Anne Stone (Associate Professor of Music, CUNY Graduate Center)
Medieval Song in New York City

December 6, 2013
7.30 p.m.

English Studies Conference Room of the Graduate Center, CUNY (room 4406)
A wine and cheese reception will follow the presentation and question time.

This paper will serve both as a pre-concert talk for the Anonymous 4 concert “A Virgin Unspotted: Medieval and Traditional Christmas Songs for Mary,” and also as a broader meditation on the history and cultural significance of the decades-long tradition of performing medieval music in New York City. In recent years it has become a commonplace of early music scholarship to exclaim over how little we know about what medieval music sounded like; the history of the early music revival is thus a history of modern fantasies about medieval sound. New York has been a particularly active hotbed of the “invention of medieval music” (to quote the musicologist Daniel Leech-Wilkinson), since the founding of The New York Pro Musica in 1952 by Noah Greenberg, and the Waverly Consort in 1964 by Michael Jaffee. In the course of my talk I’ll play recorded examples of each group and discuss how their different approaches reflect our changing expectations for medieval music. I will focus on two issues in this discussion: programming, that is, the choice of pieces that are arranged to make up the concert; and something I will call sound manufacture: the choices of timbre, texture, vocal quality, and instrumentation that together create the sound-world cultivated by the ensemble.

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Myra Seaman (College of Charleston)
“Animal Control: Cultivating Virtue in the "Children's Corner" of a Middle English Household Book”

Friday November 1, 2013
7.30 p.m.

English Studies Conference Room of the Graduate Center, CUNY (room 4406)
A wine and cheese reception will follow the presentation and question time.

My talk offers an object-oriented reading of a late 15th-century Middle English household book that includes 41 verse texts, collected and extensively adapted by a single scribe who marks the anthology heavily with his name (in half of the colophons) and with a recurring fish-and-flower motif that draws attention to the nonhuman inhabitants of the texts that fill its pages. My approach considers fictional representations to be real phenomena with effects in space and time and finds, in this manuscript, fictional organic and inorganic agents of instruction (operating as Latourian mediators) in the affective ecology of an anthology whose primary orientation is toward modeling patterns of forgiveness. My reading combines manuscript study, book history, and close reading with insights offered by affect theory, object-oriented studies, and the history of emotion, seeking texts’ historically situated affective impacts rather than meanings. This hermeneutic assembly reveals how the collection’s texts encourage (human) audiences to understand their own agentive potential as just one element in a conglomeration of inhuman and human affective agentive potency. The “Children’s Corner” is the modern name for the first eight items in the manuscript, among them a romance (Sir Isumbras), a saint’s life (St. Eustace), and six conduct texts (two of them by Lydgate), which may have been aimed at a particular subset of the household. Focusing on this portion of the manuscript shows that one’s social virtue depends on acknowledging and cooperating with human and nonhuman associates in the household ecology. Within the “Children’s Corner,” the imaginative narratives instruct through animals and other nonhuman figures, while the direct-address conduct texts (spoken by a father, a mother, and “Dame Curtasy”) teach pragmatically—and yet an object-oriented reading of the collection and of the “Corner” in particular reveals a de-centering of the human, and a social inclusion of objects, that encourages us to read even conduct texts obliquely rather than in direct accord with their overt performative instructions. My talk will demonstrate the important effects of premodern conceptualizations of the physical world on reading, on interpretation then and now, and on our understanding of and engagement with the Middle Ages.

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Fiona Griffiths (New York University)
“Enoc of Wales and the Fate of Nuns' Priests in the Central Middle Ages”

Friday October 4, 2013
7.30 p.m.

English Studies Conference Room of the Graduate Center, CUNY (room 4406)
A wine and cheese reception will follow the presentation and question time.

Enoc of Wales is not a well-known figure, even among medievalists. His story—reported briefly in a single source—has survived as a cautionary tale of misguided spiritual enthusiasm, priestly misconduct, and sexual scandal. According to Gerald of Wales, Enoc was a Welsh abbot, who briefly and disastrously set himself up as a priest and spiritual guide for nuns. “At length,” as Gerald reported, Enoc “succumbed to temptations and made many of the virgins in the convent pregnant… he ran around in a comical manner, throwing off the religious habit, and fled with one of the nuns.” Gerald’s account of Enoc’s brief career as a priest for nuns lends itself to several interpretations. It is, most obviously, an indication of Gerald’s skepticism concerning men’s spiritual involvement with women—a dire warning against foolhardy experiments like Enoc’s. However, his story also indicates that men were engaging women spiritually during the period. Indeed, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, monks and priests across Europe were increasingly turning their attention to the spiritual lives of women, founding experimental communities for women (and men) that were probably very much like Enoc’s, or variations on it. These men are crucially important to the history of female monasticism: they supported and facilitated female religious life in a period now often seen as its zenith. Yet they remain something of an enigma, both for medieval observers and for modern scholars: celibate men who engaged in regular and often spiritually intimate contact with celibate, and sometimes virginal, women. In this paper, I explore the figure of the nuns’ priest in both medieval accounts and modern historiography, showing how and why nuns’ priests became subjects of scandal, suspicion, and ridicule, and contrasting cautionary accounts like Gerald’s with evidence that nuns’ priests viewed their service to women as divinely ordained, blameless, and spiritually beneficial.

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MCNY at Kalamazoo 2014

FOODWAYS I & II

May 8-11 2014

We seek papers from any discipline that speak to the theme of food. Suggested topics include but are not limited to the following: diets—seasonal, penitential, vegetarian, kosher, means-related, gender-appropriate, medically prescribed; hospitality; conviviality; table manners; eating and serving utensils; digestion; famine; hunger; gluttony; food and sex; food and gender; breastfeeding; Virgo Lactans; the production, consumption, and theology of Eucharistic bread; the occasions, locations, and rituals of eating together; food preservation; the ingredients, instructions, and sharing of recipes; the raw and the cooked; food guilds—their regulations and trade secrets; banquets and carnival; fasting and breaking fast; food on the move, local and distant, from place of production to market to place of consumption.

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Anonymous 4
discount tickets
Sunday 15 December 2013
4 p.m.
Corpus Christi Church, NYC

Dear Club Members

If you are interested in a group-discounted ticket to hear Anonymous 4 sing on Sunday 15 December (4 p.m.) at Corpus Christi Church (Morningside Heights, just off the Columbia University Campus) can you email me immediately—and certainly by this Thursday (7/18)—so I have an idea of how many tickets to purchase. If you say yes I will take that as a firm commitment even though you don’t have to pay immediately. The discounted rate is $20.

http://www.anonymous4.com/newconcerts.php

My email: vallen@jjay.cuny.edu

Thanks

Valerie

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