Online Resources for Medievalists

Please click the image below (or the link in the sidebar) for the new M@P Online Resources for Medievalists document! Links compiled by Ph.D. Candidate Daniel Davies and other M@P student and faculty members.

Vulnerability: 10th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Graduate Conference

Thanks to all of our presenters, respondents, moderators, and attendees for helping us to put on another great conference. Special mention to our keynote speaker Masha Raskolnikov; to Courtney Rydel, Penn English PhD and one of the earliest organizers of M@P, who returned to us as a respondent; and to the staff of the Kislak Center for their ongoing help and advice. We're also grateful to SIMS graduate intern Oliver Mitchell, who reviewed the conference for the Schoenberg Institute blog.

Click here to visit the conference website: medievul.tumblr.com

Photo of Panel 3 by David Wallace

Medieval Events in Spring 2018

Please see below for a selection of M@P and related events at Penn this spring. For a more complete listing of events, see the Global Medieval Studies calendar.

Jan 30: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Steven Justice’s “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?”
Feb 7: Med/Ren WIP: Julie Orlemanski
Feb 20: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Wulf and Eadwacer and Sarah Harlan-Haughey's The Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature
Feb 27: Irina Dumitrescu lecture: “The Riddle of the Old English Andreas”
Mar 17: Vulnerability: 10th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Conference
Mar 23-24: Gothic Arts Conference
Mar 29: Med/Ren WIP: Carolyn Dinshaw
Mar 30-31: Yale/Penn Workshop: Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript Roll
Apr 17: M@P Meeting: Discussion of Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
Apr 25: Med/Ren WIP: Sarah Novacich

M@P Meeting on Nov. 13th: Epistre Othea

Sarah Wilma Watson will lead our meeting next Monday, which will address Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea (Letter of Othea) and Stephen Scrope's Middle English translation of the Othea. We'll also be looking at the corresponding images in BL Harley MS 4431, folios 95r-141v.

Sarah writes: Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea (Letter of Othea) is a mirror for princes/ chivalric manual/ guide to spiritual development written around 1399. It takes the form of a letter from Othea, the goddess of Prudence, to a young prince Hector of Troy. It has a three-part structure - a poetic 'texte' and a prose 'glose' and 'allegorie.' In some versions it is accompanied by an elaborate series of illustrations. It was translated into Middle English by Stephen Scrope in 1440. 

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Call for Papers: Vulnerability: 10th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Conference

Saturday, March 17th 2018, University of Pennsylvania
Keynote Speaker: Masha Raskolnikov, Cornell University

This conference explores the forms and contexts of vulnerability in the Middle Ages, defining vulnerability as a state of being that precedes but does not necessarily entail violence and as a condition that is temporalized, oriented toward a future that is potentially hazardous. What are the methods by which the Middle Ages constructed and maintained states of vulnerability? If we think of vulnerability as entailing threat, what are the methods by which people or things are constructed as threats? What did it mean for medieval people to be living under threat?

We invite 15-20 minute papers on this subject from any discipline, including History, Art History, Musicology, Literary Studies, Religious Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The construction of race and alterity
• Gendered vulnerability and issues of care or protection
• Ecological threat and disaster
• Class, resource scarcity, and economic precarity
• (Dis)Ability and illness
• Trials, court cases, and legal actions
• War and political conflict
• Heresy and threats posed by religious orthodoxy
• Vulnerable and damaged material texts or objects
• The positions of medievalists in modern society

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words as attachments to pennmedieval@gmail.com by January 15, 2018. Submissions should include your name, paper title, email, and institutional and departmental affiliation. Papers will be due March 10, 2018 for distribution to faculty respondents.

Welcome back to another year at Penn! Our next meeting will be on October 23 at 10:30 AM in 516 Williams Hall. We'll be discussing Kellie Robertson's Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy, published by Penn Press in 2017. All are welcome!

CFP: Kalamazoo 2016 - Unhappy Families: Literary Inheritance in the Fifteenth Century

Call for Papers

A Roundtable Sponsored by Medievalists@Penn

at the 51^st International Congress of Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 12-15, 2016

Unhappy Families: Literary Inheritance in the Fifteenth Century

Organizers: Daniel Davies (daviesd@sas.upenn.edu) and Sarah W. Townsend (sarahtow@sas.upenn.edu)

vae tibi terra cuius rex est puer et cuius principes mane comedunt (Ecc. 10:16)

For Huizinga, the fifteenth century was a filial disappointment.  The profound advances made in the mature High Middle Ages were but a distant memory and it was part of an epoch marked by ‘childish’ and immature beliefs. Whether or not we accept this characterization, the fifteenth century seems peculiarly marked by questions about childhood, youth, immaturity and filiation. The English poets that succeeded Chaucer, such as Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate and Stephen Scrope, expressed anxieties about their literary pedigree, comparing themselves to ‘father’ Chaucer and finding their own abilities lacking. This session invites papers which explore textual relationships through the lens of the unhappy family. How does filial awareness and resentment shape and motivate authorship? What modes of filiation do we find poets using? In what ways do English writers of the fifteenth century both avoid and emulate Chaucer? In an age when childhood became a political problem through the minority of Henry VI, how do poets craft and explore maturity?

In addition to exploring the relationship between fifteenth-century English writers and ‘father’ Chaucer, submissions to this session might examine the insular inheritance of continental French literature. While Sheila Delany famously excluded Christine de Pizan from a list of “mothers to think back through,” Thomas Hoccleve, Stephen Scrope and Anthony Woodville all translated Christine’s French texts into Middle English during the fifteenth century. Similarly, John Lydgate worked from French ‘parent’ texts, translating Guillaume de Deguileville’s pilgrimage trilogy and using a version of the French Roman de Thèbes to compose The Siege of Thebes. Are these translations a practice of simple adaptation of material already in heavy circulation among Francophone aristocratic lay readers or do these acts of cultural appropriation take on a new meaning at the end of the Hundred Years’ War? And might these French source texts allow fifteenth-century English poets to re-think their relationship to Chaucer and shape a new vision of English literary history?

Please send proposals with a one-page abstract and a Participant Information Form (www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html) to Daniel Davies (daviesd@sas.upenn.edu) by September 15, 2015. Preliminary inquiries and expressions of interest are most welcome.