Today Katie Walter (Sussex) will speak on ‘Reginald Pecock’s Images’.

As always,  we will be in the Board Room from about 4.45 p.m., please
bring along a mug of tea, meet the speakers and catch up with
fellow medievalists. Biscuits will be provided (despite the first day of
Lent). The talk will start at 5.15, followed by drinks and questions.

After the paper you are very welcome to join the speaker for dinner in a
nearby restaurant, the Rice Boat. For any enquiries beforehand,
please contact the convenor, Orietta Da Rold (od245).

The Sandars Readership in Bibliography was instituted in 1895 with a bequest of £2000 left to the University by Mr Samuel Sandars (above) of Trinity College (1837-1894), and continues today in the annual series of Sandars Lectures.

Richard Beadle, Professor of Medieval English Literature and Palaeography, will be giving the Sandars Lectures this year on Henry Bradshaw and the Foundations of Codicology: 

25 February: ‘A shot at Henry Bradshaw: the bibliographer as sleuth’

4 March: ‘Bradshaw’s Methods’

11 March: ‘Bradshaw’s guides: close encounters with manuscripts

Lectures take place in the Milstein Seminar Rooms at Cambridge University Library, beginning at 5pm.

For further details, please visit http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/sandars/sandars_2015.html

Charles Samuelson, of Princeton University, will be giving his paper entitled, ‘After the Lyric: Queering Temporality and Repetition in 13th-century Verse Romances and Dits’ at the Medieval French Seminar. The seminar will start at 5pm (for 5.15), and will take place in the Rushmore Room, St Catharine’s. Wine, water and apple juice will be served.

As usual, we’ll be taking our speaker to dinner afterwards. Anyone attending the seminar will be most welcome to accompany us.

‘Like’ the seminar on facebook for yet more updates.

The Medieval Reading Group will meet at 5.15 on Wednesday 11 February in the English Faculty, GR-05, to hear Dr Mickey Engle (Philosophy, Cambridge) talk about ‘The Influence of Averroes: Ideas on Latin and Jewish Scholars During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’. The session will be followed by wine and cheese straw. All are very welcome.

On Wednesday 4 Febuary, Jorie Woods (Texas at Austin) talked bout ‘Classical Emotions in the Medieval Classroom’ to Cambridge researchers at the Medieval Graduate Seminar. The paper she presented is a chapter of her upcoming book (lecture collections). Her observations on the interlinear and marginal glossaries in some medieval Latin ‘textbooks’ were followed by insightful interpretations of how medieval teachers cultivated emotions and encouraged responses involving empathy to classical works.

The next Cambridge medieval French seminar will take place this Thursday, 5th February. Ella Williams, UCL, will be giving her paper entitled, ‘Eastern fantasies: Francophone literature and territorial politics in Angevin Italy’. The seminar will start at 5pm (for 5.15) in the McGrath Centre, St Catharine’s College. Wine, water and apple juice will be served.

As usual, we’ll be taking our speaker to dinner afterwards. Anyone attending the seminar will be most welcome to accompany us.

Crossroads of Knowledge: Literature and Theology in Early Modern England

Trust Room, Fitzwilliam College

Registration Deadline: Friday 6 February 2015.

Literature and Theology in Early-Modern England is a one-day colloquium to mark the launch of our new, five-year interdisciplinary research project, funded by the European Research Council. The colloquium will look from a variety of perspectives at the intersection of theology and literature in early modern England, with a particular alertness to the project’s overall thematic foci (doubt and unknowing, knowing and knowingness). Professor Debora Shuger (UCLA) will give a plenary address to the colloquium.  The round table will be chaired by Dr Rowan Williams. For details, visit http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26037

We’re very pleased to have appointed a new website coordinator, Shirley Zhang, who will be helping to improve the Research Group website and increase links between members by sharing research news.

Shirley is a PhD student whose research focuses on Malory’s ‘Book of Sir Tristram’ and its known sources. She is interested in the transitional features of Malory’s reworking of the Arthurian characters and motifs, and trying to answer questions about authorial intention through close textual comparison and discourse analysis.

If you’ve just published something, are organising an event, or have made a research discovery you want to share please email her at sz308[at]cam.ac.uk.

The Medieval Reading Group will meet on Wednesday at 5.15 in the English Faculty, GR-05 to hear Professor Heide Estes from Monmouth University read a paper on “Anglo-Saxon Riddles, Talking Animals, and Ecocriticism”. Professor Estes has published on Old and Middle English languages, literature and culture, with interest in gender theory and ecocriticism. Please see below for abstract.

The session will be followed by wine and cheese straws. All are very welcome.

Abstract: The presence of animals in the Old English Riddles is complex and unstable. Numerous animals are described in some detail; many are narrated in the voice of the animal itself, occasionally in protest against the cruelty of the human “enemy.”  This talk draws on the insights of “ecocriticism.” There are many ecocriticisms, focusing variously on animals, on rocks, on women, on trees, and on attempting to theorize why those should matter, but a provisional definition of what unifies these various enterprises is a conviction that things and beings other than the human matter. Several bird Riddles depict wild birds with distinctive detail, suggesting they mattered to the Anglo-Saxons even though they were not domesticated and provided no direct utility to them. The Bookworm Riddle (#47) suggests humans are different from animals because of the capacity for reason, but the Book Riddle (#26) complicates any easy acceptance of this dichotomy. While the Riddles enact the subjugation of animals through violence and through the claim of lack of reason, they also provide an alternative vision whereby animals protest the violence that is done to them, using human language to protest and to designate humans as “the enemy.” What lies behind this project is a commitment to advocacy, to changing our notions of what is “sustainable” and moving our focus from consumption of objects and petroleum-based fuels to human interactions.

On Tuesday, January 27th, Professor Elizabeth Tyler (York) will give a talk as part of the CRASSH seminar series, ‘Multilingualism and Exchange in the Ancient and Medieval World’:
‘From the Severn to the Rhine: Geographies and Social Networks of English Literary Culture, c.850-c.1150’.

Professor Tyler’s research interests include the political and social utility of fiction, female literary patronage, multilingualism, classical reception, history-writing and poetics. Her monograph, ‘England in Europe: English Queens and the Politics of Fiction, c. 1000-c. 1150’, will be immanently published by Toronto University Press. Co-edited collections include ‘Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West’; ‘Treasure in the Medieval West’; and ‘Conceptualizing Multilingualism in Medieval England, c.800-c.1250’.

The talk will take place at 5pm in the Alison Richard building, Room SG2.