This Lent we will meet as usual in the Board Room at the English Faculty, 9 West Road, on alternate Wednesdays for the Middle English Graduate Seminar. Papers begin promptly at 5.15, followed by drinks and questions. Biscuits 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. After the paper all are welcome to join the speaker for dinner in a nearby restaurant. For any enquiries beforehand, please contact Alex da Costa (ad666).

20 Jan, Aditi Nafde (University of Newcastle): ‘From Print to Manuscript’

3 Feb, Mishtooni Bose (Oxford University): ‘Piers Plowman and God’s Thought Experiment’

17 Feb, Laura Saetveit Miles (University of Bergen): ‘Mary as Hermeneutic Key’

2 Mar, Sebastian Sobecki (University of Groningen): ‘The Southwark Connection: Gower, Chaucer, and the Writing of The Canterbury Tales‘.

Lucy Allen will be speaking tonight on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Four Thought’ programme on Wednesday 13^th January at 8.45pm. The programme features diverse speakers on a huge variety of topical social and cultural issues.  She will be speaking about her research – which focuses on the treatment of women in fiction and the epistemic violence of medieval romance – but also about her personal responses to modern perceptions of ‘the medieval’ and of women’s voices. Well worth listening out for!

You’ll be able to download the episode from the BBC after it airs here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vkktf

Venue: Paris Campus Condorcet
Thanks to the support of the Society for the Study of
Medieval Languages and Literature- Medium Aevum, we are able to help with the funding of the travel expenses for two UK postgraduate students (the papers will be given in French). If you would like to apply to these travel grants worth £125 each, please email irene.fabry-tehranchi@bl.uk with a CV including the name of two referees, highlighting the selected workshop and providing a short justification for support. The workshops are free, but registration is needed with fanny.madeline@univ-paris1.fr. For more practical information and reports on previous workshops, see http://medatelier.hypotheses.org .

The remaining workshops are as follows:

From Manuscript to Print
15 Jan. 2016, 4pm – 6:30pm
Venue: formation room, Sorbonne interuniversity library, 75005, Paris
Run by Maud Pérez-Simon, with Florence Bouchet, Irène Fabry-Tehranchi and Jane Taylor.

Legal Right and Literature
4 Mar. 2016, 4pm – 6:30pm
Venue: formation room, Sorbonne interuniversity library, 75005, Paris
Run by Christopher Lucken with Claude Gauvard, Bernard Ribemont and another contributor to be confirmed.

Environmental History
8 April, 2016, 4pm – 6:30pm
Venue: formation room, Sorbonne interuniversity library, 75005, Paris
Run by Fanny Madeline avec Corinne Beck, Daniel Curtis and Pierre-Olivier Dittmar

The Liturgical Song
Venue: Rm C102, American University of Paris, 6 rue du Colonel Combes, 75007, Paris
27 May 2016, 4pm – 6:30pm
Run by Kristin Hoefener, with Andreas Haug and Daniel Saulnier

Time: Tuesday, 1st December
Venue: The Parlour, Magdalene College, 8.45 pm

Raghnall Ó Floinn, ‘The Use of Relics and Statues in Late Medieval and Early Modern Ireland’

All welcome, wine will be served.

Raghnall Ó Floinn was appointed Director of the National Museum of Ireland in 2013. He has lectured widely and is the author of numerous papers and has co-edited a number of books, including Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking Age (1998) and Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland ­Irish Antiquities (2002).

The lecture, ‘Meritocratic Values in High Medieval Literature’, is to be delivered by Professor Lars Bøje Mortensen, University of Southern Denmark, on Thursday, 3rd December 2015 at 5pm in GR06/07, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, followed by wine reception in the social space. All welcome!

The Department of the History of Art organizes the programme for the annual Medieval Art Seminar Series 2015-2016. The seminars will explore representations of the body within medieval art, particularly focusing on the use of surfaces, media and textures, as well as artistic and object agency.

Papers are held on alternating Mondays during Michaelmas and Lent Terms in the History of Art Graduate Centre at 4A Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1QA (across the street from the Department, above Hot Numbers coffee shop), beginning promptly at 5:30pm. Following questions, attendees are invited to stay and speak more informally with speakers over wine and light nibbles. Lectures are free and open to the public.

For more information, please visit http://www.hoart.cam.ac.uk/seminars/medievalartseminars or email Anya at aejb2@cam.ac.uk.

Conference venue: University of Bristol Conference date: 29 January 2016

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the Interdisciplinary Approaches and Regional Variations in European Witchcraft Studies one day conference at the University of Bristol. The conference offers the opportunity for postgraduate students and early career researchers engaged in researching magical beliefs throughout Europe to discuss and share their work. We welcome abstracts from postgraduate students and early career researchers on all aspects of this topic from ancient to modern history, literature, art, philosophy and archaeology.

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words to victoria.carr@bristol.ac.uk for papers no longer than 20 minutes by Monday 30th November, 2015. For more information, please visit: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/events/conferences/european-witchcraft/

‘Approaching the Medieval’, the interdisciplinary medieval reading group, will be hosting our first ever interlocutor session on Tuesday 24th November. This session begins at 12.30 and ends at 2pm. Lawrie Dower, a first-year PhD student at the University of Dundee, will speak on ‘Lovers be war and tak gude heid about: memento mori in Henryson’. We will be meeting in room 327, The Raised Faculty Building. Tea and biscuits will be served afterwards. Please join us for the discussion and lunch afterwards.