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.   

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.

Tea

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