Congratulations to Dr Nicolette Zeeman, who has been appointed a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, where she will be working this academic year. She is researching a new project, Caught in the Body, in which she ‘will be looking at medieval theories about image use and the problem of idolatry (image ‘misuse’) and asking how these ideas shape medieval attitudes to the body and its accoutrements, especially in the secular world.’

Nicky has also been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship, which she will take up in May 2015 to work on Arts of Disruption. Conflict and Contradiction in Medieval Allegory, looking at some of the narrative structures in Piers Plowman, many of which ‘are characterised by various forms of internal tension and disruption’, and the traditions with which they are in dialogue. 

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Nicolette Zeeman’s Recent Publications

With Dallas Denery and Kantik Ghosh she has recently edited a volume on scepticism in the Middle Ages; published psychoanalytically-oriented pieces on volition and dreams, and an essay entitled ‘Piers Plowman in Theory’ in the Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman.

Imminent Publications include ‘Mythography and Mythographical Collections’ in the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 1, edited by Rita Copeland (Oxford University Press); with Elizabeth Leach, ‘Gender: the Art and Hermeneutics of (In)differentiation’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, edited by Delia Da Sousa Correa (Edinburgh University Press); and, edited with Jean Michel Massing, King’s College Chapel 1515 – 2015. Art, Music and Religion in Cambridge (Harvey Miller).

Marginalia, the Journal of the Cambridge Medieval Reading Group has just held it’s 10th anniversary conference ‘Out of the Margins: New Ideas on the Boundaries of Medieval Studies’. Hosted at the English Faculty, the two day conference was packed with papers from graduates and early career researchers, as well as three plenary papers given by Mary Carruthers, Helen Cooper and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh.

Speakers came from as far as the University of Notre Dame, NYU, and Sapienza University in Rome, but also included five graduates at Cambridge from a variety of disciplines: Stephanie Azarello (PhD candidate, Art History), Ekaterina Chernyakova (PhD candidate, Music), Julianne Pigott (PhD candidate, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic), Myriah Williams (PhD candidate, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic), and Madeleine Pepe (MPhil candidate, English Literature).

A twitter feed @ootmargins kept those unable to attend in the loop, and you can read delegates’ brief responses to papers by searching #ootmargins.

The Centre for Material Texts hosted the Writing Britain 500-1500 Conference at the English Faculty over the summer. It was organised by one of the Medieval Research Group members, Dr Orietta da Rold, with Dr Richard Dance (University of Cambridge), Dr Aidan Conti (University of Bergen), and Dr Philip Shaw (University of Leicester). This is how the conference was described: 

Writing Britain is a biennial event which aims to draw on a range of approaches and perspectives to exchange ideas about manuscript studies, material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the medieval period. The 2014 iteration of the Writing Britain Conference will take place in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge under the auspices of the Centre for Material Texts. Some of the topics which we are keen to explore are literary and non-literary agencies and their significance and/or relevance in the medieval period across British medieval written culture in English, French, Latin, Norse and the Celtic languages. More broadly, we are interested in other questions such as: How did local writers, compilers and readers use writing to inscribe regional identity within broader conventions or, on the other hand, impress ‘universal’ practices and constructs on local populations? What were the different markets for books? Can we characterize their developments and differences? What new or existing methodologies can be employed to localise texts and books across Britain? What is the role of the Digital Humanities in the study of medieval book culture?

Amongst the speakers were two other members of this research group: Richard Beadle gave a plenary lecture on ‘Authorial Agency: Some Middle English First Drafts’, and Barry Windeatt spoke to the title ‘”Ne scryvenyssh … thow it write”: Not Writing Like a Scribe in the Troilus Manuscripts’. You can catch up with what happened at the conference and read responses to their talks here.