities:

  • The University of Göttingen will run a summer school in digital Latin palaeography for graduate students this summer (1-12 August). Accommodation is provided free of charge and contributions will be made to travel costs for those who require them. No prior experience in digital humanities or palaeography is required, but a basic level of Latin is essential. Applications are due by 30 April. Further information is available on the university website.
  • CFP: Performing Medievalism: Tricks, Tips and Tropes from Early Artistic Practice for the Modern-Day Performer. Offerings on music, theatre, storytelling, dance or any artistic performance practice are welcome, for critical and scholarly articles of 8,000-10,000 words in length, documentations of performer training/approaches of 4,000-8,000 words (e.g., interviews, performance reviews, documentation of artistic processes), and shorter pieces of 1,500-3,000 words (e.g., artist’s notes). (These word count ranges are inclusive of notes and references.) Please send abstracts of up to 400 words along with a short (c. 100 word) biography to Ellie Chadwick and Ollie Jones at e.chadwick@bristol.ac.uk and oliver.jones@york.ac.uk. Deadline: 31st March 2022. For full details, see the blog post.
  • CFP: Textual Cultures in Contact, Early Text Cultures at Oxford, Trinity Term 2022. The Early Text Cultures research group based at the University of Oxford invites papers for its Trinity Term 2022 seminar on ‘Textual Cultures in Contact’, which will bring together scholars whose research focus is the interactions between pre-modern textual cultures. If you would like to present a 20-minute paper at one of the seminars, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to earlytextcultures.ox@gmail.com by Monday 11 April. For full details, see the blog post.

And finally, in case game boards aren’t your thing, some alternative advice on how to enjoy your Easter vac, taken from the Old English Dicts of Cato:

Liorna manega bec 7 gehyr monig spell
Read many books and hear many stories

As this is my last email of the term, on behalf of all of us at OMS, I’d like to wish you all an enjoyable and restful Easter break! I look forward to seeing you next term.

A Medievalist, exhausted from Hilary Term, takes a much needed rest over the Easter break
Merton College, MS 249, f. 6r.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Sylio

Hesychasm in Context: Theology and Society in the Fourteenth Century

The Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Maison française d’Oxford invite you to attend the hybrid conference Hesychasm in Context: Theology and Society in the Fourteenth Century, Thursday 17th – Friday 18th March 2022. All of the papers will be livestreamed.

To register for the in-person event (including lunches), please email Dr Rei Hakamada (rei.hakamada@theology.ox.ac.uk) as soon as possible, as numbers are limited.

Registration to participate online is via the following link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZArc-2trj4iGdfuVWLi81Wc0ybeFo43Xx-i.

PROGRAMME

Thursday 17th March
Lecture Room, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LU

9.00: Welcome

9.15: Rei Hakamada (Okayama University / University of Oxford), Lay Hesychasts? Isidore and Palamas among Lay People

10.00: Mihail Mitrea (Babeș Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca / Institute for South-East European Studies, Bucharest), Hesychasm and Hagiography in Fourteenth-Century Byzantium [online]

10.45: Coffee

11.15: Ralph Greis (St Joseph’s Benedictine Abbey, Gerleve), The Connection Between Liturgical Theology and Hesychastic Spirituality in the Homilies of St. Gregory Palamas

12.00: Christiaan Kappes (Ss Cyril and Methodius Byzantine Catholic Seminary), Gregory Palamas’s Theotokos in Light of Latin Contacts and his Reception of Latin Literature in Byzantium

12.45: Lunch

13.45: Marie-Hélène Blanchet (CNRS, UMR 8167 Orient et Méditerranée, Paris), John VI Cantacuzene, the Hesychast Crisis and the Latin World: An Ambiguous Strategy

14.30: Judith Ryder (University of Oxford), When To Speak and When To Hold Your Peace: The Conflict between Demetrios Kydones and Philotheos Kokkinos

15.15: Coffee

15.45: Monica White (University of Nottingham), Hesychasm in Rus?

16.30: Norman Russell (St Stephen’s House, Oxford), Engaging with Islam in Late Byzantium: Strategies of Resistance and Accommodation

17.15: Drinks – The Maison française d’Oxford is delighted to offer participants a glass of champagne


Friday 18th March
Miles Room, St Peter’s College, New Inn Hall Street, Oxford, OX1 2DL

10.30: Eiji Hisamatsu (Ryukoku University), The Jesus Prayer and Yoga: The Early Literature of Hesychasm and the Svetasvatara Upanishad [online]

11.15: Vassa Kontouma (École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL, Paris), The Re-enchanted Universe of Iakovos of Nea Skete (19th c.). A Hesychast Response to the Copernican Revolution?

12.15: Final remarks

12.30: Lunch

Image: St. Gregory Palamas, Monastery of Vatopedi, Mount Athos (Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

Medieval Matters: Week 8

Somehow we have arrived at the last week of term already! For everyone wondering how it went by so quickly, some wisdom from the Latin-English Proverbs of British Library, Cotton Faustina A X on the passing of time:

Æghwæt forealdað þæs þe ece ne byð
[Everything grows old if it is not eternal]

Hilary Term 2022, transient as it is, may be in its final week, but that doesn’t mean that it’s slowing down: we have a full schedule of events lined up for you! Please see below for all the details. And for those of you worried about blank spaces in your diary during the vac, we are also very excited to announce that the 2022 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference programme is now finalised. See the full details on the OMS Blog. Now, on to the announcements before everyone grows old waiting for them:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • The playlist for the Medieval Mystery Cycle 2022 is now finalised but there is still a chance to get involved: volunteer as steward, help distribute posters (download here as jpg or pdf) around Oxford – and of course, spread the word! Please contact Eleanor Baker to offer help. The spectaculum starts on Saturday, 23 April 2022, 12noon in the Front Quad of St Edmund Hall and move then around the grounds. The ten plays will take place in roughly half-hour slots. Welcome to drop in or stay for the whole afternoon!
  • Registration for the Oxford Medieval Graduate conference, Medicine and Healing is now open: this will be a hybrid event and free for all participants, although there are limited in-person tickets available. The conference programme and registration details can be found on the OMGC website.
  • Please note that there is no Celtic seminar this week: the seminar will resume on 17 March with Eurig Salisbury’s talk.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 7th March:

  • The Byzantine Graduate Seminar meets at 12.30-2pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker is Matthew Hassall (Cambridge), ‘Inventing the Tyrant and the Dissident: Procopius and the Limits on Acceptable Speech‘. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list. 
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group meets at 1-2pm on Teams. Sign up here for the mailing list to receive details of each week’s sessions. Contact Matthew Holford, Andrew Dunning or Tuija Ainonen for further details.
  • The Medieval Archaeology Seminar meets at 3pm on Teams and in the Institute of Archaeology Lecture Room. This week’s speaker will be Beatrice Widdell (U. of Reading): ‘Rethinking Battlefield Archaeology: Liminal Journeys and Campaign Landscapes in 14th-century Northern Britain’. Please note: Attendance in person is by advance booking only as the room has a strict Covid-19 capacity limit. Bookings can be made by contacting: jane.kershaw@arch.ox.ac.uk. For the Teams’ link click here.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Nicholas Karn (Southampton), ‘Memory and the dynamics of dispute in Anglo-Norman England‘. Attendance at the Wharton Room is by advance booking only as the room has a strict Covid-19 capacity limit. Seats will be released 1 week before each seminar. Bookings can be made at https://medieval-history-seminar.reservio.com. 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 Old Norse Reading Group meets at 5.30pm on Teams. Please email Olivia Smith (olivia.smith2@linacre.ox.ac.uk) to be added to the mailing list and Teams group.

Tuesday 8th March:

  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 11.30pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Paul Acker (St Louis University), ‘Dragons in Old English’. For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Class on Medieval Chronology by Prof. Anna Sapir Abulafia will take place 1.30-3.30 at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, Lecture Room, Gibson Building, ROQ site. This second class will review the solutions for last week’s work. Students interested in attending should contact anna.sapirabulafia@theology.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Late Medieval Europe Seminar meets at 2pm at Saint John’s College, seminar room 21 St Giles. This week’s seminar is a discussion seminar.
  • The Medieval Book Club meets at 3.30pm in Magdalen College, Old Law Library. This week’s topic is ‘Amusement’. If you want to join us, or would like more information, please contact oxfordmedievalbookclub@gmail.com. Option to join virtually via Google Meet as well, please send your contact details.
  • The Medieval French Research Seminar meets at 5pm at Maison française d’Oxford and Online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Giulia Boitani (King’s College, Cambridge): ‘Edenic Entanglements: the Ship of Solomon in MS Bodmer 147‘. To join a session remotely via Teams, please contact helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk to receive the link.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Helen Gittos (Balliol), ‘The Cerne Giant‘.

Wednesday 9th March:

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in Oriel College, Harris Room to discuss Reinbot of Durne’s Georg and find a topic for next term. If you are interested in being added to the teams channel and the mailing list for the seminar, email Henrike Lähnemann henrike.laehnemann@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk. For further information, follow MedGermOx on Twitter.
  • The Early Medieval Britain and Ireland network meets at 12.30pm at LRVII in Brasenose College. The speaker will be Professor Jonathan Wooding, ‘Locating the Early Irish Peregrini in Iceland: Multi-Disciplinary Approaches’. All are very welcome to attend! Refreshments provided.
  • The Medieval Trade Reading Group meets at 1-2pm in the Mertze Tate room of the History Faculty and online on Teams. Anyone interested in any element of medieval trade and its study are very welcome to join, from any department. To be added to the mailing list and team please email Annabel Hancock.
  • Lucy Pick will give a talk on Blanche of Castile: An Iberian Queen in France, in the Kloppenburg Room, Cohen Quad (Exeter College) and on Zoom at 4.30-6 pm. Please register in advance here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5:30pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker is Miranda Williams (Oxford): ‘“He restored all the dismantled fortresses in Libya” (Aed. vi.5.7): Reassessing the Justinianic fortification programme in North Africa.’ Register in advance for this on-line series: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEkdeuspz8jG9IfBfrd75k6qrxLyWtG_PAu. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Thursday 10th March:

  • Middle High German Reading Group meets at 10am at Somerville College Productivity Room (Margery Fry). This week’s text is Das Donaueschinger Passionsspiel. If you have any questions or want to participate, please send an e-mail to melina.schmidt@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in St Edmund Hall. Room TBC: contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
  • The Early Textual Cultures Reading Group meets at 4.30pm, on Zoom and in person at the Dickson Poon Building (China Centre, Oxford), Lucina Ho Seminar Room. This week’s speaker will be Flaminia Pischedda (University of Oxford), ‘The Xici zhuan 繫辭傳 (Part A): Textual Structure and Readership‘. For zoom links, please register here.
  • The Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music will take place on Zoom at 5pm. Today’s speakers are John Milsom (Liverpool Hope University) and Jessie Ann Owens (University of California at Davis): ‘Thomas Morley’s A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (London, 1597): new observations and discoveries’. 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 email (matthew.thomson@ucd.ie).
  • The Oxford University Heraldry Society meets at 6 for 6.30pm on Zoom. This week’s speaker is Robert Dennis: ‘Jacobite Flags of the 1745-46 Rising‘. Booking is essential – please contact the secretary at secretary@oxford-heraldry.org.uk

Friday 11th March:

  • Pre-Modern Conversations meets at 11am-12pm on Teams. For more information and to be added the the PMC Teams Channel, email lena.vosding AT mod-langs.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Seminar in the History of the Book will meet online and in the Weston Lecture Theatre at 2.15pm. You must be registered to attend: if you wish to attend online, you must register 24 hours before the seminar. This week’s speakers are Alexandra Franklin and Andrew Honey, Bodleian Library: ‘Bodleian Materials for the teaching of Book History‘. Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/FSXrV1W98u.

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Oxford Latinitas will be running a Spring Series of online intensive courses in ancient Greek (14th-18th March), and Latin (21st-25th March). All classes will be taught using the Active Method, which means that the target language is the language of the classroom. Classes will take place via Zoom, from 5-7pm UK time each day. For Greek there are two levels available: Absolute beginners / Beginners. For Latin, there are five: Absolute beginners / Beginners / Pre-intermediate / Intermediate / Advanced (this class will read Apuleius, Cupid and Psyche). Class size is capped at a maximum of 8 students. The cost of each course is £200, payable at the time of application. For detailed information about all the courses, and to access the sign-up form, click here.
  • The Centre for Advanced Studies “Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages” at the University of Tübingen, Germany, headed by Mischa Meier, Steffen Patzold and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner, invites applications for resident fellowships starting in 2023. The fellowships are available for a duration between one and twelve months. Fellowships are available for scholars at all stages of their academic career who have completed their doctoral degree and established an independent research profile. Applicants should be engaged in a research project in any relevant discipline that is related to the Centre’s interests in migration and mobility in the period and area in question. For full details, see here.
  • CfP: 3 funded places for a Graduate Student Conference in Vienna on Late Rome, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West. In the spirit of fostering closer links between the participating universities, their teaching staff and their students, and building on their research strengths in Late Antique, Byzantine and Early Medieval studies (roughly defined as extending to the year 1000), this conference invites contributions from graduate students (MA and doctoral level) that deal with any aspect of these cultures. For full details, see here.

Finally, some more wisdom on time, appropriate to the seasonal passing of the Oxford terms:

Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg.
That passed; so will this.

I take this to mean: even though Hilary is coming to an end, a new term rises up on the horizon! I’ll be in contact again next week with some final announcements for the term, and a call for submissions for the Trinity Term Medieval Booklet. But in the meantime, I wish you a successful and enjoyable final week of term.

[A medievalist is briefly stunned after being struck by the harsh reminder that it is 8th week already]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 4r.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Aptalon