The Early Text Cultures research cluster based at Oxford is pleased to present its ResearchSeminar series in Trinity Term (May and June 2022), which will be on ‘Textual Cultures in Contact’. Through sessions comprising paired papers, this seminar series will enable participants and attendees alike to gain fresh perspectives on the nature of ‘contact’ among textual cultures, and on the affordances and limitations of their fields’ methods and approaches to the topic.
The seminar will be held in a hybrid form, with Zoom connection complementing on-site presence atthe Dickson Poon Building (China Centre, Oxford), Lucina Ho Seminar Room, on Tuesdays 16:30-18:00 UK time. Auditors are most welcome to attend in person. Zoom links will be provided on each session’s day to those who sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BtWbVHXkBFq-CvimjVnVolSeDcpR54ssZdWUC6jf15I/edit.
Joe Barber (Oxford): ‘Walk about the City and See Its Walls: An Echo of the Epic of Gilgameš in Psalm 48?’ Alexander Meeus (Mannheim): ‘Josephus’ Historiographical Theory in Against Apion: Jewish or Greek Method?’
§ Session 2 (24 May) Scribes as Cultural Vehicles (Near East, China and the Silk Road)
Ludovica Bertolini (Prague): ‘A Preliminary Reflection on the Use of Sumerian Literature in Scribal Education at Ugarit’ Christopher Foster (SOAS) & Tomas Larsen Høisæter (Western Norway): ‘Writing Between Empires: Script Use in the Tarim Basin along the Southern Silk Road’
§ Session 3 (7 June) Materiality of Translation (Medieval Greek and Latin, China)
Erene Rafik Morcos (Princeton/Rome): ‘… διὰ χειρὸς τοῦ πολυαμαρτήτου ῾Ρωμανοῦ… by the hand of the great sinner Romanos …’ Nelson Landry (Oxford): ‘A Five Dynasties Manuscript in Relation to Tang Buddhist Culture: A Study of S.3728 from the British Library’
§ Session 4 (14 June) Religion Through Cultural Boundaries (Iran, India and China)
Aleksandra Wenta (Florence): ‘Early Tantric Magic: An Example of Śaiva (Hindu)-Buddhist Intertextuality in Pre-modern India’ Francesco Barchi (Munich): ‘Traces of “Buddhist Iranian” in Early Chinese Buddhist Translations’
The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce our first event of Trinity Term 2022, a Roundtable Discussion with Professors Sara McDougall and Hannah Skoda.
We invite all interested parties to attend the event on Thursday 26th May at 13:00-14.30, in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College. Participants will be able to ask questions and engage in discussion with Professor McDougall and Professor Skoda on a shared area of their research, Marriages, Unmarriages, and Subjectivities.
Professor Sara McDougall is Associate Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York) and coordinator of the Medieval Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Specialising in legal history, her research focuses primarily on women and crime in medieval France and explores topics such as gender, marriage, religion and illegitimacy. Her publications include Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800-1230 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Professor McDougall is in Oxford this term as an Astor Visiting Lecturer.
Professor Hannah Skoda is Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History at St. John’s College, Oxford, and specialises in the cultural and social history of the later Middle Ages. She has particular interests in education, conflict, ownership, slavery and constructions of deviance in late medieval Europe. Her monograph Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 (Oxford University Press, 2013) won the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s 2014 Best First Book Prize, in which year she was also awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize to explore nostalgia in the fourteenth century.
It is with very great sadness that I have to pass on the news that Nigel F. Palmer, Emeritus Professor of German Medieval and Linguistic Studies, Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, FBA, died yesterday, Sunday 8 May 2022. Lesley Smith and Henrike Lähnemann write: Nigel Palmer was one of those scholars defining medieval studies. He was everywhere in Oxford – always in the Library, attending seminars, always asking fundamental questions – but he also reached out across the world to colleagues in Germany and far beyond. He was also one of the kindest and most generous friends and colleagues. He treated everyone with the same respect and good humour, whether they be visiting professor, or first-year student. Oxford without Nigel will never be the same. Details of the funeral for family and close friends at the end of the month and plans for a celebration of his academic and personal life for spring next year will be announced later. Tributes and cards for his widow, Sue Palmer, can be sent to St Edmund Hall via mail or Henrike Lähnemann via email.
Please see below for the week’s events:
EVENTS THIS WEEK:
Monday 9th May:
The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Silvio Roggo (Cambridge), ‘Justin II and the Miaphysites‘. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
The Medieval Commentary Network meets at 4pm at Research Centre, Christ Church (in the thatched barn at the top of Christ Church Meadow, behind the tourist shop). This week’s speaker is Maria Czepiel, ‘From curiosa to criticism: Benito Arias Montano and Encyclopedism in Sixteenth-Century Biblical Commentary‘. Drinks and nibbles will be provided after the lecture.
The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Julia Crick (KCL), ‘Staffing the Conquest: Mobility, Stasis, and Scribal Work in England, 1066-1100‘. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
Tuesday 10th May:
The Oxford Numismatic Society meets at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Dr. Jeremy Piercy – ‘Just a name on a coin: What epigraphy can tell us about labour organisation and social networks in Pre-Conquest England‘. For further information please contact the secretary: giorgia.capra@new.ox.ac.uk.
The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 3: St Augustine’s and Christchurch, 950–1091. Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.
The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speakers are Harriet Strahl (Oriel), ‘Emotions in the Aftermath of the Wreck of the White Ship‘, and Nia Moseley-Roberts (Jesus), ‘An Immortal Work’: ideas of scribal labour at Witham Charterhouse c. 1200‘.
Wednesday 11th May:
The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in St Edmund Hall, Old Library. We are going to discuss Seuse’s ‘Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit’, chapter 6 this week. For more information, please email henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk.
The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker is Anca Dan (CNRS, Paris Sciences & Lettres), ‘Kosmokrator: the origins of the iconographic tradition, between East and West‘.
The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Carl Phelpstead (University of Cardiff), ‘“If you will listen patiently”: conversion, conversation and cosmopolitanism in Old Icelandic sagas of Apostles’ (chaired by Gareth Evans). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.
The Middle High German Reading Group meets at 10am at Somerville College Productivity Room (Margery Fry). This term’s topic is ‘Maeren’. If you have any questions or want to participate, please send an e-mail to melina.schmidt@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in Harold Wilson Room,Jesus College – meet at Jesus lodge. This week’s text is Suetonius, Life of Tiberius 34-36. Contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place at Trinity College (Levine Room 5) at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Étienne de la Vaissière (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), ‘Manichaean Roads‘. Follow the link to the Zoom meeting.
The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 4: From Neumes in campo aperto to Neumes on Lines (at Christchurch, Canterbury). Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.
The Old English Reading Grouptakes place at5.30pm. For more information and to receive the text in advance email eugenia.vorobeva@jesus.ox.ac.uk.
The Oxford University Heraldry Society meets online at 6.30pm. This week’s speaker is David Broomfield, ‘The Heraldry of Eton College‘. To receive the link to attend, please email secretary@oxford-heraldry-org.uk.
Friday 13th May:
The Medievalist Coffee Morning takes place at 10.30pm in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!)
The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5pm in Taylorian Room 2 and on Zoom. This term, Luca Crisma (EPHE, Paris) will lead reading of the Anglo-Norman Letter of Prester John. For texts, joining instructions, and further information, please email Stephanie Hathaway or Jane Bliss.
OPPORTUNITIES:
Revoicing Medieval Poetry – May-June 2022: Call for participants. Revoicing Medieval Poetry will offer a workshop-conversation space for researchers, artists and practitioners who are engaged in exploring how, why, and to what effects medieval poetry is translated, reused, and resourced in twentieth- and twenty-first-century creative practices. Confirmed speakers include Caroline Bergvall, Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Becca Drake, and Clare A. Lees. We hope you will join us at one or more of our four workshops! Read the full CPF here, and register your interest here.
The Oxford Trobadors return to the stage on Sunday 5th June, at the Sheldonian Theatre, at 6 pm. Tickets from www.ticketsoxford.com / 01865 305305. £12, £25, £50. Medievalists may like to know that the Oxford Trobadors are returning to the Stage again after the lockdowns. The concert will include performances of several medieval trobadors and trobairitz, including Arnaut Daniel, Peire Vidal, Bernard de Ventadorn, Jaufre Rudel and Marcabru, as well as some modern Occitan songs. The concert has been arranged as a fusion event with leading Bengali musicians in the UK, who perform in a tradition that derives from a trobador-like song tradition very similar to that of the Occitan trobadors. Students: a sponsor has made some complimentary tickets available for registered students in medieval studies. Email denis.noble@balliol.ox.ac.uk if you wish to apply for a complimentary ticket. Include your college and stage of study in your email.
Registration is now open for the Freedom & Work in Western Europe c.1250-1750 conference, organised by the FORMSofLABOUR project (led by Prof Jane Whittle) and hosted in Exeter on 6-8 July 2022. Full programme and registration here. The conference will explore the historical relation between freedom and work across different forms of labour, cultures, legal systems and time periods. Please send any questions to FORMSofLABOUR@exeter.ac.uk.
Finally, some wisdom from the Old English Dicts of Cato, in honour of Nigel, who was a friend to many on the mailing list:
Help ægðer ge cuðum ge uncuþum þær þu mæge. [Help both friends and strangers, wherever you can]
The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford.
The activity should take place between June 2022 and January 2023. The closing date for applications is Friday of Week 5 of Trinity Term (27 May 2022).
Grants are normally in the region of £100–250. Recipients will be required to supply a report after the event for the TORCH Medieval Studies blog. Recipients of awards will also be invited to present on their events at the next Medieval Roadshow.
Applicants will be responsible for all administrative aspects of the activity, including formulating the theme and intellectual rationale, devising the format, and, depending on the type of event, inviting speakers and/or issuing a Call for Papers, organising the schedule, and managing the budget, promotion and advertising. Some administrative and organisational support may be available through TORCH subject to availability.
May is here, and with it, the long-awaited return of May Day celebrations in Oxford. Whether you managed to attend the May Morning revelries or not, here is some celebratory wisdom for the occasion, from the Durham Proverbs:
Hwilum æfter medo menn mæst geþyrsteð. [Sometimes people are thirstiest after drinking mead]
What the anonymous poet forgot to mention, of course, is the accompanying Proverb: ‘sometimes people are happiest after drinking tea‘. You may put this theory to the test at our newly reinstated Medievalist Coffee morning, which takes place on Friday at the Weston Library – all are welcome!
It is only second week, but we have already had many wonderful events – so many, in fact, that you may have missed some! Luckily, you can catch up with how things went on our blog. We kicked term off, of course, with the Mystery Plays – read here Dr Alison Ray’s post about how the plays went, and here Prof. David Wiles’ reflections on the experience of directing a medieval play in French. Last week we enjoyed Caroline Danforth’s fabulous OMS Lecture on Paper, Linen, Silk, and Parchment – Material Fragments from an Extinguished Convent : many thanks to all who tuned in! For those who missed it, you can now watch the recording on the OMS Youtube channel. As for future events, we have a wonderful schedule this week:
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Save the date: The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce a public lecture by Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davies on Thursday 9th June 2022. Dr Cooper-Davies will speak on the topic of “Christine de Pizan: Guilty Feminist?”. The lecture will take place in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College, 13:00-14.30.
EVENTS THIS WEEK:
Monday 2nd May:
The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Yan Zaripov (Oxford), ‘Literary Imitation (mimesis) in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Case of Theodore Prodromos’. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Rebecca Rist (Reading), ‘When is a Pope an Anti-Pope? The Medieval Papacy and the Concept of Schism’. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
Tuesday 3rd May:
The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Lucia Akard (Linacre), ‘Cultures of Rape and Resistance in 15th Century Dijon‘
The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 1: Sound and its Capture in Anglo-Saxon England. Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.
The Medieval French Research Seminar will take place at 5.15pm at Maison Francaise, MFO Auditorium and Online. This week’s speaker is Emma Campbell (University of Warwick): ‘Translanguaging and Multimediality in Philippe de Thaon’s Medieval “French” Bestiaire‘. Please email helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk for video-conference link for remote joining.
Wednesday 4th May:
The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15-12.45 in St Edmund Hall, Old Library. We are going to discuss Seuse’s ‘Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit’. For more information, please email henrike.laehnemann@seh.ox.ac.uk.
The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker is Marie-France Auzépy (emerita, Université Paris 8), ‘The siege of Constantinople in 717-718: the embarrassing memory of a triumph‘.
The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Emily Corran (UCL), ‘Polemicising doubt in late medieval England: adaptations of Latin casuistry in Wyclif, Dives and Pauper and Margery Kempe’ (chaired by Kantik Ghosh). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.
Thursday 5th May:
The Middle High German Reading Group meets at 10am at Somerville College Productivity Room (Margery Fry). This term’s topic is ‘Maeren’. If you have any questions or want to participate, please send an e-mail to melina.schmidt@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in Harold Wilson Room,Jesus College – meet at Jesus lodge. This week’s text is Aristophanes, Clouds, 223-75. Contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place at Trinity College (Levine Auditorium) at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Thomas Benfey (Oxford), ‘The Qom Documents and Their Post-Sasanian Context: Change and Continuity in Early Islamic Iran’. Zoom meeting link.
The Lyell Lectures From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Musical Notations, 900-1150, by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge) takes place at 5pm in Weston Library Lecture Theatre. This is Lecture 2: A Community of Scribes at Worcester. Registration is essential for attending in person, and booking is for the whole series, for the sake of simplicity. Your booking entitles you to attend as many lectures in the series as you are able. Book here.
Friday 6th May:
The Medievalists Coffee Morning makes its triumphant return! Meet at 10.30-11.30am at Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road: straight ahead and up two floors!). The coffee mornings feature the opportunity to meet other Medievalists as well as a) coffee, tea, and biscuits, b) access to the roof terrace, c) sneak previews of new acquisitions. Here a link to the last week’s presentation of newly acquired Artists Books. All welcome!
OPPORTUNITIES:
Conference: Orosius Through The Ages: 25th-27th May. Booking is essential and will be open until 4 May. The conference will take place in person at Senate House, London, and on Zoom. If you will be attending partly in person and partly online please email valerie.james@sas.ac.uk with the dates when you will be attending in person. If no in person places remain, please book to attend online instead.
Call for participants. Revoicing Medieval Poetry will offer a workshop-conversation space for researchers, artists and practitioners who are engaged in exploring how, why, and to what effects medieval poetry is translated, reused, and resourced in twentieth- and twenty-first-century creative practices. Confirmed speakers include Caroline Bergvall, Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Becca Drake, and Clare A. Lees. We hope you will join us at one or more of our four workshops! Read the full CPF here and register your interest here.
Doctoral Funding Opportunity: an ARHC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship between the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Kent and the Bodleian in Oxford to work on manuscript fragments. Full details are here. Deadline is 26th May.
Finally, some further wisdom from the Durham Proverbs regarding coffee mornings:
Eall on muðe þæt on mode. [All in the mouth that’s in the mind.]
I take this to mean: great biscuits promote great scholarship. May your week be filled with both!
[A Medievalist wonders whether greatness of biscuit directly corresponds to greatness of scholarship] Merton College, MS 249, f. 1v. View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Leun
The Oxford Medieval Society is pleased to announce a public lecture by Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis on Thursday 9th June 2022.
Dr Cooper-Davis will speak on the topic of “Christine de Pizan: Guilty Feminist?”.
The lecture will take place in the New Seminar Room in St. John’s College, 13:00-14.30.
About the speaker: Dr Charlotte Cooper-Davis is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, and the author of Christine de Pizan: Life, Works, Legacy (Reaktion Press, 2021). Her DPhil thesis explored text-image relations in de Pizan’s works, and a resulting monograph is currently under contract with ARC Humanities Press.
Please direct any queries to oxfordmedievalsociety@gmail.com.
Image credit: British Library MS Harley 4431, f.259v (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).
The French play was part of the Oxford Medieval Mystery Cycle performed on 23 April 2022 in St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. The Playgroup: Les Soeurs de Sainte-Hilde (avec la participation de quelques paysans d’Iffleï) had been formed for the occasion by director: David Wiles The play is part of a cycle, ‘Le mystère de la passion’, written in the mid C15th by Arnoul Gréban, organist at Notre Dame cathedral, and doubtless also choirmaster. Full text available open access.
People ask me: “Why did you decide to do a play in French?” Implication: it’s an English-speaking audience, and they won’t understand – middle-English bad enough. Three responses to this one. 1. Political: not good to live in a monoglot culture, and unlike modern scholarship the medieval world did not view life through the lens of the nation-state. 2. Theatrical: to communicate through action and the body is a challenge which forces actors to engage with language on a different level, and reach out to their audience. 3. Intellectual: venturing into Gréban’s text was a journey of discovery, as impenetrable hieroglyphs yielded slowly through rehearsal into recognisable speech patterns, with every phrase having its theatrical work to do. What looks like literary doggerel turns out to be theatrical gold.
An interesting research question follows – what are the cultural continuities that make Gréban’s mighty four-day passion play recognisably French, when set alongside the familiar English cycles? Centralisation is one feature – responsibility not subdivided to autonomous guilds, but a single integrated work for an urban community to mount. Another is the French ability to listen and maintain concentration upon the word. In the English texts, action typically takes place between stanzas, but in the French text couplets conjoin speeches, so each new speaker has a rhyme to echo in order to come in on cue, a feature we found invaluable. The sustained rhythmic flow ratchets up the tension, with enough variety of register and poetic form to hold the spectator’s attention. Like the alexandrines of Racine, the eight-syllable medieval line has a lilt that asks to be animated by the arms, so different from English metres which asked to be stamped with the feet.
After seeing the performance, a friend asked me: “What lesson was the play is supposed to impart?” Implication: medieval theatre was didactic, a case of the church telling the peasants what to think. There is no simple moral to the John the Baptist sequence. In the artistic structure John’s martyrdom is there because it foreshadows Christ’s. People didn’t need telling that tyrants are venal, rather, it’s the recognisable social reality upon which a drama is built. Herod has his reasons for acting, and he washes his hands like Pilate. The medieval Salome is an enigma – we are free to draw our own conclusions, not told what to think. The urge to create theatre or art is a human constant, responding to the sensation of life as a cosmic mystery. The idea that medieval theatre is ‘didactic’ is a handy modernist cliché, serving the narrative of progress, and all the cultural arrogance which that narrative commonly instils. My preferred picture of the longue durée is one of progressive fragmentation, and I find in medieval theatre a holistic model of how theatre used to embrace and address a complete community in all its diversity, along with the gamut of human experience – comic and tragic, bestial and sublime – before dedicated theatre buildings and professionalism in acting and penmanship locked theatre into its lonely compartment.
David Wiles is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter, and lives in Iffley. He is a theatre historian whose main specialisms have been Greek and Shakespearean drama. He wrote the entry on medieval theatre for the Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre. His medieval CV includes a student production of the plays of the Wakefield Master in the gardens of Westminster Abbey, Mankynde in the Burton Taylor rooms, a crucifixion on a farmer’s trailer in Buckingham marketplace, staging three plays by the C10th nun Roswitha, and a community production of the N-Town Creation/Fall and York Noah in Iffley.
Repeat performance of the play at Iffley Church on 24 April 2022. Cast: John the Baptist – Laurence Nagy Manasses (disciple) – Alice Hawkins Sophonias (disciple) – Laura Laube Herod – Alex Marshall Herodias – Irina Boeru Salome – Alice Hawkins Groignart A (servant) – Kate Bunn Groignart B (servant) – Andrew Stilborn Amphiarus (noble) – David Wiles Radigon (noble) – Laura Laube God – Henrike Lähnemann Crew: Director: David Wiles Consultant: Sebastian Dows-Miller Head Creator: Andrew Stilborn Filmed by Isabel Reichenbach
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.
Trinity term has arrived! I hope that everyone has been enjoying the warmer weather and arrival of Spring. We welcomed the beginning of term with the spectacular Mystery Plays last Saturday. On behalf of OMS, I’d like to extend a huge thank-you to all medievalists across Oxford who took part in the Plays whether as actors or spectators: we had 89 active participants and 320 registered attendants in person plus up to 150 simultaneous views on the live-stream! For those of you who missed out, you can catch up on all the action online – the recordings will be edited but are already watchable, warts and all, via the St Edmund Hall youtube channel; pics of the day are accessible via the hashtag #OxfordMysteries on twitter.
As we all return to term and to Oxford, some wisdom from the Old English Maxims:
Muþa gehwylc mete þearf, mæl sceolon tidum gongan. [Every mouth needs food; meals must come at the correct time.]
Though technology doesn’t allow me to send you food of the traditional type, I bring you a whole smorgasbord of feasts for the mind in the form of the Trinity Term Medieval Booklet. Please do peruse it and whet your appetites for all of the exciting offerings that we have this term. For now, this is what is happening this week:
EVENTS THIS WEEK:
Monday 25th April:
The Book at the Bodleian: Whence, Where, Whither? takes place at 11am-6pm in the Lecture Theatre, Weston Library and also streamed live. Visit the webpage for further information.
The Oxford Byzantine Graduate Seminar will take place on Zoom at 12.30-2pm. This week’s speaker is Jack Sheard (Royal Holloway), ‘Byzantium and the Black Sea, c.1000-1204′. To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm at The Wharton Room, All Souls College and online on Teams. This week’s speaker is Richard Purkiss (Lincoln/RAI), ‘The limits of the Danelaw’. The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
Tuesday 26th April:
The Trinity Term OMS Lecture takes place at 5pm, online via the OMS youtube page. This term’s lecture is by Caroline Danforth, and will be on the subject of ‘Paper, Linen, Silk, and Parchment – Material Fragments from an Extinguished Convent‘.
The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in Warrington Room, Harris Manchester College. This week’s speaker is Lucy Pick (University of Chicago) ‘Parables and Commandments: a Jewish text in Latin‘
Wednesday 27th April:
The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles. This week’s speaker is Baukje van den Berg (Central European University), ‘Twelfth-Century Scholars on the Moral Value of Ancient Poetry‘.
The Medieval English Research Seminar meets at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of English. This week’s speaker will be Hannah Bower (University of Cambridge), ‘“And bi þe bodi he him hent, | And al to peces here torent”: violent fragmentation and productive uncertainty in The Seven Sages of Rome’ (chaired by Marion Turner). For further information, contact daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk.
Thursday 28th April:
The Middle High German Reading Group meets at 10am at Somerville College Productivity Room (Margery Fry). This term’s topic is ‘Maeren’. If you have any questions or want to participate, please send an e-mail to melina.schmidt@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.
The Greek and Latin Reading Group meets at 4pm in Harold Wilson Room,Jesus College – meet at Jesus lodge. This week’s text is Catullus 5, 85 and 101. Contact John Colley or Jenyth Evans to be added to the mailing list.
The After Rome and Further East Seminar takes place at Trinity College (Levine Room 5) at 5pm. This week’s speaker is Nadine Viermann (Durham), ‘In and out of Constantinople: Early-seventh-century coronation rituals in context’.
The Old English Reading Grouptakes place at5.30pm. For more information and to receive the text in advance email eugenia.vorobeva@jesus.ox.ac.uk.
Friday 29th April:
The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5pm in Taylorian Room 2 and on Zoom. This term, Luca Crisma (EPHE, Paris) will lead reading of the Anglo-Norman Letter of Prester John. For texts, joining instructions, and further information, please email Stephanie Hathaway or Jane Bliss.
OPPORTUNITIES:
Oxford-Cambridge student conversations on ‘Cross-Cultural Entanglements’. We are a group of students from Oxford and Cambridge interested to cross-cultural entanglements in the medieval and Early Modern Period. Building on a successful first meeting, we are aiming at expanding the network to include as many students as possible. The idea is to meet once a month on Tuesday to exchange ideas and discuss both sources and articles. Anyone interested into this theme should feel free to join this group, whose meeting will be online, monthly. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, send an e-mail to nicola.carotenuto@history.ox.ac.uk
CFP: Hyggnathing. Following on from last year’s sucess, Hyggnathing returns this year for a fully online one-day conference for graduate students of Old Norse. We hope that the online format will allow students to join regardless of their financial situation (in-person conferences are expensive!) and geographical location. For full details, please visit the OMS blog.
Finally, as we embark upon Trinity Term, some wisdom from the Old English Rune Poem:
ᛋ [sigel] se-mannum symble biþ on hihte [The sun is always a hope for seafarers]
May the sun in Oxford similarly bring some hope to scholars! I wish you all a happy and productive first week in the April sunshine!
[A Medievalist whets their appetite with the many offerings of the Trinity Term booklet] Merton College, MS 249, f. 7r. View image and text in the Taylor Edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/bestiary/#Serra
23 April 2022, 12noon to 5pm. A cycle of medieval mystery plays performed by various groups around St Edmund Hall. A multilingual medieval experience not to be missed! All welcome (free of charge)! Performed by a variety of groups with links to Oxford Medieval Studies. Full information https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/mystery-cycle Directors: Henrike Lähnemann & Lesley Smith, Manager: Eleanor Baker
At 12 noon, the chapel bell will ring for the prologue, followed by Creation in the Old Dining Hall. From there the story of mankind will unfold, with the Old Testament being acted out in the Front Quad and the New Testament in the churchyard around St Peter-in-the-East.
Front Quad – 11:45-12:00 midday Musical Entertainment 12:00-12:05 Introduction 12:10-12:40 1. Creation and the Fall of Adam (Faculty of English) 12:45- 12:55 2. The Killing of Abel (Holloway Mystery Players) 1:00 – 1:25 3. Noah (Medieval Studies Students)
Churchyard – 1:30 – 1:50 4. The Visitation (Jasmine and the Kilnsians) 1:55- 2:20 5. The Shepherds’ Play (The Pastoral Players) 2:25- 2:40 6. The Magi (The Wise Women) 2:45 – 2:55 7. Herod the Great (The 5th Week Blues) 3:10 – 3:30 8. John the Baptist (Les Soeurs de Sainte-Hilde avec la participation de quelques paysans d’Iffleï) 3:35 – 3:55 9. Lazarus (Medieval Masters) 4:00 – 4:15 10. The Crucifixion (The Manic Medievalists) 4:20-5:00 11. The Resurrection (The Mercantile Minstrels)
