A reminder that the third Medieval Graduate Research Seminar of the term will be this Wednesday (17th Feb) in the Board Room at the English Faculty, 9 West Road.

Dr Laura Saetveit Miles (Associate Professor, University of Bergen) will be speaking on ‘Mary as Hermeneutic Key’:

The Shadow of Faux Semblant: Fiction, Truth, and Deception in
Fourteenth-Century Allegorical Poetry (France, England, Italy)’

The Roman de la Rose is not only one of the most influential literary
texts of the later middle ages (surviving in over 300 Manuscripts), but
it is also one of the most problematic and intellectually challenging
texts of the period. Far from being a ‘canonical’ work in the ordinary
sense, the Rose in fact invites its readers to interrogate the very
notion of literary authorship and discursive authority. Rather than
affirming his own identity as author in self-confident fashion, as many
readers of this influential poem assume, Jean de Meun’s attitude towards
his own poetic craft is in fact deeply ambivalent and ironic. This
culminates in the exact centre of the poem, with the appearance of the
character of Faux Semblant, the embodiment of hypocrisy and deception.
As a personification of the liar-paradox, Faux Semblant thus
crystallises a whole range of anxieties concerning the epistemological
status of literary fiction, and this concern comes to play a central
role in later European literature influenced by the Rose, notably in the
work of such figures as Machaut and Deguileville in France, Langland and
Chaucer in England, or Dante and his contemporaries in Italy. In this
paper I propose an initial sketch for a wider study of a European
reception history of the Rose, with particular attention to the ethical
function of poetry, and its problematic, unstable relation to truth and
deception.

Dr Marco Nievergelt is currently a EURIAS research fellow at the Paris
Institute for Advanced Studies (2015–16), and is working on a
book-length study entitled Allegory as Epistemology: Dream-Vision Poetry
on Language, Cognition, and Experience. His research interests include
allegorical literature, chivalric literature and culture, Arthurian
literature, Anglo-French cultural relations, and the history of literary
self-representation from the medieval to the early modern period. His
first book is entitled Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser.

Unfortunately our speaker tonight, Mishtooni Bose, has had to withdraw for significant health reasons.

Professor Richard Beadle will be speaking instead on ‘The Children of the York Plays’.

The paper will begin promptly at 5.15, followed by drinks and questions. Cake will be available in the Board Room from 4.45p.m., so please bring along a mug of tea and catch up with fellow medievalists.

The Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic will take place in the English Faculty on Saturday 13th February 2016. This year’s theme is ‘Faith and Fabrication’ and the keynote speaker will be Professor Richard Gameson of Durham University, delivering a lecture entitled ‘Faith and Fabrication in the Gospels of St Augustine of Canterbury’.

Please register soon to ensure your place at the event, particularly if you would like to join the speakers for the post-conference dinner in Selwyn College.

You can find the programme and registration information here: CCASNC 2016 Programme and Registration

Chris Page was appointed the Gresham College Professor of Music in 2014 and is giving a series of lectures this year entitled ‘Music, Imagination and Experience in the Middle Ages’. Wonderfully, each of the lectures is available to watch online here.

According to Gresham College’s website, ‘in 1597 Queen Elizabeth I made the recommendation of who should be the first incumbent of this Professorship at Gresham College. In recent years the Professorship has seen lectures on jazz, experimental music and film music as well as on the more traditional classical canon.’

The Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series (CCRSS) looks forward
to welcoming you to the following event this Thursday:

PROFESSOR MARILYNN DESMOND

“Trojan Temporality and the Materiality of Literary History” (Abstract below)

THURSDAY 21ST JANUARY 2016

5.15pm, Room G. 21, Faculty of Classics

ALL WELCOME

(Tea is served in the room adjacent to G.21 from 4.45pm)

*DINNER:*

/After the talk, we will be taking Professor Desmond for a meal at a
local restaurant. If you wish to join us (at guests’ own expense),
please email Maya /(mcf37@cam.ac.uk) */to
reserve a place./*

The matter of Troy in the medieval Latin West sustains a vision of the
city of Troy as ever present yet always already destroyed: a city that
exists outside of time. In medieval historiography, the Fall of Troy
results in the Trojan diaspora and the settlement of Europe by Trojan
refugees who flee the burning city; the fall of Troy consequently makes
the narrative of European history possible. This vision of Trojan
ancestry as a myth of origins is often invoked to express a vision of
European futurity. This paper will explore how the /translatio /of the
matter of Troy generated its own temporality.

In the absence of the Homeric epics, the matter of Troy was transmitted
to the medieval West by the Latin prose texts attributed to Dares and
Dictys. These texts represent themselves as the /translatio /of ancient
Greek textual traditions and simultaneously as the material transmission
of these traditions from papyrus to parchment. The vernacular itinerary
of the Latin texts of Dares and Dictys create a distinct Trojan
temporality. In the twelfth-century /Roman de Troie/, Benoît de
Sainte-Maure insists that the materiality of translation practices
allows the reader to participate directly in the Trojan War, while two
centuries later, the visual program in a manuscript of Raoul de Presles’
translation of Augustine’s /De Civitate Dei/ encapsulates the
atemporality of Troy as transmitted by Dares.

Marilynn Desmond joins us from Binghamton University, where she is
Distinguished Professor. She is an expert in French and English medieval
literature, and the reception of Classics in those fields. She is the
author of, among other things, /Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and
the Medieval Aeneid /and /Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of
Erotic Violence/. In 2014 she was the recipient of the prestigious Rome
Prize from the American Academy in Rome, enabling her to kickstart her
new research project on the reception of the Fall of Troy in medieval
literature.

For further information about this event, please contact either of the
CCRSS convenors:

Maya Feile Tomes (mcf37@cam.ac.uk)

Ben Folit-Weinberg (bjf32@cam.ac.uk)

http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/seminars/seminars/crdg

This Wednesday (20 Jan), Dr Aditi Nafde from the University of Newcastle will be giving a talk at the Medieval Graduate Research Seminar on  ‘From Print to Manuscript’.

After the advent of print in England, the earliest forms of printed books were largely imitations of manuscripts. However, as the century drew to a close, new print practices began to have a marked effect on the ongoing production of manuscripts. This paper will examine the effect of new print practices on the production of manuscripts after 1473. Looking closely at two examples, Oxford, St John’s College 266 and Bodleian Library Hatton 51, both manuscripts copied from print exemplars, the paper will examine how book producers and readers responded to each of the two formats, whether the new medium of print began to alter readers’ demands, and how far post-print manuscript production was changed to fit a shifting market.

The paper will begin promptly at 5.15pm in the English Faculty Board Room, followed by drinks and questions. Biscuits will be available in the Board Room from 4.45pm., so please bring along a mug of tea and catch up with fellow medievalists. After the paper all are welcome to join the speaker for dinner at Sala Thong (Thai restaurant). For any enquiries beforehand, please contact Alex da Costa (ad666).

Professor Mary Carruthers, the Remarque Professor Emeritus of Literature at New York University will be delivering this term’s Trinity College Clark Lectures on The Art of Invention. All lectures are at 5pm in the Mill Lane Lecture Theatre:

Tuesday 26 January: Disquiet, Dislocation, Performance: Augustine’s conversion

Tuesday 2 February: Imagination and Reasoning: Langland and others

Tuesday 9 February: Vividness, Evidence, Proof: the role of visions

Tuesday 16 February: Disposed to Play: the Gawain poet