Postgraduates Present

April 24

10.30 – 11.00
Coffee and Registration

11.00 – 11.40
Aisling Birne (St. John's College, Cambridge)
Authority and Limitation in Alexander's Journey to the Earthly Paradise

Focussing on texts read and composed in Britain, in particular the rarely-studied "Buik of Alexander the Conquerour" by Gilbert Hay, this paper will explore Alexander's journey to the Earthly Paradise. The encounter with Paradise is the point at which the main themes in Alexander's legend converge: ambition and wonder, desire and death, authority and limitation. By placing the episode within the tradition of literary otherworld journeys, this paper argues that it precipitates a shift in the horizon of expectations within the narrative of Alexander's life and, as such, forces a provocative engagement with the notion of human authority.

11 .40 – 12.20
Chris Tilley (KCL)
Community and Identity in the Life of a Thirteenth Century Knight: Fulk of Rycote and his World

The survival of royal government records in large quantities has allowed considerable insight into the nature of society in medieval England, but has tended to give historians a top-down view, over-emphasising royal institutions and the ‘county community’.  This paper investigates the social worlds in which Oxfordshire knight Fulk of Rycote (d. 1302) moved, and the effect these different social networks might have had on his identity.  For Fulk, we have unusually detailed knowledge of his familia, and evidence of extensive urban interests, allowing a new perspective on the different circles a member of the knightly class could be part of.

12.20 – 13.20
LUNCH
Please bring your own. Hot and cold drinks will be available.

13.20 – 14.00
Katherine Leeks (UCL)
With Cash in Hand, Time Stood Still: Time and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon Literature

This paper aims to explore the role of gift-exchange in Anglo-Saxon constructions of time. Cultural anthropology states that reciprocal exchange reproduces social ideologies which ensure community survival. I will examine the extent to which this model can be applied to early Anglo-Saxon exchange practice and explore the implications ritual donation may have held for perceptions of temporality. Examples will be drawn from the Exeter Book Riddles and Beowulf as well as archaeological findings to propose a framework for understanding complex relationships between material and textual artefacts.

14.00 – 14.40
Anne Baden-Daintree (Bristol)

‘Oblesse, oblesse – que porrar obler’: Remembering and Forgetting in the English Poems of Charles D'Orleans

In the penultimate roundel of the English Poems of Charles D’Orléans, the narrator embraces forgetfulness (oblesse) as a means of coping with the death of his mistress, before concluding with a poem that denies the possibility of ‘cure’. In the ‘forgetting’ of his adopted language, slipping between English and French, Charles foregrounds issues of memory and identity as central to the recovery of his bereaved protagonist. This paper examines the sequence’s persistent images of remembrance and forgetfulness, destruction and repair, brokenness and wholeness, and their operation within the dynamics of both the courtly relationship and the disruptions of bereavement.

14.40 – 15.00
Tea

15.00 – 15.40
Thomas Smith (RHUL)
Re-evaluating the Character of Pelagius, Papal Legate for the Fifth Crusade

This paper will re-evaluate the character of Pelagius, cardinal bishop of Albano (1213-30), who was selected by Pope Honorius III as the papal legate for the Fifth Crusade (1217-21). Pelagius has been accused of being an arrogant and overbearing military leader of the Fifth Crusade by contemporary thirteenth-century chroniclers and modern historians alike, and blame for the failure of the crusade has often been attributed to him. Through a reassessment of the sources for Pelagius’s legation, this paper will argue that Pelagius performed successfully as a spiritual rather than military leader of the crusade, and that his controversial actions towards the end of the crusade, which have been used as evidence of him overstepping his authority, were not only known about at the papal curia, but actively encouraged as well.

15.40 – 16.30
Discussion with respondent Ardis Butterfield