UPCOMING TALK with Karen Overbey, Friday, 2/3!

Post Anglo-Saxon: St Kenelm in Pictures and Performance
Karen Overbey, Tufts University

Friday, February 2, 2011
7:30pm

CUNY Graduate Center • 365 Fifth Avenue
English Department Lounge • Room 4409

Wine and cheese reception following the talk

St Kenelm, a ninth-century boy king murdered by his scheming sister, enjoyed a lively cult in post-Conquest England and into the later Middle Ages. He appears in liturgical calendars and genealogies alongside Edward, Oswald, Edmund, and Aethelbert, representing Mercia in the map of royal martyrs. His vita was written in the eleventh-century by Goscelin for Winchcombe Abbey in Gloucestershire, where Kenelm was buried and where his shrine drew pilgrims seeking miracles. The child-saint remained popular into the late fourteenth-century: the ‘life of St Kenelm’ read by Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest could have been the version in the South English Legendary, or perhaps in the Golden Legend.

The visual culture of St Kenelm, however, is much less familiar -- and in fact, very little remains. The only known narrative representations are fourteenth-century wall paintings at a small chapel in Worcestershire, which were destroyed in the nineteenth century, and survive only in partial drawings and a few textual descriptions.

It is impossible to reconstruct the entire painting cycle, but the traces suggest that the cult in Worcestershire -- where there were neither relics nor shrine, and no record of healing miracles -- was grounded in the local landscape, in holy wells and sacred trees and pastures; although Winchcombe held the saint’s relics, the chapel stood on the site of his martyrdom. The relationship between the “lost” wall paintings and the textual hagiography of Kenelm is not straightforwardly iconographic, and understanding the function of the pictures requires us to consider not only what we see, but also what we don’t see.

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Please join us--we hope to see you there!

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Schedule Change...

Please Amend Your Calendars!

CANCELLED
Friday April 6

Martha Rust, New York University
"Writing, Numeracy, and the Poetics of Reckoning in Late-Medieval England"

Due to terrible scheduling on our part, Dr. Rust's talk was scheduled for both Good Friday and the first day of Passover. Unfortunately, we were not able to reschedule her for this year. We encourage all of our members to attend the "Digital Middle Ages and the Renaissance" conference that will be held at NYU on the following Friday, April 13. We will be sure to get Dr. Rust's lecture on our fall schedule! Our February, March, and May talks will all proceed as scheduled!

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UPCOMING MCNY TALK
Glenn Burger

CUNY Graduate Center, English Department (Rm 4409)

Friday, December 2, 7:30

“‘Ful lik a moder’: The Affective Circuit in the Griselda Story”

ABSTRACT:
In Boccaccio’s version of the Griselda story, not only does Walter insist on his right to choose Griselda, but he offers Griselda the chance to explicitly and freely choose him in turn. In doing so, Boccaccio underscores how the bonds of marriage construct authority by virtue of an affective contract agreed to by both partners. And it is this affective contract, as much as Griselda’s obedience that is threatened by Walter’s excessive testing of Griselda’s obedience in the later action of the tale.

Boccaccio’s account of affect and emotion, however, remains a largely biologic one of “doing what comes naturally.” In his humanist Latin translation of Boccaccio’s story, Petrarch develops a much more complex representation of Griselda’s affective contract with Walter, one that explores how steadfastness functions as an emotion that is made rather than simply called up from within a pre-formed self. Petrarch’s reworks the Griselda story in order to construct an affective circuit that not only links author and reader with Griselda, but also the humanist author with his masculine audience. The performative acts of reading and displays of affect management made possible by this affective circuit thereby allow these masculine subjects to register a level of self-knowledge and agential wisdom that their “betters” do not always display.

Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale on the one hand echoes and intensifies Petrarch’s focus on an affectively understood ethical subject position. On the other hand this very intensification of affect forestalls the Petrarchan impulse to “read like a man” and move to socialize affect in appropriately authoritative ways. In moments such as Griselda’s final swoon, feeling here operates as a more powerful, creative, and disruptive force than Petrarch’s affective circuit would allow for. As such, rather than working to construct the kind of emotional community Petrarch’s affective circuit attempts, the Clerk’s emphasis on Griselda’s embodiment of a pre-social, pre-individual affective remainder works to produce what Sarah McNamer has called “an upheaval of thought” on the part of the tale’s audience.

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Upcoming MCNY Panel

Sex in Muslim and Christian Marriage Law

Friday, November 4, 2011
7:30pm

CUNY Graduate Center • 365 Fifth Avenue
English Department Lounge • Room 4409

Wine and cheese reception following the talk

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The abstracts for the panelists talks are below:

Marion Katz, New York University
Sex as a Marital Right and Duty in Islamic Law
It has long been widely argued, by Muslim feminists as well as academic historians, that Islamic law recognizes a woman's right to sexual intercourse as an entitlement of the marital relationship. More recently, it has been demonstrated that in early Islamic legal texts, marital sex is conceptualized as a male right and a female duty within a asymmetrical and gendered set of marital obligations. This paper examines the arguments of some later Islamic scholars, working in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries C.E., who offered interpretations of the marital relationship newly emphasizing that the entitlement to sexual contact was gender-neutral and reciprocal. This conceptual reconfiguration involved rethinking the roles of sex and domestic labor within a marital relationship that they continued to envision as gendered and hierarchical, a shift that affected their understanding of the roles of concubines as well as wives.

Sara McDougall, John Jay College
In medieval western Europe rules for the sexual conduct of married Christians included both prohibitions and requirements for lawful sexual activity. Canon law demanded that husbands and wives alike have sexual relations only with each other. If prohibited from extramarital relationships spouses were not only encouraged but required to have sex whenever a spouse asked for what is known as the marital debt or duty. Canon law condemned adultery and required the marital debt largely in gender-neutral terms. If some canonists and especially theologians considered female adultery a worse offense than male adultery, other canonists urged the contrary, arguing that men, as the responsible sex, should be held to higher standards. When addressing the marital debt, canonists presented this obligation in starkly equal terms. Gender played no role in the rules for how and when the debt should be rendered. We might expect that these gender neutral principles, when applied, treated men and women quite differently. My paper will address the application of these rules by the bishop's court of Troyes, in Northeastern France.

Miriam Shadis, Ohio University
Protected Sex: secular concubinage in theory, contract, and practice in Medieval Iberia
Scholars have written at length on the theory and practice of medieval concubinage, especially when it comes to the early middle ages, and when it comes to clerical concubinage (and its fraught cousin, clerical marriage.) I turn my attention to what I call “political sex work,” and examine the actual practice of barraganía, or concubinage at the royal courts of twelfth and thirteenth century Iberia, considering the legal expectations surrounding the relationship of the king and his concubine, and the protected status of their real and potential offspring. In particular, I am considering the idea of a “contract” related to this practice, and thinking about it comparatively to the Iberian arras, or dower agreement, given to Iberian women by their husbands well into the thirteenth century.

We hope to see you there!

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Speculative Medievalisms Aftermath

Speculative Medievalisms Aftermath

This is a brief and belated post re the Speculative Medievalisms conference last Friday. Thank you, Eileen Joy et alia, for a wonderful and lively program.

For those of you who missed it, or, like me, had to run in and out, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen presents a colorful overview over at In The Middle (and even shares his paper here).

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