This Michaelmas and Lent terms, 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 Orietta Da Rold (od245) for the MT seminars and Alex da Costa (ad666) for the LT talks.

Michaelmas Term

14 October: Nicola Morato (Liège), ‘Entropy in Old French Arthurian Prose Texts. Examples from the early diffusion of “Tristan” and “Méliadus” (c. 1235-1290)’

28 October: Sara Harris (Cambridge), “Custom and Character in Thomas’ ‘Roman de Horn'”

11 November: Paul Binski (CamBridge), ‘Artifice, Nature and the Ascetic Imperative in Gothic Art’

25 November:  Marion Turner (Oxford), ‘Chamber, Court, and Counting-House: Writing the Spaces of Chaucer’s Life’

Lent Term

20 Jan, Aditi Nafde (University of Newcastle)

3 Feb, Mishtooni Bose (Oxford University)

17 Feb, Laura Saetveit-Miles (University of Bergen)

2 Mar, Sebastian Sobecki (University of Groningen)

The Cambridge Medieval French Research Seminar will take place on Thursdays at 5pm, in the Audit Room, King’s College, Cambridge. Papers last between 20 and 50 minutes, and are followed by discussion.Wine and water will be served. For further details, or if you have any particular access requirements, please contact Melissa Berrill (mb754@cam.ac.uk) or Blake Gutt (bag28@cam.ac.uk).

Please follow the seminar on Facebook and/or Twitter (@CamMedFrenchSem) for further updates.

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is an interdisciplinary forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices within western Europe, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts of all kinds (Latin and vernacular) in their manuscript contexts. Three workshops are usually held on Friday afternoons during the first half of each Easter Term, avoiding the week of the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through a pair of short presentations and general discussion. The dates for Easter Term 2016 are as follows: 6th, 20th and 27th May, 2-4 pm, Milstein Seminar Room, Cambridge University Library. All are welcome. Further details of themes, speakers and titles of presentations will be circulated during the Lent Term.

Convenors: Dr Teresa Webber, Dr Orietta Da Rold, Dr Suzanne Paul, Professor David Ganz, Dr Sean Curran

For further information, email Tessa Webber (mtjw2@cam.ac.uk <mailto:mtjw2@cam.ac.uk>) or Orietta Da Rold (od245@cam.ac.uk <mailto:od245@cam.ac.uk>).

Barry Windeatt’s translation into modern English of Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) – the earliest identifiable woman writer in English – has been published in the Oxford World’s Classics series.  It was ‘Paperback of the Week’ in the Guardian of Saturday 9th May, and you can read an associated blog on the Oxford University Press website by clicking on the link here: OUP blog: Jesus takes a selfie: the Vernicle and Julian of Norwich.

The Old Library of Magdalene will be open to the public on 13th and 14th June (2pm to 6pm) for a special exhibition. A selection of the medieval and modern manuscripts will be on display, many for the first time in public. Entrance is free, all are most welcome.

The eighteenth issue of Marginalia (Cambridge’s graduate journal on medieval studies) is now available online. Please follow the link to read the latest articles and book reviews.

Cambridge University Library (Milstein Seminar Room), 2-4pm

‘The problem of dating manuscript witnesses for editors of texts and those studying the history of textual dissemination and reception’

Professor Jill Mann will use her current research (editing the Speculum stultorum of Nigel of Longchamps), to raise questions about dating manuscript witnesses to texts, especially where the manuscripts in question have not yet received close attention from palaeographers. This workshop will focus upon specific examples from Professor Mann’s own research as well as upon the methodological issues involved (whatever the text and dates of the surviving manuscripts) and what available published material might be of assistance.

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through one or more informal presentations and general discussion. All are welcome.

Convenors: Teresa Webber, Orietta Da Rold, Suzanne Paul and David Ganz

For further details, email mtjw2@cam.ac.uk

The next medieval reading group meeting will take place this Wednesday, 20th May, at 5.15pm.
Venue: GR05, Faculty of English building

Bernardo S. Hinojosa and Anna DeWolf (both MPhil candidates, Faculty of English) will read papers on, respectively, ‘The Speculum Christiani and Fourteenth-Century Versified Theology’ and ‘Yseut’s Hair Shirt: Misdirected Penance in Thomas’s Tristan’.

As ever, all are very welcome to attend. Discussion will be followed by drinks and biscuits.

In the splendid tradition that Helen Cooper started, it was great to celebrate the nearing end of the academic year yesterday with so many of Cambridge’s medievalists! Glasses of fizz and Norfolk St Bakery’s excellent custard pies rounded off a year of thought-provoking seminars.

On Tuesday 2nd June at 6 pm at the Parlour, First Court, Magdalene College, Dr Megan Leitch (Cardiff University) will speak on ‘Chaucer, Hypertextuality, and the Memory of Middle English Popular Romance.

Dr Megan Leitch is Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2012. She is the author of Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford University Press, 2015), and has published essays in journals including Medium Aevum, The Chaucer Review, and Arthurian Literature. Her research interests include romance, Arthurian Literature, Chaucer, and the fifteenth century; she is currently working on a monograph on Sleep and its Spaces in the Pre-modern Imagination.

As usual, we will be having dinner with the speaker at a local restaurant after the talk. Please let us know if you would like to join via email to mms@magd.cam.ac.uk.