Medieval Round Table 2018
by Hannah Vanyai
Papers for 2018
5 February
Cassandra Whittem, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
Haunting Fear: A Literary History of the Ghost from the Medieval to the Gothic Era - Masters Completion Seminar
The ghost is an enduring device in literature, one that has appeared over centuries in a plethora of different forms. Over many centuries it has become an ubiquitous figure, so haunted by generic convention that its metonymic associations with fear often pass into cliché. Yet the power of the ghost as a literary device and the key to its endurance is in the intense, heightened emotion of the moment of encounter between living and dead. Moreover, when these moments of heightened emotion are depicted in popular cultural forms, cultural expectations governing the expression and representation of emotions are revealed. My thesis examines an emblematic text from three key periods in literary history: the anonymous fifteenth-century romance The Awntyrs off Arthure, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1605) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). It will examine what emotions each text engages with, through the form, environment and genre in which the ghost appears and through the language in which these are expressed. By tracing a history of the representation of ghosts through these texts, my thesis will gain new insight into the evolving representation and narrative function of the ghost in literary culture and explore the connection between these changes and changes in theories of emotions that occurred over the same period.
5 March
Michael Warby
Through the Eyes of Patriarchy: Muslim Commentary on Christian Women
In his The Muslim Discovery of the West (1982, 2001) Bernard Lewis observes that: “The Muslim visitors who left records of their travels to Europe were, until the nineteenth century, without exception, males. Most of them, however, have something to say on women and their place in society. For seekers after strange and wonderful stories, there were few more fruitful topics. The Christian institution of monogamous marriage, the relative freedom of women from social restriction and the respect accorded to them by even exalted personages never failed to strike visitors from the lands of Islam with wonderment though rarely with admiration.”
The classical period in Islam extends from its founding the C7th to beginning of the medieval period in Islam in the C10th century with the formalisation of the iqta tax fief system by the Iranian Buyid dynasty of governors (934-1065). These tax fiefs evolved into the Ottoman timars, the Iranian tuyuls and the Indian jagirs, the final remnants of which ended with the abolition of the jagirdar system by the Indian government in 1951.
The medieval period of Islam extends to the early C19th, ending with the massacre of the iqta-holding Egyptian mamluks (1811) by Muhammad Ali Pasha al-Mas'ud ibn Agha (1769-1849), founder of modern Egypt, 30th Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II’s (r.1808-1839) elimination of the timar tax rights of the Ottoman sipahi (1831) (some regional exceptions lingered in Bosnia and Herzegovina until 1851) and his suppression of the mamluk state in Iraq (1831), though the tuyul fiefs of Iran were not abolished until 1907.
The paper examines passages from two Muslim writers on women in Norse society in the C9th and C10th and four on women in Christian society ranging from the C12th to C18th.
The passages from the latter writers, which have some clear continuities across several centuries, provide illustrative examples of the very different gender dynamics that Christian monogamy generated compared to Sharia polygyny. The comparison provides an opportunity to interrogate the notion of patriarchy, including its dependence on more fundamental structures within human societies and its very limited connection to sex roles.
Michael “Lorenzo” Warby is a principal of Multisensory Education, trading as Medieval Education, which provides Medieval and Ancient days for schools. He is currently writing a book, working title Marriage Matters. This paper draws on extensive reading on the anthropological, psychological, historical and economic scholarship on marriage and gender dynamics across human societies.
9 April
Professor Stephen Knight, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
Arthur, the Historic Hero
King Arthur is unusual in being a figure who is both mythical and historicised. This is key to his importance and influence, but is largely unrecognised, because to realise his unusual structural complexity requires knowing materials from pre-conquest British culture. These develop essentially separate traditions of Arthur as both a mythic and also a historic hero, unlike say Cuchulainn, Beowulf or Roland, who function essentially in only one domain. It was Geoffrey of Monmouth who in the 1130s combined fully the British myth of Arthur with a now Normanised historicism to create the king who became both a mythical International Hero and one of the historical Nine Worthies.
7 May
John Weretka, University of Divinity
Sicard of Cremona and the Tradition of the Liturgical Commentary
Based on work in progress to translate the first book of the nine-volume De mitrale written by late-twelfth/early-thirteenth century bishop of Cremona, Sicard, this paper will examine the position of Sicard’s work in the grand tradition of the liturgical commentary, his utilisation of his sources and ways in which his work was then reused by William Durandus in the Rationale divinorum officiorum, perhaps the most authoritative liturgical commentary before Guéranger’s L’année liturgique. A particular focus of examination will be the rite of church consecration, consolidation of which formed a special locus of attention in the Carolingian reform of liturgical practice.
4 June
Professor Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia
Emotion and “Violence": The Alliterative Morte Arthure and The Siege of Jerusalem
Susan Broomhall has remarked of the work of Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias that ‘[b]oth appeared to understand the violence and the affective behaviours of medieval people as one and the same phenomen[on]’. Broomhall stresses the key role of conceptual definitions in establishing the relation of emotion to violence, ‘for these terms cannot be assumed to have shared meanings among disciplinary traditions, nor indeed among past and present populations’. In this paper, as an attempt to add clearer definition to the medieval concept of ‘violence’, or at least to avoid some confusion, I discuss the place of emotion in the construction and evaluation of ‘violent’ bodily actions in later medieval English war writings.
I pay special attention to two texts. One is the Alliterative Morte Arthure, a late fourteenth-century poem in the Arthurian tradition stemming from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 1130s Historia regum Brittanie. The second is The Siege of Jerusalem, another anonymous alliterative poem, variously dated between 1370 and 1400. It describes the total destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE after a siege led by the Romans Vespasian and Titus.
In analysis of these texts, I suggest that although medieval ‘violence’ is notionally a category established on ethical grounds, assessing permissible or wrongful uses of physical force, the first question to ask about an instance of extreme force in a medieval text is not whether it is justified or condemned on ethical grounds, as if one were discussing a case in abstraction, or even by ‘by the way [it] derive[s] its meaning from larger systems of honor’ (Di Marco, 2000, pp. 29-30). What matters most is what kind and what degree of emotional engagement its written form is designed to display and to attract in situ. ‘Violence’ and its opposite, ‘just force’, are poetic achievements rather than consistent cognitive categories. The meaning and evaluation of extreme bodily force in later medieval English literature has less to do with the general nature of the force involved than with its poetic expression, with the links between aesthetics, ethics and action formed in texts and creating a process of emotional affiliation for their readers.
2 July
Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne
Vincentius of Kraków and the Influence of Antiquity in his Chronicle
Bishop Vincentius of Kraków (c. 1150-1223) was the first Pole to write a comprehensive history of Poland. This native history is called the Chronica Polonorum and is acknowledged as a masterpiece of medieval scholarship in the Latin language. Even before his election as bishop of Kraków, Vincentius was an influential prelate and statesman in Poland closely connected to the ruling Piast dynasty. His work, the Chronica Polonorum, charts the history of the Poles from time immemorial to the early years of the thirteenth century. This paper will explore the many influences which shaped the Chronica Polonorum and in particular the strong impact of the heritage of Antiquity.
6 August
Professor Véronique Duché, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne
Does Size Matter? The Cronica cronicarum
Developed from a combination of universal history, national epic and rotulus genealogies, medieval universal chronicles appealed to a relatively broad literate audience. Bringing together sacred and secular sources, they “served primarily as an historical map, orienting a reader in particular ways and providing a summary of basic historical landmarks in an intellectual landscape that encompassed nearly all of human life” (McKitterick, 19).
There exists an extensive archive of scholarship focussed on universal chronicles that were written in Latin. Recent academic studies have brought a much-needed renewed attention to medieval French historiography, and scholars such as Davis and Norbye have provided comprehensive studies of fifteenth-century French scroll chronicles in manuscript format. However, to date the Renaissance chronicles in French have raised little scholarly interest.
The focus of my paper will be the anonymous Cronica cronicarum, Abbrege et Mis Par Figures Descentes et Rondeaulx, first published in Paris in 1521 by the French printer Jacques Ferrebouc.* Sold in both roll and codex formats, this beautifully illustrated chronicle in vernacular French depicts world history from Creation up to 1521. A second edition was printed 11 years later by Anthoine Couteau for the famous Parisian bookseller Galliot Du Pré - the lavish in-folio, with its 92 woodcuts, being transposed into an in-quarto format.
While this chronicle would have served an instructive purpose, helping the reader understand the contemporary world, I will explore the importance of the format in which it was sold. How was the Cronica’s new mythology of world history made accessible to a lay reader?
3 September
Annie Blachly, Monash University
Oxford: A Place of Emotion and Violence? Mapping the Coronial Deaths of Medieval Oxfordshire
The verdict of suicide, or felo de se (‘felon of himself’), is an ever-present matter in medieval English legal records, where self-inflected deaths are both a legal and economic issue tackled by both the local community and central bureaucracy. Within the courts of the Oxfordshire Coroner (1298-1348), however, there is a notable discrepancy to this trend: there is only one recorded incidence of felo de se in fifty years of records. My paper intends to ask why this is the case and if, in fact, this is an accurate appraisal of the incidence of suicide within Oxfordshire, based upon a close reading of Coronial Inquests. The medieval Coroners’ Rolls are a fascinating repository of social, cultural and legal information, established most recognisably in Barbara Hanawalt’s seminal work, The Ties That Bound. This paper will draw together a study of the implications of juror’s verdicts and cultural views on self-killings to question the viability of using the Coroners’ Rolls as evidence of perspectives towards violence within local medieval communities.
1 October
Dr Helen Dell, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
‘A single, true, certain authenticity’: The Authenticity Wars in 20th-century Folk and Medieval Music Revivals
At intervals throughout the twentieth century, serious disputes on correct performance values have arisen amongst performers, collectors, scholars, directors, reviewers and audiences in the folk and early music spheres. Despite differences in the material and the research methods proper to each, similar tensions have persisted amongst participants in both fields. The high level of emotional investment evident among contestants indicates the magnitude of what is at stake for them. The term ‘revival’ has not been in common use in the early music scene but studies on revivalism can, nonetheless, offer insights into the kinds of fantasies in play in arguments around authenticity in both folk and medieval music and the degree of emotional weight they bear. Musicologist Elizabeth Randell Upton and ethnomusicologist Tamara Livingston are two who have noted the similarities.
Tamara Livingston, in ‘Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory’ (Ethnomusicology, 43. 1, 1999) outlined what she called the ‘basic ingredients’ for a revival. These are the first three:
1. an individual or small group of “co-revivalists”
2. revival informants and/or original sources ...
3. a revivalist ideology and discourse.
These three ‘ingredients’ are central in both folk and early music revivals. The lack of revival informants for early musicians and their subsequent reliance on an interpretation of texts indicates one important distinction between the two fields, but the upholding of a legitimised source as the bearer of authenticity which in turn authenticates a performance is central in both.
My paper discusses two central English figures who bore the standard for authenticity in their fields: the early twentieth-century folk song collector and promoter, Cecil Sharp, and Christopher Page, the medieval literature and music scholar and director of the multi-award winning medieval music group, Gothic Voices. Both men have promoted, in different circumstances and in different styles, the idea of an authentic national character which finds expression in music or its performance, differentiating the English from others - in particular continental Europeans.
12 November (2nd Monday)
Dr Anne McKendry, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
Excess, Sacrifice and Sovereign Power in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale offers two examples of exorbitant consumption that recall Georges Bataille’s theory of an “economics of waste.” Bataille argues that the excess energy generated by society in the form of wealth - his so-called “accursed share” - must be squandered before it destroys the society that produced it. The construction of Theseus’s awe-inspiring tournament stadium incurs a year’s worth of labour and massive expense, but it is used for only one day before being demolished to make way for Arcite’s equally extravagant funeral. Arcite is Theseus’s “accursed share,” representing both the disruptive remnant of the Theban enemy and the sacrificial victim that ensures Athenian society avoids obliteration. Moreover, Theseus harnesses these excessive performances and translates them into a statement of his dominance over both Athens and his regional rivals. This paper examines these two episodes from the Knight’s Tale through the frame of Bataille’s economics of waste in order to decipher the discourse of sovereign power that Theseus enacts through spectacular destruction and inescapable sacrifice.