Sunday, 22 January 2017
Coming Soon: Hilary Term Meeting!
Our Hilary Term 2017 Meeting is approaching! Note our new time in Week 4 instead of the usual Week 5. Dinner for Society members will be at Marco's on the High Street.
To sign up for dinner, email caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk by the end of Week 3, or 4 February 2017.
MICHAELMAS TERM MEETING: CHANGING LANDSCAPES
The Oxford Medieval Society kicked off the 2016-17 academic year with papers dealing with change, otherness and cultural perceptions – apt themes, all things considered.
Aisling Byrne began her discussion of 'Otherworlds in the Atlantic' by explaining how medieval otherworlds, some of the most memorable and troubling aspects of medieval literature, work: they can be accessed in various geographical ways and they often have complicated or even funny relationships to real world geography. Sir Orfeo is a king of Winchester! St. Brendan's voyage to marvelous islands is still located in the Atlantic Ocean; the Island of Avalon is neither part of the human world nor entirely removed from it.
Dr. Byrne also noted that the 'otherworlds' are not often as 'other' as they seem: otherworlds often provide commentary on serious topics and contemporary political situations rather than escapism, providing a fictional backdrop for the exploration of historical realities. Locations in the real world can also be reimagined as part of an otherworld. Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are often the most popular candidates, but the British Isles were referred to as 'alter orbis', the other world, in Latin texts, and most classical commentary on the British Isles discusses how severed from the world they are. Their otherness becomes inherent in their geography, and the European northwest ends up cramped up on the edges of classical world maps, colored differently, or locating Ireland and Iceland outside the world circle entirely as in St Johns College MS 17.
Dr. Byrne noted that the 'remoteness' of the British Isles inspired reflections on the forms of alterity that might be linked to remoteness – an exceptional location might create exceptional qualities in its people. Ireland was seen as a site for the production of marvels, prodigies, and peculiarities. In Gerald's account of Ireland, the 'wonders of the east' become the 'wonders of the west', and the peripheries of the world are filled with strange things. This translates, unfortunately, into an account of the Irish people's 'barbarism' from Gerald: they have too much of this strangeness and too many marvels.
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough picked up on this thread to discuss the imaginative world of the medieval Norse. Pointing out the Arctic North, Greenland, Vinland, Russia, Constantinople and North Africa as the physical peripheries of the Norse world, Dr. Barraclough reminded us that we no longer bave blank spaces in our world maps where we can say there are men with their faces in their chests and lynxes who pass gems instead of urine – but even our maps and world knowledge and are not objective, but open to reinterpretation and reclassification. She noted that when the sagas were being composed, the 'edges' of the map were much closer to home, and they contained a weird host of marvelous creatures, pointing to the Hereford mappamundi – which gets less geographically detailed and features more explanatory text and drawings of exotic animals.
In the blank spaces and at the edges of the world, monsters crowd in; the limits of the map become the limits of humanity itself. In the fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript GkS 1812 IV, dealing with world knowledge, Africa is written as a series of columns, large chunks of information without indication as to how items are connected or should be arranged. Information dwindles the further away the locations discussed by the manuscript become, ending with 'here are wastes and deserts.' Hauksbók includes numerous lists of fantastic creatures – learning and imagination trump experience on the edges of the map.
Dr. Barraclough then turned to the sagas, in which protagonists venture to all sorts of places, including areas, like sub-Saharan Africa, that the Norse never actually traveled to. These early armchair anthropologists relied on classical learning and European accounts of monstrosities. Dr. Barraclough pointed out that saga protagonists explore the world 'like video game avatars', as if they've been dropped down into fantastic locations with all the necessary knowledge they need to beat the monsters that live there. The elements used can be cut-and-paste pastiches of other accounts, or use semantically loaded Norse words, as in the fictional Bláland (blá meaning black or blue, and being the color of the cloaks of murderers and the skin of revenants in the Íslendingasögur). The sagas, unlike maps, don't have literal blank spaces, but semantic and literary ones, which their authors filled with borrowed scholarship and imagination.
Next up? Our Hilary Term Meeting, on Exploring Medical Humanities! We'll be meeting in Week 4 instead of our usual Week 5, but our speakers will be as exciting, and the preceding dinner as delicious, as ever! Send a message to your friendly Communications Officer at caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk to sign up by the end of Week 3.
Aisling Byrne began her discussion of 'Otherworlds in the Atlantic' by explaining how medieval otherworlds, some of the most memorable and troubling aspects of medieval literature, work: they can be accessed in various geographical ways and they often have complicated or even funny relationships to real world geography. Sir Orfeo is a king of Winchester! St. Brendan's voyage to marvelous islands is still located in the Atlantic Ocean; the Island of Avalon is neither part of the human world nor entirely removed from it.
Dr. Byrne also noted that the 'otherworlds' are not often as 'other' as they seem: otherworlds often provide commentary on serious topics and contemporary political situations rather than escapism, providing a fictional backdrop for the exploration of historical realities. Locations in the real world can also be reimagined as part of an otherworld. Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are often the most popular candidates, but the British Isles were referred to as 'alter orbis', the other world, in Latin texts, and most classical commentary on the British Isles discusses how severed from the world they are. Their otherness becomes inherent in their geography, and the European northwest ends up cramped up on the edges of classical world maps, colored differently, or locating Ireland and Iceland outside the world circle entirely as in St Johns College MS 17.
Dr. Byrne noted that the 'remoteness' of the British Isles inspired reflections on the forms of alterity that might be linked to remoteness – an exceptional location might create exceptional qualities in its people. Ireland was seen as a site for the production of marvels, prodigies, and peculiarities. In Gerald's account of Ireland, the 'wonders of the east' become the 'wonders of the west', and the peripheries of the world are filled with strange things. This translates, unfortunately, into an account of the Irish people's 'barbarism' from Gerald: they have too much of this strangeness and too many marvels.
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough picked up on this thread to discuss the imaginative world of the medieval Norse. Pointing out the Arctic North, Greenland, Vinland, Russia, Constantinople and North Africa as the physical peripheries of the Norse world, Dr. Barraclough reminded us that we no longer bave blank spaces in our world maps where we can say there are men with their faces in their chests and lynxes who pass gems instead of urine – but even our maps and world knowledge and are not objective, but open to reinterpretation and reclassification. She noted that when the sagas were being composed, the 'edges' of the map were much closer to home, and they contained a weird host of marvelous creatures, pointing to the Hereford mappamundi – which gets less geographically detailed and features more explanatory text and drawings of exotic animals.
In the blank spaces and at the edges of the world, monsters crowd in; the limits of the map become the limits of humanity itself. In the fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript GkS 1812 IV, dealing with world knowledge, Africa is written as a series of columns, large chunks of information without indication as to how items are connected or should be arranged. Information dwindles the further away the locations discussed by the manuscript become, ending with 'here are wastes and deserts.' Hauksbók includes numerous lists of fantastic creatures – learning and imagination trump experience on the edges of the map.
Dr. Barraclough then turned to the sagas, in which protagonists venture to all sorts of places, including areas, like sub-Saharan Africa, that the Norse never actually traveled to. These early armchair anthropologists relied on classical learning and European accounts of monstrosities. Dr. Barraclough pointed out that saga protagonists explore the world 'like video game avatars', as if they've been dropped down into fantastic locations with all the necessary knowledge they need to beat the monsters that live there. The elements used can be cut-and-paste pastiches of other accounts, or use semantically loaded Norse words, as in the fictional Bláland (blá meaning black or blue, and being the color of the cloaks of murderers and the skin of revenants in the Íslendingasögur). The sagas, unlike maps, don't have literal blank spaces, but semantic and literary ones, which their authors filled with borrowed scholarship and imagination.
Next up? Our Hilary Term Meeting, on Exploring Medical Humanities! We'll be meeting in Week 4 instead of our usual Week 5, but our speakers will be as exciting, and the preceding dinner as delicious, as ever! Send a message to your friendly Communications Officer at caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk to sign up by the end of Week 3.
Sunday, 6 November 2016
Michaelmas Term Meeting Approaches!
Our Michaelmas Term Meeting is in only a few days! On Thursday 10 November at 8 pm, our brilliant speakers Eleanor Barraclough and Aisling Byrne will discuss 'changing landscapes' in medieval literature. There will be maps, monsters, and other marvels – and, as always, rather a lot of free wine.
Dinner with the speakers for Society members will be at 6 pm before the meeting at Marco's New York Italian on the High Street! To sign up for dinner, email caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk; spaces are going fast, so book in quickly.
Wednesday, 15 June 2016
TRINITY TERM MEETING: GLOBAL HISTORY!
Our Trinity Term Meeting in association with the Byzantine Society sparked lots of discussion from medievalists and Byzantinists alike!
"Everyone else is going global, and we don't want to be left behind!" said Catherine Holmes, speaking about the Global Middle Ages project, a worldwide research collaboration to talk about the swath of time that makes up the 'Middle Ages' across the world, from Rome to Kerala. She spoke at length about "why a global Middle Ages makes sense" and what the project means.
Dr. Holmes explained that as scholars, we have a responsibility to find roots, parallels, and differences between medieval and modern phenomena; specialization is a recent development in academia rather than an inherent feature, and Europe wasn't always the centre of things. G-MAP uncovers different histories and moves away from traditional ideas about what the 'Middle Ages' included. Communities in the Middle Ages had porous boundaries: people, goods, and ideas moved back and forth more than we previously imagined, shedding new light on religious activity and state formation.
Dr. Holmes said that G-MAP focuses on things like plural burials: for example, a grave found on the Swedish island of Helgo containing a Buddha probably made in Kashmir, a North African ladle, and an Irish crozier.
The Helgo Buddha
She discussed a synagogue 'library' in old Cairo whose contents indicated the Jewish community was widespread and communicated with one another to some degree; the distribution of Chinese pottery across the Indian Ocean area and the Islamic world, particularly showing up on the Swahili coast in the 9th and 10th centuries, used to decorate houses. She did offer a caveat, however: we cannot claim intense interaction between all parts of the globe during all parts of the Middle Ages. The scholarly study of the 'Global Middle Ages' requires experimentation to decide which "tools and toys" are most productive, and whether our current periodization is accurate or too Western-centred.
Shards of Chinese pottery excavated on the Swahili coast, British Museum
She then offered a case study: six copper plates dated to 849 CE and discovered in Kerala, in southwestern India. One plate describes a set of trading privileges given to merchant associations; another sets up a grant for a church. They include four languages, five scripts, and five world faiths. The plates are proof of the significant scale of the vibrant early medieval Indian Ocean trade. What we don't know, and maybe can't know? Whether the plates reflect a world where people felt they were 'encountering' each other; whether those encounters were collective. Dr. Holmes warned us against applying our modern sense of the word 'global' onto these interactions. The presence of large empires operating at the time is missing from the Kerala plates - the focus is instead on the local chieftain, who is able to grant these rights.
Dr. Holmes talked more broadly about the need to collaborate with other scholars in other fields on global history projects: we may need new tools to deal with the period between 500 and 1500 CE. The use of Chinese pottery to decorate a Swahili house indicates that we may need to develop new ideas about the relationship between local and global forces, about change, rupture, and movement in medieval communities. Some of this global interaction may have lead to the intensifying of connections, but also foreclosed certain options – an increase in religious identity politics, for example. She concluded, in the question session, by acknowledging that 'medieval' is a Eurocentric word and possibly problematic – but it is used for convenience to designate a vast and varied time period.
One set of the Tharsipalli plates, Kerala, 849 CE
Dr. Conrad Leyser then spoke about the Middle Ages as an era of 'faith': faith in terms of religion, certainly, but also faith in terms of allegiance, to family or empire. Dr. Leyser explained how the idea of faith and allegiance changed in western Europe during the rise of Latin Christendom.
We were told that, in the ancient Mediterranean, the family was a legal and religious unit devoted to ancestor worship; adoptions were made when biology failed. By the thirteenth century, however, a distinction was made between nature and culture in the Latin west: family was defined by blood descent – while the Church was a group of celibate men whose genealogy was ritual and metaphorical, i.e. the priesthood. This split may be due to religious reforms in the eleventh century which officially prohibited priestly marriage and simony. Property was divided by blood or institution, but not both. The idea of the priesthood as men without blood families was unusual across Eurasia at that point in history – priests are essentially those who conduct sacrifice, as a remedy for being born of woman, for having a blood genealogy. Priests were imagined as family men well into the late Carolingian Empire; they were considered to be different from monks and nuns, and a rivalry existed between the two modes of religious commitment.
Charlemagne in a portrait by Albrecht Dürer
The religious reforms of the eleventh century were essentially answering in the affirmative the question of whether priests were going to make themselves invulnerable to the charge of having family interests, and become a purely sacrificial order. 'Faith' became a relationship to an institution, rather than an individual relationship with the divine –– unlike in medieval Islamic communities, Dr. Leyser pointed out, where faith rests on a personal bond with God without a sacrificial system, and the question of blood versus culture manifests instead in the struggle between Sunni and Shi'a over the caliphate, or in early medieval China, in the rivalry between Daoist priests and Buddhist monks. The rise of Confucianism moved China towards culture and away from blood as the defining principle of family, whereas the Latin West moved increasingly towards defining family purely by blood.
Confucius, 551-479 BCE
Dr. Leyser concluded by pointing out that there is great value in thinking comparatively, across cultures and across time spans. This is also not, he points out, a story of 'modernization', of how we came to the 'modern' way of viewing things, as the act of balancing blood ties with other kinds of social bonds is a question that we still address.
Our year concluded on an excellent note! Keep watching the blog this summer for updates on OMS activities next year, and our usual drinks party will take place in Week 1 of Michaelmas Term to kick everything off for the academic year 2016/17. If there are topics you would like to see addressed at an OMS Term Meeting, email your webmaster at caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk and your ideas will be brought before the committee!
"Everyone else is going global, and we don't want to be left behind!" said Catherine Holmes, speaking about the Global Middle Ages project, a worldwide research collaboration to talk about the swath of time that makes up the 'Middle Ages' across the world, from Rome to Kerala. She spoke at length about "why a global Middle Ages makes sense" and what the project means.
Dr. Holmes explained that as scholars, we have a responsibility to find roots, parallels, and differences between medieval and modern phenomena; specialization is a recent development in academia rather than an inherent feature, and Europe wasn't always the centre of things. G-MAP uncovers different histories and moves away from traditional ideas about what the 'Middle Ages' included. Communities in the Middle Ages had porous boundaries: people, goods, and ideas moved back and forth more than we previously imagined, shedding new light on religious activity and state formation.
Dr. Holmes said that G-MAP focuses on things like plural burials: for example, a grave found on the Swedish island of Helgo containing a Buddha probably made in Kashmir, a North African ladle, and an Irish crozier.
She discussed a synagogue 'library' in old Cairo whose contents indicated the Jewish community was widespread and communicated with one another to some degree; the distribution of Chinese pottery across the Indian Ocean area and the Islamic world, particularly showing up on the Swahili coast in the 9th and 10th centuries, used to decorate houses. She did offer a caveat, however: we cannot claim intense interaction between all parts of the globe during all parts of the Middle Ages. The scholarly study of the 'Global Middle Ages' requires experimentation to decide which "tools and toys" are most productive, and whether our current periodization is accurate or too Western-centred.
She then offered a case study: six copper plates dated to 849 CE and discovered in Kerala, in southwestern India. One plate describes a set of trading privileges given to merchant associations; another sets up a grant for a church. They include four languages, five scripts, and five world faiths. The plates are proof of the significant scale of the vibrant early medieval Indian Ocean trade. What we don't know, and maybe can't know? Whether the plates reflect a world where people felt they were 'encountering' each other; whether those encounters were collective. Dr. Holmes warned us against applying our modern sense of the word 'global' onto these interactions. The presence of large empires operating at the time is missing from the Kerala plates - the focus is instead on the local chieftain, who is able to grant these rights.
Dr. Holmes talked more broadly about the need to collaborate with other scholars in other fields on global history projects: we may need new tools to deal with the period between 500 and 1500 CE. The use of Chinese pottery to decorate a Swahili house indicates that we may need to develop new ideas about the relationship between local and global forces, about change, rupture, and movement in medieval communities. Some of this global interaction may have lead to the intensifying of connections, but also foreclosed certain options – an increase in religious identity politics, for example. She concluded, in the question session, by acknowledging that 'medieval' is a Eurocentric word and possibly problematic – but it is used for convenience to designate a vast and varied time period.
Dr. Conrad Leyser then spoke about the Middle Ages as an era of 'faith': faith in terms of religion, certainly, but also faith in terms of allegiance, to family or empire. Dr. Leyser explained how the idea of faith and allegiance changed in western Europe during the rise of Latin Christendom.
We were told that, in the ancient Mediterranean, the family was a legal and religious unit devoted to ancestor worship; adoptions were made when biology failed. By the thirteenth century, however, a distinction was made between nature and culture in the Latin west: family was defined by blood descent – while the Church was a group of celibate men whose genealogy was ritual and metaphorical, i.e. the priesthood. This split may be due to religious reforms in the eleventh century which officially prohibited priestly marriage and simony. Property was divided by blood or institution, but not both. The idea of the priesthood as men without blood families was unusual across Eurasia at that point in history – priests are essentially those who conduct sacrifice, as a remedy for being born of woman, for having a blood genealogy. Priests were imagined as family men well into the late Carolingian Empire; they were considered to be different from monks and nuns, and a rivalry existed between the two modes of religious commitment.
The religious reforms of the eleventh century were essentially answering in the affirmative the question of whether priests were going to make themselves invulnerable to the charge of having family interests, and become a purely sacrificial order. 'Faith' became a relationship to an institution, rather than an individual relationship with the divine –– unlike in medieval Islamic communities, Dr. Leyser pointed out, where faith rests on a personal bond with God without a sacrificial system, and the question of blood versus culture manifests instead in the struggle between Sunni and Shi'a over the caliphate, or in early medieval China, in the rivalry between Daoist priests and Buddhist monks. The rise of Confucianism moved China towards culture and away from blood as the defining principle of family, whereas the Latin West moved increasingly towards defining family purely by blood.
Dr. Leyser concluded by pointing out that there is great value in thinking comparatively, across cultures and across time spans. This is also not, he points out, a story of 'modernization', of how we came to the 'modern' way of viewing things, as the act of balancing blood ties with other kinds of social bonds is a question that we still address.
Our year concluded on an excellent note! Keep watching the blog this summer for updates on OMS activities next year, and our usual drinks party will take place in Week 1 of Michaelmas Term to kick everything off for the academic year 2016/17. If there are topics you would like to see addressed at an OMS Term Meeting, email your webmaster at caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk and your ideas will be brought before the committee!
Wednesday, 11 May 2016
Graduate Presentation Day FINAL PROGRAMME!
Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow at ST JOHNS COLLEGE at 13:00!
Sunday, 24 April 2016
TRINITY TERM MEETING!
Look for our poster in the term booklet! And, as always, if you would like to join us for dinner at Marco's New York Italian on the High Street with the speakers beforehand, email your Communications Officer at caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk. This term we're talking trade, religion, and power in the global Middle Ages, in cooperation with the Byzantine Society!
Friday, 4 March 2016
Call for Papers: OMS Graduate Research Presentation Day!
All the excitement of a conference, all the helpful advice of a work-in-progress seminar. Come present your research –– all post-graduates working in the medieval period are welcome, especially first year students.
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