Apollonia von Freyberg was a Poor Clare nun living in the medieval village of Mülhausen (today, Mulhouse, France). We know of Apollonia through an artefact housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC – a colored woodcut by Lienhart Ysenhut (1959.16.15) which is housed inside a box made, in part, of recycled materials. Among these materials is the fragment of a letter addressed to Apollonia. Apollonia enriched her convent with manifold gifts and subsequently experienced the dissolution of her cloistered home during the Protestant Reformation. Beginning with Ysenhut’s print and the clues hidden in its enclosure, learn more about Apollonia’s family, wealth, and fate following her departure from Mülhausen in the early 16th century.
Caroline Danforth holds an MFA in painting from The George Washington University and a BA in German, Art History, and Fine Arts from Mary Washington College. She also studied art history in Germany for two years, in Munich and Tübingen. Since 2008, she has worked as a preservation framer of prints, drawings, and photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her research interests include the history and manufacture of parchment, German to English translation, and the Poor Clares of late medieval Germany. Most recently, Caroline served as guest editor for a special issue on parchment for Art in Translation and co-authored Letters for Apollonia for Franciscan Studies.
Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed landed in the Latin scholastic world of the thirteenth century like a stick of dynamite. Christian scholastics of the mid to late-thirteenth century — Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Meister Eckhardt — knew the Guide through the Latin translation called the Dux neutrorum, and its extensive and influential network of scholastic readers have used up most of the scholarly oxygen dedicated to Maimonides Latinus. I will identify another community of readers of the Guide, an earlier one, of Jews and Christians reading together. Identifiable as a community in Toledo in the first two decades of the thirteenth century, this community would eventually spread to Rome, Provence, Naples, and Paris. I will focus here on four members: Samuel ibn Tibbon, who wrote the first Hebrew translation of the Guide; Michael Scot, first a master in Toledo and later Emperor Frederick II’s court astrologer; Jacob Anatoli, Samuel’s son-in law and Michael’s colleague in Naples; and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, in whose cathedral Michael and Samuel may have met and in whose writings we can trace the earliest evidence of Maimonides’ impact on the Latin world.
Lucy Pick is a historian of medieval thought and culture. Her research interests include the relationships between gender, power, and religion; the translation of science and philosophy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and its impact on relations between religious groups; and the development of monastic thought and practice. Her first book, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Thirteenth-Century Spain (University of Michigan 2004), discusses Jewish, Christian, and Muslim relations in thirteenth-century Toledo. Her second, Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in Early the Spanish Kingdoms (Cornell 2017) examines the careers of royal women in early medieval Spain. She is also the author of the novel, Pilgrimage (Cuidono 2014), a story about the Middle Ages that explores betrayal, friendship, illness, miracles, healing, and redemption on the road to Compostela. She is currently studying the earliest translation of part of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed into Latin and what it tells us about intellectual cooperation and conflict across religions in Toledo, Naples, Provence, and Paris in the early thirteenth century.
Drinks at St Edmund Hall after the lecture. Please contact Luisa Ostacchini by 31 January if you would like to come to dinner with the speaker at your own cost. We have reserved eight places for graduate students at a discounted price of 10GBP. First come, first served!
Header image: Biblioteca Nacional de España ms 10087 fol. 22r
2pm–5pm, 10 February 2022 (Feast of St. Scholastica)
Griffiths Room, 11 Norham Gardens, St. Benet’s Hall
This workshop will commemorate the centenary publication of Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nunneries and her influence on convent studies in England and beyond. The workshop will begin with talks by Professor Maxine Berg, the author of Power’s biography, and Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars. It will include roundtable discussions with Oxford scholars about their current research on nuns and the future of convent studies.
Fans of Fantastic Beasts may know about bestiaries: collections describing both local and exotic animals, given a moral or allegorical interpretation and sometimes sumptuously illustrated. The Bodleian Library’s MS. Bodley 764 is one example, made in thirteenth-century England. Such writings reflect a desire to harmonize research on the natural world from classical and biblical texts with lived experience.
These excerpts feature geese, bees, sheep, and peacocks at Port Meadow, the Botanic Garden, Wytham Woods, and University Parks. If David Attenborough had lived in the Middle Ages, Planet Earth might have sounded something like this.
The goose calls its night watch to witness by its persevering noise. No animal senses a human’s smell like a goose. The Gauls’ assault on the Capitol was detected by its noise. Thus Rabanus says: ‘This bird can symbolize foreseeing people, keeping a good watch over their guard.’ [Rabanus Maurus, De uniuerso 8.6.46]
Now there are two kinds of geese: domestic and wild. Wild geese fly high and in a row, and they symbolize those who live far removed from earthly status by living well. But domestic geese live together in villages, often calling out; they wound one another with their beaks. They symbolize those who, although they love a gathering, spend their time on gossip and back-biting.
All wild geese are ash-grey in colour, and I have never seen one that was multicoloured or white. But in domestic geese, there is not only the ash-grey colour but also multicoloured and white. Wild geese have the ash-grey colour because those who are far from the world take a low garb of repentance. But those who dwell in cities or in villages wear clothing of a more beautiful colour.
A goose senses the smell of a person arriving before the rest of the animals; it does not cease to call out at night, because a prudent person recognizes others, however far away, through their evil or good reputation. Therefore, when a goose senses the smell of one arriving by night, it does not cease to call out, because when a prudent brother sees thoughtless offences of ignorance in others, he should call out. The noise of geese was once of use to the Romans on the Capitol, and in the chapter every day the noise of a prudent brother is useful when he sees thoughtless offences. The noise of a goose drove back the enemy Gauls from the Capitol; but the noise of a prudent brother drives the ancient enemy from the chapter. The noise of a goose saved the city of Rome unharmed from enemy attack; the noise of a prudent brother guards his attention from being disturbed by wicked people.
Perhaps divine providence would not have displayed the natures of birds to us – unless, it may be, he wished to make them useful to us in some way.
Bees (Botanic Garden)
Bees [apes] are so named either because they cling to one another with their feet [a (by) + pes], or because they are born without feet [a (without) + pes], for they develop both feet and wings afterwards. These are diligent in the task of creating honey. They live in assigned dwellings; they build their homes with indescribable skill; they compose their honeycombs from different flowers; and they fill up their beehives with innumerable offspring in wax cells. They have armies and kings, and they wage battles. They flee from smoke and are provoked by a disturbance.
Many people know from observation that bees are born from the corpses of cattle. For to create these bees, the flesh of slaughtered calves is beaten; worms are created from the rotten gore. Afterwards, the worms become bees. Strictly speaking, however, the ones called ‘bees’ come from oxen, just as hornets are from horses, drones from mules, and wasps from asses.
The Greeks call the larger bees created in the honeycomb’s outer cells ‘castros’. Some people think they are called kings, because they lead their beehives [castra].
Among all the kinds of animals, only bees have shared offspring. They all live in one house; they enclose the borders of a single country; all their work is shared; their food is shared; their tasks are shared; their custom and produce is shared; their flight is shared.
They ordain a king for themselves, they appoint people, and though placed under a king they are free. For they also maintain his privilege of judgement, and have affection for him by the fidelity of their devotion, since they choose him as king in the same way as a deputy for themselves, and they honour him with the entire swarm. But the king is not selected by lot, because a lot involves chance rather than judgement, and often the worse candidate is preferred to the better one by the irrational falling of the lot.
None of the bees dare to leave their homes, nor go out into any pastures, unless the king has gone out first and has claimed authority for himself with his flight. They go forth through fragrant fields where they inhale the odours of the flowers of the garden, where streams flow among fragrant grasses, where the banks are pleasant. There, lively youth play their games, there men take their athletic persuits, there they find release of cares. The first foundations of the hives are laid as a delightful labour among the flowers and sweet herbs.
Sheep (South Hinksey)
The sheep is a soft wooly domestic animal, with a vulnerable body, a gentle spirit. Its Latin name, ‘ovis’, is derived from ‘oblations’, because when the ancients first began sacrificing, they did not kill cattle but sheep. Some people call them two-toothed, because some have two upper teeth along with eight others. The gentiles used to offer these especially in sacrifice.
When winter comes, the sheep grazes insatiably and tears at the grass voraciously, because it senses the coming sharpness of winter. It first stuffs itself with grass for food, since all the grass is destroyed by the freezing cold.
Sheep, as we said, represent innocent and simple people among Christians. Furthermore, at times the sheep also allegorically displays the mildness and patience of the Lord himself. A passage of Isaiah on the innocent Saviour’s death says, ‘as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’ [Isaiah 53.7] In the Gospel, sheep are the faithful people: ‘The sheep hear his voice’. [John 10.3] And in a psalm: ‘Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet: sheep and oxen’. [Psalm 8.6–7] Two sheep represent the peoples of the nations that a man nourishes, that is Christ, on which it is read in the prophet, ‘in those days a man shall nourish a young cow and two sheep; and because of the abundance of milk he shall eat butter’. [Isaiah 7.21–22]
Peacocks (Harcourt Arboretum)
The peacock’s name comes from the sound of its call; its flesh is so tough that it hardly suffers decay, and it is not easy to cook. Concerning it, someone once said: ‘Do you admire him whenever he spreads out his jewelled wings, and can you hand him over, hard-hearted man, to the cruel cook?’ [Martial 13.70]
Because Solomon carried a peacock from distant lands, and it has different colours in its feathers, it is a sign of the gentile people, coming to Christ from remote parts of the earth, who also shine brightly, adorned with the grace of many virtues.
Andrew Dunning is the R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library and Supernumerary Fellow in Book History at Jesus College.
By Dr Liv Robinson, Brasenose College/English Faculty
‘The bottom line is that, even when written with probing wit by [Carol Ann] Duffy, medieval morality plays are not the place to go to for sophisticated characters and gripping plot twists.’
TimeOut’s review of the recent National Theatre production of Duffy’s Everyman articulated a sense that the medieval play’s 2015 update was perhaps hampered by its late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century origins. Reviews of the play – whether the reviewers loved it or loathed it – returned frequently to what they perceived as the aesthetic and intellectual paucity of the medieval Everyman upon which Duffy based her twenty-first century adaptation. They contrasted her ‘memorable characters’ with the ‘intrinsic thinness’ of the medieval play (TimeOut again); they described the play as ‘dramatically threadbare’, lacking ‘psychological substance’, but revealing that ‘that’s partly the limitation of the medieval source material’ (The Telegraph); or they congratulated her on making a now-irrelevant piece of medieval literature speak to contemporary concerns: ‘what was originally church propaganda has been turned… into a scathing assault on the myopic materialism of the modern age’ (The Guardian).
As a medievalist with research specialisms in translation and medieval drama, these reviews rather got my goat. It wasn’t that so many reviewers enjoyed Everyman’s 2015 incarnation: I too thought it was outstanding – thought-provoking, terrifying and moving in equal measure. My own academic work centres in part upon the re-creative and critical potential which resides in translation, and I was excited by the ways in which Duffy had creatively responded to the dialogic form, the sounds and rhythms of the medieval play, as well as to its complex ethical and soteriological concerns. My frustration with the critical reception of her work arose principally from the fact that so many reviewers seemed to take as read the tediousness of the medieval Everyman, to cheerfully assert its poor quality as drama and the unsophistication of its intellectual endeavours.
Everyman, to me, is emphatically not a dramatically limited or unsubtle play; nor is it simply ‘church propaganda’ aimed at a credulous, unquestioning medieval Catholic audience. The play speaks to shared and complex apprehensions, imaginings and terrors. It begins as an abstracted, allegorical dramatization of a character called Dethe’s approach to a character called ‘Everyman’ – who represents each and every one of us – and it concludes as an attempt to actively think through and beyond the end of our lives. It asks, how can we prepare ourselves for death? How do we give shape to what happens when we die, in terms of the ‘experience’ of dying? How do we imagine death – not just in the sense of watching a character, on-stage, dying, but rather ‘from the inside’: what it’s like to go through the process of becoming not-alive? Can we even conceive of this state, given that the acts of thinking, imagining and questioning are all, in some senses, predicated on the state of being alive and conscious – and this is the one thing we won’t be when we die?
In its sixteenth-century printed editions, Everyman travels with a subtitle: ‘a tretyse… in maner of a morall pleye’. The term ‘tretyse’ perhaps suggests something other than drama – yet the fact that it is ‘in maner of a pleye’ is also key – what is it that performance brings? One of the key elements here is sophisticated on-stage embodiment of allegorical concepts. Everyman begins with the stage representing its audience’s own world, or something like it – watching, we’re apparently on the outside, as Everyman, an individual, a character external to us, even as we know that allegorically ‘represents’ us all, meets (quite literally) his Dethe, and then seeks out some other characters – his Felawshyp, or friendships; his Kindrede and Cosyn, or family members; his Goodes, or possessions – to attempt to persuade them (fruitlessly) to help him make his reckoning before God. Once his worldly goods have left Everyman, he’s forced to seek out his Good Dedes, and this moment marks a pivot in the play. On one level, that’s because Everyman has turned to the ‘right’ people, things or processes to help him secure salvation – his own good deeds, and Knowledge, who points the way to the sacraments of Confession and extreme unction at the hands of a priest – so it marks a movement from bad choices to good, from despair to hope.
But it also marks a pivot in terms of what we, as the audience, are watching, in that the playing space suddenly ceases to represent a world peopled by other individuals and characters (friends, family, objects Everyman owns), and begins to represent the internal world of Everyman himself. The stage disorientingly shifts to become the space inside his mind and body, which is peopled by his own physical and psychological forces, each played by a different actor: his Strength, his Beaute, his Fyve Wyttes or five senses, his Discrecion, his Knowledge. Everyman, then, is allowed to enter a conversation with parts of himself, to become sensitised to the presence of the faculties within him which allow him to experience, to know, to interact with other individuals and the world – to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, to feel, to move, to learn – in a word, to live. At the play’s climax, Everyman is stripped of these faculties one by one in a really challenging attempt to imagine and perform, not what it looks like when an individual dies but what it is like to experience death within a fractured and multi-voiced human psyche, moment by moment. And because Everyman is who he is – each and every one of us – the space of the stage becomes in some senses the inside of everyone’s head. It forces us all to attempt to imagine a conscious calling into being, then a gradual abandonment of our own, unique and personal bodily and psychological attributes – to confront our own mortality. The play certainly does express an orthodox medieval Christian message about salvation: that it can only be assured through an intricate mixture of our own works during our lifetimes and the operation of divine grace; that the sacraments, particularly penance, mediated through the proper ecclesiastical authorities, are key to that process. Yet the questions that it asks about the terrifying and disorientating experience of dying are no less resonant for the fact that they are approached through this framework.
It was with all this in mind that I embarked, in November 2015, on my own production of Everyman at the generous invitation of the University Church, using mainly my second-year English students as actors. Many saw the production as an opportunity for them to become far more familiar with a medieval text, and to appreciate more fully its dramatic workings, than if they had simply read it for a tutorial. My own aims were two-fold: one was certainly pedagogic, in that I too hoped for these outcomes for my English students, and was curious to see how performing the play would impact on their Middle English comprehension and close reading skills. However, I also wanted to interrogate, through performance, the assessments of Everyman prevalent in press reviews of Duffy’s play. Would my students succeed in conveying to a non-specialist audience the complex questions that the medieval play poses, in rendering them critically engaging and thought-provoking? Could Everyman be provocative of discussion and interest, and could that challenge some ideas about the ‘relevance’ of medieval literature to today’s culture, and how that ‘relevance’ might be conceptualised? I wasn’t trying to suggest that the medieval play holds up a straightforward mirror to our own, twenty-first century preoccupations and desires, or that ‘medieval people were just like us’ (for a compelling critique of ‘relevance’ and an argument for the importance of underlining alterity in relation to medieval literature, see Marion Turner’s post here). What I wanted was to show that experiencing the medieval play on its own terms could provoke questions and conversations; that the play was ‘relevant’ in the sense that it challenged us to think.
We performed to a full house in the University Church’s Old Library, and the audience comprised a wonderful mixture of academic colleagues (largely non-medievalist), students and members of the public. We held an audience Q and A session after the performance, in which all the actors took part, and the questions they were asked – about the process of representing and embodying abstract forces such as Fyve Wyttes, about the shifting ownership of Knowledge throughout the play and how its staging might convey this, about the role and presence of God in the world, the ambiguous potential for corruption amongst His representatives, the Priesthood, and the consolatory, supplicatory presence of embodied, human Good Dedes at the moment of death – left me in no doubt that the medieval play had been as generative of thought and engagement as I had hoped.
The pedagogical impact, too, has been rich: although perhaps not primarily in the areas I’d anticipated. Certainly, performing the play forced the students to understand every single word or line spoken by their character(s), and so forced them to think through sometimes confusing or counterintuitive syntax carefully, to notice the impact of verse form and register on meaning. This is especially important in a play like Everyman where the actors have to give embodied shape to forces and concepts which have no ‘set’ physical form. There was a danger that the play would become very static – two or more allegorical characters standing still in conversation – and we worked hard on translating close reading into dynamic, physical performance. Yet some of the most rewarding pedagogical outcomes that I’ve seen have been in students’ grasp of more conceptual ideas and challenges. In class, we have discussed shifting or co-existent times and spaces in texts; or tensions between the abstract and the ‘real’, the human and the divine, and a student has begun with ‘it’s a bit like in Everyman, when…’ The play seems to have formed a reference point, a shared set of ideas and questions which can help to understand other unfamiliar medieval texts. It also gave the students an opportunity to mix theatrical creativity fully with their academic work: their insights, suggestions and intellectual excitement were crucial in rehearsal (you can read about two actors’ perspectives here. I was very proud of them as they confidently and sensitively fielded questions about our creative work: I realised in those moments just how much they had taken from the process, in both an academic and non-academic sense.
It’s for all these reasons that I’ll be returning to the University Church in 7th week Trinity Term with (hopefully) a new set of student performers and a new medieval play: we warmly invite readers to join us. (For further information, email olivia.robinson@bnc.ox.ac.uk or penny.boxall@universitychurch.ox.ac.uk).
