Medieval Round Table 2023

Programme for 2023

6 February

Guy Geltner, Monash University

The Nature of Extraction in Preindustrial Europe

Image: Altarpiece of St. Anne’s Church, Annaberg-Buchholz (Germany), c. 1521

As mining burgeoned across Europe from the thirteenth century on, the sector’s promoters and observers had to contend with resource management in a new key.  Ore extraction differed in scale and scope from traditional practices of agriculture and animal husbandry.  It was also more visibly destructive and by many accounts impacted the health of people, animals, soils and crops.  This paper begins by exploring such emic accounts and how they differ from present-day ecological and biochemical explanations.  It then moves to ask whether the era’s documented cultural responses to mining-related landscape change amount to an environmental turn or a secularization of Creation, a phenomenon scholars tend to associate with modernization?  As this paper will argue, tracing early mining history can be inspired by environmental history while challenging some of its conventions.

6 March

Karen Green, University of Melbourne

Money and Christine de Pizan's Mirrors

Christine’s economic thought matured and developed over the fourteen years of her career, during which she turned from allegory, poetry and the citation of authorities, towards realistic description, prose and original theorizing.  Her earliest representations of wealth pit the evils of greed and riches against the higher values of wisdom and virtue.  In writing the biography of Charles V she came to recognize that the circulation of money is an important means for fostering the health of the body politic.  As a result, in subsequent mirrors, she insisted that economic management and good public administration should strive to ensure that money’s circulation does not encourage vice, but instead fosters and rewards virtue.

3 April

Erin Sebo, Flinders University

Eart þu se Beowulf...?  Beowulf, Emotion and the Ideal

Although there has been considerable critical interest in using psychoanalytic frameworks to understand the monsters of Beowulf, the hero is still largely considered as the expression of a literary ideal - even when scholars cannot agree on precisely which ideal he exemplifies.  In a sense, this is hardly surprising. The poem describes what Grendel, for example, sees, thinks, hopes for and feels: his desire to kill, his anger, misery, joy, and finally fear. By contrast, in the same passage, there is hardly any mention of the feelings or thoughts of the hero. This is typical: the poet rarely speaks directly about Beowulf's motivations. And yet, the poet has depicted an atypical hero. His choices are unconventional, his decisions unusual. All heroes are exceptional, but Beowulf is surprising. He is, as Klaeber points out, ‘a solitary figure in life’. Unlike other characters, he does not seem to have strong emotional connections. When Grendel kills his chosen shield companion, Hondscio, he makes no attempt to save him and shows no distress at his death—in unsettling contrast to Hrothgar’s long lament when Aeschere is killed by Grendel’s mother. Moreover, he is the only king in the poem who lives to old age without marrying or choosing an heir. This paper explores why the poet has chosen to obscure Beowulf's interiority.

1 May

Jenny Smith, Monash University

The Conflict of Conscience and the Glass of Government: Two 1570s English Morality Plays

After Queen Elizabeth’s excommunication in 1570, and with religious division at home and in Europe, the play as mirror or moral example for its audience was a complex metaphor.  This paper looks at mirror metaphors in two plays that draw on conventions of medieval moral allegorical plays.  The minister Nathaniel Woodes’ Conflict of Conscience retells the story of a historical figure who recanted his Protestant beliefs, as an everyman character in the morality play tradition, dazzled by the ‘glass of vanities’ held by personified vices, so that the audience might see themselves in the story.  Like Woodes, George Gascoigne framed his Glass of Government as a mirror ‘for euery man, that list his faultes to mend’.  Lately returned from the wars of religion in the Netherlands, Gascoigne’s  choice of plot (a version of the parable of the prodigal son, set in Antwerp) supports his positioning of himself as a reformed prodigal.  In this paper I want to consider how the conventions of morality plays were used in a post-Reformation context that included debate about the function of performance itself.

Jenny Smith is a PhD student at Monash University, working on a history of the mirror as a metaphor in Elizabethan England.

5 June

Michael Warby

Trade, Empire, Fiefs and Militias: Adverse Incentives Within the Medieval Roman State

The thematic cavalry of the medieval Roman state was perhaps the most prominent cavalry militia system, and one of the longer-lasting militia systems, in history, evolving in response to the Arab conquests and collapsing in the eleventh century.  In its decay, it reflected the weaknesses of militia systems.

The granting of extensive trading privileges to the Italian city-states weakened both the long-term commercial development of the medieval Roman state and reflected, and entrenched, adverse incentive structures within that state.

This paper presents a simple model of the revenue of pre-industrial states that explicates the role of trade revenue in the rise and decline of empires.  It uses the warrior-franchise model to explore the long-term persistence of fief systems, their economising on administrative costs and their superiority over militia systems.  It also presents a simple model of the advantages and pathologies, of bureaucracy.

The thematic cavalry and the relative mercantile failure of the medieval Roman state provides a case study to illustrate these patterns, throwing light on the very different long-term trajectories of Latin and Orthodox Christendom.

Michael “Lorenzo” Warby is a principal of Multisensory Education.

7 August

Stephen Knight, University of Melbourne

Nature in Robert Henryson's The  Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phryvgian

While most medieval authors dealt to some extent with the inter-relation of nature and humanity, a notably extensive and thoughtful treatment of the theme is to be found in Robert Henryson’s lengthy Scottish poem The Moral Fabillis of Esope the Phryvgian.

Written in the later fifteenth century, the poem offers thirteen fables focusing on animals and their links to nature, which in varied ways also handle the human interconnection with, and at times misuse of, the natural world.  Seven of the stories are drawn from Aesop’s sixth century fables (and here he even re-tells one of them), while the six others are drawn from the late twelfth-century French Roman de Renart, dealing mostly with foxes.

Focusing on seven of the stories, and providing extensive quotations, the paper will show how some stories simply explore how animals and the natural context operate, usually in ethical terms, but other stories operate as fables about the human world or actually representing human conflict with the forces and values of nature.

For Henryson, much more than for his admired authority Chaucer or for his near-contemporary  Scot William Dunbar, the world of nature is complex, and deeply revealing in descriptive, evaluative and Christian terms.

4 September

Helen Hickey, University of Melbourne

Sensing the Weather in Medieval Europe

Image: Rabanus Maurus, 11c. De universo. 929

Meteorological modelling is a science, even if forecasting is often imprecise.  But before 1300ce until the seventeenth century, there were broadly two kinds of weather knowledge. First was the science of weather prognostication, which relied on the speculative and theoretical treatises that came to the West from Mediterranean classical sources.  These required the explanatory skills of astrologers and astronomers who interpreted cosmic signs that prioritised planetary juxtapositions.  Second was the local and usually aural weather lore grounded in observation, memory, and the senses.  This mode was vital for those who relied on such signs for their livelihood: farmers, shepherds, sailors, or horticulturalists.  This paper focuses on the senses, especially olfaction, in medieval weather discourses.  Unlike the other senses, olfactory neurons are exposed directly to the environment.  I argue that the sense of smell and its intersection with air and weather offers valuable insights into humankind’s engagement with climate.

6 November

Katy Barnett, University of Melbourne

The Statute of Labourers, the Black Death and Inducing Breach of Contract

The modern tort of inducing breach of contract has medieval origins, in the Black Death, when the medieval action of per quod servitium amisit was adapted to stop servants leaving masters, first with the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349, and then with the Statute of Labourers in 1351.  This talk will describe the medieval origins of this action, and the surprising persistence and adaptation of the tort to the modern day.

4 December

Stephanie Trigg, University of Melbourne

"One mighty stream of soul”: Chaucer in Australian Literature

Image: Blamire Young, Chaucer, 1900, Art Gallery of South Australia

This paper explores a small number of texts of Australian literature (loosely defined) that make reference to Geoffrey Chaucer or his works.  These texts engage in very different ways with Chaucer’s legacy, sometimes foregrounding their colonial or post-colonial setting, sometimes transcending place in order to celebrate Chaucer’s cultural longevity.  I will start with a short story by Ellen Smith, ‘The Black Letter Chaucer’ (1913), and then consider three poems that allude to Chaucer in different ways: Charles Harpur’s ‘Chaucer’ (1845); Les A. Murray, ‘A New England Farm, 1914’ (1965); and Arthur Collins, ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’ (1982).  I will finish with a brief discussion of Karen Brooks’ novel, The Good Wife of Bath: A (Mostly) True Story, 2021.  I won’t assume knowledge of any of these texts, but simply invite listeners to marvel at the different ways Chaucer — and the idea of Chaucer — have been appropriated in Australian literature.