Medieval Round Table
by Hannah Vanyai
The Medieval Round Table is an informal discussion group open to interested students, academics and independent scholars. The Round Table meets monthly, usually on the first Monday of the month for presentations of papers, discussions of participants’ work in progress, discussions of readings etc.
Convenors
Professor Stephanie Trigg
School of Culture and Communication
sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Mairi Stirling Hill
School of Culture and Communication
mairi.hill@unimelb.edu.au
Jenny Smith
University of Melbourne Libraries / School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
jsmit@unimelb.edu.au
To be added to the mailing list please email any of the convenors.
Time
6:00 except where noted otherwise.
Venue
As noted for each session; subject to change.
Programme for 2026
3 March
Lightning talks on the bed in medieval and early modern culture
As part of their preparation for their co-edited special issue of Parergon for 2027, “Living, Dreaming, and Dying in the Premodern Bed,” Rose Albiston, Mairi Stirling Hill and Stephanie Trigg will chair a special round table event, in which we share images or short texts about beds in medieval and early modern culture: beds for sleeping, waking, dreaming, dying, giving birth, having sex, being sick in, given as gifts, left in wills, as places for private or public events; beds to be bought or sold, covered in textiles, etc.
This will be a zoom-only session.
13 April
Will Hoff, University of Melbourne
Becoming Robin Hood: Presence and Performance in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
The medieval Robin Hood tradition was created by cultures of embodied performance. In the mid-thirteenth century, the name “Robynhod” carried no literary significance but was used as an identity marker for both individual criminals and whole families. I argue that adoption of the name shaped the creation of the character, with literary material witnessing this culture of performativity. I trace this process from its origins to the significant changes wrought on the character during the religious and cultural reforms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to argue for its centrality to the myth which has since been conservatively eroded.
Will Hoff is a PhD candidate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, with a research interest in construction of social identities in the later Middle Ages. His primary interest is in Robin Hood as a cultural figure in the medieval period and beyond.
11 May
Dr Jacopo Bisagni, University of Galway
The late medieval fight-books and the case of Leeds, Royal Armouries, I.33
Medieval “fight-books” constitute a rich but still underexplored body of technical literature. This seminar will focus on Leeds, Royal Armouries, I.33—the earliest surviving European fencing manual (Germany, c. 1320)—arguing for its importance as a source for the intellectual history of embodied knowledge in the Middle Ages.
Building on work carried out since 2021 in the context of the Lutegerus Project, the seminar will adopt a philological approach centred on historical semantics, examining selected lexical case studies (terms such as ars dimicatoria and the verb calcare) in order to reveal how the author of I.33 deployed a precise and conceptually informed technical Latin lexicon, shaped in part by broader Scholastic frameworks. With this approach, I hope to show how close linguistic analysis can illuminate both the socio-cultural context of the manuscript and the practical, embodied knowledge it seeks to transmit.
I studied Classics, Celtic linguistics, and Indo-European linguistics at the University of Pisa, and I was then awarded a PhD in Old and Middle Irish at the University of Galway in 2008 for a thesis on the early Irish poem Amrae Coluimb Chille (‘Eulogy of St Colum Cille’, published in revised form by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 2019). I have taught widely in early Irish, Latin, historical linguistics, and medieval intellectual history in the Department of Ancient Classics at the University of Galway.
My research ranges from Celtic philology and early medieval Irish literature (both Latin and vernacular) to manuscript transmission, with particular interests in topics such as Latin–Old Irish bilingualism and the production and transmission of scientific texts (mainly on computus and cosmology) in the Carolingian period.
Between 2018 and 2023 I directed the project Ireland and Carolingian Brittany: Texts and Transmission (IRCABRITT,https://ircabritt.universityofgalway.ie/), funded by the Irish Research Council. Since 2021, I have also co-directed the Lutegerus Project, which focusses on the fourteenth-century fight-book Leeds, Royal Armouries, I.33, combining philological analysis with the study of embodied martial knowledge.
via Zoom only
1 June
Rose Albiston, University of Melbourne
Save the Outpassing of the Soul: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe on the deathbed
John Medley Building 261E (map here) and via Zoom
Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe each first experience divine communication on what was believed to be their deathbeds; Julian during a serious illness that befell her at age thirty, and Margery after the months’ long episode of madness that followed the birth of her first child. The influence of late-medieval deathbed discourse has rarely been considered in relation to these two instances of near-fatal illness. This can be seen, for instance, in the frequent categorisation of Margery’s visions of devils as hallucinations caused by post-partum psychosis, without consideration that medieval texts consistently assert that devils attend those on their deathbeds.
I read A Revelation of Divine Love and The Book of Margery Kempe against late-medieval ars moriendi and argue that both Julian and Margery leverage the medieval conception of the deathbed as a liminal space, an extreme space, and an equalising space in their works. Rather than seeking to establish that particular ars moriendi were used as textual sources, I contend that elements of deathbed discourse represented in ars moriendi but circulating in late-medieval English culture more generally were deliberately deployed by Julian and Margery in their self-representations.
Rose Albiston is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research concerns textual depictions of the deathbed in late-medieval and early modern England.