CALL FOR PAPERS

The Medieval Club of New York is sponsoring two sessions in Kalamazoo in 2013 on "Lateran IV: Before and After."  Abstracts from a variety of disciplines are welcome.

Lateran IV: Before and After

As the 800th anniversary of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) fast approaches, it is important to consider both the forces that led Innocent III to convene the council and the wide-ranging consequences of its canons. From transubstantiation to confession, from the Albigensian Crusades to the founding of the Dominican Order, from distinctions between Christians and Jews, Saracens, and others to condemnations of heresy, the canons of the council were far-reaching, with enormous impact on (to name just a few areas) ecclesiastical organization, clerical behavior, the sacraments, the relations of Christians to non-Christians, inquisitions, crusades, etc.  The aim of these two interdisciplinary sessions, therefore, is to bring together scholars who approach Lateran IV from a variety of perspectives, including history, theology, art and architecture, literature, etc., with the aim of developing a more complete understanding of this historic assembly.

For more information on the conference and the general call for papers, see: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/files/call-for-papers-2013.pdf

Deadline for submission of abstracts to these two sessions is September 15, 2012.  Please send them directly to me, at the email address below.

Sylvia Tomasch

Professor

Department of English

Hunter College (CUNY)

695 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10065

(212) 772-4052

fax: (212) 772-5411

stomasch@hunter.cuny.edu

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/english/

The Pagan, the Medieval, and Us

Sarah Salih, King's College London

The Twenty-Second Annual Rossell Hope Robbins Lecture

Friday, May 4
7:30

The Graduate Center of City University of New York

365 Fifth AvenueEnglish Department Lounge, Room 4406

Abstract:

Late medieval writers were fascinated by the idea of the pagan; both ancestor and stranger, the pagan was an infinitely flexible figure and the subject of various thought-experiments. Imagining paganity enabled examination of questions of history, memory and time. Paganity in Lydgate’s Troy Book is analysed as a flawed system of memorialising, centred on the live and dead, glorious and horrible preserved body of the hero Hector. Hagiography, meanwhile, tells the story of how the world that pagans built came to be appropriated for Christian use by the deployment of the live yet dead bodies of the saints. Yet paganity is never quite over; traces of the pagan persist in the Christian world. The pagan is to be found in the future as well as the past; indeed, the pagan may even be identified with our own post-Christian present-day.

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Women and Gender in Medieval Studies
Pearl Kibre Medieval Study, Fifth Annual Spring Roundtable


Friday, April 27th, 2:30 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, room 6421


Moderator: Sara McDougall, Assistant Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

*Fiona J Griffiths, Associate Professor of History at New York University The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (2007)

* Mary Erler, Professor of English at Fordham University Records of Early English Drama: Ecclesiastical London (2008) Women Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (2002)

* Rebecca Lynn Winer, Associate Professor of History at Villanova University Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan c.1250-1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town
(2006)

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THIS WEEK! Friday, 3/2: Anglo-Norman Historiography with Paul Antony Hayward

The Golden Age of Anglo-Norman Historiography—or What Connects the Works of William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth?
Paul Antony Hayward, Lancaster University

Friday, March 2, 2012
7:30pm

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

Wine and cheese reception following the talk

Between 1125 and 1139, in quick succession, within a space of less than fifteen years, and after a period of almost four centuries in which nothing of equivalent substance had appeared—a period stretching back to the time of Bede—four quasi-classical histories of Britain and its peoples were published in England: that is, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum and Gesta pontificum Anglorum, Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Gesta Britonum. Historians have long been aware of this remarkable outburst of history-writing and that these historians were alert to each other’s work, but we have still to arrive at a common explanation for the genesis of their histories that can account for all of their salient features and themes, especially their religious and philosophical positions. This paper will venture a new solution to this problem, one that focuses on a neglected element of the context in which the three historians were working—an element that can explain what all three men were trying to do.

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Please join us!

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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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