Tag: Newsletter

Medieval Matters: Week 4

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06/02/2023

10:45

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February marks LGBTQ+ history month in the UK. Alcuin, who frequently wrote of his male colleagues with romantic affection, is celebrated by many LGBTQ+ scholars as part of our history. Here are some appropriate words from the 8th Century:

Haec ideo, frater, tibi scripsi, ut scias, si tamen scire potes, qua te caritate diligo; nam me ipsum fateor edicere non posse – fordan etiam nec tu, qua me diligas – Deus scit, qui hanc infudit cordibus nostris.

[I have written you this, my brother, so that you might know how much I love you; for I confess that I cannot express it – and perhaps you too cannot say how much you love me – but God, who poured this love into our hearts, knows it, Ep. 17]

In the spirit of uplifting LGBTQ+ scholars and scholarship, I’d like to bring special attention to one of our newest additions: the Queer and Trans Medievalisms Reading and Research Group, which meets at 3pm on Monday at Univ College, 12 Merton St Room 2 to discuss the wonderful Yde et Olive! All are welcome!

On another note, please keep in mind that over the coming weeks, many seminars, reading groups etc. may be cancelled or postponed at late notice in solidarity with UCU strike action. For all the latest updates, please check our Calendar (on the right hand side of our blog) or Twitter (@OxMedStud). If you are cancelling an event, please let me know so that we can update the community!

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Registration for the Memorial Event for Nigel F. Palmer is open. To celebrate the life and scholarship of Nigel F. Palmer, Professor of  German  Medieval Literary and Linguistic  Studies at the University of Oxford, Faculty, College and academic community will honour his memory with a symposium, to be held at the Taylorian and the Weston Library on 19-20 May 2023.
  • Piers Plowman performance on Saturday 11 February, 2-3pm, in St Edmund Hall! This coincides with National Garden opening of the beautiful grounds. The charity donation of £4 includes entry to the play – or write a review (speak to the OBS members at the entrance about how to do this) and you get in for free!
  • The Dark Archives 19-21 Proceedings: Voyages into the Medieval Unread and Unreadable are going to print this week! The Dark Archives conferences examine the praxis of digitisation and its impact on medieval studies worldwide. To read more about the volume, see the blog post by Stephen Pink and Anthony John Lappin.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 6th February:

  • The Byzantine Graduate Seminar takes place at 12.30-2pm online via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Daniel Alford (University of Oxford), Adults, Children and Other Animals: The Construction of the Zoroastrian Household. To register, please contact the organiser at 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. We will start with natural history from a medieval encyclopaedia. 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 Yde et Olive. 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 Archaeology Seminar meets at 3pm at the Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. This week’s speaker will be Prof. Oliver Creighton, University of Exeter, ‘Warhorse: The archaeology of horses in England, AD800-1600‘.
  • The Medieval History Seminar takes place at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College and on Teams (Teams link here). This week’s speaker will be Justine Trombley (Durham), ‘Books and the Late Medieval Landscape of Heresy and Inquisition.’. 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 Lincoln Leads seminar takes place at 5.30–7pm at Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College. This week’s panel is ‘Love and Other Emotions’, and features Em Horne (MSt in English 650-1550) on emotionality in Old Icelandic Sagas. Book a free place here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/cc/lincoln-leads-2023-1539199.

Tuesday 7th February:

  • The Europe in the Later Middle Ages Seminar will take place at 2–3.30pm in the New Seminar Room, St John’s College. Tea and coffee available from 1.45pm. This week’s speaker will be Cecilia Gaposchkin, Dartmouth, ‘Sacral Paris and the Capetians‘.
  • A ‘Digital Hub’ event called ‘Digital Keys to Invisible Texts’ takes place at 5.30-7.30pm in Jesus College’s new Cheng Building, with Richard Ovenden, Dirk Van Hulle, and Mike Kestemont. Free registration via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/digital-keys-to-invisible-texts-tickets-488521088727

Wednesday 8th February:

  • The Medieval German Graduate Seminar will meet at 11:15am in the island room of Oriel College for discussing Heinrich von Neustadt’s Apollonius von Tyrland. If you are interested to join, contact Henrike Lähnemann to be added to the teams chat.
  • The Medieval Italian Seminar will take place at 2pm at Rees Davies Room, History Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Adele Curness, (Oxford, St John’s), ‘Calabrian Hagiography and Mediterranean Connectivity in the Long Tenth Century’.
  • GLARE (Greek and Latin Reading Group) takes place at 4-5pm at Jesus College. Please meet at Jesus College Lodge. This week’s text will be Homer, Odyssey, ll. 23–50 & 465–503. All welcome to attend any and all sessions. For more details and specific readings each week, or to be added to the mailing list, email john.colley@jesus.ox.ac.uk or jenyth.evans@seh.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 (michael.stansfield@new.ox.ac.uk) for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar takes place at 5pm at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles. This week’s speaker will be Yan Zaripov (St Hilda’s College), ‘Theodore Prodromos’ Epigrams on the Old and New Testament: Narrative, Rhetoric, and Classical Mimesis’.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar takes place at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty, followed by a drinks reception. This week’s speaker will be Philip Knox (University of Cambridge), ‘Usk’s Books’. All welcome.

Thursday 9th February:

  • The Oxford Medieval Commentary Network will meet at 12.45-2.15pm in Thatched Barn, Christ Church (by meadow entrance). Free lunch from 12.45, seminar paper begins at 1.15. Today’s speaker will be Jiani Sun, Oriel College, Oxford, ‘The Making of an Autobiography: Reading, Writing, and Shaping the Life of Solomon in Wisdom of Solomon 7–9′. Please direct all questions to cosima.gillhammer:chch.ox.ac.uk, or visit the website.
  • The Celtic Seminar will not run today due to UCU strike action. The paper by Myriah Williams has been postponed to the autumn.
  • The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5.15pm at St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speakers are Lauren Rozenberg University College London, ‘In the Flat Round: Brain Diagrams in Late Medieval Manuscripts‘ and Sergei Zotov, University of Warwick, ‘Christian Motifs in Fifteenth-Century Alchemical Iconography‘.

Friday 10th February:

  • The Medievalist Coffee Morning takes place at 10:30-11.30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!). This week we’ll be treated to a number of Hebrew manuscripts by Dr Thea Gomelauri, among them Bodleian Library MS. Can. Or. 28, 34, 37, 41 and 94 – do come!

Saturday 11th February:

  • A Fair Field of Folk will be performing The Potted B Text of PIERS PLOWMAN. Come and join our merveillous swevene, 2–3pm at St Edmund Hall, Broadbent Garden (behind the library church of St-Peter-in-the-East). Gardens open 2–5pm as part of the National Garden scheme. Ticket for the gardens £4.00 on the door, includes entrance to the play.

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • The Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University invites applications to short-term fellowship programs available for research in its collections. The library holds over 40,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts reproduced in microfilm and digital formats. Fellowships are available to graduate students and established scholars regardless of nationality. For further information on application details and submission deadlines, see our fellowship guidelines.
  • Call for Submissions: The Database of Religious History. The Database of Religious History (DRH) is currently recruiting historians, archaeologists, and religious studies scholars in all areas of expertise (PhD students and above). If you have academic expertise in the history or anthropology of religion, please consider contributing to the DRH. In an effort to build the database in as swift a manner as possible, and improve the quality of any analyses produced with it, the DRH is offering $300 CAD honoraria for each completed entry. If you are a PhD candidate or above and would like to contribute an entry on any religious group, place, or text, please contact Dr. Ian Randall (irandall@mail.ubc.ca) or sign up for the database at https://religiondatabase.org/landing/get-involved and select Dr. Randall as your entry editor. For more information please see here.
  • CFP: Priests and their Manuscripts in the Holy Land and Sinai (Vienna, 8–10 November 2023). Please send the title of your paper and an abstract (max. 300 words) to Giulia Rossetto (giulia.rossetto@oeaw.ac.at) no later than March 15, 2023. The speakers will be notified by April 15.For full details, see our blog.

I leave you with another quote from Alcuin’s letters, on the power of love, as a little preview for next week’s Valentine’s day:

Dulcedo sanctae dilectionis vestrae omnibus horis etiam et momentis aviditatem pectoris mei habundantur

[The sweetness of your righteous love makes the desire of my heart overflow every hour and every minute, Ep. 78]

May love (of this medieval community and your research) make your heart overflow this week!

[Two medievalists discover that they are birds of a feather]
Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 66 v.
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian

Medieval Matters: Week 2

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23/01/2023

10:46

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I hope that you have all settled back into the rhythms of Oxford life. It’s terribly cold this week, with a thick layer of fog covering Oxford’s spires. Here’s some advice from Alcuin on how to wrap up warm:

Nullatenus capitis cura obmittenda est; levius est pedes dolere quam caput
[Care of the head should never be neglected: it is less serious that the feet should suffer than the head, Ep. 114 ]

I interpret this to mean: don’t forget to wear a warm hat! If you want to care for the head in a less literal sense, we of course have a whole host of intellectually stimulating seminars, reading groups and events for you to enjoy this week:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • The Medieval Misuse discussion and reading group meets every 2 weeks, on a Thursday 5-6, for an informal discussion about the ways that medieval history, culture and literature are misused by modern political parties and extremist groups. Interested individuals should email: tristan.alphey@stx.ox.ac.uk
  • 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
  • Oxford Ancient Languages Society (OALS) is running a great programme of classes and events this term – perfect for medievalists who want to brush up or acquire Latin! For full details, see their website here.
  • Please note that the Carlyle Lectures are medieval this year! This year’s lectures will be given by John Hudson, on common law and Roman law and custom, C12-13: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/carlyle-lectures

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 23rd January:

  • The Byzantine Graduate Seminar takes place at 12.30-2pm online via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Rebecca Amendola (La Sapienza Università di Roma), Manuscripts in Motion: The Parma Gospel Book (Ms. Pal. 5) and Its Journey to Italy. To register, please contact the organiser at 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. We will start with natural history from a medieval encyclopaedia. 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 Heldris of Cornwall’s Le Roman de Silence. 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 takes place at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College and on Teams (Teams link here). This week’s speaker will be Jamie Wood (Lincoln), ‘The Memory of the Martyrs: The topography of sanctity in Visigothic Toledo.’. 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 24th January:

  • The Europe in the Later Middle Ages Seminar will take place at 2–3.30pm in the New Seminar Room, St John’s College. Tea and coffee available from 1.45pm. This week’s speaker will be Catherine Holmes, Oxford, ‘Networks, brokerage and identity in the late medieval eastern Mediterranean‘.
  • The Comparative Philology Seminar: Old High German meets at 2.15-4pm in the Lecture Theatre of the Centre for Linguistics and Philology (Walton Street). This week’s speakers will Luise Morawetz and Howard Jones, Introduction/Phonology. All are welcome, basic linguistic knowledge is assumed. 
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5-6pm in the Charlese Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker will be Susannah Bain (Jesus), ‘Maps, Chronicles and Treaties: defining political connections in late-thirteenth-century northern Italy‘.
  • The John Hudson Carlyle Lectures takes place at 5pm at South School, Examination Schools. This week’s lecture will be Legal development in Europe: a view from the 1190s. This lecture examines patterns of legal development in England, France and north Italy in the latter part of the twelfth century. It suggests that those patterns do not act as a clear guide to the developments that followed in the thirteenth century. This lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in North Schools. All are welcome!

Wednesday 25th January:

  • The Medieval German Graduate Seminar will meet at 11:15am in the island room of Oriel College for discussing the prologue of this term’s text, Heinrich von Neustadt’s Apollonius von Tyrland. If you are interested to come along, contact Henrike Lähnemann, to be added to the teams chat.
  • The Medieval Italian Seminar will take place at 2pm at Rees Davies Room, History Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Paul Oldfield (Manchester), ‘Inquest and History in Thirteenth-Century Puglia’.
  • GLARE (Greek and Latin Reading Group) takes place at 4-5pm at Jesus College. Please meet at Jesus College Lodge. This week’s text will be Demosthenes, Against Neaera, 72–8. All welcome to attend any and all sessions. For more details and specific readings each week, or to be added to the mailing list, email john.colley@jesus.ox.ac.uk or jenyth.evans@seh.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 (michael.stansfield@new.ox.ac.uk) for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Old French Reading Group takes place at 4-5pm at St Hilda’s College (meet by the lodge). 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 Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar takes place at 5pm at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles. This week’s speaker will be Olivier Delouis (Maison Française d’Oxford), ‘Teaching Greek grammar to one’s son: an unpublished manual by Nikolaos Artabasdos Rabdas (14th c.)’.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar takes place at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty, followed by a drinks reception. This week’s speaker will be William Sweet (Independent), ‘Lydgate and Humanist Reading After Arundel’. All welcome.

Thursday 26th January:

  • The Oxford Medieval Commentary Network will meet at 12.45-2.15pm in the McKenna Room at Christ Church. Please note the change of venue! Free lunch from 12.45, seminar paper begins at 1.15. The speaker will be Tristan Franklinos, Wolfson & Oriel Colleges, Oxford, ‘Peter Abelard’s Hymns as exegesis for the sisters of the Paraclete’. Please direct all questions to cosima.gillhammer:chch.ox.ac.uk, or visit the website.
  • The Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music will take place on Zoom at 5pm. This week’s speaker will be Julia Craig-McFeely (DIAMM, University of Oxford), The Sadler Sets of Partbooks and Tudor Music Copying. 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 matthew.thomson@ucd.ie.
  • The Medieval Misuse discussion and reading group meets at 5-6pm, for an informal discussion about the ways that medieval history, culture and literature are misused by modern political parties and extremist groups. Interested individuals should email: tristan.alphey@stx.ox.ac.uk
  • The Germanic Reading Group meets at 4-5pm on zoom. This week’s topic will be Old Norse skaldic verse (Nelson Goering leading). Please contact Howard Jones Howard.Jones@sbs.ox.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list and receive the zoom link.
  • The Celtic Seminar will take place at 5.15pm via Teams and in The History of the Book Room, English Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Mark Williams (Oxford), ‘Magic and violence in Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi‘. Please contact david.willis@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk if you need a link.
  • The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5.15pm at St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speakers are Sarah Griffin, Lambeth Palace Library, London, ‘From Hours to Ages: Time in the Large-scale Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris (1296-c. 1352)‘ and Anya Burgon, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, ‘In a Punctum: Miniature Worlds in Late Medieval Art and Literature‘.
  • The Oxford Interfaith Forum is hosting a lecture by Professor Laurent Mignon, Professor of Turkish Literature at the University of Oxford, UK, at 6-7pm, online. The lecture will be ‘From the People of the Book to the Books of the People: Christian Literature and the 19th Century Ottoman Turkish Literary World‘. For full details and registration, click here.
  • The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies is hosting The David Patterson Lectures at 6-7pm, at the Catherine Lewis Lecture Room and on zoom. This week’s lecture will be of interest to anyone who teaches papers on the Central Middle Ages, English history, and also to feminist / gender historians of all stripes. The speaker will be Dr Emily Rose, ‘The Expulsion of Jews from England (1290): It is Not What You Think’. To register for online attendance, click here. For enquiries, email enquiries@ochjs.ac.uk.

This weekend marked Lunar New Year: Happy New Year to all who celebrate! This year is the year of the rabbit. I wanted to provide a suitable quote and image but to my knowledge, Alcuin has nothing to write about rabbits, and nor are any to be found in the Ashmole bestiary. So please forgive a temporary departure from our usual material. Here is Albertus Magnus describing the importance of camraderie amongst rabbits:

Est […] animal timidum, et ideo injuriatum relinquit habitationem, quod videns grex totus de loco transit, ac si indignetur ad injurias sociorum
[It is a shy animal, and for that reason when disturbed it flees its home, and seeing this the whole colony leaves the place too, as if offended by the insult to their companion 20:29]

May we medievalists enjoy such loyal companionship!

Announcing the year of the Rabbit (no rabbits were harmed in the making of this year)
Detail from La Queste del Saint Graal, France, N., early 14th century, Royal MS 14 E III, f. 89r

Medieval Matters: Week 8

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27/11/2022

22:39

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Here we are at the end of term! Last Friday was Oxmas, traditionally celebrated one month before Christmas Day to allow us to spread some festive cheer before term ends. I’m sure this week will be filled with festive celebrations. If you are about to embark upon Christmas shopping, you might be struggling to find the perfect gift. Fear not: Alcuin also struggled with this dilemma…

Diu deliberans, quid mentis meae devotio ad splendorem imperialis potentiae vestrae atque augmentum opolentissimi thesauri vestri muneris condignum reperire potuisset – ne ingeniolum animi mei, aliis diversa divitiarum dona offerentibus, otio torpuisset inani, et vacuis manibus parvitatis meae missus ante faciem beatudinis vestrae venisset.
[I have long deliberated over what I might consider a worthy gift for the brilliance of your imperial power and for the increase of your most opulent treasury, lest my mind might have grown slothful through the holiday and through idleness, and my messenger appear before you with empty hands whilst others were offering various gifts of riches, Ep. 205]

I have been wondering long and hard what “gifts” to offer you at the end of term, and hope that this seasonal and lengthier than usual quotation might suffice! I didn’t want to come to your inbox empty-handed since others are offering various gifts of great riches this week, from a special lecture by Professor Gordon Noble on Tuesday, to the final chance to see the exhibition of Violent Victorian Medievalism in person in the Taylorian on Friday. See below for a round-up of all of the diversa divitiarum dona on offer this week.

And a reminder: We are still looking for takers for plays for the Medieval Mystery Cycle on 22 April 2023. Full information here on how to propose a play – and do get in contact with Michael Angerer or Henrike Lähnemann if you have any questions. There will be a workshop for anybody considering taking part in early Hilary Term!

ANNOUNCEMENTS

  • Remember to sign up for the Medieval Mystery Cycle! As play proposals are starting to trickle in, don’t miss your chance to join this unique bit of medieval fun. We will be offering a workshop on cutting play scripts at St Edmund Hall on Friday 20 January 2023, open to all potential directors. You can find more information, as well as the sign-up link, on our blog post.

EVENTS THIS WEEK

Monday 28th November:

  • The Byzantine Graduate Seminar takes place at 12.30-2pm online via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be İrem Kısacık (İstanbul Medeniyet University), Emotions in Late Antiquity. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Latin Manuscript Reading Group led by Matthew Holford, Andrew Dunning, and Tuija Ainonen is meeting as usual via Teams from 1-2pm.
  • The Medieval Archaeology Seminar takes place at 3pm in the Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. This week’s speaker will be Jane Kershaw, ‘A Viking winter camp in Northumberland? Ongoing work in the Coquet valley‘.
  • The Queer and Trans Medievalisms Reading Group meets at 3pm at Univ College, 12 Merton St Room 2. This week’s theme is The trial of Joan of Arc. 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 takes place at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College and on Teams (Teams link here). This week’s speaker will be Robert Wiśniewski (Warsaw): ‘‘Avoid undue leaps’. Clerical career paths in Late Antiquity’. 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 English Reading Group takes place at 5.30-7.30pm. Please email grace.oduffy@sjc.ox.ac.uk for more information and to be added to the mailing list.

Tuesday 29th November:

  • The Medieval English Research Seminar takes place at 12.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Rhiannon Purdie (St Andrews),  ‘Synchronic histories of Older Scots Literature: the rewards and challenges of reconstruction’. The paper will be followed by lunch with the speaker. All welcome.
  • GLARE (Greek and Latin Reading Group) takes place at 4-5pm at Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College. Please meet at Jesus College Lodge. This week’s text will be Pseudo-Seneca, Octavia. All welcome to attend any and all sessions. For more details and specific readings each week, or to be added to the mailing list, email john.colley@jesus.ox.ac.uk or jenyth.evans@seh.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar takes place at 5pm at Charles Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College. The theme for this term is ‘Women’. This week’s speaker will be Delfi Nieto-Isabel (Queen Mary University of London): Connecting the Dots:  heresy, inquisitors and invisible women. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar.
  • The Codicology and History of the Book Seminar is hosting a Welcome Evening for Oxford DPhil Students at 6-8pm, in the Blackwell Hall, Weston Library. For further details, email bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Early Medieval Britain and Ireland Network will host a lecture by Dr Gordon Noble, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. His talk, entitled ‘Discovering the Northern Picts,’ will discuss some of the significant discoveries of the award-winning Northern Picts excavations and what these findings mean for Pictish society ca 300-900 AD. The talk will take place at 7:00 PM at Worcester College in the Linbury Room. All are very welcome to attend. Any queries, please contact Meredith Cutrer at meredith.cutrer@worc.ox.ac.uk.

Wednesday 30th November:

  • The Medieval German Graduate Seminar this week does not meet on Wednesday but rather on Friday, 3pm (see below) for a paper by Dr Pia Selmayr. If you want to be added to the medieval German mailing list, please contact 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 (michael.stansfield@new.ox.ac.uk) for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar takes place at 5pm at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles. This week’s speaker will be Michael Jeffreys (Oxford), Imperial ceremonies away from the Great Palace, 1148-1159: the evidence of Manganeios Prodromos.

Thursday 1st December:

  • The Old French Reading Group takes place at 4pm at St Hilda’s College (meet by the lodge) 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 Digital Humanities and Sensory Heritage (DHSH) – Seminar Series will meet at 4.30pm in the Linbury Room, Worcester College. The speaker will be Jean-Philippe Échard (Paris), Materiality-driven Digital Approaches to Music Museum Artefacts: from Spectro-imaging and CT Scans, to Photogrammetry. All welcome! For more information, click here.
  • The Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music will take place on Zoom at 5pm. This week’s speaker will be David Burn (University of Leuven): Sixteenth-Century Symbola. 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 me an email (matthew.thomson@ucd.ie).
  • The Oxford Medieval Visual Culture Seminar will take place at 5pm in St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Julian Luxford University of St Andrews, The iconography of the Mass of St Gregory in England.
  • The Celtic Seminar will take place at 5pm, online via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Dewi Alter, ‘Darllen y tir yn iawn: Mannau’r cof yn Drych y Prif Oesoedd‘. Please contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk for the link.

Friday 2nd December:

  • The Medievalist Coffee Morning takes place at 10:30-11.30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!). This is a perfect opportunity to see treasures of the Bodleian, go up to the roof terrace, pick the brains of other medievalists and, of course, drink coffee.

Finally, some wisdom from Alcuin on the joy of gifts:

Licet nullius nunc mens mea desideret munuscula propter animi mei requiem, tua tamen mihi sunt semper dulcia.
[Although my mind now desires nothing because of the peace of my spirit, your gifts are always sweet to me, Ep. 189.]

In other words, no matter how peaceful your spirit, it’s always nice to get a present! I hope that your last week is filled with sweet gifts! I will be back in your inboxes briefly next week with a Christmas email to finish off the term.

[A Medievalist finds the perfect sweet gift for a friend]
Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 60 v.
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian

Medieval Matters: Week 2

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17/10/2022

13:45

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Term is now well underway! Thank you to everyone who organised, gave papers, or attended any of our wonderful events last week. In the words of Alcuin:

‘Totius sapientiae decus et salutaris eruditionis ornatus per vestrae nobilitatis industriam renovari incipit‘
[The glory of all wisdom and the honour of beneficial learning are beginning to be revived by the efforts of your excellence, Ep. 112]

The Oxford Medieval community certainly feels revived and full of life. In fact, we were such a large crowd that the Bodleian ran out of mugs for us to drink from at the Coffee Morning on Friday – a real testament to the phenomenal size of our community! It was lovely to meet so many of you there. Please do continue to join throughout the term for a well-earned break. If you missed the coffee morning, you can see the presentation of manuscripts by Dr Andrew Dunning here on youtube – huge thanks to Andrew and the Bodleian conservation team for all of your hard work on this! You can also meet the team here and put faces to all of our names.

Now, without further ado, please peruse the glorious wisdom and beneficial learning on offer this week:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Palaeography Self-Help Groups: Students in the history and MML faculties are working together on two palaeography groups, one every week of term, alternating between French and Iberian palaeography. They are both student run, collaborative groups where people can bring something they’re working on to get help from others and work through things together, and improve their skills. We also share resources and course recommendations. If you’d like to be involved please email Clare Burgess at clare.burgess@univ.ox.ac.uk, and state which group (or both!) you’re interested in. Full details on our blog.
  • Save the Date: St John’s Film Club presents two new short films on Love, Hope, Death and Eternity on Wednesday 26th October, 5-6.30pm at St John’s College, the Mark Bedingham Room (located in St John’s Library). The first of these films, Complete Surrender (dir. Louise Nelstrop) will be of particular interest to Medievalists: it follows five celebrated Belgian artists and three religious sisters as they engage with the erotic mysticism of the female medieval mystics Hadewijch and Marguerite Porete. For full details, see our blog.
  • Save the Date: Professor Antje Richter will give a talk on the narrative role of silence in the Buddhist scripture Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa-sūtra at Pembroke College on December 1st, 2022, 14:00-16:00. Please see our blog for more information. 

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 17th October:

  • The Medieval Archaeology Seminar takes place at 3pm in the Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. This week’s speaker will be Claus Kropp, ‘Of droughts, ‘internal climates’ and the mouldboard plough. Experimental Archaeology and the Study of the Early Middle Ages‘.
  • The Queer and Trans Medievalisms Reading Group meets at 3pm at Univ College. This week’s theme is Queer longings for God. 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 takes place at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College and on Teams (Teams link here). This week’s speaker will be Christian Liddy (Durham), ‘The city and the household: Towards a social history of politics in the late medieval town‘. 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 English Reading Group takes place at 5.30-7.30pm. Please email grace.oduffy@sjc.ox.ac.uk for more information and to be added to the mailing list.

Tuesday 18th October:

  • The Medieval English Research Seminar takes place at 12.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty. This week’s speaker will be Harriet Soper (Oxford), ‘Twists, Turns, and Jumping the Riverbed: The Life Course in Old English Poetry’. The paper will be followed by lunch with the speaker. All welcome.
  • GLARE (Greek and Latin Reading Group) takes place at 4-5pm at Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College. Please meet at Jesus College Lodge. This week’s text will be Seneca, Thyestes. All welcome to attend any and all sessions. For more details and specific readings each week, or to be added to the mailing list, email john.colley@jesus.ox.ac.uk or jenyth.evans@seh.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar takes place at 5pm at Charles Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College. The theme for this term is ‘Women’. This week’s speaker will be Emily Winkler (SEH): The Many Griefs of Merlin. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar.

Wednesday 19th October:

  • The Medieval German Graduate Seminar meets for a paper by Annette Volfing on Arthurian elements in ‘Dietrichs Flucht’ at 11:15am in Somerville College – ask at the Lodge for directions. If you want to be added to the medieval German mailing list, please contact Henrike Lähnemann.
  • The Early Textual Cultures Seminar will be held at Corpus Christi College Seminar Room at 2–3pm. This week’s speaker will be Katherine S. Beard (Oxford), The Chieftain at Reykholt: Snorri Sturluson’s Impact on Old Norse/Icelandic Studies. To join remotely, please register here.
  • 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 (michael.stansfield@new.ox.ac.uk) for further details and the Teams link.
  • The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar takes place at 5pm at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles. This week’s speaker will be Alberto Ravani (Oxford), “Manuscripts don’t burn”: Composition and story of the text of John Tzetzes’ Homeric Allegories.

Thursday 20th October:

  • The Celtic Seminar will take place at 5pm via Zoom. This week’s speaker will be Elena Parina (Bonn): ”Dysgeidiaeth Cristnoges o ferch’ in Aberystwyth, NLW, Peniarth 403 and its sources‘. Please contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk for the link.
  • The Oxford Medieval Visual Culture Seminar will take place at 5pm in St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building. This week’s speaker will be Sandy Heslop, University of East Anglia: Reconfiguring the Cloisters Cross: art and crusading in Cnut VI’s Denmark.

Friday 21st October:

  • The Medievalist Coffee Morning takes place at 10:30-11.30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!).

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Oxford Bibliographical Society Photography Competition: Libraries of Oxford and Oxfordshire. The Oxford Bibliographical Society marks its 100th anniversary with a photography competition celebrating libraries connected with Oxford and Oxfordshire, in 2022. Qualifying entries should depict any library, whether public, private, personal, large or small, static or mobile, old or new. The photographs may show the contents of the library, its architecture, or the library’s users. Categories & Prizes: Adult – first prize £150, second prize £100, third prize £70; Under 18 – first prize £100, second prize £50, third prize £30. For full details click here.

Finally, some wisdom from Alcuin on the importance of teachers:

‘Locus sine doctoribus aut non, aut vix salvus fieri poterit‘
[a place without teachers cannot be safe, or can scarcely be, Ep. 105]

Given the incredible number of teachers we have here at Oxford, I think that by this metric we may be able to claim to be one of the safest places on earth! Wishing you all a week of productive study and comfort in the knowledge that you are surrounded by such a large and wonderful community of Medievalists.

[A hoard of Medievalists are informed that the cups have run out at the coffee morning…]
Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, f. 9 r.
Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian

Medieval Matters: sigelbeorhte dagas

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08/07/2022

05:36

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Trinity Term has ended, and with it, the academic year! Since this is the final Medieval Matters of the year, on behalf of everyone at OMS I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has enabled our many wonderful seminars, reading groups and events this year to happen. The Medievalist community at Oxford is incredibly fortunate to have such a diversity of scholarship and such a wealth of goings-on, and all of your contributions have made this year richer and more enjoyable! Here is some wisdom on doing good things, from Beowulf:

Lofdædum sceal
in mægþa gehwære man geþeon.
[By praiseworthy deeds one shall prosper among peoples everywhere.]

Wherever your summer is taking you, I am sure that your praiseworthy organisation, convening and paper-giving will lead you to prosper! Safe travels to those of you leaving Oxford and congratulations to our Masters students for finishing their studies. Please see below for the roundup of summer events, save the dates, and some important tasks to do:

Important To-Do:

  • For those leaving Oxford/changing college: if you would like to continue to receive Medieval Matters emails, please make sure to sign up with your new email address. You can do it yourself via http://medieval.seh.ox.ac.uk/about/ or contact me. Please also alert any medievalist visitor or new student to this! For postgraduate course convenors: when your incoming students have their Oxford email addresses, please register them for the mailing list or contact me with a list of addresses and I can do this for you.

Summer events:

  • Coffee Morning with Professor William Chester Jordan, 23rd June 10.30-12 noon. The Faculty of History and Oxford Medieval Studies are pleased to invite you to an informal meet and greet coffee morning with William Chester Jordan (Professor of Medieval History, Princeton University) on the occasion of his reception of an honorary degree of the University of Oxford, in the garden of Harris Manchester College (Mansfield Road), or in the Warrington Room in the case of rain. Coffee and croissants will be provided. For catering purposes, please register your attendance if possible: https://forms.gle/AkvPUsX2Ur1hbgTU7
  • Mandeville 700 Conference, 30 June 2022. In 1322, Sir John Mandeville left his native England to travel through Europe, to the pilgrim sites of Jerusalem, and beyond to the Far East, where he served as a mercenary in the Great Khan’s army before returning home 34 years later to write an immensely popular and influential account of his travels. Or not: historical research has been unable to find any John Mandeville who can be firmly identified either as traveller or author, and the book itself was largely adapted from other sources. To mark the 700th anniversary of his supposed departure, this conference will bring together scholars working on one of the most striking and enduring inventions of the late Middle Ages. For further information and to book, please click here.
  •  Medium Ævum Annual Lecture taking place on Saturday, 2 July (4:30-6pm BST): Dr Ryan Perry (University of Kent) will deliver the annual lecture on ‘Middle English Books of Devotion and Liturgical Privatisation in Fifteenth-century England’, as part of the ‘Pfaff at 50’ conference at the University of Nottingham marking 50 years since the publication of Richard W. Pfaff’s ground-breaking New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England. Registration details for in-person and online attendance are available at the following link: https://pfaff50.wordpress.com/keynote/
  • The Oxford Festival of the Arts has a smorgasbord of exciting events of interest to medievalists:
    -The Art of Illumination: makers and users of medieval manuscripts (June 25, Lecture Theatre, Weston Library, 2pm – 4.30pm)
    -Illuminated Manuscript Workshop with Patricia Lovett MBE (June 26, Magdalen College School Studio, 10am – 5pm)
    -Professor Robert Bartlett: The Middle Ages and the Movies (June 27, Festival Marquee, 8pm)
    -Treasures from Around the World at New College Library (July 2, 11am-4pm, Lecture Room 4, New College)
    -British Society of Master Glass Painters Centenary Touring Exhibition (The Chapter House, Christ Church Cathedral (throughout the festival))
    -Dr Janina Ramirez in discussion with Peter Frankopan (July 5, 7.30pm, Festival Marquee, Magdalen College School, Oxford)
    -John Leighfield: Atlases and Maps (July 6, 5pm-7pm, Magdalen College School Studio)
    For full details of these events, and links for booking, please consult our blog here.

Save the Date:

  • Prof. Ardis Butterfield giving the Michaelmas Medieval Studies Lecture: ‘Do we mean lyric or song?’ We’re very pleased to announce that Prof. Ardis Butterfield (Yale) will give the Medieval Studies Lecture in Michaelmas Term, as part of her stay in Oxford as an Astor Visiting Lecturer. She will be here in week 4 of term (31 October to 4 November), taking part in a number of events and seminars and working with students in a number of medieval disciplines, in particular on medieval lyric and song. The lecture itself is planned for Monday 31 October, and its provisional title is ‘Do we mean lyric or song?’.
  • Medieval Mystery Cycle 2023. Following the successful Medieval Mystery Cycle 2.0, plans are underway for the third iteration of what has fast become an Oxford tradition. Please reserve the date of 22 April 2023 (Saturday before Trinity Term) and spread the word! 

Opportunities:

  • Oxford Medieval Commentary Network Second Conference, 29 September 2022: Call for Papers and Sign-up. Proposals are invited for the second conference organised by the Oxford Medieval Commentary Network, following the successful launch of the Network last year. The one-day conference will take place at Christ Church, Oxford, on 29 September 2022. For full details, please see our blog.
  • Graduate Convenor for the Medieval Mystery Cycle 2023: we are looking for a graduate convenor who will take on the mantle of Eleanor Baker in masterminding the operation. Have a look at seh.ox.ac.uk/mystery-cycle for getting a sense of the scope and watching the plays performed in 2019 and 2022. Please send expressions of interest for the Graduate Convenor by 30 June 2022 to Co-Directors Henrike Lähnemann and Lesley Smith under medieval@torch.ox.ac.uk.
  • CFP: Christian Political Cultures in Late Antiquity. We invite papers for a conference (and planned edited volume) on Christian Political Cultures in Late Antiquity. This conference is designed as a pre-publication workshop for a planned edited volume on Christian Political Cultures in Late Antiquity. The deadline for proposals is 30 June 2022. Please send a title and an abstract (no longer than 500 words) to robin.whelan@liverpool.ac.uk. If you have questions, do not hesitate to get in touch with one of the organisers. For full details, click here.
  • CFP: Early Book Society University of Limerick, 11th-15th July 2023: Meaning, Memory, and the Making of Culture: Manuscripts and Books, 1350–1550. The 18th biennial conference of the Early Book Society will be hosted by Carrie Griffin and Eleanor Giraud at the University of Limerick from 11th to 14th July 2023, with an excursion on 15th July. Confirmed keynote speakers include John Thompson, Emeritus Professor, Queen’s University Belfast, and Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America. Planned activities include an early music concert and hands-on use of the university’s printing press. Please mark your calendars.  We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, themed panels (three papers and a chair), roundtables, and 5-minute lightning papers (ideal for work-in-progress updates). Scholars at all levels, including graduate students and early career researchers, are cordially invited to participate. 

Finally: It has been an honour and a delight to be your guide to all things Medieval in Oxford this academic year. Here is my final piece of Old English wisdom for the academic year, taken from the Old English Maxims:

Ræd biþ nyttost,
yfel unnyttost.
Good advice is the most useful, bad the least useful.

I hope that some of this year’s Old English Wisdom has fallen into the former category! I am delighted to be remaining in my role as Comms Officer for 2022-23, so I will be back in your inboxes come September. Until then, I wish you all a productive and restful summer – may you enjoy these ‘sigelbeorhte dagas’ (sun-bright days)!

Medievalists leaving Oxford for the summer encounter some strange adventures…
Merton College, MS 249, f. 7r.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dow

Medieval Matters: Week 8

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13/06/2022

12:11

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Somehow we are now at the final week of the academic year! It seems to have flown by – it feels like only yesterday that I met many of you at the Michaelmas Term Medieval Roadshow. This year we’ve enjoyed the return of in-person seminars, covering topics from late Byzantine Arabic and Persian poetry to St Birgitta of Sweden; a whole range of OMS events ranging from special lectures by Caroline Danforth and Lucy Pick to the Medieval Mystery Plays; and a whole host of exciting events and conferences. A very short but very appropriate piece of wisdom today, taken from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

Wurðe ðe god se ende
[May the end be good]

To ensure that this term has a good end, here is the roundup of events that you can enjoy:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Release of Oxford Research in English Issue 13: Masks. The committee for Oxford Research in English (ORE), the journal of the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, is pleased to announce the release of its latest issue! This issue has been slightly delayed from Autumn 2021, but we are happy to announce it is now fully published. Its theme was ‘Masks’, and the committee were excited to have so many submissions of such high quality. Please find a copy available for download or online reading at this link. 

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 13th June:

  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Stephanie Forrest (Cambridge), Byzantine-Armenian Doctrinal Discourse in the Period of the Early Islamic Conquests, c. 630-720. 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 Alice Taylor (KCL), ‘The Problem of Politics in C12 Europe’. 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 Forgotten Christianities Seminar meets at 5pm online. Booking is essential so that you receive the link for the seminar: please click here. This week’s speakers are Dr Peter Miller (Iowa), ‘Learning Ascesis in Three Steps: Training Novices in the Reform Monastic Tradition of the Church of the East‘ and David Gyllenhaal (Princeton), ‘The Rebuke Homily: Collective Trauma and the Christianization of the Syriac Speaking Peasantry‘.

Tuesday 14th June:

  • The Oxford Numismatic Society meets at 5pm. This week is the McKenzie Lecture. For further information please contact the secretary: giorgia.capra@new.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Ian McDole (Keble), ‘Bruno of Toul or Leo IX? Progressing from bishop to pope‘.

Wednesday 15th June:

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in St Edmund Hall in the Principal’s Drawing Room for a presentation by Linus Möllenbrink on his project of Reading Practices. For more information, please email henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Trade Reading Group meets at 1pm in the Mertze Tate room of the History Faculty and online. 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 at annabel.hancock@history.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Iberian History Seminar takes place at 4.30pm at Rector’s Drawing Room, Exeter College. Today’s speaker will be Rosa Vidal Doval – ‘Tracing the Medieval Genealogies of ‘Limpieza de Sangre’.
  • 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 Ugo Mondini (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) – ‘John Mauropous: verse, structure, and poetry book‘.
  • The LIPS: Manuscript Studies Lecture takes place at 5pm at The Senate Room, First Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. The speaker will be Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), on “Witness/Copy/Record: Towards an Expansive Manuscript Studies“.

Thursday 16th June:

  • Choral Eucharist for Corpus Christi takes place at 12pm at St Edmund Hall. This lunchtime service in the Crypt of St Peter’s-in-the-East celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi, instituted in the late Middle Ages to give thanks for the gift of Holy Communion. A consort will sing John Taverner’s Mean Mass for five voices and William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus. The service will conclude with a procession from the Crypt to the Chapel and with final Benediction hymns there.
  • The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place Online. This week’s speaker is Barbara Roggema (CERES), ‘The Abbasid translation movement on the move: Qusta ibn Luqa’s refutation of the inimitability of the Qur’an and his move to Armenia’. Zoom meeting link.

Friday 17th June:

  • 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!). This week, Andrew Dunning and Henrike Lähnemann will present the Bavarian prayerbook manuscript left by Nigel Palmer to the Bodleian Library (which used to have the shelfmark Utopia Armarium codicum bibliophilorum Cod. 1!).

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Call for papers: Thematic issue “Memory and truthfulness in narratives of conflicts: England and France in the Middle Ages” We invite submissions of articles, translations and reviews. For more information, reach us at fernando.p.santos@unesp.br or Academia.edu (https://unesp.academia.edu/FernandoSantos). Don’t forget to have a look at Brathair (Journal of Celtic and Germanic Studies) (ISSN: 1519-9053) website: https://ppg.revistas.uema.br/…/bra…/announcement/view/72. Call for papers postponed until July, 30th.
  • Job Opening: Editorial Assistant for Studies in Late Antiquity. Studies in Late Antiquity (SLA) is a journal that provides a forum for scholarly research on global Late Antiquity (150 – 750 CE). This field-leading, international journal is published quarterly by University of California Press and is currently operated at Princeton University. We seek an editorial assistant for SLA who will oversee editorial management of the day-to-day operations of the journal. To apply, click: <https://main-princeton.icims.com/jobs/14999/editorial-assistant/job> To learn more about the journal, click: <https://online.ucpress.edu/sla>.

Finally, some timely wisdom from Beowulf about endings:

Ure æghwylc sceal ende gebidan
worolde lifes; wyrce se þe mote
domes ær deaþe.
[Each of us must await the end of life in this world; let him who can achieve glory before death.]

I interpret this to mean that, though term will inevitably end on Friday, we can nonetheless achieve medievalist glory in the meantime by enjoying seminars and events and catching up with our colleagues before we all go our separate ways for the summer! I’ll be back briefly next week with some final announcements / exciting opportunities happening over the summer, but for now, I wish you an enjoyable and ‘glorious’ last week of term.

[A Medievalist shocked and horrified to discover they have reached the end of the term]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 5v.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Mustele

Medieval Matters: Week 7

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06/06/2022

12:15

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Although the weather wasn’t always sunny, this weekend saw much celebration in Oxford, bringing both the platinum jubilee and LGBTQIA+ Pride! In honour of these events I have, of course, been on the look out for some seasonal wisdom. There is plenty of Old English guidance on kingship, but the Instructions for Christians holds some particularly pertinent wisdom on the subject for us as academics:

[Leornunge] geeadmodað eghwylcne kyng,
swilce þone earman eac aræreð

[Learning humbles every king, and likewise raises up the poor]

Though some seminars have now wound down for the summer, we still have plenty of opportunities for leornunge this week which are sure to raise us all up, both in mind and in spirit. Please see below for the weekly schedule:

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 6th June:

  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Natacha Puglisi (KCL), ‘Sanctity in Late Antiquity‘ (exact title TBC). 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 History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is David d’Avray (UCL), ‘How to do medieval papal (and perhaps most) history’. 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 7th June:

  • The Medieval Book Club meets at 3.30-4.30pm at the Old Law Library in Magdalen College. We will be reading on Women Writers: Women’s Letters.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Scott Moynihan (Pembroke), ‘God Wills It? Crusade and inter-religious diplomacy in the 13th century‘.
  • The Medieval French Research Seminar meets online only at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Domenic Leo (independent researcher): ‘“Authorial Presence” in a Manuscript of Guillaume de Machaut’s Collected Works (Paris, BnF, ms. Fr.1584)’. Please email helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk for video-conference link.

Wednesday 8th June:

  • The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in St Edmund Hall, Old Library. We are discussing Seuse’s ‘Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit’, this week Nia Moseley-Roberts on Citational Practice in German and Latin and Rebekka Gründel on Women as readers. For more information, please email henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk.
  • Dumbarton Oaks Ukraine Lecture Series: The Cathedral of St. Sophia, Kyiv takes place online at 12-1.30pm. The cathedral of St. Sophia in the historic center of Kyiv dates to ca. 1037 and is one of the most remarkable medieval monuments of Kyivan Rus. This roundtable brings together three scholars who will address the distinctive architectural and decorative features of this impressive monument, as well as its visual and symbolic transformations from the Middle Ages into the present. Speakers: Thomas Dale (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “‘In Heaven or on Earth’: Saint Sophia in Kyiv and the Reinvention of Byzantine Sacred and Palatine Architecture in the Kyivan Rus”; Ioli Kalavrezou (Harvard University), “The Original Mosaic Program of St. Sophia in Kyiv”; and Sofia Korol’ (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine), “To the History of the Interwar Church Decorations in Galicia: Kyivan Rus’ Images and Motifs (P. Kholodny and M. Osinchuk)”. To register, please click here to visit the website.
  • 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 Arietta Papaconstantinou (University of Reading) – Greek letters from the Arab chancery: who wrote the governors’ missives in eight-century Fusṭāṭ.

Thursday 9th June:

  • 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.
  • Oxford Medieval Society Public Lecture: Christine de Pizan: Guilty Feminist? Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis will give this lecture in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College, 1-2.30pm. All are very welcome, and please do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions at oxfordmedievalsociety@gmail.com. We look forward to seeing many of you there!
  • The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place at Trinity College (Levine Auditorium) at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Adrian Pirtea (Universität Wien), ‘Syriac Monastic Networks and the Transfer of Knowledge between the Eastern Mediterranean, Sasanian Iran and Central Asia’. Follow the link to the Zoom meeting.
  • 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 10th June:

  • 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.
  • Lecture at St Edmund Hall: Dag Nikolaus Hasse (Würzburg University) will speak on ‘What is European? Medieval, Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives‘ at 5pm in St Edmund Hall Old Library and on Teams. If you would like to participate remotely, please contact Henrike Lähnemann to be added to the teams call.

Finally, in the spirit of Pride, some wisdom contained in a 12th Century lesbian love letter written by a nun, preserved in München Clm 19411:

Revera iuxta quendam sapientem magna miseria est hominis,
cum illo non esse
sine quo non potest esse

[Indeed, as a certain wise person says, it is a great misery for somebody not to be with the person without whom they cannot be.]

May your week be filled with all of the people and learning without whom you cannot be!

[A couple of Medievalists, having had a rather celebratory weekend, take a small break from being raised up by learning to enjoy just ‘being’]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 9v.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Colum

Medieval Matters: Week 6

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30/05/2022

10:40

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June seems to have snuck up on us: already we are fast approaching the end of the academic year! One very nice aspect of this is that the days are getting so much longer and lighter. The Old English Menologium or ‘Metrical Calendar’ tells us that the reason for this is that the sun wishes to spend longer regarding the earth:

Wyle syððan leng
grund behealdan and gangan lator
ofer foldan wang fægerust leohta,
woruldgesceafta.

[Then the fairest of lights and of things in this world wishes to behold the ground longer and go more slowly over the earth]

I interpret this to mean: no matter how busy and important a person might be, it is still important to take a moment to slow down and ponder! Take time this week to ‘behold’ some of the events that we have on offer:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Save the date: on Thursday 9th June 2022, Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis will give a lecture entitled “Christine de Pizan: Guilty Feminist?”. The lecture will take place in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College, 13:00-14.30. All are very welcome, and please do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions at oxfordmedievalsociety@gmail.com. We look forward to seeing many of you there!
  • New Seminar Series: ‘Forgotten Christianities‘ is a seminar series exploring critical theories of identity formation, communal memory, and intellectual exchange. Each session will bring together doctoral students and ERCs from various fields such as history, archaeology, theology, and the social sciences. Spanning Late Antiquity, the early Islamic era, and the Middle Ages, they will provide a diachronic and kaleidoscopic view of these historical communities and their self-representation. Seminars will be held on Zoom. For further details, and to sign up for events in advance, please click here or contact forgottenchristianities@gmail.com.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 30th May:

  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Luca Farina (Tübingen), ‘Arabo-Greek Astrological Manuscripts: The Vind. Phil. Gr. 115 and Its Anonymous Chapters‘. 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 Oxford Medieval Commentary Network meets at 4pm at Lecture Theatre 2, Christ Church. This week’s speaker is Audrey Southgate, ‘Experiments in Openness: Reading the Wycliffite Interpretations of the Psalms’. For further information, email cosima.gillhammer@chch.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm online on Teams. Please note that there is no in-person seminar this week. This week’s speaker is Fanny Bessard (Trinity), ‘Riches and Respect. Baghdad’s robber barons (892-945)’. 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 31st May:

  • The Oxford Numismatic Society meets at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Dr. Elena Baldi – works on Ostrogothic coinage, title TBC. For further information please contact the secretary: giorgia.capra@new.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speakers are Diana Myers (St Benet’s Hall), ‘Gendered authority in the Barking Abbey Ordinal (Oxford, Univ. Coll. MS 169)‘ and Barbara Pinto De Almeida Lima (Wolfson), ‘Sexual Agency and Violence: the construction of female sexuality in the 13thc pastourelle‘.

Wednesday 1st June:

  • There is no meeting of the Medieval German Seminar.
  • The Medieval Trade Reading Group meets at 1pm in the Mertze Tate room of the History Faculty and online. 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 at annabel.hancock@history.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 Ine Jacobs (University of Oxford), ‘The Byzantine Dark Ages at Aphrodisias‘.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Vincent Gillespie (University of Oxford), ‘Preaching to the choir: a sceptical look at English Carthusian transmission of vernacular spiritual writings’ (chaired by Laura Ashe). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.

Thursday 2nd June:

  • 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 Lucian, The Dream (or, the Cock) 18-19. 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). This week’s speaker is Alberto Riggolio (Durham), ‘Towards a History of Syriac Rhetoric in Late Antiquity’. Zoom meeting link.

Friday 3rd June:

  • Because of the bank holiday, there will be no Medievalists Coffee Morning this week. But do return next week when Chris Fletcher has promised we will be shown one very recent  acquisition and one which had been ‘hiding in plain sight’ for almost 100 years and is effectively new! 

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • CFP: The Great Medieval Feast, c.1050-1500: We ask for paper submissions covering topics on European feasting cultures and practices between c.1050–c.1500. These include papers that cover works or portrayals of courts outside Europe, but have some basis in European literature, art, or practice. Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to thegreatmedievalfeast@gmail.com. Paper presentations should last 20-minutes. Papers can cover material from any language, but sources not in English should be presented with translations. Presenters can be at any stage in their career; we particularly welcome early career researchers. For full details please see the full CFP here.

Finally, for days when it isn’t as sunny, some wisdom on a more metaphorical kind of light:

Wisdom is leoht wera æghwilcum
to habbanne her on weoruldæ.
[Wisdom is a light for all to have here in this world]

Of course, I hope that you get to enjoy the light of wisdom and of the sun this week!

[A very busy Medievalist carves out a little time for themselves]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 8v.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Fenix

Medieval Matters: Week 5

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23/05/2022

11:38

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We are now half way through Trinity Term! Though it is one of the busiest times of year, we also get to enjoy how beautiful Oxford looks in the sunshine. The fact that everything just looks better in the summer is acknowledged in the Old English Seafarer:

Bearwas blostmum nimað, byrig fægriað,
wongas wlitigað

[The groves begin blossoming, the cities grow fair, the plains become beautiful]

Even if it’s not sunny outside, we can still enjoy some nature today: if you would like a break from work, New College Library has a one-day exhibition in lecture room 4 from 11-4pm, showing rare books and manuscripts from the library’s fabulous collections relating to Botany and Zoology, including a 13th-century manuscript of Pliny’s Historia naturalis! Though not all of our offerings this week are so nature-inspired, they will nonetheless bring plenty of joy, and make Oxford feel brighter, whether you’re frantically finishing your MSt dissertation or marking exams:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Registration open: Oxford conference on Julian of Norwich. “New Visions of Julian of Norwich” is a conference which will take place at Somerville College, Oxford, on Friday 15th-Saturday 16th July 2022, bringing together old and new voices on the work of the medieval visionary, theologian, and writer Julian of Norwich. The conference is organized by Antje E. Chan (Lincoln College, Oxford), Godelinde Gertrude Perk (Somerville, Oxford), Raphaela Rohrhofer (Somerville, Oxford), Alicia Smith (English Faculty, Oxford). To see the programme, please visit the conference website here. Click here to book: in-person bookings available till 29th June, online bookings open till 11th July.
  • The Faculty of History and Oxford Medieval Studies are pleased to invite you to an informal meet and greet coffee morning with William Chester Jordan (Professor of Medieval History, Princeton University) on the occasion of his reception of an honorary degree of the University of Oxford, on Thursday 23rd June, 10.30am-12 noon, at the garden of Harris Manchester College. For catering purposes, please register your attendance here by 14th June. NB: Bill Jordan’s lecture for OMS “A Thirteenth-Century Polymath Considers the Jews” from last year is available to watch online.
  • Small grants are open once again! Send in 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.
  • Postponed: Oxford Medieval Commentary Network Lecture Series. Due to speaker illness the convenors have had to postpone the next lecture, originally planned for 23 May. They will aim to reschedule this for another week later this term. The lecture series will continue on 30 May (Week 6), 4pm, with Audrey Southgate’s lecture on ‘Experiments in Openness: Reading the Wycliffite Interpretations of the Psalms’.

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 23rd May:

  • Botany and Zoology Treasures of New College Library: As part of New College Library’s series of subject-themed exhibitions, on Monday, 23 May we shall have on display for you rare books and manuscripts from the library’s fabulous collections relating to Botany and Zoology. From 11 am till 4 pm on Monday in New College’s Lecture Room 4, we shall be exhibiting for you—with explanatory captions—some of our Botany and Zoology treasures. Please do come along—and enjoy our exhibition.
  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Tiffany VanWinkoop (Wisconsin-Madison), ‘Blueprints of Power: Roman Statecraft and Politics in Konstantinos VII’s ‘Book of Ceremonies’. 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 History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Giles Gasper (Durham), ‘Comets, Elements, and Pastoral Care: Framing Medieval Science in Collaborative Working’. 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 24th May:

  • The Medieval Book Club meets at 3.30-4.30pm at the Old Law Library in Magdalen College. We will be reading on Women Writers: Medical and Scientific.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speakers are Catriona Dowden (Oriel), ‘The Mappa Mundi and Medieval Visions of Pilgrimage‘, Kelli Anderson (Somerville), ‘The Gate to Heaven: the use of spiralling strigillations as a framing technique in early medieval art & architecture‘, and Gabrielle Samra (St John’s), ‘Anthropophagous Predation: An Examination of the Middle English Richard Coer de Lyon in the Framework of Medieval Anti-Jewish Blood Libels‘. Please note that the line-up has slightly changed due to speaker illness last week.

Wednesday 25th 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’, this week Anna Wilmore will introduce Suso as mystical troubadour. 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 Priscilla Ralli (French school of Archaeology, Athens) – ‘Architecture and Sculpture in the Early Byzantine Peloponnese: Defining a Regional Context’.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Helen Barr, Cosima Gillhammer, Vincent Gillespie, Elizabeth Solopova and Annie Sutherland, ‘On the work of the late Anne Hudson (1938-2021)’ (chaired by Kantik Ghosh). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.

Thursday 26th 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.
  • Marriages, Unmarriages, and Subjectivities: A Roundtable Discussion with Professors Sara McDougall and Hannah Skoda. The Oxford Medieval Society invites all interested parties to attend the event on Thursday 26th May at 1-2.30, 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.
  • The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in Harold Wilson Room, Jesus College – meet at Jesus lodge. This week’s text is Ovid, Heroides 10.1-59. 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 Lucy Parker (Oxford) ‘Holy Men and the End of Antiquity’. Follow the link to the Zoom meeting.
  • 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 27th 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:

  • The Society for Medieval Archaeology Annual Conference is taking place next month in Oxford AND online. From June 24-26, the Society for Medieval Archaeology annual conference will bring together an international group of scholars at Rewley House, Oxford to talk about early medieval migrations, present new DNA data and discuss how such data should be interpreted in terms of the wider cultural implications of migration and mobility. Please visit the following page for more details.
  • PGR/ECR Scholarships to attend the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium: Applications for the Dobson Scholarships are welcome until Tuesday 31st May. These cover conference fees for two PGRs or ECRs working on any aspect of medieval death and dying, and are an excellent opportunity for emerging historians to meet academics and experts and to share their research. Even if you are not eligible for the scholarships, please do pass on the information to anyone you think might be interested: for full information, click here.
  • This year’s conference organised by the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE) will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 27 June to 1 July 2022. It will feature a large number of exciting papers detailing the latest research being carried out by scholars of crusading and the Latin East, with several plenary presentations by international historians, as well as a trip to medieval sites and plenty of opportunities to meet other scholars. You can attend the conference in person (in Egham, UK) or online. Find out more about this event by visiting sscleconference.com and click here to register.
  • Two Associate Lectureships in Art History pre-1800 at the University of St Andrews for semester one (1 September to 15 January). The deadline is 27 May (next Friday) and the details are here: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CPM132/associate-lecturer-in-art-history-pre-1800-aoac1807rxnb.

Finally, some further wisdom on good weather from Maxims I:

Seoc se biþ þe to seldan ieteð þeah hine mon on sunnan læde,
ne mæg he be þy wedre wesan

[The one who eats too seldom will be sick; although someone should lead him into the sun, he cannot exist on the weather]

I take this to mean: we must enjoy the good weather, but not be too tempted to sit in the parks all day long and forget to do any work! I hope that your week is filled with sun and intellectual nourishment.

[A Medievalist enjoying the sun in uni parks]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 7v.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Onager

Medieval Matters: Week 4

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16/05/2022

12:14

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The weekend saw the glitz, glam, and questionable music of the Eurovision song contest! Whether you tuned in or not, here is some wisdom on songs, from the Old English Maxims:

Longað þonne þy læs þe him con leoþa worn.
[He who knows many songs is less troubled by longing]

But what, I hear you ask, does Eurovision have to do with Medievalists? Well, this week we have not only musical events like Singing the Reformation: With Living Stones, but also a whole range of languages and cultures! Our schedule for the week includes Greek, Old High German, French and Middle English, and takes us all around the medieval world. The After Rome and Further East seminar takes us to the Caliphate and Byzantium; the Medieval Commentary Network gives us a glimpse into the Carolingian Empire; and the Medieval History Seminar lets us explore migration in the Viking North. And this is only the tip of the iceberg! Have a look at all of our offerings this week:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

EVENTS THIS WEEK:

Monday 16th May:

  • The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Alice van den Bosch (Exeter), ‘Creating the Female Martyr in Late Antiquity‘. 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 Oxford Medieval Commentary Network meets at 4pm at Lecture Theatre 2, Christ Church. This week’s speaker is Zachary Guiliano, ‘Biblical Commentary and Royal Patronage in Carolingian Europe’. For further information, email cosima.gillhammer@chch.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm online on Teams. Please note that there is no in-person seminar this week. This week’s speaker is Pragya Vohra (York), ‘Feminising Migration in the Viking North‘. 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 17th May:

  • The Oxford Numismatic Society meets at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Dr. Aneurin Ellis-Evans & Dr. Leah Lazar ‘Early silver coinage of Lampsakos’. For further information please contact the secretary: giorgia.capra@new.ox.ac.uk.
  • The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speakers are Jonah Skolnik (Trinity), ‘Impeachment, Treason, and Good Governance in the Age of Richard II: 1386-1397‘ and Gabrielle Samra (St John’s), ‘Anthropophagous Predation: An Examination of the Middle English Richard Coer de Lyon in the Framework of Medieval Anti-Jewish Blood Libels‘.
  • 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 5: Assimilation or change? Normans at Winchester. 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.

Wednesday 18th 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 Medieval Trade Reading Group meets at 1pm in the Mertze Tate room of the History Faculty and online. 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 at annabel.hancock@history.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 Matthieu Cassin (CNRS-IRHT), ‘From Princes Islands to Oxford: Greek Manuscripts from the Holy Trinity of Halki‘.
  • The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Anne Mouron (Regent’s Park), ‘“In pious hearts, a tree must grafted be”: Mechthild of Hackeborn’s The Boke of Holy Grace and The Desert of Religion’ (chaired by Ayoush Lazikani). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.

Thursday 19th 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 Lucian, The Dream (or, the Cock). 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 Garden Room). This week’s speaker is André Binggeli (CNRS, IRHT), ‘Neomartyrs between the Caliphate and Byzantium: around the publication of “Les nouveaux martyrs à Byzance”’. Zoom meeting link.

Friday 20th 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 last-but-one’s week’s presentation by Andrew Honey of a very early curious copying machine. All welcome!
  • The Germanic Reading Group meets at 4pm. This week will focus on Old High German: A few minor monuments (lead by Will Thurlwell) Anybody interested in joining the discussion, please email Howard.Jones@sbs.ox.ac.uk.

Saturday 21st May:

  • Singing the Reformation: With Living Stones takes place in Iffley from 3pm. Come and explore with Henrike Lähnemann some of the music that may have been sung by church-goers in Iffley during the 16th century, and trace developments in the music that was sung in churches, homes and royal chapels while major theological debates and liturgical changes were taking place. Tickets for the afternoon with tea and coffee cost £10 and are available online at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/singing-thereformation-tickets-261162011607 or on the door. The service of Evensong is, as always, free

OPPORTUNITIES:

  • Conference: The conference “Margins at the Centre – Practices of Annotation. Scholarly Networks, Teachers and Audiences in ninth-century East Francia” will take place in hybrid form at the Viennese Institute for Medieval Research on Monday 23 and Tuesday 24 May 2022, starting at 9.00am CEST (Vienna time). Further information, the programme of the conference and the forms for registration (via Zoom or in person) can be found here on the conference website.

Finally, some further wisdom on song from Maxims I:

Ræd sceal mon secgan, rune writan, leoþ gesingan, lofes gearnian.
[One should talk sense, write down secrets, sing songs, and earn praise]

This reads like something of a to-do list for the week ahead. I hope that your week is filled with talked sense, written down secrets, lots of songs, and earned praise!

[A Medievalist unsure what to make of the questionable musical talent of Eurovision]
Merton College, MS 249, f. 2r.
View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Leun