Dear Friends,

Karen Pratt has now retired as President of the LMS after her second term.  We would like to thank her for agreeing to take on the position again when we needed her, and for fulfilling her role with great tact and humour, as well as with erudition.  Karen frequently undertook the chairing of sessions and meetings but she has also more than once helped out on the practical matter of helping to find a venue for our meetings, and we are grateful to her for her efforts.  It has been a pleasure to work with her as our President, and we hope we will continue to see her at our Colloquia whenever she is able to come. 

We are delighted to welcome Miri Rubin as our new President.  Miri has started her term of office by stepping in at a critical time to find the LMS a new venue for its colloquia, and we look forward to meeting this year in the Lock-Keeper’s Cottage at Queen Mary – University of London.  We are very glad to have such an energetic new President.

The London Medieval Society sponsored a session this year, entitled ‘In War and Peace: The State of Marriage in Medieval English Literatures’.

The session covered a broad chronological span and a range of genres, and the papers generated a cohesive and thought-provoking session.  The speakers were the LMS Treasurer, Pirkko Koppinen (Royal Holloway, University of London), and two old friends of the LMS, Melanie Heyworth (now at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sidney), and Cathy Hume (Centre for Medieval Studies, York; she is now at Bristol University). 

Report and Abstracts from the Autumn and Summer Colloquiua

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 conemporary 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. Berekeley, 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.

LMS Postgraduate Colloquium 12 April 2007

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.

Karen Pratt's Speech for Michael

Professor Michael Clanchy is not only a great scholar and enlightening speaker, as we have just heard, but has been a faithful supporter of the LMS for many years.  Since appointing him as our patron he has generously chaired sessions, led discussions and suggested numerous speakers for our different topics.  It is therefore with great pleasure that we celebrate his 70th birthday by offering him a cake.  As you can all see, the cake has a suitably allegorical edible picture on it of an elephant from a Bestiary.  It is taken from BL Harley MS 3244, fol.39, written in England (in Latin) in the early 13th century.  It depicts an elephant carrying people who are blowing trumpets and waving banners.  It seems that the elephant was thought to be intelligent gentle (leading the lost wayfarer back to the road), to possess a great memory, to live for 300 years, and to be afraid of mice.  When travelling together, it was careful not to injure its companions with its ivory tusks, tended the wounded and protected them in the middle of the herd, and used its trunk to gather leaves to feed, hence the name proboscis, ‘for the bushes’.  As Gopa said, it’s cheery, and the allegorical reading seems to fit nicely – Michael is the elephant and the passengers are the LMS.  So, in the hope that Michael is pleased by our thoroughly medieval comparison of him with an elephant, I shall now ask him to cut the cake.

London Medieval Society Annual General Meeting, Saturday 24 June 2006 - Minutes

1. Apologies from Karen and Kate who were unable to attend.

2. Matters arising.
Gopa has investigated the possibility of 11 Bedford Square as a venue for LMS colloquia. The conclusion is that it is too expensive: rooms available in Senate House not only cost less but are better equipped.

3. Committee posts
Michael to remain as LMS Patron.
Karen has officially given one-year’s notice as President. Possible replacements were discussed and it was agreed that Michael will ask Miri Rubin (who is at the History Department, Queen Mary).
Pirkko to remain as Treasurer.
Kate / Alison / Gopa to remain in their current secretarial roles.

4. Treasurer’s report
The main conclusion was that the Society is in credit; this is largely thanks to the decision to raise the membership fee to £20 and the decision to contact all those whose membership had lapsed. The Summer Colloquium (today) ran at a loss but the Society will nevertheless still be in credit.

5. Secretaries’ report
Speakers’ abstracts are now available on the web site.
It was agreed that it would be a good idea to put up posters and flyers for future events on the web site.
It was agreed that the idea of a ‘contacts register’ (discussed at previous meetings) should be abandoned. There are too many logistical difficulties and it was unanimously felt that greater benefit will be gained by the secretaries putting their efforts into supporting the success of the colloquia.

6. Date for the 2006/07 colloquia
18th November 2006
25th February 2007
21st April 2007. It was agreed that we should hold the third (‘postgraduate’) colloquium in April next year (rather than later in the summer as has been the case in the past) because more people should be available to attend at that time.

7. Themes for the 2006/07 colloquia
November: ‘Honour and reputation’
February: ‘Representing women’
April to remain the ‘postgraduate’ colloquium

8. Date for next AGM
It was agreed that the 18th February colloquium will be the date for the next AGM (as the attendance is generally higher in February)

Officers of the Society 2006/2007