Medieval Round Table

Winchester King Arthur’s Round Table cake By Hannah Vanyai
Winchester King Arthur’s Round Table Cake
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

Andrew Stephenson
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
andrewws@unimelb.edu.au

To be added to the mailing list please email Andrew Stephenson andrewws@unimelb.edu.au.

Time

6:15 except where noted otherwise.

Venue

As noted for each session; subject to change.

Programme for 2024

2 February

ANZAMEMS Rehearsal Day

As ANZAMEMS approaches, a few of us have been wondering how much interest there might be in holding a pre-conference rehearsal day or half-day for medieval and early modern studies?  We’ve sometimes done this in the past and it’s been useful for a couple of reasons: good practice for postgraduates who may not have had a lot of practice speaking before strangers; a good soft deadline for everyone who needs a bit of help getting organised; a good test for timing a talk and working with powerpoint presentations; good practice for people chairing sessions; and especially, a neat way of avoiding the experience at conferences where you feel you have to go to ‘support’ your colleagues but in doing so, you miss making other connections.  The idea would be that we could hear our friends and colleagues locally, and then feel free to attend a parallel session at the conference proper if it were of interest. It would also be a nice way for those not attending the conference (e.g. me!!) to hear some of our local colleagues’ work; and a lovely excuse for members of our Melbourne community (Monash, Melbourne, La Trobe, ACU, Deakin and independent scholars) to gather together.

This would be principally an in-person event, but we could also give speakers practice at zooming in and presenting online.

We will book a room for the day here in Melbourne, and see how many sessions we can put together. So if you would like to take part, whether to present, chair, or just attend, could you email Stephanie Trigg: sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au please (along with title and abstract if you would like to present) and we’ll put together a program.  We don’t have any funding, but there are plenty of eating options on campus, now (even a rather nice pizza restaurant).

Really looking forward to this chance to gather together.  We won’t hold a meeting of the Medieval Round Table on the following Monday, February 5, so this rehearsal day would be in lieu of our February gathering.  We’ll put out a formal call for Medieval Round Table speakers (first Monday of the month) later on, so do have a think if you would like to present some work in that forum.

8 April

Sarah Corrigan, University of Melbourne

6 May

Clare Davidson, Australian Catholic University

Medieval Legal Genealogies in Colonial Australia: Robert Torrens and the Historicity of Title by Registration

Robert Torrens (1812–1884) is remembered as the innovator of title to land through registration, a statutory regime for conferring property rights that has since been adopted in jurisdictions across the world.  This system is heralded as one of Australia’s greatest intellectual exports and a landmark reform bringing increased efficiency and security to land law.  Torrens, identifying as a politician and condemning the complexity of specialised legal practice, promoted title by registration as a long overdue reform of the common law and a return to Anglo-Saxon tradition.  This corresponds with a broader tendency to legitimise legal doctrines and reforms by finding ancient historical precedents, but this jurisprudential process essentially depends on selective ideas of the past.  When the first Parliament of South Australia passed the controversial Real Property Act 1858 it overturned many centuries of established practice.  This change was framed as a renouncement of Norman impositions and rejection of elite English landholding monopolies.  Medieval legal genealogies had the rhetorical power to legitimise governance in colonial Australia.  The medievalist framing of the Real Property Act 1858 was part of a broader negotiation of English tradition, the authority of which could be creatively deployed in Australia to extinguish the prior land rights of First Nation peoples.  Thematically, this paper discusses title by registration and Torrens’ articulation of Anglo-Saxon custom in relation to the settler community in colonial South Australia, Aboriginal peoples, the Crown, and other landholding corporations.  Adopting interpretive methodologies from literary studies, I consider historicism as a particular form of jurisprudence that works to legitimate the authority of decision-makers and the law. The paper theorises legal medievalism as a way of analysing legal facts and fictions that draw authority from political versions of premodern English history.  As a case study, Torrens and the passing of the Real Property Act 1858 demonstrates how ideas of the English Middle Ages helped shape colonial jurisprudence and, from a contemporary perspective, help account for the form and function of historicism in the Australian legal system.

3 June

Michael Warby

Keeping the Grimly Won Gains: Why Fourteenth-century Western Europe’s Response to the Black Death Diverges from More Common Patterns

In fourteenth-century Europe the Black Death killed people, but left land, machinery and coin untouched.  This increased the scarcity value of labour.  Scholars have explored the various effects on medieval European society of the increased returns to labour resulting from the Black Death.

What is surprising about the response to the Black Death in medieval Europe is not that it increased labour’s scarcity value — that is the normal effect of deaths from disease on such a scale.  What is surprising is that providers of labour were mostly able to enjoy the benefits of such increased returns rather than those returns being coercively extracted through mass human bondage (i.e. slavery or serfdom).

This paper considers a range of cases of where the labour scarcity premium was, or became, high, leading to its coercive extraction by mass slavery or serfdom — Sub-Saharan Africa, colonial Americas, Dominate Rome, early medieval Europe, early modern Eastern Europe — to tease out why fourteenth-century Western Europe had this strikingly unusual pattern.

The paper also examines how family patterns affect whether women were, or were not, able to take advantage of their increased scarcity.  The paper argues that these patterns support the principle enunciated by economist Glenn Loury: that social relations come before economic transactions.

1 July

5 August

2 September

7 October

4 November

2 December

Previous Papers