Thursday, March 7 & Friday March 8: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight screening & role play | sponsored by the Medieval Literatures Center, Department of English
Thursday, March 7: Screening The Green Knight (2021, dir. Lowry) | Scott Frank Room SSMS 2311
Friday, March 8: Role Play: the MLC research assistant will run a single-session of The Green Knight table-top role playing game (TTRPG) | refreshments provided! For more information, & to sign up here
Friday, March 1 & Saturday March 2, 2024 | Early Modern Center Annual Conference: Body Matters! Disability in English Literature to 1800 | sponsored by EMC, Department of English
Friday, February 9, 2024 | Ingela Nilsson, Uppsala University, “Ekphrastic and Embodied: Spatial Form as Novelistic Storytelling” | 3:30, HSSB 4088, sponsored by the Department of Classics and the Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction
Wednesday, February 7, 2024 | Julian Talamantez Brolaski, “Rhyme and Lies in Medieval Poetry” | 5:45, Santa Barbara Public Library, sponsored by ACGCC, Department of English
Friday, January 26, 2024 | Megan McNamee, University of Edinburgh, “Parchment as Material” | 12:00, Arts 1332, sponsored by Department of History of Art and Architecture
Events for 2022-2023 Include:
Medieval Studies Program | 2023 Lecture Series:
January 24th and 30th, and February 17th
HSSB 6020 | HSSB 6056 | HSSB 6056
January 24, 2023 | Prof. Jody Enders, French and Italian, UC Santa Barbara
“Translating Medieval Farce” Humanities Decanted Series
January 30, 2023 | Prof. Mark Meadow, History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara
“Showing Off: The Performativity of Techne in Philip Hainhofer’s Pommersche Schreibtisch”
February 17, 2023 | Prof. Nicolas Tackett, History, UC Berkeley
“The Long-Term Consequences of Divergent Pathways of Chinese Reunification: The Sui Founding vs. the Song Founding”
Introducing New Initiatives
Reem Taha & Jessica Zisa, IHC RFG
“Un-disciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender”
Heather Blurton & Debra Blumenthal, Engaging Humanities seminar
“Moors, Mongols and the Monstrous: Race and Racism in the Middle Ages”
Jody Enders, Department of French and Italian
October 4, 2022
Join us for a fun “cold read” of one or two of her farces from her forthcoming Immaculate Deception (vol. 3) or Trial by Farce (vol. 4)
Daniel Reeve, Department of English, “The Green Knight and the Green New Deal: David Lowery’s Climate Catastrophe”
October 11, 2022
Medieval Studies X RFG
October 18, 2022
Join us for a reading and discussion of Sharon Kinoshita’s “Worlding Medieval French Literature,” in eds. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Events for 2021-2022 included:
Alice Fulmer (Dept of English) “‘Gode is þe lay, swete is þe note’: The Liminality of Media in the Worlds of Sir Orfeo”
April 5, 2022
RFG Undisciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Rachel Shine (NYU Abu Dhabi), “Racing Time: Chronologies of Black Muslim Belonging in Arabic Epics
April 12, 2022
Jo Livingstone (independent scholar) “Public Medievalisms”
April 21, 2022
RFG Undisciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender Mayte Green Mercado (Rutgers University), “Mediterranean Displacements: Morisco Migration in the Sixteenth Century”
April 26, 2022
Medieval Studies Program | Annual Colloquium: Global/Premodern/Race
March 21, 20222
This symposium brings together scholars working in Iberian, Middle Eastern, and Medieval Studies to engage in a critical discussion concerning race—reevaluating both its utility as a category of analysis in the premodern world and how it has structured medieval and early modern studies as academic fields.
Participants include:
PAMELA PATTON (Art History, Princeton University)
M. LINDSAY KAPLAN (English, Georgetown University)
HANNAH BARKER (History, Arizona State University)
MOHAMAD BALLAN (History, SUNY Stonybrook)
AMBEREEN DADABHOY (Literature, Harvey Mudd College)
JOSH COHEN (Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University)
ABDULHAMIT ARVAS (English, University of Pennsylvania)
TERENCE KEEL (African American Studies & Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA)
KATHY LAVEZZO (English, University of Iowa)
Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center; Medieval Studies; Early Modern Center, English Department; Center for Middle Eastern Studies; College of Letters & Science; History Department; and Latin American and Iberian Studies
Jody Enders (Department of French and Italian)
February 1, 2022
Join us for a fun “cold read” of one or two of her farces from her forthcoming Immaculate Deception (vol. 3) or Trial by Farce (vol. 4) Curé
Christene d’Anca (Program in Comparative Literature) “The Medieval Roots of Globalization in Modern English Literature: From a Comparative Literature Perspective”
January 11, 2022
Medieval Studies X RFG Undisciplining Premodern Histories of Race and Gender
January 18, 2022
Ya Zuo (Department of History) “What Makes Emotions Deep”
January 25, 2022
Lecture, Ed English, Dept of History, UCSB – “What Renaissance? The Fourteenth-Century Siennese Elite”
October 18, 2021
Book Launch! Celebrating S. C. Kappie Kaplan’s Women’s Libraries in Late Medieval Bourbonnais, Burgundy, and France: A Family Affair (Liverpool UP, 2022)
November 1, 2021
Events for 2017-2018 included:
IHC VISITING SCHOLAR TALK: MEDIA BEFORE GUTENBERG
April 10, 2018
Although “media” conjures modern, technologized modes of communication (television, the internet, print journalism), mediation is a central part of all communication. In the Middle Ages, media referred to networks of voices, texts, bodies, human actions, and nonhuman forces that were involved in sense perception, social interaction, storytelling, and other acts of cultural transmission. This talk will elaborate on the media ecology of the medieval West by putting Aristotle’s theories of sense perception in dialogue with theories of new media and embodied informatics, from Marshall McLuhan’s description of media as the “extensions of man” to N. Katherine Hayles’s cyborg theory. Understanding media before machine technologies and the era of mass communication heralded by the printing press also yields new insights into medieval literature, and this talk will conclude with a discussion of media and mediation in Geoffrey Chaucer’s masterwork, The Canterbury Tales.
Ingrid Nelson is the author of Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice (University of Pennsylvania, 2017). She is an Associate Professor of English at Amherst College and a 2017–18 IHC Visiting Scholar.
Events for 2016-2017 included:
MEDIEVAL BESTSELLERS VS. MASTERPIECES: WHAT WE READ NOW & WHAT THEY READ THEN
May 5, 2017
This symposium addresses the strange fact that, in both European and Middle Eastern medieval studies, those texts that we now study and teach as the most canonical representations of their era were in fact not popular or even read in their day. On the other hand, those texts that were popular, as evidenced by the extant manuscript record, are taught and studied with far less frequency. Our symposium will provide cross-cultural insight into both the literary tastes of the medieval period and the literary and political forces behind the creation of the modern canon of medieval literature.
Sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Department of English, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Medieval Studies Program, and the College of Letters and Science.
Events for 2015-2016 included:
Giovanna Benadusi, University of South Florida | “Bringing People’s Voices into the State: Familial Relationship, Princely Rule and a Social Order of Gender Inequalities in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany”
January 27, 2016 | HSSB 4020.
Between 1601 and 1602, in a series of petitions addressed to the Medici Grand Duke and argued within the Magistrato Supremo, Orazio Pancrazi, captain of the state militia, questioned Leonora Gonzaga, his widowed daughter-in-law’s reputation, charging her with having simulated the delivery of a son five months after the death of her husband. In turn, Leonora disputed her father-in-law’s honesty and integrity by accusing him of having tampered with the amount of a debt. What led Orazio and Leonora to appeal to the Magistrato Supremo, to request the attention of the grand duke, and to draw friends and neighbors as witnesses into a conflict that seemingly centered on each other’s moral characters? This presentation explores the intersection between the law as lived experience and expression of self-representation and as institutional form that shapes politics and social relations. This perspective brings new issues into view and revises our understanding of key developments in early modernity, specifically about commonly held assumptions of the place ordinary people had in the grand narrative of state building.
Professor Benadusi is the author of A Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany: Family and Power in the Creation of the State (Baltimore, 1996) and edited Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Grand Ducal Tuscany (Toronto, 2015).
A lecture by Nancy McLoughlin, Associate Professor UC Irvine |”Jean Gerson, Gender and the Two Sides of Bathsheba”
March 14, 2016 | HSSB 4080
French theologian, Jean Gerson (1363-1429), employed the fleshly and spiritual readings of the biblical figure Bathsheba as a means of stirring Queen Isabeau of France to promote peace while simultaneously undercutting her authority over her minor son’s kingdom. Gerson’s complex strategy for coopting Isabeau’s authority for the University of Paris provides crucial insights into the relationship between the development of misogynist discourses and the exercise of authority by women.
UCSB Medieval Studies Program Presents | Gender & Religious Practice in the Middle Ages.
7 May 2016 | McCune Conference Room, 6th Floor HSSB
Free and Open to the Public.
Keynote talk by Fiona Griffiths, Associate Professor of History at Stanford University:
“Men in Women’s Monasteries: Nuns’ Priests in the Central Middle Ages”
Sponsored by the Departments of History, English, French and Italian, Comparative Literature, and Religion, and Chaucer’s Books
Events for 2014-2015 included:
The Medieval Studies Program with the University of California Mediterranean Seminar Group sponsored a two-day meeting on “Land and Sea in the Mediterranean World”
November 7-8, 2014:
November 7, 2014 |Friday colloquium:
Session I: Chair, John W. I. Lee (UCSB)
Glenn Bugh (Virginia Tech) | “Fortress Morea: Venetian Defensive Strategy in the Peloponnese.”
Nikki Malain (University of California, Santa Barbara) | “Who are You Calling a Pirate? The Birth and Spread of the Term ‘Corsair’ in the Twelfth Century”
Aaron Burke (UCLA) | “Ioppa Maritima: In Search of Jaffa’s ‘Solomonic’ Harbor”
Session II: Chair, Debra Blumenthal (UCSB)
Suzanne Akbari (University of Toronto) | “The Door to the Latin Kingdom: Early Thirteenth-Century Views of the Port of Acre.”
Michael North (University of Greifswald) | “The Sea as Realm of Memory: The Straits of Gibraltar and the Dardanelles.
Keynote: Brian Catlos (Religious Studies: University of Colorado Boulder/Humanities: University of California Santa Cruz) | “’This Sea, Although Narrow, is Difficult to Cross’: Terrestrial Commonalities and Maritime Connectivity in the Medieval Mediterranean World.”
November 8, 2014 |Saturday colloquium:
Daniel Hershenzon (University of Connecticut) |“The Political Economy of Ransom in the Early Modern Mediterranean, 1600-1650”
Comment by Cristelle Baskins (Tufts University), and discussion by participants.
Claudio Fogu (Italian Studies, UCSB) | “From the Southern to the Mediterranean Question: Making Italians and the Suppression of Mediterranean-ness”
Comment by Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan), and discussion by participants.
Susan Slyomovics (Anthropology and Near Eastern Cultures, UCLA) | “Moving War Memorials from Algeria to France”
Comment by Sharon Kinoshita (UCSC), and discussion by participants.
Peggy McCracken, the Domna C. Stanton Collegiate Professor of French, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan | “Skin, Survival, and Sovereignty in Medieval France”
January 22, 2015
In this lecture, I make a claim for the bio political grounding of notions of human sovereignty as represented in a series of medieval texts. I focus on narrative representations of animal skins used by humans for material and symbolic purposes in order to insist a repeated return to the conflation of material and symbolic use that grounds human dominion over animals and, by extension, over human subjects as well. In other words, human sovereignty depends in material and symbolic ways on the use of animals. But such use is not only a display of power over animals, or over other humans. It is, I argue, a site of interrogation for medieval thinkers. I further suggest that the identification of human dominion over animals as an exemplary sovereignty, as both a practice of power and a display of power through the use of animal skins, also opens a space of resistance in which animal voices call for ethical response, interest and justice extend to nonhuman actors, and human dominion is contested in terms of animals’ claims to wear their own skins.
Edward Muir, Northwestern University | “To Trust is Good, But Not to Trust is Better”: The Italian Paradox
March 2, 2015
How did the citizens of Italian communes learn to trust one another, trust one another enough to build the fundamental institutions of a civil society in which citizens enjoyed participatory politics, elected officials to administer the laws, and adjudicated disputes according to legal statutes? The answer to this question points to a peculiar paradox of Italian history in which vital, successful communities cohabited with pervasive violence manifest most infamously in feuding and vendetta. Trust and mistrust lived in the same house, on the same street, within the same city walls. This lecture argues that what made Medieval and Renaissance Italy so culturally creative were the many new ways people found to build trust, especially through written documents. It was literacy that made the trust necessary for modern life possible.
Carol Sibson (Queen Mary University of London) | “Christ, the Lover-Knight, His Lady and the Devil: Allegory and Social Speculation in Bozon’s `Tretys de la Passion’”
May 11, 2015
In addition to its role in expounding and enhancing religious belief, allegorical discourse offered the medieval writer wider, creative opportunities to engage in the formation of multiple significances and connotations. Through a consideration of Nicholas Bozon’s poem, Tretys de la Passion (early-fourteenth century), we see how the primary instructional focus shifts to an exploration of social, moral and emotional issues, to be unraveled and interpreted by the audience. The poet provides no answer, only speculation and suggestion.
The Medieval Studies Program was a cosponsor with the Department of English of a conference entitled: “Neighbors and Networks in Medieval Literature”
May 22, 2015
Keynote Address: Patricia Clare Ingham, Indiana University: “Curiosity and Care.”
Panel 1: Networks
Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan: “Figuring Text Networks”
Hannah R. Johnson, University of Pittsburgh: “Method Makes Meaning: Chaucer and the Tradition of Source Studies”
Panel 2: Neighbors
Rachel Levinson-Emley, UCSB: “Neighbor-, God-, and Self-Love in The Sultan of Babylon”
Emily Houlik-Ritchey, UCSB & Rice University: “Being Neighborly in Gower’s `The Tale of the Jew and the Pagan’”
Response: L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, UCSB
Events for 2013-2014 included:
A SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF CAROL PASTERNACK
JANUARY 18, 2014
This conference honors the scholarship of Carol Pasternack, Professor of English Emerita at UCSB: SEX, TEXT, AND POLITICS: A SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF CAROL PASTERNACK
Featured Speakers, Facilitators and Participants: Drs. Alexandra Cook (U of Alabama), Allen Frantzen (Loyola U-Chicago), Jennifer Hellwarth (Allegheny College), Kate Koppelman (Seattle University), Kathy Lavezzo (U of Iowa, Megan Palmer-Browne (UCSB)
10:00am Opening Remarks: David Marshall, Dean of the Humanities and Fine Arts
10:15am Introductions, Aranye Fradenburg
10:30am Remarks by Megan Palmer-Browne; general discussion, facilitated by Dr. Aranye Fradenburg
11:00am Coffee Break
11:15am Remarks by Allen Frantzen; general discussion, facilitated by Heather Blurton
12:00pm Remarks by Kathy Lavezzo; general discussion, facilitated by Kate Koppelman
12:30pm Remarks by Jennifer Hellwarth; general discussion, facilitated by Alexandra Cook*
1:00pmGeneral Discussion, facilitated by Aranye Fradenburg & Heather Blurton
John Tolan of the University of Nantes | “RELMIN: The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (5th -15th Centuries)”
April 7, 2014 | HSSB 4020
Its research team consists of doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and associated scholars throughout the world. In addition to creating the database, the team organizes seminars and conferences in Nantes and elsewhere in Europe and the Mediterranean. Through this database, RELMIN collects and publishes legal texts defining the status of religious minorities in pre-modern Europe. The corpus of texts is rich and varied, spanning ten centuries over a broad geographical area; these texts, in Latin, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic (and also in Medieval Spanish, Portuguese, and other European vernaculars), are dispersed in libraries and archives across Europe. The Roman law code of emperor Theodosius II, promulgated in 438, accorded to Jews (and their synagogues) measures of protection but also restricted their access to certain functions of the Roman administration. These principles echo through the canon law and imperial and royal legislation of Medieval Europe, providing the bases for an inferior and often precarious place in Christian society for Jews. Later canon lawyers and lay princes extended the same inferior but protected status to Muslims living in their realms, particularly in Sicily and Spain. In Muslim societies, Qur’an and Hadith define the status of the dhimmi, protected minorities (principally Jews and Christians). Hundreds of legal texts from Muslim Spain, Sicily and elsewhere testify to the role of religious minorities and to the legal issues posed by their daily relations with the Muslim majorities: Fatwas (judicial consultations) and hisbas manuals (municipal law collections) deal with everything from the reliability of Jewish and Christian witnesses in court trials to dress restrictions. While Jews were everywhere the minority, their relations with the adherents of other religions were also based on sacred texts (the Torah) and on the legal opinions of the Talmud. Various Jewish authors of Medieval Europe, from Cordova to Krakow, in texts such as biblical commentaries, letters, or responsa, offered legal advice to fellow Jews on the proper and legal limits to relations with Christians and Muslims. The texts that appear in this database are thus extremely diverse (in provenance, language, nature, purpose …). By bringing them together, we seek to offer students and researchers an important tool for the study of the history of interconfessional relations and specifically for the study of the legal strictures (and protections and privileges) conferred on religious groups. While it will be impossible for this or any one project to compile an exhaustive anthology of texts, we seek to present a broad and representative sample of texts.” More Info: “http://www.cn-telma.fr/relmin/index/?langue=eng. The database is part of the research project and offers possibilities for funding research.
Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Arnold Faculty Fellow, Department of English | “Conversion Woes: Christian Community and the Saracen Convert in the Sowdon of Babylon and the Hystoria del Emperador Carlo Magno”
April 23, 2014 | HSSB 4041
Conversion woes trouble the assimilation of Fierabras, a Saracen knight and new Christian convert, in two medieval Charlemagne romances. By comparing the early 15th century Middle English The Sowdon of Babylon to its early sixteenth-century Castilian counterpart, the Hystoria del emperador Carlo Magno, my talk reveals the overlapping/intersecting sites of religious and cultural encounter emerging in both works. For while both redactions of this medieval story tradition situate their action in an imaginary “Spayne,” their own different historical moments, sites of production, and circulation dramatically alter the fantasies of representation each text gives of geography and community. I examine both the conversion and the fate of the Saracen character of Fierabras (Ferumbras in the English) in each text to highlight such differences. Differences in Fierabras’s/Ferumbras’s racial identity in each text, the comparative ease with which he is accepted into the Christian community, and the terms of his separation from Charlemagne at the end of the narrative all elucidate dramatic differences in each text’s preoccupation with Christian communal cohesion, and its imagination of geographic space/place. In addition to raising questions (with historicist and theoretical resonances) about medieval communities’ efforts to respond ethically to their neighbors, my argument invokes Kenneth Reinhard’s provocative insight for Comparative Literature. To read romances as neighbors is not to deny the “genealogical and formal relationships […] based upon derivation and resemblance between texts” that the discipline traditionally prioritizes, but rather to insist that those connections alone cannot “fully adjudicate between the incommensurabilities that haunt every textual pairing.” My paper explores the way “neighboring” medieval romances may help us to productively reassess the ethical function of the genre.
Events for 2012-2013 included:
Linda G. Jones, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain and Visiting Lecturer, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara | “Manliness and Religious Identity in Medieval Muslim and Christian Iberia: From Gender Difference to Cross-Cultural Gender Constructions”
November 28 2012 | HSSB 4020
The scholarship on gender and religious or ethnic difference in the Middle Ages has been based largely upon readings of western Christian sources. Explorations of textual and visual representations of Byzantine eunuchs and “Oriental” transvestites, cross-dressers, and homosexuals have helped illuminate the instability of gender categories, while the study of western stereotypical representations of “menstruating” Jewish men and hyper-sexed, “monstrous,” or effeminate Saracens has revealed how Latin Christian authors attempted to justify their dominance on the basis of religious and “racial” differentiation. This talk posits that medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Byzantine males will only be inscribed as “other” in the scholarly imagination as long as there are not more concerted efforts to explore the full range of constructions of masculinity from within those cultures and to undertake comparative analyses that transcend the privileging of the sources from Latin western Christendom. Using medieval Almohad, Merinid, and Castilian chronicles, I will undertake a cross-cultural analysis of Muslim and Christian constructions of masculinity and assess the significance of religious difference in the gendered depictions of male rivals and allies in both chronicle traditions.
Christopher Dyer (Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester and Leverhulme Research Fellow, and presently in residence at The Huntington Library) | “John Heritage: An English Wool Merchant and his World, 1495-1520″
February 28, 2013 | HSSB 4020
The chance discovery of a unique wool merchant’s account book in the muniment room of Westminster Abbey gives us a detailed picture of the trading networks and business contacts of a wool monger who lived at Moreton-in-Marsh on the edge of the Cotswold Hills. Through him, we gain an insight into a society of sheep farmers and traders and their involvement in the export trade in raw wool. The presentation will include some of the family history, landscape history, and social history of an important period, which stands between the late middle ages and the Tudor expansion.
Professor Dyer is an eminent historian of daily life, economic history, and local history. His numerous publications include Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (1989); Everyday Life in Medieval England (2003); Making a Living in the Middle Ages (2003); An Age of Transition: Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Age (The Ford Lectures) (2007); ed. Social Relations and Ideas: Essay in Honour of R.H. Hilton (2009); William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-1689 (2009); and A Country Merchant, 1495-1520: Trading and Farming at the End of the Middle Ages (2012).
Katie Sjursen (Department of History, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville) | “Philip VI and the Breton Rebels”
March 21, 2013 | HSSB 4020
In April 1341, the death of the childless duke of Brittany sparked a twenty-three-year long civil war over who would succeed to the duchy, attracting the intervention of the kings of France and England, who were already locked into their own struggle for the throne of France itself. One Breton faction garnered the support of Philip VI, who was seeking an ally in this important duchy that controlled so much of the coastline; the other faction turned to Edward III, who appreciated Brittany’s location as a jumping-off place for invasions of the French realm. While Philip VI asserted his claims to authority in other parts of his realm—by declaring war on Edward, in the latter’s capacity as duke of Aquitaine, and charging perceived enemies with treason, for example—this newly appointed king tread much more carefully in Brittany. What does Philip’s policy in Brittany at the start of the Breton Civil War reveal about him and his strategies as a new king?
Robert Rouse (University of British Columbia) | “Thinking before the Map: Writing the World in Middle English Romance”
April 15, 2013 | McCune Conference Room
Medieval culture was not a cartographic culture. As Nick Howe has shown, most medieval “maps” were written, not drawn. This paper examines how Middle English romance operates as just such a mode of written map, and suggests that such texts stand as important examples of how medieval England understood the wider world. In particular, the text examines the implications of the re-reading of romance in the fourteenth century by newly emergent urban mercantile reading communities.
Nicole Archambeau (Department of History, UCSB) | “Identifying Health Care Providers in the Later Middle Ages”
April 19, 2013 | HSSB 4020
I use the medieval canonization inquest of Delphine de Puimichel to answer the seemingly simple question: What did people do when they were sick? I show that the answer was often far more complex than traditional research in the history of medicine shows. By sifting through the narratives of people coping with their own and loved-ones’ health care, we find that people used a plurality of available methods and even created new ones when needed. We also see that medieval concepts of health care extended beyond the boundaries of the physical body to include the passions or what contemporaries called “accidents of the soul.” Healers and sufferers saw that sadness, fear, and anxiety could damage physical health and were health problems in their own right.
Matthew Fisher (Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles) | “`You Didn’t Build That,’ or, What We Talk About When We Talk about Digital Humanities”
May 29, 2013
“You Didn’t Build That” considers the Digital Humanities as an inevitable and also an already essential part of literary criticism and research as it is conducted today. Offering at once an historical and a methodological introduction to certain trends in DH scholarship, I look at a number of text-analysis and text-editing projects from the 1980s and ’90s to the present. I expose some assumptions made by the designers of these tools, and discuss the implications of the limits of the tools for the work we as humanities scholars do. Looking at texts ranging from Hamlet to Jane Eyre, from a medieval Middle English chronicle to the Autobiography of Mark Twain through the lens of projects such as TAPoR, Google ngrams, Juxta, and T-Pen, this talk argues for new priorities in the use and misuse of Digital Humanities in our research.
Medieval Studies Program | Fall 2012 Colloquium
“Digging up a Mediterranean Past?: Archaeology and Comparative Material Culture”
9-10 November 2012
The Medieval Studies Program at UCSB hosted an interdisciplinary event in conjunction with the UC MPR on “Mediterranean Studies.” The main speaker on Friday afternoon was Marcus Milwright of the University of Victoria in British Columbia who is the Director of the Program for Medieval Studies and Associate Professor, of Islamic Art & Archaeology in the Department of History in Art. The title of his paper will be “Archaeology and the Study of Traditional Urban Crafts in the Islamic Mediterranean.” His research focuses on the archaeology of the Islamic period, the art and architecture of the Islamic Middle East, cross-cultural interaction in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, the history of medicine, craft practices in Late Ottoman Syria, and the architecture and civil engineering of southern Greece during the Ottoman sultanate. He is the author of two books: An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology, The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and The Fortress of the Raven: Karak in the Middle Islamic Period (1100-1600), Islamic History and Civilization, Studies and Texts 72 (Brill, 2008).
The event drew participants from across the UC system. The morning and early afternoon were taken up with pre-circulated papers for discussions:
Workshop paper 1: Luca Zavagno (Visiting Research Fellow, Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Center, Princeton) | “Two Hegemonies, One Island: Cyprus between the Byzantines and the Umayyads (650-850 A.D.)”
Workshop paper 2: Nikki Malain (Graduate Student, History, UC Santa Barbara) | “Predators and praeda: The Logistics of Piracy in the Twelfth-century Mediterranean”
Workshop paper 3: Karen R. Mathews (Research Assistant Professor, Art & Art History, University of Miami) | “Anxiety of Origins: Shifting Conceptions of the Past in Genoese Historical Chronicles and Civic Architecture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries”.
Events for 2011-2012 included:
Christophe Picard, (Université de Paris I, Sorbonne), “Abbasid Jihad and Ribat in the Ninth-Century Mediterranean”
October 26, 2011
Christophe Picard is a research professor at the Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is a specialist on the history of the Medieval Mediterranean, Muslim maritime history, Mozarabs, and the history of the Ribat.
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University) “Toward A Speculative Literary Criticism”
October 27, 2011
At UCLA – “Rivalry and Rhetoric in the Early Modern Mediterranean;” The UC Multi-Campus Research Group in Mediterranean Studies Fall Meeting
October 28-19, 2011
Professor Donald Maddox (University of Massachusetts Amherst), “Fictions of the Undead: Eschatological Bodies in the 13th-Century Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian Romances”
November 8, 2011
Meredith Cohen, Department of Art History, UCLA, “Saint Louis and the Construction of Sacral Kingship in Thirteenth-Century France”
November 18, 2011
Medieval Studies Program | 2012 Winter Colloquium
The Struggle for Civility and Justice: The Common Good in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy
January 21, 2012
This colloquium will address ideas about the Common Good and the actual realities of political, economic, and social life in the polities of Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. This was an era in which corporate bodies such as factions and interest groups threatened, influenced, or controlled what might be said about the traditional, classical, and medieval concepts of the common good of society.
9:00 Breakfast service
9:45 Welcoming remarks: Heather Blurton (Chair, Medieval Studies Program, UCSB) and Edward D. English (UCSB)
10:00 Session I: Renaissance Venice
Sarah Ross (Boston College). “`Al beneficio commune ‘: Physicians and the Common Good in Renaissance Venice”
Elizabeth Horodowich (New Mexico State Universit ). “Public Speech and the Public Good: The Control of Language in Early Modern Venice”
Comment: Jon Snyder (French/Italian, UCSB)
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Session II: The Common Good and Politics in Bologna and Siena.
Nicholas Terpstra (University of Toronto). “The Common and Uncommonly Good: Cultures of Charity and the Struggles of Republicanism in Late Renaissance Bologna”
Edward D. English (UCSB). “The Reality of the Common Good in Fourteenth-Century Siena”
Comment: Stefania Tutino (History/Religious Studies, UCSB)
3:00 Session III: Ideas about the Common Good in Thought
Ronald G. Witt (Duke University). “The Common Good in Thirteenth-Century Artes arengandi and in the Thought of Albertano da Brescia”
Peter Stacey (UCLA). “Representation in the Renaissance res publica”
Comment: Robert Morstein-Marx (Classics, UCSB)
5:00 Reception
Sponsors: Medieval Studies Program, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Department of History, Renaissance Studies.
Cary Howie (Cornell University) at Westmont College
January 25-26, 2012
At UCSD, UC MRG Mediterranean meeting
February 3-4, 2012
Carol Pasternack, “Blood Lines: Purity, Warfare, and the Procreative Family in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History”
February 17, 2012
Brantley Bryant, Sonoma State University, “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Humor, Html, and the Humanities”
February 24, 2012
Brantley Bryant will speak about his experiences blogging as “Geoffrey Chaucer” at the wildly popular http:// houseoffame.blogspot.com/; his unmasking; and the subsequent publication of the book version of his blog.
The New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Plenary Speaker: Jody Enders, University of California, Santa Barbara, “The Devil in the Flesh in Medieval Farce”
March 10, 2012
Paul Megna (English and Medieval Studies, UCSB) “Reactionary Rage: The Premodern Roots of `Tea-Party’ Anger”
March 9, 2012
Isaac Gottlieb (Ramat-Gan, Israel Institute for the History of Jewish Bible Research): “Rupert (of Deutz) and the School of Rashi”
March 14, 2012
Medieval Academy of America, Annual Meeting, St. Louis. MO
March 22-24, 2012
Renaissance Society of America, Annual Meeting, Washington DC
March 22-24, 2012
UC Mediterranean MRP, Spring Workshop – “Identities” – University of Colorado, Boulder
April 6, 2012
Carol Lansing (UCSB), “Rape, Humiliation, and the Exercise of Power”
April 13, 2012
Medieval International Congress, Kalamazoo
May 10-13, 2012
Martin Foys ( Drew University ), “By Bell, Book, and Candle: Ecologies of Early Medieval Media”
May 11, 2012
Beyond oral poetry and monkish manuscripts, we rarely think about the medieval past in terms of the media people used. Considering the robust network of technological and physical practices employed by pre-modern societies to communicate and exchange information helps us understand the (often skewed) visualist framework in which modern study of the medieval past operates. Between and beneath the lines of surviving medieval writing, we still can discover a more vibrant media ecology – one of words, but also of bells, of weapons, of light and darkness, of silence and sign language, and of technologically altered bodies . . . for starters.
Jesse Njus (English, Theatre and Dance, UCSB), “Guilty of Christ’s Blood?: Representing Jews in Medieval Passion Plays”
June 1, 2012
The representation of Jews in medieval theatre has not inspired the same enthusiasm as the portrayal of Jews in medieval art, perhaps because there exists an assumption that the dramatic characterization of Jews lacks nuance and provides less valuable information than the study of the pictorial record. Through a comparative study of the medieval Passion plays of Western Europe, I demonstrate that the representation of Jews varies surprisingly among plays, illustrating an increasing complexity in medieval drama and in the portrayal of Christ’s Passion as well as differing attitudes towards the role of the Jews in Christ’s death. In the most intriguing case, a dramatic tradition rooted in France found itself transformed by an Italian adaptation. Yet this instance is only one example of the intricacy behind dramatic representations of the Jews in medieval drama and of the ways in which, by following these representations across national and linguistic boundaries, they can be unraveled to reveal the conceptual debates central to the medieval understanding of sacred history.
Events for 2010-2011 included:
Anna Sapir Abulafia (Vice-President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, College Lecturer, and Director of Studies in History) | “Who Serves Whom in Medieval Jewish-Christian Relations”
October 14, 2010
Her Books include: Christian-Jewish relations, 1000-1300: Jews in the Service of Latin Christendom (2010), Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (1995), Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West (c. 1000-1150) (1998), and edited Religious Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives (2002).
Jane Taylor (University of Durham) | “What Happened to Tristan in the Renaissance?”
November 5, 2010
In her lecture, Dr. Jane Taylor will discuss the question of ré-écriture and changing literary tastes through an analysis of two late Tristan versions, the Tristan of Pierre Sala’s (ca. 1525) and Jean Maugin’s Nouveau Tristan (1554). While Sala attempted to recover the medieval in the manuscript versions of his work, Jean Maugin endeavored to make his modernized prose treatment of the Tristan tradition, which appeared in printed form, address the forward-looking aesthetic of his times, set by the meteoric success of the Amadis de Gaule. Professor Taylor is a world-renowned French medievalist whose research covers a wide variety of subjects ranging from the twelfth to early sixteenth centuries. Her current work focuses on three topics: Arthurian romances and how they are translated, adapted, and rewritten in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the late-medieval French lyric; and the rewritings of François Villon’s poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in France and in England. Her many publications include: The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (2007); The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context ( 2001); a co-authored edition of Le Roman de Perceforest, première partie (with Roussineau, Gilles) (1979); and three co-edited volumes on women and the book culture (with Lesley Smith): Women, the Book and the Godly (1995); Women, the Book and the Worldly (1995); Women and the Book: Assessing the Evidence (1997). She is a Past resident of the International Arthurian Society and past editor of Medium Aevum and was a Fellow of St Hilda’s College at Oxford University for ten years before accepting a position at the University of Durham. She is currently a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley.
Medieval Studies Progam | 2011 Winter Colloquium
February 11-12, 2012
On Friday and Saturday, the 18 th and 19 th of February 2011, the Medieval Studies Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara in conjunction with a meeting of the University of California MRP for Mediterranean Studies will be hosting a conference on “Mediterranean Princely Courts and the Transmission of Cultures.” We have chosen to use princely courts as a lens to study influence across cultures. Courts were crucial sites of interaction. Clever rulers used them to project their power and authority, and also to live in opulence among the diverse populations of the regions around the Mediterranean . The meeting asks the questions of just how various Mediterranean courts learned from were influenced by the cultural and artistic ideas and practices of their neighbors — who might be from a different tradition.
The list of speakers and the titles of their proposed papers are: Joshua C. Birk (Smith College) “Slaves of the Court: Eunuchs in a Twelfth Century Mediterranean World,” William Tronzo (UCSD) “The Norman Palace in Palermo as Crucible of the Arts,” Lara Tohme (Wellesley College) “The Normans and the Creation of a New Mediterranean Capital in Palermo,” S. Peter Cowe (UCLA) “Islamic Interchange with the Armenian Court at Cilicia in the Levant (12th-14th centuries),” Elizabeth B. Smith (Pennsylvania State University) “Santa Maria Novella in Florence as Communal Alternative to the Princely Model,” Nancy Khalek (Brown University) “Epistles to the Byzantine Emperor in the Abbasid Period,” Christine Chism (UCLA) “ Between Muslim and Christian in Ibn Battuta’s Travels in between Courts in the North-East Mediterranean ,” Dwight Reynolds (UCSB) “Music in the Courts: Trade in Music and Musicians in Medieval Europe and the Middle East,” Carol Lansing (UCSB) “The Emperor’s Elephant: Mediterranean Influence on North Italian Courts,” Florence Eliza Glaze (Coastal Carolina University) “From Babel to Biblion: Episodes in the Development of a Uniform Latinized Graeco-Arabic Pharmacological Tradition in Eleventh and Twelfth Century Salerno,” Heather Blurton (UCSB) “Hugo Falcandus’ History of the Tyrants of Sicily and the 12 th Century,” and Chris Wright (University of London) “Ideology and Opportunism: The Anatolian Turks and the Byzantine Court.” The final schedule has not yet been set. Most of the papers will be on Saturday.
Events for 2009-2010 included:
Stephen Humphreys of the Department of History | “Christian Communities and Muslim Rule in Early Islamic Syria and Mesopotamia (634-1070)”
October 30, 2009
Roger E. Reynolds, University of Toronto | “God’s Money: Eucharistic Hosts in the Ninth Century according to Eldefonsus of Spain, Observations on an Unusual Text”
February 16, 2010
Medieval Studies Program | 2010 Winter Colloquium
Women, Art and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
February 26-27, 2010
Friday, February 26th
2:00-2:30 pm Welcome
Introductions: Cynthia Brown, Chair, Advisory Committee, Medieval Studies
Welcoming Remarks:
David Marshall, Executive Dean, Letters and Science, Dean, Humanities and Fine Arts, UCSB
Yann Perreau, Deputy Cultural Attaché, French Consulate, Los Angeles
2:30-4:00 pm First Session:
Moderator, Carol Lansing , Department of History, UCSB
“‘Les gardins de ma dame’: Mahaut d’Artois’ Control and Use of the Park at Hesdin.” Abigail Dowling, Department of History, UCSB
“Saint Bavo at the Service of Princely Propaganda, or the Case of Philip the Handsome and Mary of Burgundy .” Olga Karaskova, Histoire de l’Art, Université de Lille-3, Curator of Prints, The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Commentary. Erika Rappaport, Department of History, UCSB
4:00-6:00 Reception, Mosher Alumni House, Library (2 nd Floor)
Saturday, February 27th
8:45-9:15 am Coffee and pastries
9:15-9:30 Introductions: Edward D. English, Executive Director, Medieval Studies, Department of History, UCSB
Welcoming Remarks:
Henry T. Yang, Chancellor, UCSB
Gale Morrison, Dean, Graduate Division, UCSB
9:30-11:00 Second Session:
Moderator, Brigit Ferguson, Department of History of Art and Architecture, UCSB
“Remembering Delphine’s Books: Reading as a Means to Shape a Holy Woman’s Sanctity.” Nicole Archambeau, Department of History, UCSB
“Staging the Court: Aliénor de Poitiers and the 1478 Mise en Scène of a Princely Nativity.” Noa Turel, Department of History of Art and Architecture, UCSB
Commentary. Peter Bloom, Department of Film Studies, UCSB
11:00-11:15 Coffee Break
11:15-12:15 Keynote Address
Moderator, Cynthia Brown, Chair, Advisory Committee, Medieval Studies, Professor, French and Italian, UCSB
“Constructing the Ideal and Universal Princess: The Entry of Joanna of Castile into the City of Brussels on December 9, 1496.” Professor Anne-Marie Legaré, Histoire de l’Art, Université de Lille-3
Commentary. Thomas Kren, Curator of Manuscripts, The Getty Museum
12:30-4:00 Third Session:
Moderator: Shannon Meyer, Department of English, UCSB
“Books in the Noble Women’s Chapter of Sainte-Waudru’s Collegiate in Mons (Hainaut): Hermine de Hairefontaine’s Lectionary (London, B.L., Ms Eg. 2569).” Anne Jenny-Clark, Histoire de l’Art, Université de Lille-3
“To Better Impress Upon the Mind: Manuscript II 232, a Renaissance Textbook for Women?” Jessica Weiss, Department of History, UCSB
Commentary. Laury Oaks, Department of Feminist Studies, UCSB
Guy Geltner, Professor of Medieval History, University of Amsterdam | “Friars under Fire: The Scale and Scope of Anti-Mendicant Violence”
April 14, 2010
Medieval Studies Program | 2010 Spring Colloquium
“The Medieval Other”
April 30, 2010
Benjamin M. Liu, Hispanic Studies, UC Riverside: “Medieval Spain ‘s Asian Other.”
This paper will be looking at the figure of resemblance that Foucault identifies as “aemulatio”, in the context of Medieval Spain’s knowledge of and relation to Asia. From Ramon Llull to late-14th and 15th century maps and travel narratives, China and “Greater India ” are delocalized sites that, as they are desirously gazed upon from medieval Spain, also return a gaze that serves to constitute a Spanish polity.
Christine Chism, English, UCLA: “Over the Edge: Narrative and Cultural Extremities in the Travels of Ibn Battuta.”
This paper investigates Ibn Battuta’s experiences in South Asia, the Maldives, and especially China — where he finally reaches the edge of cultural comprehension and suffers a form of culture shock that effectively ends his journey and sends him home to Tangier, traumatically neck and neck with the spread of the bubonic plague. This paper contrasts the sections of the narrative on China with other, more interpenetrative encounters with otherness in the narrative. It investigates the causes of the traveler’s sudden, uncharacteristic lack of willingness to encounter the strangeness to be found over the East Asian edge of the Islamic world, an unwillingness that pervades even the style of the narration, which becomes aversively vague and allusive. I chart the narrative’s flight back to the more familiar heartlands of the Dar al-Islam, where the traveler reencounters, almost with joy, the more encompassable alterities of the Christians and Jews to be found within its contact zones. I end with Ibn Battuta’s description of an incident at Damascus, where, in the face of the accelerating attritions of the plague, all the monotheisms join in a penitential fast and public procession, a performance of penitential solidarity that unite all the people of the book, and, in the narrative, effectively ameliorates the plague. In this traumatic return, the narrative effectively rerenders former alterities into relationships within an unstable continuum.
Nancy McLoughlin, History, UC Irvine: “The Monstrous Other: Jean Gerson (1363-1429) and the Deadly Sins of Politics.”
The fifteenth-century Parisian preacher and theologian, Jean Gerson, has been credited with laying the foundation for the early modern witch-hunts by blurring the boundary between divinely inspired women visionaries and diabolically possessed religious frauds to such an extent that all women’s claims to divine inspiration fell under increasingly severe suspicion. Gerson, however, did not reserve his accusations of diabolical influence for women. In the sermons he delivered before the French royal court, Gerson cast the enemies of the University of Paris , whether these were the princes of the blood or the queen regent, as the very embodiment of the seven deadly sins. Worse yet, he suggested that if these monstrous agents of the devil succeeded in influencing the policy of the French crown that Jews and Saracens would rejoice and France would lose its status as the most Christian kingdom. My paper examines Gerson’s deployment of a constellation of diabolical and religious others as a means of promoting his own authority, paying particular attention to how the multiple layerings of othering, which characterize his sermons, allowed him to condemn his enemies and present the University of Paris as a loyal voice of reason.
Comment: Sharon Farmer, History, UC Santa Barbara
Events for 2008-2009 included:
Seminar: Transitions from Medieval to Renaissance Philosophy
November 21, 2008
Brian P. Copenhaver, Director, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA | “A Medieval Source for Renaissance Philosophy: Valla’s Metaphysics and the Logic of Peter of Spain.”
Lodi Nauta, Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, University of Groningen | “The Transition from Medieval to Renaissance Philosophy: Lorenzo Valla.”
Medieval Studies Program | 2009 Winter Colloquium
“Pre-Modern Perspectives on Torture”
January 23, 2009
Alison Frazier. University of Texas .“Machiavelli, Trauma, and the Scandal of the Prince.”
Kenneth Pennington. The Catholic University of America .”Women on the Rack: Three Trials.”
Lisa Hajjar. UCSB, Comment.
Lecture: “The History of the Mediterranean Diet from the Present to the Middle Ages”
February 23, 2009
Allen Grieco, Harvard University, Villa I Tatti, Università delle Scienze Gastronomiche (Italy), University of Tours. An event in “Food Matters”, the theme for 2008-2009 of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB
Medieval Studies Program | 2009 Spring Colloquium
“Medieval Perspectives on Environmental History”
April 3, 2009
Paolo Squatriti, University of Michigan | “Storms, Floods and Climate Change in the Dark Ages: An Italian Case.”
D. Fairchild Ruggles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | “Islamic Gardens in the Mediterranean (7th-15th Centuries): Environmental Perspectives on Water and Landscape.”
David Cleveland. UCSB Environmental Studies Program, Comment.
Heather Blurton, Department of English, UCSB | “The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Narratives of Ritual Crucifixion in 12th Century England?”
May 18, 2009
In the second half of the twelfth century, in England, there suddenly appear three unconnected narratives of accusations against English Jews that they had kidnapped and ritually crucified Christian children. This project attempts to account for the strange appearance of these narratives of ritual crucifixion in Anglo-Norman England by situating them in the first instance in the literary context of changes in the practice of insular hagiography after the Norman Conquest, and in broader terms in the epistemological shifts of the twelfth century.
Film and Discussion: Allan Langdale, “The Stones of Famagusta: The Story of a Forgotten City”
May 21, 2009
The Mediterranean Research Focus Group of the IHC and the Medieval Studies Program are sponsoring a film presentation and a discussion by Allan Langdale of UC Santa Cruz on Thursday, 21 May 2009 at 4:00-6:00 in HSSB 4020: “The Stones of Famagusta: The Story of a Forgotten City.” Art historian and filmmaker Dr. Allan Langdale takes you on a bicycle tour of the once famous medieval city of Famagusta, Cyprus. Once considered the world’s richest city, Famagusta is now largely forgotten by the West. Explore the wonders of the gothic churches and monasteries, the ruins of Venetian palaces, the fabulous two-mile long walls and moat, Byzantine churches, Ottoman baths, and some of Famagusta’s unique and mysterious underground churches.
Lecture: Kathy Lavezzo, University of Iowa | “The Minster and the Privy”
May 26, 2009
This talk offers a new vantage point on the politics of identity in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale by examining how its built environments–namely the abject privy into which the murdered schoolboy is thrust and the conventual church where his corpse finally rests–at once make and unmake notions of Christian selfhood and Jewish alterity. Through a cultural geographic and historicist analysis of the minster and the privy as spaces whose production is mutually constitutive with the making of identities, Lavezzo decelerates our analysis of the dynamic of Christian purity and Jewish danger at work in the tale. Ultimately, by reading the minster and the privy not as fixed entities but as contingent, fluid spaces joined through the infrastructure of the tale, she identifies in Chaucer’s anti-Semitic text an early materialist critique of any effort to conceive of a purely religious space. I have attached a flyer for the event.
Events for 2007-2008 included:
Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University | “Inscribing the Word — Illuminating the Sequence: Epithets in Honor of John the Evangelist in the Graduals from Paradies bei Soest”
Thursday, 4 October 2007
Workshop: “Emergence of ‘the West’: Shifting Hegemonies in the Medieval Mediterranean”
October 26, 2007
Brian A. Catlos, History Department, University of California , Santa Cruz will present “ Is Mediterranean Studies Nothing More than an Excuse for Goat Cheese and Olives? (or Power, Institutions, Identities in the Medieval Mediterranean )” and Sharon A. Kinoshita, University of California , Santa Cruz , will present “What is Medieval Mediterranean Literature?” They are currently directing a residential research group during the Fall of 2007 at the UCHRI at UC Irvine. http://www.uchri.org/main.php?nav=sub&page_id=1232
The Readings for the Mediterranean Workshop
Brian Catlos: Reader
Sharon Kinoshita: “Silk & French Feudal Imagination,” “Deprovincializing the Middle Ages,” and “Ports of Call: Boccaccio .. Medieval Mediterranean.
Medieval Studies Program | Conference
Discipling Texts
February 9, 2008
9:30 a.m. Light Breakfast
10 a.m. Rachel Fulton, Department of History, University of Chicago, Ph.D. Columbia University. Author of From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (2002) , recipient of the 2006 John Nicholas Brown Prize by the Medieval Academy of America and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize by The Journal of the History of Ideas and co-editor with Bruce Holsinger of History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person (2007), as well as author of an array of articles in journals including Speculum, The Journal of Religion, Medieval Studies, and Viator.
“Hildegard of Bingen’s Theology of Revelation.” A reading of the book Scivias as a coherently structured work of theology, rather than, as has so often been claimed, simply a loosely connected series of visions. Points for discussion will include the appreciation of theology as a particular kind of intellectual task, the relationship between theology, revelation and vision, and the reasons that not only contemporary scholars, but likewise Hildegard’s immediate followers had such difficulty appreciating her work and what this says about our own categories of textual analysis.
11-11:15 Break
11:15 Zrinka Stahuljak, Department of French, UCLA, Ph.D. Emory University. Author of Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translatio, Kinship, and Metaphor (2005) and co-editor with Claire Nouvet and Kent Still of Minima Memoria: Essays in the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, as well as essays on medieval historiography, translation and translation theory, and violence and neutrality.
“Genealogy and Its Discourse.” As Jacques Le Goff, Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, Caroline Bynum, and others have recently been pointing out, blood in its meaning of lineage was infrequent before the fifteenth century. Thus the question that must be asked is how blood acquired such an importance in the study of medieval genealogy in the twentieth century. In other words, why was blood accepted as a natural given of medieval genealogy, rather than, for instance, a metaphor or narrative tool for lineage? Conversely, why has medieval genealogy not been studied as a discursive practice? Part of the answer lies, I will argue, in the nineteenth-century medical notions of heredity and consaguinity.
12:15-1:45 Lunch
1:45 Jennifer Hellwarth, Department of English, Allegheny College, Ph.D. UCSB. Author of The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2002) and essays on medieval medicine and literature in medieval and early modern texts, including “‘materia medica /materia magica’: Managing the Anglo-Saxon Sexual Body Through Female Healers, Charms, Penitentials, Laws, and the early English Romance Apollonius of Tyre.”
“Sex, salves, and matters of state in Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligés.” The medieval sexual body was managed through a variety of systems including civil, common, and canon laws, penitentials, medicinal and magical recipes and remedies, and imaginative literature. Taken together, these texts provide multiple narratives about the potential threat and benefits of the sexual body (and the female healers who sought to manage that body) to the community. I want explore this matrix by reading some extant medicinal recipes and selections of early medieval laws and penitentials that deal with magic and magical practices related to the sexual body along side Chretien de Troyes’ Cligés. Among other things, Cligés provides a narrative about a female healer’s use of magical medicine to manipulate the sexual body, which ultimately has implications in matters of state. I want to explore the ways the documentary evidence suggests ambivalence around the culture’s relationship to the sexual body and the female practitioners who managed it.
2:45-3:00 Break
3:00 Daniel M. Klerman, Charles L. and Ramona I. Hilliard Professor of Laws and History, USC Gould School of Law, J.D. and Ph.D. University of Chicago. Recipient of the David Yale Prize from the Selden Society for distinguished contribution to the history of the laws and legal institutions of England and Wales. Author of many articles on current, early modern, and medieval topics, including the development of Common Law, jurisdictional competition amongst medieval courts, and “Women Prosecutors in Thirteenth-Century England.”
“Reading and Analyzing Medieval Legal Texts.” Medieval legal records are a rich source for social, political, and legal history. Professor Klerman will discuss approaches to analyzing legal texts, focusing on close interpreation of individual cases and quantification. He will illustrate these methods with work he has done on women prosecutors and the history of the jury.
4:00 General Discussion
Medieval Studies Program | 2008 Spring Colloquium
Writing History and Lyric in Trilingual England
April 11, 2008
Ralph Hanna, Professor of Paleography, Fellow of Keble College, Oxford University: “The Matter of Fulk: Romance and History in Fourteenth-Century Shropshire.”
Fouke le Fitz Waryn, an Anglo-Norman prose text of c. 1325-30, is the only surviving full rendition of a narrative retold at least three times, in English and French, during the period c.1260-c.1400. Most of the text is devoted to Fulk III’s quite historical revolt against King John in 1201-3. But the text has always appeared problematic, since the tale of Fulk’s disobedience has acquired a patina of ‘romance’ materials very far from plausible, let alone historical. The lecture examines aspects of this presentation, far from limited to this text but ubiquitous in insular historical writing and romance.
Seth Lerer, Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities, Stanford University: “The English Lyric in a Trilingual World.”
The paper looks at the lyrics of the famous Harley MS collection to explore the ways in which English, French, and Latin interact to to challenge our modern notions of vernacularity and our historical sense of the vernacular short poem. In particular, the paper argues that the study of the English lyric has gone on in a radically de-historicized manner, as most of us read and teach these poems out of anthologies and collections that efface the original manuscript contexts of the works. Restoring these poems to their original contexts helps us understand how English, French, and Latin constituted strata, in effect, of vernacular expression in lyric forms. It also helps us understand the ways in which these poems may be less the personal articulations of an emotive voice and more the literate performances of or ventriloquisms of learned tropes and conventions. Finally, I want to realign the study of the medieval lyric away from the formalist appreciations of the Dronke tradition and towards a method that stresses distinctive histories of language, manuscript production and reception, and genre.
Till-Holger Borchert, Viewing Van Eyck
Art Reception & Interpretation in Late-Medieval Europe
April 25, 2008
Chief Curator, Groeninge Museum, Bruges Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History (2007-08), University of Memphis
Mark Cohen, Princeton University, “Modern Myths of Muslim Antisemitism”
May 30, 2008
Events for 2006-2007 included:
A lecture by Judith Bennett, University of Southern California. “Phillipa Russell and the Wills of London’s Late Medieval Single Women.”
Monday, 23 October 2006
A seminar on her research by Mary Lampe, a PhD candidate in History. “Survival and Profit: Notarial Witnesses in Medieval Palermo.”
Tuesday, 14 November 2006
Faculty Seminar on Current Research, Sharon Farmer, History Department, UCSB “The Empire Comes Back: Mediterranean Immigrants in Paris and Northern France in the Age of the Crusades”
Friday, 8 December 2006
A lecture by Monica Green of Arizona State University. “The Trial of Floreta d’Ays (1403): Jews, Christians, and Obstetrics in Later Medieval Marseilles.”
Friday, 26 January 2007
A lecture by Christopher C. Baswell, English Department, UCLA, “The Medieval Virgil Meets the Italian Humanists: MS Cambridge, Jesus College 33.”
Thursday, 15 February 2007
A lecture by Lester K. Little, Smith College. “Medieval Pandemics: The Plague of Justinian and the Black Death.”
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
A lecture by Jane Geddes, University of Aberdeen. “Christina of Markyate and the St Albans Psalter.”
Thursday, 5 April 2007
A lecture by Maura B. Nolan, Department of English ,University of California, Berkeley. “The Fortunes of Piers Plowman and Its Readers.”
Thursday, 26 April 2007
A lecture by William Tronzo of the Stanford Humanities Center. “Zisa and Cuba: Gardens and the Image-Performative.”
Thursday, 24 May 2007
A lecture by Deborah McGrady of Tulane University “Medieval Reading Lessons: What Machaut Can Teach Us About Reception.”
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
Medieval Studies Program | 2007 Winter Colloquium
“Conversion and Apostasy in the Medieval World”
2-3 February 2007
Sixth Annual UCSB Medieval Studies Graduate Student Colloquium.”Civic Culture: Cities and Towns in the Middle Ages.”Centennial House, Saturday, 19 May 2007, 9:30-5:00. This year’s plenary speaker will be Edward Muir, Northwestern University Professor and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences. This interdisciplinary conference features original research by graduate students at UCSB and other UC campuses and will present a composite picture of urban life in the Middle Ages by examining aspects of life within and around cities and towns. Speakers will examine court cases, sieges, intercultural interaction, art and literary production and distribution, and plays as performed as part of civic identity.
A lecture by Bernard McGinn of the University of Chicago Divinity School and JE and Lillian Byrne Tipton Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Religious Studies, UCSB for 2007. “Divine and Human Love in Two Twelfth-Century Letter Collections”
Friday, 1 June 2007
Events for 2005-2006 included:
David Abulafia: Lecture: “Aragon versus Turkey: Tirant lo Blanc and Mehmet the Conqueror”
March 15, 2006
Lectures by David Abulafia, Robert Swanson, and Pamela Long; faculty and graduate student seminars: Carol Lansing, Mark O’Tool, Karen Frank, and James Maiello
Medieval Studies Program | 2006 Winter Colloquium
Death and the Hereafter
Friday-Saturday, February 3rd-4th
McCune Conference Room | Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
1:00-3:00p | Friday, February 3, 2006
Opening Remarks: David Marshall, Dean, Humanities & Social Sciences, College of Arts & Letters, University of California, Santa Barbara
Commentator: Carol Lansing, History, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jody Enders, French/Dramatic Art, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Memories and Allegories of the Death Penalty”
Mark Miller, English, University of Chicago, “Dead Meat”
3:15-5:15p | Friday, February 3, 2006
Commentator: Ann Marie Plane, History, University of California, Santa Barbara
Aranye Fradenburg, English, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Chicken Soup for the Calamitous Fourteenth Century”
D. Vance Smith, English/Medieval Studies, Princeton University, “The Physics of Elegy”
9:30-11:30a | Saturday, February 4, 2006
Commentator: Edward D. English, History, University of California, Santa Barbara
Alan E. Bernstein, History, University of Arizona, “Hell and the Year One Thousand”
Steven Botterill, Italian, University of California, Berkeley, “Holy Living and Holy Dying: The Finis of Dante’s Comedy in the Fourteenth-Century Commentary Tradition”
1:30-4:00p | Saturday, February 4, 2006
Lunch Break
Commentator: Debra Blumenthal, History, University of California, Santa Barbara
Diane Wolfthal, Art History, Arizona State University, “Images of the Fable of the Murdered Jew: Christian Complicity and Jewish Justice”
Leor Halevi, History, Texas A & M University, “Washing Muhammad’s Corpse.”
Sponsored by Medieval Studies, the Departments of History, Religious Studies, Catholic Studies, French & Italian, History of Art and Architecture, Jewish Studies, Middle East Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
Events for 2004-2005 included:
Medieval Studies Program | Medieval Studies Fall Colloquium
The Medieval Pilgrimage: History, Art, Literature, and Virtual Reality
Saturday, October 16, 2004 | 9:00 am to 6:00 pm
Harbor Room, University Center
9:30 am | John Dagenais, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, “The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela: The Original Design for Master Mateo’s Pórtico de la Gloria and the Shape of Faith”
Respondent: Juan Campo, UCSB, Department of Religious Studies
11:00 am | James D’Emilio, University of South Florida, Department of Humanities, “The Santiago Cathedral, the Pilgrimage, and the Art and Architecture of Twelfth-Century Spain.”
Respondent: Conrad Rudolph, University of California, Riverside, Department of Art History
12:30 pm | Lunch
1:30 pm | M. Alison Stones, University of Pittsburgh, Department of History of Art and Architecture, “Who is in and Who is out: The Saints of The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago.”
Respondent: Sharon Farmer (UCSB, Department of History).
3:00 pm | Sarah Kay, Girton College, University of Cambridge, “The Divided Path in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pelerinage de Vie Humaine: Separation and Identity”
4:30 pm | Reception
Medieval Studies Program |2005 Winter Colloquium
Travel in the Middle Ages
Saturday, February 12th
Centennial House
9:30 am | Jay Rubenstein, Assistant Professor, History, University of New Mexico, “‘Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Holy Land in Chronicles of the First Crusade'”
Respondent: Richard Hecht, Department of Religious Studies, UCSB
11:00 am | Daniel Birkholz (Assistant Professor, English, University of Texas at Austin)
‘Harley Lyrics & Hereford Clerics: The Implications of Mobility, c.1300-51’
Respondent: Richard Helgerson, Department of English, UCSB
12:30 pm | Lunch
1:30 pm | Marina Tolmachëva, Professor, History, Washington State University, “‘From Ptolemy to Idrisi to Ibn Said al-Maghribi: A double puzzle in the Islamic cartography of Africa and the Indian Ocean'”
Respondent: Joshua Birk, Department of History, UCSB
3:00 pm | Suzanne Akbari, Associate Professor, English, Comparative Literature, Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, “‘Currents and Currency in Marco Polo’s Divisement dou monde and The Book of John Mandeville'”
Respondent: Yunte Huang, Department of English, UCSB
4:30 pm | Reception
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University | “Economies of Grace: Counting Female Piety in Medieval Britain”
Monday, February 28, 2005
4 p.m., McCune Conference Room
For over four hundred years, French was a major language of literature and culture and of documentation and record in medieval Britain. In literature alone, nearly a thousand texts
have been cataloged (many still unedited): administrative, mercantile, legal, and other
records also exist in vast quantity. But this corpus has suffered from nineteenth-century
nationalizing literary histories constructing it as English to the French and French to the
English. Attention to the French of England revises, for example, women’s literary history
in medieval England: women write, commissioned, and form important audiences from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, not (as in the Middle English record) only from the later fourteenth century on. As part of an ongoing exploration of continuities and disruptions in a French-inclusive account of literary history in England, this paper looks at thirteenth-century penitential models of female selfhood in the francophone literature following Lateran IV and at women’s books. It considers modes of ordination in these texts together with contemporary models of social order and suggests that alongside older romance models for ‘the discovery of the individual’, there are other ways in which women and their texts are present in the literary history of thirteenth-century England.
Sponsored by Medieval Studies, IHC, English, Religious Studies, French & Italian, Women’s Studies
Chris Wickham, University of Birmingham | “Violence in Land Disputes in Twelfth-Century Tuscany”
Thursday, May 19, 2005
4:00 PM, Harbor Room, University Center, UCSB
Professor Wickham is one of the editors of Past and Present, a Fellow of the British Academy, the Chair of the British School of Rome’s Publications Committee, and a Group Leader of the European Science Foundation’s Transformation of the Roman World Project. This event is of interest to historians and scholars of law, conflict resolution, Medieval and Renaissance Italy, and Italian culture.
His interests are in early medieval Italy; settlement patterns in medieval Italy, including archaeology. He is currently writing a book on the socio-economic history of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800, a comparative analysis of all the post-Roman regions from Denmark to Egypt, using documents, narratives and archaeology.
His publications include: Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400-1000. London: Macmillan, 1981, rpt. 1989; Studi sulla società degli Appennini nell’alto Medioevo: contadini, signori e insediamento nel territorio di Valva (Sulmona). Bologna : Clueb, 1982; Il problema dell’incastellamento nell’Italia centrale: l’esempio di San Vincenzo al Volturno. Florence: Edizioni all’insegna del giglio, 1985; James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992; The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988; Essays Presented to Philip Jones, edited by Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham. London: Hambledon Press, 1990; Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400-1200. London: British School at Rome, 1994; Dispute ecclesiastiche e comunità laiche: il caso di Figline Valdarno (XII secolo). Figline Valdarno: Comune di Figline Valdarno, 1998; Legge, pratiche e conflitti: tribunali e risoluzione delle dispute nella Toscana del XII secolo. Rome: Viella, 2000; The Long Eighth Century. Edited by Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham. Leiden: Brill, 2000; City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; forthcoming Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800, September 2005.
Events for 2003-2004 included:
Medieval Studies Program | Medieval Studies Fall Colloquium
History, Politics, and the Medieval Romance
Friday, October 17, 2003 | 1 pm to 4 pm
McCune Conference Room, 6th Floor HSSB
1:00 pm | Scott Kleinman, Assistant Professor, Department of English, California State University, Northridge, “What’s in a Name? Local History and Romance in Eastern England”
The tale of Havelok the Dane, best known from Geoffrey Gaimar’s twelfth-century Estoire de Engleis and the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Middle English Havelok the Dane, is extant in a number of forms, most of them preserved in historiographical literature. This paper suggests that the tale originated, not from popular tradition, as is commonly held, but from the participation of both historiography and romance in a single textual community, a body of materials in which the tale circulated. Tracing the interactions between these materials through the names of the characters, I argue that the story emerged from the chronicle tradition of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries in which writers attempted to establish an identity for an Anglo-Scandinavian East Anglia. Later, the historical anglicization of the Anglo-Danes prompted the revision of their historical place in England. Both the passing of the story from chronicle into romance and the continued manipulation of the tale by chroniclers narrating the origins of England reflect this absorption of the Anglo-Danes into English society.
1:45 pm | Respondent: Mary Hancock (Anthropology and History)
2:00 pm | Break
2:30 pm | Richard Barton, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, “Blurring the Boundaries of Romance and History: the Strange Case of Count David of Maine”
In the context of a dispute with their neighbors during the 1130s, the canons of St Pierre de la Cour produced charters purportedly issued by a Count David of Maine. Since no such count existed in history, it is worth asking where and why the canons invented him. This paper offers several possible solutions before concluding that the best explanation involves a sense of the past that was derived both from “historical” sources and from the world of romance and chanson de geste. In particular, the Charlemagne cycle of the 12th century provides important symbolic points of contact between the real world of Maine in the 1130s and the more satisfying and, to the canons, the perhaps equally plausible world of Charlemagne and his knights.
3:15 pm | Respondent: Christine Thomas (Religious Studies)
3:30 pm | Discussion
This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program, IHC, and the Department of English.
Medieval Studies Program | Medieval Studies Winter Conference
Cultural Conflicts and Collaborations in the Middle Ages
Saturday, January 31, 2004 | 9 am – 5 pm
McCune Conference Room, 6th Floor HSSB
9:00 | Coffee, fruit, baked goods
9:15-9:30 | Welcome
9:30-10:15 |Patricia Clare Ingham, Associate Professor, Department of English, Indiana University, “Medieval Alterity”
10:15-10:30 | Lisa R. Lampert, UC San Diego – Response
10:30-10:45 | Break
10:45-11:30 | E. Jane Burns, L. M. Slifkin Distinguished Term Professor of Women’s Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Saracen Silk and the Virgin’s chemise at Chartres Cathedral: Cultural Crossings in Cloth”
11:30-11:45 | Sharon Kinoshita, UC Santa Cruz – Response
11:45-1:00 | Lunch. Buffet provided for all registrants
1:00-1:45 | Annemarie Weyl Carr, University Distinguished Professor of Art History, Division of Art History, Southern Methodist University, “Crusader Cyprus: Forms of Confluence in a Complex Land”
1:45-2:00 | Debra Blumenthal, UC Santa Barbara – Response
2:00-2:15 | Break
2:15-3:00 | Steven A. Epstein, Ahmanson-Murphy Distinguished Professor of Medieval History, Department of History, University of Kansas
“Faithless Franks and Complex Identities in the Eastern Mediterranean”
3:00-3:15 | Sharon Farmer, UC Santa Barbara – Response
3:15-3:30 | Break
3:30-4:15 | Panel of Presenters and Respondents
Gabor Klaniczay: “Sainthood and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages”
Monday, May 17, 2004
3:30 pm HSSB 4020
Gabor Klaniczay, Central European University, Budapest. Professor Klaniczay is the author of numerous books. His English titles include The Uses of Supernatural Power. Transformations of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Polity Press, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Robert I. Moore: “The War Against Heresy in Europe”
Thursday, May 27, 2004
4:00 pm, Flying A Room of the University Center
R. I. Moore is a fascinating and controversial scholar; his analysis of medieval heresy in terms of state formation and the rise of persecution has been perhaps the most influential book in medieval history in the last two decades. Moore’s first book, The Origins of European Dissent (1977) was a meticulous analysis of the sources for popular heresy before 1200. A decade later, he stood the problem on its head by arguing in The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (1987) that this was better understood as the rise of organized persecution of groups considered deviant, including Jews, sodomites, and lepers as well as heresy. The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215 (2000) is a rewrite of the narrative of the formation of medieval Europe. Moore is a Professor of History at Newcastle-upon-Tyne.