List of Abstracts from Past Colloquia

February 2001 – ‘Orality and Literacy’

Peter Orton (Queen Mary and Westfield)
The impact of incipient literacy on linguistic and literary forms in Old English

The Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’, like most of the other Old English elegies, consists largely of an utterance by a ‘homodiegetic’ speaker (i.e. one who is the subject of the story told). The isolation of the speaker as he speaks is indicated clearly by the content of his speech, and suggests that ‘The Wanderer’ was conceived by the poet as a silent monologue rather than as a speech addressed to an audience. Viewed from this perspective, the poem is likely to have originated in a literate rather than oral milieu, and may mark the beginning of inwardly directed, psychological poetry in English literary tradition.

Catriona O Dochartaigh(School of Celtic Studies, D.I.A.S.)
Prayer in medieval Irish manuscripts

The orality and literacy debate has concentrated on narrative text and in particular verse epic as source material. Little research has been conducted on the orality of other literary genres or indeed non-literary texts. Prayer and other forms of devotional composition offer a rich corpus with a marked oral formulaic character. How medieval prayer committed to writing interacted with memorised prayer is a fascinating question. The Irish collection of medieval vernacular prayer presents an interesting case in point, especially as a number of modern versions of the medieval prayers were collected by folklorists in the early twentieth century, raising questions related to oral transmission and the conservatism of religious language.

Simon Gaunt(Dept. Of French, King’s College, London)
Fictions of orality in Marie de France’s Lais

This paper examined the value of references to oral sources and oral style in Marie de France’s Lais. As the Lais themselves unambiguously partake of a written culture, the ‘orality’ of the Lais should be seen as fictional, contrived by Marie to construct an alternative textual space that is represented as more authentic than other Latinate written traditions in the vernacular. The role of fictional representations of orality was taken up in relation to textual transmission and authorship to suggest that Marie was particularly concerned to underline the fragile hold that women authors in the Middle Ages had on their texts.

Ananya Kabir(Trinity College, Cambridge)
Scop, Scyppend, Shaping: Imaging Oral Performance in Anglo-Saxon Texts

Older arguments for the oral formulaic nature of Old English poetry often drew support from the image of the ‘scop’ or poet-as-performer that is frequently encountered within Anglo-Saxon texts themselves. Most famously, this image is found in Beowulf within the account of the minstrel singing of creation during a feast at Heorot, and in Bede’s story of Caedmon’s poetic inspiration included in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. More recent scholarship, such as that of Allen Frantzen and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, has demonstrated that Anglo-Latin as well as Old English textual culture was a product of transitional literacy or residual orality, and have often re-read Bede’s story of Caedmon in support of this revised view of the orality-literacy dichotomy within Anglo-Saxon culture. This paper will return to the image of the ‘scop’ as found in Anglo-Saxon poetry, but ask a somewhat different question of the nature of oral performance projected therein: namely, what Anglo-Saxon authors themselves thought about the discursive relationship between oral performance, the Old English language, and the power inherent in poetic creation.

May 2001 – ‘Masculinities’

Rebecca de Saintonge(Humanities Dept. Birkbeck)
Masculine bodies, feminine souls: The effects of gender fragmentation on spiritual men in the later middle ages, based on the letters of the Swedish Dominican, Peter of Dacia (d.1289)

This paper looks again at an intriguing gender reversal that took place over a period of l50 years during the later middle ages which I contend has not been sufficiently remarked upon. While historically a woman had been perceived as sanctified when she ceased to be a woman and became ‘man’ by renouncing her female sexuality, by the 12th and 13th centuries a man became truly sanctified when he adopted the impedimenta of the feminine – lack of social status, disempowerment, emotionality – and became more like a woman. Religious men, hungry for new intimacy with Christ, began to mimetically adopt the feminine, to put on the emotional garments of woman, as they too sought to be ‘brides of Christ’, employing the language of female eroticism to express their spiritual longings. While such gender reversal has been viewed until now mainly as an act of intellectual and spiritual humility on the part of male religious, I want to suggest that we have assumed too readily that it caused no deeper problems for individuals thus caught in a gender divide between their body and soul. The core text for this paper is Petri de Dacia: Vita Christinae Stumbelensis – a little known text which consists partly of Peter’s love letters to a female religious. They appear to reveal a deep-seated alienation with his own body which he links directly to his spiritual inadequacy. During one he fantasises his male body as female. I explore whether Peter was transgressive in wanting to indwell a female body, or whether there was a more widespread sexual and gendered anxiety at the core of contemporary masculine spirituality.

Emma Campbell(Dept. of French, King’s College, London)
Boys Won’t be Boys: Sainthood and Masculinity in the Vie de Saint Alexis

My paper explores the theme of the conference – the notion of plural masculinities – in connection with the depiction of masculinity in the Vie de Saint Alexis . Using a theoretical approach informed by the work of anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern, I argue that the concept of gender articulated in the Vie is dependent upon relationships forged within networks of exchange. This concept of gender aligns itself with the attitude towards identity that Strathern associates with gift economies (as opposed to commodity economies). I argue that the ‘plurality’ of Alexis’ masculinity in the Vie is the result of the saint’s participation (and non-participation) in gift networks that the poem represents as being in competition with one another; the terrestrial social network and the spiritual network in which exchange between the saint and God takes place. The interdependence of these two networks means that Alexis, in repudiating those things which would define his identity in the terrestrial world, maintains an exchange relationship with God that redefines the saint’s masculinity. I go on to argue that the reading of the saint’s masculinity within this new context of exchange is also fundamental to the relationship between God and the

Christian public mediated by the saint after his death: the saint’s role as intercessor is bound to his identity as a masculine saint rather than to his identity as a masculine man. The spiritual relationship that the saint mediates operates according to similar principles of exchange to those which characterise Alexis’ relationship to God, but is not a part of that other relationship. The saint’s gender is composed of a series of relationships that resist conventional (commodity) forms of gender classification. Rather than offering a neatly reified form of alternative masculinity, the conclusion of the Vie de Saint Alexis invites us to recognise the saint’s gender through the nexus of relationships in which it is composed.

Catherine Batt(Dept. of English, Leeds)
Malory’s Launcelot: Masculinity in Translation

This paper, which draws in part on the argument of my forthcoming book, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (Palgrave, New York), and in part on new material, compares two episodes in Malory with his French prose sources, to argue that the English romance complicates the already vexed paradigm of masculinity Lancelot represents in French romance, and does so by making the interrogation of gender part of the process of translation. Where the French romances recognise a certain fluidity in gender identity, Malory’s work seems anxious to maintain a tighter control of gendered behaviour, yet at the same time it textually inscribes the problems inherent in any attempt to invoke and deploy gender as reading strategy and as control-mechanism.

17^th May 2002 – ‘Biography’

Catherine Batt(School of English, Leeds)
Henry, Duke of Lancaster's Book of Holy Medicines: A Medieval Essay in Abjection?

This talk explores some aspects of the imagery of this midfourteenth-century Anglo-Norman devotional text, which is remarkable for the detail with which it works through the metaphor of the sinner as a wounded body in need of the spiritual medicine Christ's own wounds provide. Drawing, for context, on Julia Kristeva's formulations of abjection, and on the language of medieval devotion, I argue that in Henry's construction of religious autobiography, his particular emphasis on the wretched and wounded human body is less an expression of abjection than a delimitation of the text's devotional reach and a marker of aesthetic control.

Alison Truelove(Faculty of English, Cambridge)
Minding the Biographical Gaps in Fifteenth-Century English Correspondence

Although fifteenth-century English correspondence offers many insights into medieval life, there are numerous difficulties in extracting biographical information from such documentation. This paper analyses the various approaches taken by historians when using the surviving letters for biography, and assesses their relative success. It attempts to account for the problems inherent in using these letters to write biographical studies, and considers how the particular characteristics of the documents’ composition and delivery determine the type of information available to a biographer. Gaps in our knowledge of an individual’s life are shown to be of less importance when the available facts are dealt with carefully, and it is suggested that however limited the evidence, we are usually able to empathise to some extent with the subject.

Michael Clanchy(Institute of Historical Research)
'Establishing the authenticity of Abelard and Heloise'

Can the letters of Abelard and Heloise be authenticated? In particular, are the new 'Lost Love Letters' edited by Constant Mews in 1999 genuine? Do we have to invent Abelard and Heloise before we ascribe letters to them? What historical existence do Abelard and Heloise have outside their letters? Can their voices be distinguished from each other? Did they deliberately create a fictive correspondence in order to impress posterity? How can their letters be genuine productions of the 12th century, when there is nothing else like them in the 12th century?

14 February 2004 – ‘Love’

Sally Burch (Dept. of French, UCL)
‘Love and Law in Amadas et Ydoine’

The late-twelfth-century Anglo-Norman romance of Amadas et Ydoine engages with contemporary theological and legal issues around marriage. It argues for marriage as a form of community, and opposes the church doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. The paper will discuss the learned background to the text, and raise the question of authorship: could such a well-informed debate be the work of a layman? Could a cleric take such a 'commonsensical' view of marriage?

 Philip Shaw (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds)
‘“Vinctus sum domni regis amore mei”: Expressions of Love in the
Correspondence of Charlemagne and Paul the Deacon?’

Paul the Deacon, in writing to Charlemagne, is writing for multiple audiences, including Charlemagne himself, Peter of Pisa, and the wider court circle. In referring to his love for Charlemagne, he addresses these various audiences in complex ways, and makes use of conventional images for love in order to point up his own difficult status as a Lombard within the Frankish court circle.

12 June 2004

Melanie Heyworth (Royal Holloway, University of London and University of Sydney)
Constructions of Sexual and Emotional Knowledge in Two Exeter Book Riddles

The experience of marriage in Anglo-Saxon England has long been deemed an unemotional and purely pragmatic one, characterised by most scholars as "a business deal; … 'marriage by purchase' ". The purpose of this paper is to nuance, or qualify, that view through an analysis of two double entendre Exeter Book Riddles, both of which address marital experience. Since marriage is the primary social institution in Anglo-Saxon England in which men and women related on both a sexual and an emotional level, the construction of an ideal marriage in the double entendre riddles allows us new insights into heterosexual sexual and emotional interaction. By emphasising the semantic range of the riddles' vocabulary for sexual activity, companionship and marriage, and by acknowledging the nexus created by the intersections of these semantic fields, I offer an alternative ideal for marital experience in Anglo-Saxon England.

 Danna Piroyanski(Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London)
‘Richard Scrope Archbishop of York: Patron-saint in perilous seas’

Cults of ‘political martyrs’ - people who had died in political circumstances, and were consequently venerated as martyrs - formed an organic part of the devotional and social fabric of late medieval life in England. One such late medieval political martyr was Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, who was executed in 1405. In this paper I shall concentrate on one aspect which came to characterize Scrope’s cult – that of the late Archbishop as a patron of sailors and travellers on seas.

On 8 June 1405 Scrope was executed outside the city walls for the insurrection which he had led against King Henry IV, and was buried in York Minster. Despite the King’s attempts to discourage the cult which promptly evolved around the dead Archbishop, the cultic activity spread and gathered further support. In a stained glass image of Scrope in the church of Fotheringhay (Northumptonshire), he was juxtaposed with St Clement and St Ersamus who were known as bishops, martyrs, and also protectors against the perils of the sea. Scrope’s juxtaposition with them hints, therefore, to his own importance as a patron of sailors, and sheds light on several other beliefs related to his cult.

Among the lay people of York who were adherents of Scrope’s cult many were merchants, involved in shipping goods to and from York. These men, and their financial well-being, were at times at risk from conditions at sea, which worsened during the fifteenth century. Hence Scrope’s popularity as a saint protecting ships and travellers was cherished in the mercantile community of the city of York, especially in a time when harassment, piracy and seizures of ships and their goods became an all too-familiar phenomenon.

Stephanie Gibbs(King’s College, University of London and University of Pennsylvania)
‘Rewriting Cupid: Authorial Identity in Three Late Medieval Allegories’.

This paper examines the representation of authorship within allegory through the figure of the God of Love in three texts responding to Guillaume de Lorris’ seminal Roman de la Rose: Jean de Meun’s late thirteenth-century continuation of the Roman de la Rose, Christine de Pizan’s late fourteenth-century Epistre au Dieu d'amours, and Thomas Hoccleve’s Epistola Cupidinis, a Middle English translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre composed in 1402. Contemporary accounts of developments in authorship theory during the Middle Ages commonly posit an oppositional relationship between authorial recognition and allegorical interpretation. As these rewritings of the God of Love’s figurative and authoritative stance demonstrate, however, there is an intimate connection between the medieval theorization of authorship and the kind of allegorical interpretation invited by these late medieval works.

Natasha Romanova(Department of French, University College London)
‘Female doubles in Thomas's Tristan and in Renaut's Galeran de Bretagne’

The paper will argue that through its use of the figure of the double, the late 12th early 13th-century French verse romance Galeran de Bretagne (signed by Renaut) posits itself as a rewriting of Thomas's Tristan. The conversion of the tragic Tristan plot into a 'happy ending' story of Galeran, however, is made possible by sacrificing a secondary character - the heroine's double.

 Pirkko Koppinen(Department of English, Royal Holloway, London)
‘Ond Seo Cwen Numen (And the Queen Taken): Feud and the Ambiguity of Hildeburg’s Marriage in the Old English Poem Beowulf’’

The hermeneutical, or interpretive task of Beowulf’s reader is exceedingly difficult: the narrative structure, the allusions to unknown historical events, and the rich, but enigmatic story yield little about the horizon of expectations the modern reader needs to construct in order to comprehend the poem. Therefore the reader has to rely heavily on extra-textual and extra-linguistic frames in order to unravel the semiotics of the poem, that is, how and what the poem and its different components mean.

This paper focuses on the gaps in the Finnsburg episode in Beowulf. The aim is to examine the way readers construct Beowulf by using extra-textual frames, which is the knowledge gained from archaeology, other Old English texts, and readings from other scholars. What I would like to discuss in this paper is the way we view the feud in the Finnsburg episode if the extra-textual frame changes. Although there are many gaps in the episode that can be filled in different ways I shall concentrate on the ambiguity of Hildeburh and Finn’s marriage, namely on the reasons they married, and how the different reasons change our reading of the poem.

In my reading Hildeburh’s marriage, instead of being a peace-bringing alliance is the cause of a feud that results in the destruction of her home by her own kin. This view challenges the accepted view of Wealhtheow and the rest of Beowulf’s female characters as peace-weavers. The use of different extra-textual frames shows how meaning in the Beowulf resonates with the different contexts we create for it from the knowledge we possess of Anglo-Saxon culture.

 26^th February 2005 – ‘Animals and Birds: Natural and Supernatural’

Kathleen Walker-Meikle (Dept of History, UCL)
‘Pet Keeping and Gender’

This paper considers why the keeping of pets in the Late Middle Ages appears to have been highly gender-specific. Using a wide range of sources, I considered the diverse purposes of pets, the role of pets as companions, the methods of obtaining a pet, in particular high status gift-giving in regard to gender and conspicuous expenditure through purchase, diet, accessories and living standards of a pet. Other issues tackled were the exhibition of social status through pet keeping, an analysis of contemporary criticism and tolerance of pet keeping and the spatial context in which pets appears, both in the religious institutional and secular worlds.

Aleks Pluskowski (Dept of Archaeology, University of Cambridge)
‘Hunting the Hunters: Wolves and Royal Interests in Medieval Britain and Scandinavia’

The wolf was recognised as a top predator in medieval Europe, targeting a diverse range of prey, in particular wild ungulates. In the late eleventh century, the Norman Ducal forest system was introduced into England, restricting the hunting of deer in designated areas. By the mid-twelfth century, the institution had become established in both England and Scotland. The sustained hunting of wolves subsequently  promoted by the crown can be linked to competition for deer. In Scandinavia, the development of élite hunting culture took a different form, resulting in limited promotion of wolf persecution. The contrast between the two regions is explored in this paper.

Forthcoming work related to this topic:

'Prowlers in wild and dark places: mapping wolves in medieval Britain and Southern

Scandinavia', in A. G. Pluskowski (ed.) Just Skin and Bones? New Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations in the Historic Past, British Archaeological Reports, Oxford (in press).

Wolves and Wilderness in the Middle Ages, Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer (in preparation). [by Aleks Pluskowski]

 25 June 2005 – ‘Postgraduate Presents’

Jennifer Ledfors
'A Medieval Maritime parish and Family: The Gonsons of St Dunstan in the East, London, 1500-1550'

This paper looks at the regional identity of the Medieval London parish of St Dunstan in the East in the 16th century as related to the nautical community. It specifically focuses on one family who lived in the parish, and uniquely looks at the interior of the families’ medieval London home. Only a couple members of the family are really well known to Historians, but this paper looks at the lives of other family members who are not as well known. One of the sons was a member of the English regiment of the Order of St John and appears to have been falsely accused of treason, and consequently hanged, drawn and quartered.... A few years later, his father, a popular, and highly respected servant of Henry VIII commits suicide. The paper covers the background of these events, and discusses the ramification of these events for the family in medieval London/ society. The paper looks at the network of various family members: the family was deeply pious and very close knit. They experienced financial and social success, and were active in their community and church, and the paper examines theses aspects of their lives. However, it is the maritime and naval achievements in which they are know, and how history has remembered them.

Kathryn Hurlock
'Power, Authority and the Crusades: The Experience of Wales.'

'This paper examines the role the crusades played in the struggle for religious and political control between Wales and England from 1188 to 1282. It considers how Canterbury tried to extend its control in Wales through the propagation of the crusade message and the preaching tour of 1188, and how and why this developed over the next one hundred years. The metropolitan claims of St Davids and the use of the crusade by the English kings during this period will also be considered, as will the role the papacy played in moving the focus for crusade organisation in Wales away from the English bishops and back to the Welsh diocese.'

Peter Robson
‘Alfred's Gothic Ancestry and the Viking Invasions’

It is a commonplace of writing on Alfredian accounts of the Gothic sack of Rome that the Goths in some way act as a figuration of the Vikings, and the accounts of Gothic activity can be read as echoes of and commentary on the contemporary situation in England. This paper follows two strands of thought which strongly suggest that this is not so. The opening strand concerns the additions to the West Saxon Royal genealogy commissioned by Alfred, which quite deliberately insert Gothic antecedents where there were none previously. The evidence of the genealogies makes it hard to support an argument for the universal negativity of treatment of the Goths in Alfredian literature. Having opened the possibility, we will then look at the evidence for the depiction of Goths in Alfredian writing, drawing attention to the fact that the presentation may not be so negatively nuanced as supposed. Finally, we will turn to the examination of possible alternative rationales for the depiction of Goths in Alfredian writing, suggesting avenues for future research.

Muriel Cadilhac
‘Exhausting friendship: A Lacanian reading of the moral ambiguities in Amis and Amiloun’

Amis and Amiloun ostensibly depicts a perfect friendship. This paper, however, questions this assertion and addresses the texts’ very intricate moral ambiguities, that Lacanian psychoanalysis helps resolve. The crux of the matter is that the ideal the protagonists should epitomise is hollow. Every effort is made to save appearances but the multiple instances of situations that should prove perfect friendship only point to its very emptiness. Eventually, a crisis is unavoidable. Usually referred to as a tale of exemplary friendship, Amis and Amiloun would be better qualified as a tale of destruction for the sake of one over privileged relationship under divine auspices.

Tina Chronopoulos
‘Who is saying what? The literary sources in the Passion of St Katherine of Alexandria’

It is not for nothing that St Katherine is the patron saint of blue-stockings: the first and highly distinctive trial she has to face is a mass-gathering of pagan philosophers, expressly convened to argue against her, only to find themselves comprehensively out-argued. This paper explores the various literary sources that the author of the Passion used to construct Katherine's eloquence. I will briefly look at each 'source' on its own, and will then examine how it is adapted into the Passion. I will then show how these sources - which have not previously been linked with the text in question - can be used to create a context for the author, place and date of composition, of the Passion as we have it.

24 June 2006 – Postgrad

Jill Singer (English, KCL)
The Company They Keep - a vocabulary of poverty in early Middle English

The focus is the examination of the network of words used about poverty and the poor in specific texts in early Middle English. These words are identified by context but also through links with connected words, expressed through collocation, partial synonym and antonym. It is suggested that they form the poverty category for the text from which they are gathered. The question is whether the nature of these categories can provide an insight into the contemporary frames that the words inhabit – involving linguistic and extra-linguistic content.

Tom Hodgson-Jones (English, KCL)
Out of the Mouths of Babes: the Good Daughter and the re-knitting of social order in the Confessio Amantis

This paper uses the characters Peronelle from “The Tale of the Three Questions” and Thaise from “The Tale of Appolonius of Tyre” to discuss the relationship between social dependent and social superior in the Confessio Amantis.  The paper proposes that the possession of an independent voice is a metaphor for limited social autonomy allowed by the monarch.  These two girls show that the autonomy of the subject depends upon the wisdom of the ruler.

Kathleen Palti (English, UCL)
Writing women’s songs: Lullabies and the Medieval English Carol

This paper will examine the production and functions of Middle English lullabies by combining manuscript study with formal analysis. Medieval lullabies represent a mother singing to (or with) her child, most commonly the Virgin Mary and the Christ child, and/or use ‘lulling’ words. I will consider the relationship between surviving lullabies and oral song traditions. Many lullabies are carols, a genre with links to secular popular song but which flourished in the fifteenth century in group performance during religious festivals. In the lullabies, oral women’s song traditions were re-made for the literate expression of communal devotional practice. This paper will demonstrate how the carol form proved to be an ideal vehicle for such exchanges.

Andrea Oliver (English, UEA)
John, Duke of Lancaster and St. George: the King's Two Bodies

The Bedford Hours contains a portrait of John, Duke of Bedford kneeling in front of Saint George. The illustration is a unique depiction of the saint and has been interpreted as relating to Bedford's Regency in France with George variously standing for Henry V, Henry VI or England herself.  Focusing on the ideals symbolised by the Order of the Garter and using the theory of the King's Two Bodies, I seek to demonstrate that Saint George operates as the 'immortal, incorrupt and invisible' version of the Regent.'

18November 2006 – ‘Honour and Reputation’

Laura Ashe (Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London)
William the Marshal, Lancelot, and the Perils of Chivalrous Lordship 

This paper argues that there are clear parallels between the depiction of William Marshal and the Young King Henry in the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal (c. 1226), and that of Lancelot and King Arthur in the French prose Vulgate Arthurian cycle (c. 1220s-30s). It is suggested that the parallels are not merely literary, however, but that these historical individuals can be seen to have been influenced by literary models in the conduct of their lives – in ways which had unfortunate effects. I argue that chivalry is revealed to be a code which celebrates knighthood, but excludes and limits kingship. Finally, it is suggested that the differences between insular and continental romances in this period provided a model whereby the poet of the Histoire progressively aligned the Marshal with insular, English ideals.

Katherine McClune (St. Hilda’s College, Oxford)
‘Blasphemed in thy ryme’: Poetic Reputation in John Stewart of Baldynneis’ Ane Schersing Ovt of Trew Felicitie and Gavin Douglas’ Palace of Honoure

This paper focuses on Gavin Douglas’ Palace of Honoure, and John Stewart of Baldynneis’ Ane Schersing Ovt of Trew Felicitie. It examines the depiction of the poet in each of these poems, arguing that the authors establish within their work the antitype of the ideal poet-reader relationship, with Stewart’s depiction clearly responding to that of Douglas’. The poems show that misinterpretation is a result of over-dependence on the sensual at the expense of the rational faculty, and it is suggested that both poets, in directing their texts to their respective kings, emphasise the didactic importance of poetry.

Joanna Martin (Lincoln College, Oxford)
Literary Reputations in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scottish Literature: The Case of John Gower

John Gower was famously characterised by Chaucer as ‘Moral John Gower’. However, Gower’s early readers understood this reputation for morality in rather different ways to many modern critics who have long regarded him as too sober to have had an impact on the development of late medieval British writing. Indeed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland, successive generations of writers responded to Gower’s reputation as a moral poet, and the interpretive and ethical complexities of his English poem, the Confessio Amantis (c. 1390-2), in a range of creative and subtle ways. This is clearly demonstrated in the anonymous Spectacle of Luf (c. 1492), Gavin Douglas’s The Palice of Honour (c. 1501), and John Rolland’s The Court of Venus (c. 1560). These texts engage with aspects of the Confessio’s frame narrative in order to consider the function of literature and its relationship with virtue, and together comprise a distinctive and highly intertextual Scottish tradition of rereading Gower.

Michael Clanchy (IHR, University of London)
The Concern of Abelard and Heloise for his Reputation

The secret marriage of Abelard and Heloise (in Paris in ? 1118) endangered his reputation as the teacher of the next generation of leaders of the Church.  The Latin word he uses for ‘reputation’ is fama.   ‘Who ever equalled your fame?’, Heloise rhetorically asked.  This was more than conceit, as the reverse of fame was infamy which barred a person from being a cleric altogether.  In becoming a wandering scholar, Abelard had abandoned the protection of his family and his Breton homeland.  For him, his ‘fame’ – meaning his honourable reputation – was his right to exist.

24 February 2007 – ‘Representing Women’

Caroline Barron (Dept. of History, RHUL)
'Representations of St Zita/Sitha in Medieval England'.

Zita was a servant in the Faitinelli household in Lucca. She died in 1278 but was not officially canonised until the seventeenth century. Within twenty years of her death there was an altar dedicated to her at Bury St Edmunds, and her cult spread rapidly in England, and also reached Ireland and Iceland. There are over 100 representations of her to be found in stained glass, alabaster, tomb sculptures, Books of Hours, embroideries and on altar screens. The aim of this paper will be to look at the different ways in which a humble servant girl was represented, and to examine why her cult may have had such a wide appeal to men and women at all social levels.

Elisabeth Van Houts (Emmanuel College, Cambridge)
'The role of aristocratic women in the cultural relations between Germany and the kingdom of Poland (11th c.)'

The paper will analyse the written and material evidence for the relations between Germany and Poland in the eleventh century. Several chronicles, books and letters have survived (some in Krakow cathedral) which testify to the important role played by German aristocratic women in the establishment of intellectual life at the Piast court of Mieszko II (1025-34) and Wladyslaw Herman (1080-1102).

Christina Lee (Viking Studies, University of Nottingham)
'Fabricated Identities: Textiles as markers of ethnicity?'

The recent debate around the wearing of the niquab is a reminder of the connection between clothes and cultural and/or religious identity.  In this paper I want to examine whether similar observations may be made in Viking-age Britain. There are relatively few objects that may be identified having an ‘ethnic’ dress connotation, such as oval brooches, so far been found in England (in contrast to over 4,000 paired oval brooches found in Scandinavia), and yet a tenth-century cleric is berating a ‘fellow Englishman’ for the wearing of ‘Danish fashion’. This poses the question: what is Danish fashion? And could this be distinguished from Hiberno-Norse fashions from around the Irish Sea region?

Of course, much of the evidence has subsequently decayed, but one way to get around the problem is to look more closely at the fabric from which such clothing was made and which is preserved as metal-replaced or mineralised scraps from a number of objects in graves. Textile work in the first millennium is generally women’s work and may be part of a local economy. It has been claimed that there are identifiable differences between weave type, spinning and also the use of wool in different communities and the paper will examine whether there are correlations between different forms of manufacture and the groups they are supposed to represent. I want to look specifically at remains from around the Irish Sea region, and compare it to ‘Viking-style’ textiles found in the home lands in order to ask whether these communities used textile as a marker of their identity.

Diane Watt (Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
‘Lesbian (In)visibility in Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives'.

Lesbian invisibililty in medieval literary and historical studies is particularly striking in Old English criticism, for a variety of reasons, including resistance within the discipline to radical theoretical approaches. In this paper I provide a brief discussion of the theoretical issues and critical debates surrounding issues of lesbian 'representation' before going on to offer a reading of two Old English saints' lives from a lesbian perspective, drawing on insights from contemporary lesbian film theory, and focusing on the so-called 'transvestite' saints Euphrosyne and Eugenia.

Alcuin Blamires (Dept. of English & Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths' University of London)
'"Sisterhood"', the Poor Relation of "Brotherhood" in Medieval Writings?  Ipomadon as Case-Study'.

This investigation concerns non-familial ‘sisterhood’ and ‘brotherhood’. Medieval writing and (to judge from some observations by Derrida) much post-medieval writing cultivates affective male-male bonding far more than affective female-female bonding. There appear to be certain exceptions in medieval romance -- especially conspiratorial alliances between heroine and nurse or heroine and maidservant – but do they really encompass a concept of ‘sisterhood’ as a model of friendship? Analysis suggests that Ipomadon (a somewhat subversive romance narrative in several ways) is a rare example of an attempt to emphasize and test a substantial friendship between women.

Patricia Harris Gillies (Dept. of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex)
'Intercultural Connections: Matilda of Saxony and Bertran de Born'.

In late 1182 Henry II’s daughter Matilda, her husband Henry, Duke of Saxony and her family were staying in Argentan as exiles from the Holy Roman Empire. The interaction of Occitan with Latin, Anglo-Norman and English culture defined the terms of the troubadour and nobleman Bertran de Born’s attendance on Henry II’s daughter Matilda at Argentan.  By considering the intercultural viewpoints that shift through the poems of Bertran de Born, perhaps we can glimpse deeper into the complex realities of late twelfth century women in the courts of empire. [texts and translations from the Paden, Sankovitch, Stablein-Gillies ed. trans, The Poems of Bertran de Born. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California press, 1986.]

 Rowena E Archer (Brasenose College and Christchurch, Oxford)
'Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk (d.1475) and her Books'.

Alice Chaucer, the granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer was the only surviving child and heiress of Thomas Chaucer.  Though born a commoner she rose by marriage to become a duchess and she is buried in a fine late medieval chest tomb at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, the Chaucer family property.  Among the Ewelme papers is a list of her belongings including her books which she had moved from Suffolk to Oxfordshire in 1466.  The paper will consider both her general patronage of, and connections with, the literary and educational world of the fifteenth century as well as her own personal library.

12 April 2007 – Postgraduate

Amanda Moss (Royal Holloway College, University of London)
Westminster School MS 3: a fifteenth-century devotional miscellany

Westminster School MS 3 is one of many vernacular devotional miscellanies, produced during the first part of the fifteenth century, aimed at the growing lay market for accessible theological material. The manuscript provides devotional and conduct advice, suitable for use by a pious household, from expositions of basic prayer and the Ten Commandments, through to a treatise on marriage and the education of children. Yet it also contains a mixture of orthodox and Lollard-leaning texts, which raise questions about the rationale behind the selection and ordering of the material and the nature of the piety that the compiler sought to promote.

 Kirsty Black (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
'Displaced Chronicle: A Modernist Reworking of Medieval Historiography'

David Jones’s The Anathemata, published in 1952, is a fragmented epic demonstrating a preoccupation with cultural identity and national roots and a concern for the preservation of the past.  It is widely described as lacking narrative coherence, for which it is criticised, yet accepted as being characteristically modernist. 

However, I argue that those qualities which are most typically ‘modernist’ are in fact equally ‘medievalist’, and are derived directly from Jones’s extensive research of medieval sources.  The coherence of The Anathemata relies on an understanding of Christian historiographical principles, which underpin a dislocated, though not absent, narrative form. I suggest that Jones was influenced by the narrative model offered by the medieval chroniclers and writers of the vitae, with its digressions, catalogues and anachronisms, and that his emulation of the earlier authors is closely associated with his Catholic beliefs.

Pirkko Koppinen (Royal Holloway College, University of London)
Multimodal Images: The Boar in Beowulf.

This paper examines the different extra-textual references required to read Beowulf’s signs and uses material from Anglo-Saxon archaeology and textual culture in order to argue that to read the multiple meanings of the boar-image in the text requires a multimodal approach which engages the reader in the visual and written cultural discourses, in which the text is grounded.

Although the boar occurs only six times in the course of the 3182 lines of the Old English poem Beowulf, it remains an important signifier in the text with multiple functions.  The potential complexity of the boar-sign in the meaning-making process is aptly illustrated with the threefold Peircean sign and its components: icon, index, and symbol.  As an Old English word for ‘a boar’, eofor is an abstract symbol, but the connection between the word and the concept ‘boar’ is not easily available to the modern reader – it needs to be learnt.  The boar-image on a helmet, as another extra-textual, visual sign may be viewed as an icon, as in the case of the Anglo-Saxon Benty Grange helmet, or a visual signifier which resembles the ‘real’ boar by its metonymic association.  Thus, the boar-image in Beowulf is also an index as it points to an extra-textual boar-crest on a real helmet.  To take the boar-image’s indexicality further, the word eoforlic ‘boar-image’ sometimes stands for, or replaces the word helm ‘helmet’ through metonymy.  The boar-image also indexes the protection that the helmet offers to its wearer, as well as status, wealth, worth, and the contract between the Anglo-Saxon lord and his retainer.  The word on the manuscript page has the power to evoke all of the above meanings and more in the modern reader’s mind – as long as the connections between the different modes the poem engages in are learnt.  However, although archaeological evidence is often useful in imagining the heroic world in Beowulf, the iconic image of the boar escapes us.

Tom Hinton (KCL)
Medieval Occitan Narrative and Cultural Identity

The identification of Occitan as a ‘lyric language’ may help to explain not only the low number of surviving narrative texts in the language, but also the generic hybridity which is a common feature of these texts, this hybridity resulting primarily from the interaction of lyric and narrative discourses. Recent work has suggested that the narrative form itself, epitomised by the paradigm of chivalric romance, was viewed by Occitan writers as French and that lyric discourse in the Occitan text therefore represents a kind of ‘cultural resistance’ to French influence in Occitania. I would like to argue rather that the use of narrative models drawn from the French literary tradition allowed these texts to negotiate the potentially stifling identification of troubadour production as the essence of Occitan culture.

Vicki Blud (KCL)
Sex and the City: Female Exile and Urban Wilderness

Using Giorgio Agamben's 'Homo Sacer' as part of the theoretical framework - the idea of the outlaw being neither in one space nor another – this paper looks at the concept of exile from the point of view of female characters or speakers. Referring to Bisclavret's wife and the speaker of "Wulf and Eadwacer', it argues that, although the outlaws living in the archetypal wastelands are the conspicuous exiles, the women in these texts suffer exile within urban space.

Christopher Lay (QMUL)
The manuscripts of William Lichfield's "Complaint of God"

Lichfield's 'Complaint of God', a fifteenth-century verse dialogue between God and Man composed by the rector of All Hallows, Thames Street, in London, known in his time as a radical preacher.  The critical obscurity it which it has lain since the Reformation is belied by its appearance in a substantial number of manuscript and printed witnesses from the mid-fifteenth century to 1534.  This paper examines the appearance of the 'Complaint of God' in a number of fascicular manuscripts compiled from independently-produced booklets. It suggests that slim booklets of popular pious works were a recognised commodity at the end of the Middle Ages, part of an growing market for the speculative production of texts which prefigured the coming of print.

19 April 2008 – ‘Postgraduate Presents’

Suzy Knight (History, Queen Mary - University of London)
Protecting the Innocents: Devotional Jewellery and Magical Amulets for Children: The Case of the Florentine Foundling Hospital

My paper will look at the types of devotional and talismanic objects that Renaissance Florentine mothers armed their young children with to protect them from harm. Developing current research that has focused mainly on middle-class children, I will consider the types of devotional jewellery and amuletic objects that were available to poorer families. Using iconography, contemporary literature and archival evidence from the Florentine foundling hospital, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, I will be asking what solutions were available to the poorest of mothers.

Christopher Wilson (History, Queen Mary - University of London)
The After-life of Visions of the Otherworld in Thirteenth-century England

The long thirteenth century has been regarded as the period when Purgatory became established as a distinctive third place in the geography of the medieval otherworld.  Vision narratives of journeys to this otherworld have been used in recent work to argue for a ‘top-down’ dissemination of the doctrine of Purgatory and as evidence for an older ‘folkloric’ belief in a place between Heaven and Hell.  By looking at how vision narratives were redacted, summarised and amended in the long thirteenth century and focusing on the example of the vision of the monk of Eynsham in Roger of Wendover’s ‘Flores Historiarum’, this paper will argue that both these models fail to account for the complexity of thirteenth century belief about what happened after death.

Linda R. Bates (Trinity Hall, Cambridge)
The Journey and the Stable: Aspects of Middle English Nativity Narratives

The nativity is the moment when we see “Our God contracted to a span /Incomprehensibly made man.’’ Here Charles Wesley articulates an incomprehension in the eighteenth century that also finds voice in the attempts by Middle English authors to describe the miraculous birth. I will explore the treatment, in a variety of Middle English narratives, of the journey to Bethlehem and of the stable wherein the child is born. The paper considers the gospel accounts of the nativity in Matthew and Luke, and the apocryphal gospels Protevangelium Jacobi and Pseudo-Matthew to establish the conventions of the story with which Middle English authors worked. The nativity narratives in Matthew and Luke are sparse; therefore each period and each culture can fill the gaps left according to the demands and tensions of its own time. The paper delineates the ways in which the authors expand and select apocryphal material to retell the familiar story of Christ’s birth and suggests how this might articulate the theological concerns that develop during the Middle Ages.

Ken-Kun Hsu (King's College, London)
Aimance as the Politics of Friendship in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale

Friendship had been revered as an almost noble and sacrosanct bond between men, represented in Amis and Amilyon as a deep and abiding relationship marked by loyalty. However, Chaucer’s representations of brotherhood seem to deviate from this characterization. There have been efforts such as those by Alcuin Blamires who uses Chaucer’s allusion to the perfect friendship of Theseus and Perotheus to explain those deviations. However, these attempts fail to account for the reason readers also seem to take delight in Chaucer’s imperfect portrayals of the fraternal allegiance, for example, Chaucer’s characterization of Arcite as an oath-breaker. Derrida in Politics of Friendship conceptualizes a new sense of friendship, one that extends the classically determined one, as aimance, as friendship to come. This study analyzes Chaucer’s imperfect portrayal of the fraternal oath in the Knight’s Tale from the perspectives of Derridan friendship and postulates that this new sense of friendship serves as the basis upon which the Canterbury fellowship project seems to be based.

Virginia Langum (Magdalene College, Cambridge)
Wholesome Tongues: Speech, Health and Authority in Late Medieval Medical Prologues

Many late medieval surgeries include prologues or chapters that outline a system of professional ethics and etiquette. While they have been mined in service of the history of medicine, these surgical handbooks remain to be fully appreciated by students of language and literature. What surgeons say, how they say it and why they say it form major concerns in the surgeries. As part of a larger project that examines the inter-relationships of speech, diet and health in pastoral, medical and poetic writing, this paper will focus on how deontological passages reveal the impact of linguistic acts upon the body and that of bodily processes upon health.

22 November 2008 – ‘Childhood’

William MacLehose (Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at UCL)
Childhood and Human Frailty in Western Medieval Medicine

Medical writings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries articulated a detailed and coherent notion of childhood that emphasized vulnerability and danger. The category of childhood became a centre of conflicting views within the medical community, which debated the child’s nature, temperament, nourishment, and care. In doing so, medical theorists sought to expand their realm of expertise to include almost every aspect of the child’s life, including moral and intellectual concerns. By 1300 we witness an attempt by medical authors to compete with moral philosophers and theorists of education through the use of physiological interpretations of the child’s behaviour and development.

Susan Boynton (Columbia University)
Young Singers in Medieval Monasteries and Cathedrals

Drawing principally on prescriptive texts such as ordinals and monastic customaries, this paper will address the participation of young singers in sacred music from the ninth to the fourteenth century. The most ample information available for this period deals with the liturgical responsibilities of child oblates, but young singers are also attested in cathedral choirs, particularly beginning in the thirteenth century. Certain compositions may be a sign of the presence of boy singers in secular churches in earlier periods as well. The musical role of the young was just one of the reasons that their education and care was of central importance for so many medieval religious communities.

Michael Clanchy (Institute of Historical Research)
How Boys Learned to Read and Write

An image from 15^th century Germany depicts the Child Jesus going to school, clasping a writing-board on which are the words: ‘Ich bin Jesus’.   Is he going to learn to write German at school?   From the time of Cicero and Quintillian writing had been taught in grammar schools as part of the process of formally learning Latin.  This is best attested by surviving schoolboys’ books from Trecento Florence.  Was the teaching of writing largely confined to boys’ grammar schools?  The answer seems to be ’Yes’.  Girls might learn to read at home, or at dame schools.  But, as they were not usually taught Latin after c1200, they probably did not learn to write. 

Nicholas Orme (University of Exeter)
Going to School in the Fifteenth Century

By the 15th century, education in England took place in a variety of settings: from homes to dame schools, schools in churches, and well-organised grammar schools. More is known about children’s schooling than about most other aspects of their lives, and studying it enables us to recreate their experiences, at least those of the minority (chiefly boys) who went to school. The paper centres on how schools were organised: which children came to be taught, what resources they needed to have, how classrooms were laid out, how lessons took place, how discipline was enforced, and what was done to maintain the interest of the pupils.

April 25 2009 – ‘Postgraduates Present’

Tamsyn Rose-Steel (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Exeter)
The Use of Citation and the Vernacular in the Motets of the Roman de Fauvel

An examination of the motets of BN fr. 146 demonstrates how citation and the vernacular are used to gloss and develop the narrative of the Roman de Fauvel – the story of the wicked horse raised by Fortune to a position of power.  In particular the motet Detractor est/Qui secuntur will be examined: it has an atypical bilingual structure of alternating French and Latin lines.  This paper will look at the significance of the infiltration of the vernacular into the motets, and the conflicting and schizophrenic use of voice; these ideas will be examined in light of Fauvel’s infiltration into the society of the story and depictions and descriptions of him in the manuscript.

 Diane Heath (Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury)
‘A beast, no more’: Doubts and the Transmission of Ideas in a late medieval English Bestiary (Canterbury Cathedral Archives Lit. Ms D.10)

How can this 14thC bestiary present a fruitful problematization of our perceptions of medieval cultural exchange and the transmission of ideas? I shall explore how it contains an unusual discourse on accepted medieval thought modes by comparing the chapter on ‘ursus’ (bear) to decorated initials in earlier works. These comparisons reveal complex uses of homophones and exegesis, linking ursus to orsus and beast to divine, unbecoming “a beast, no more”. However, the cultural norms associated with this “simple” manuscript are further complicated by its doubts, omissions and alterations. How should we interpret the marginal notations of ‘dubio’ in this chapter and so open up new perspectives in pre-existing cultural codes?

Daniel Thomas (Jesus College, Oxford)
Prisons in Old English: Image and Reality

Whilst much critical attention has been focused upon the resonances of such apparently traditional “Germanic” images as exile and transience in Old English literature, the image of imprisonment – distinct from that of fettering or chaining – has received little consideration. In this paper, therefore, I consider the significance of the prison image and the Anglo-Saxon understanding of it. This consideration falls into two parts. Firstly, I examine the evidence for knowledge of incarceration as a penal practise in Anglo-Saxon England. Secondly, I explore the use of the image of prison and imprisonment and consider its symbolic value.

James Paz (Department of English, King's College, London)
Perception, Place and Power: the anonymous Life of St Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels

This paper asks how issues of perception, place and power are bound up in the anonymous Latin Life of Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels by taking Peter Brown’s concept of ‘micro-Christendoms’ as its premise, whereby elements of a universal Christianity are made particular.

The body of Christ is an instance of a ‘universal’ sign which becomes ‘localised’: how is this body made perceptible within the Northumbrian landscape? In the Life of Cuthbert, the saintly body of Cuthbert stands in for Christ's body and thus verifies the ‘realness’ of God within a particular place. The artwork of the Lindisfarne Gospels visually references the body of Christ, as Cross, in a distinctly Northumbrian artistic and cultural context. This context is intricately linked to the upper levels of Northumbrian society, so that the Crosses can be said to ‘wear’ the same kind of wealth and status that adorned aristocratic and ecclesiastical bodies. What is more, the remarkable dedication and endurance of the Gospel’s maker may be compared with Cuthbert’s spiritual and physical feats. The bodies of saint and artist-scribe substantiate the existence of God within place, but these are also ‘bodies in pain’. How are they perceived and interpreted within the Northumbrian landscape? And what can they tell us about the formation of pre-Viking age Northumbria identity?  This paper concludes by examining who has the power to perceive these bodies and how these perceptions may relate to the particular ‘version’ of Northumbria shaped by the Life and Gospelbook.