2025
Programme for 2025
3 March
Matthew Champion, University of Melbourne
Possible Futures in the Religious Cultures of the Fifteenth-century Low Countries
This paper explores of some of the many futures that emerged in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Northern Europe alongside the dynamic religious movement known as the devotio moderna. This movement has rightly been seen as deeply interested in the shaping, regulation, measurement and knowledge of time—one sister of the movement was praised for paying “such close attention to her work...that she always knew in the midst of it exactly what time of day it was.” What varieties of the future can we uncover in the midst of these complex cultures of temporal regulation and representation?
This will be a hybrid session. So you can join us in John Medley Meeting Room, E261 (Ian Maxwell Room) for a 6.15 start; or join the meeting by zoom. If you would like that option, please email Stephanie to receive the zoom link on the afternoon of Sunday March 2.
7 April
Dr Elizabeth Boyle, Maynooth University
Constructing Medieval Ireland after Modernism: from Thomas Kinsella to Emma Donoghue
This is a revised version of a paper originally given as the William Matthews Memorial Lecture at Birkbeck, University of London, in December 2023.
The image of medieval Ireland that reaches the popular imagination has long been mediated through creative writers and poets. Much important scholarly work has been done on the way that writers of the “Celtic” or “Gaelic” Revival, such as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge, fashioned medieval Ireland in a form that reflected their political, cultural and linguistic worldview. However, less attention has been given thus far to Modernist and Post-modernist Irish writers and the medieval Ireland they have created—one which reacts to the Romanticism of the Revivalist writers as much as it engages with medieval Irish sources themselves. This paper looks at a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and ways in which they construct medieval Ireland as a fictive space in which to consider issues such as class, sexuality and landscape.
About the speaker: Elizabeth Boyle has taught in the Department of Early Irish, Maynooth University, Ireland, since 2013. She is the author of History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland (Routledge, 2021), and a collection of personal essays, Fierce Appetites (Penguin, 2022). In April 2025 she is the Doohan Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney.
via Zoom only
5 May
Michael Warby, Director, Medieval Education
Escaping the Kin-Group Trap: Slave Warriors of Islam
Slave warriors were used at a scale and duration by Islamic rulers from the 800s to the 1800s far in excess of their use within any other civilisation. There is, however, something of a paradox in this. While the scale of the systematic use of slave warriors is distinctive to Islam, many Islamic polities either did not use slave warriors, or their use was peripheral, transitory or otherwise marginal.
In his PhD dissertation—later published as a monograph (1981)—Daniel Pipes argued that slave warriors were a response to Muslim rulers not being able to live up to the moral aspirations of Islam, so rulers came to use slave warriors due to the unreliability of local recruits. Pipes over-estimated how extensive their use was across the regions of Islam.
This paper argues that slave warriors were adopted when Islamic rulers—in areas where kin-groups were significant—could neither use local kin-groups to organise their military forces nor suppress kin-groups. In doing so, the paper explores the farmer versus pastoralist divide, why the Middle East is the incubator of monotheism, and how Christianity sanctified the (Roman) farming social synthesis while Islam sanctified the (Arabian) oasis-pastoralism social synthesis.
via Zoom only
4 August
Rachael Robertson, Australian Catholic University
“And he was sore afraid”: Medievalisms of Monstrosity, Faith, and Angel Blood in Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass (2021)
Isolated and predominantly Catholic Crockett Island welcomes a new arrival - Father Paul, apparently replacing the island’s elderly, much-loved priest. He brings with him secretive freight from the Holy Land - a vampire that he has mistaken for an angel. This encounter is one of awe - indistinct, the angel all fearful proportions and burning eyes, the priest falling to his knees, transfixed. Measured out at Mass with ritual care from the vampire’s willing wrist, the “angel blood” is treated with the veneration due a relic.
This paper seeks to interrogate how the Netflix limited series Midnight Mass draws on and repurposes the Medieval in this refashioning of a favourite Gothic pop culture monster. The Middle Ages offers up an excess of encounters with angels captured in the writings of (among others) Hildegard of Bingen’s Sciavas or Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum and it is among these that Midnight Mass locates its conception of angels and angelic messengers. Furthermore, on Crockett Island, angel blood replaces Communion wine, and thus, transubstantiation - of a monstrously profane sort - truly unfurls each time the liturgy is professed.
Rachael Robertson lectures and tutors in literature at the Melbourne campus of the Australian Catholic University, as well as teaching at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne. Her current research interests include the way the Medieval haunts later iterations of the Gothic. She has recently published in Gothic Nature.
John Medley Meeting Room 261 (2nd floor, East Tower: behind the lifts - map here) and via Zoom
1 September
Ellie Crookes, University of Wollongong
The Joans of Arc: a global medievalist phenomenon
This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘the Joans of Arc’: a medievalist trend of women being celebrated as their nation’s own Joan. Though these women bear the name of a medieval French woman – ‘the Irish Joan of Arc,’ ‘the Turkish Joan,’ ‘la Jeanne d’Arc du Canada’ – use of the moniker in these instances is in fact indivisibly bound to diverse and shifting preoccupations, prejudices, and prerogatives of post-medieval people and societies. What at first appears to be the global reach of the legacy of Joan through the phenomenon of the Joans of Arc is, however, undermined by the fact that by and large this is a distinctly Western preoccupation. Namely, the ‘Joans of Arc’ is a Western medievalist activity that, when appearing beyond the borders of Europe or the amorphously defined parameters of ‘the West,’ is largely imposed from without.
Dr Ellie Crookes researches the reception of the late French, Irish, and British Middle Ages, examining instances where texts, legends, and characters of the medieval past have been adopted, adapted, and manipulated to suit the needs of artists, writers, and activists in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Her work centres women's writing and women's history. Her first monograph, Joans of Arc Worldwide, is under contract with Arc Humanities Press and set to be published in 2025. Her and Ika Willis' co-edited collection, Medievalism and Reception was published in 2024 by Boydell and Brewer.
6 October
Dr Richard Tait, Monash University
The Divine Doctor: Classical and Medieval Roots of the Conduct of Renaissance Physicians
Physicians in the cities of early modern Venice used books of advice on professional conduct. These told them how to project moral authority, inspire confidence, get paid, ensure compliance and avoid problems that might embarrass them professionally. Given the limitations of medical knowledge, failures must have been common, as shown by high child mortality. Yet records show that physicians were largely trusted, respected and given positions of status in their communities. I have argued that this credibility and respect were due to a widely understood code of conduct promulgated in these books.
Early modern works on the conduct of physicians have a history that can be traced back to Hippocrates and Galen. While the connection to works such as the Hippocratic Oath may seem obvious, being referenced even today, codes of conduct were much broader and richer. Their evolution traces the ways in which physicians sought to establish their credibility, build social prestige and deal with problems that might undermine them professionally. In this paper, I trace the classical and medieval origins of early modern codes of conduct and explore how they reflect on physicians’ search for professional credibility and status.
10 November
Dr Stephanie Downes, La Trobe University
Joan of Arc in Australia
This paper presents material from an ongoing research collaboration with my colleague Associate Professor Catherine Padmore.
In Australia, creative responses to the life of Joan of Arc reach back to the early decades of the colony and stretch across sculpture, art, theatre, screen and literature. They include a short story, ‘The Maid of Orléans’, published in the Australian Journal in 1884; an unfinished verse-drama illustrated by Norman Lindsay in the early 1900s; Dorothy Hewett’s two-act rock opera, Joan (1975); and Ali Alizadeh’s 2017 work of historical biofiction, The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc, to name but a few. Joan’s Australian reception is still evolving: in late 2024, director Baz Luhrmann announced his intention to produce a biopic about Joan based substantially on Thomas Keneally’s 1974 novel, Blood Red, Sister Rose.
Yet despite the fact that manifestations of Joan in Australia span a variety of media over more than a century, little scholarly attention has been paid to her local cultural presence to date. This paper attempts to map Joan’s reception in Australia from the nineteenth-century to the present day. It asks: can the case be made for a distinctly ‘Australian’ Joan of Arc? And if not, why not? In assessing Joan’s complex and often contradictory place in Australian medievalisms, we also reflect on the absence of Australia’s Joans from studies of her global reception.
Dr Stephanie Downes is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University. She has published on medieval Anglo-French textual cultures and their modern reception, and on the history of emotions and medieval literature. Her current research interests include contemporary historical fictions and literary award cultures, and bioadaptations, especially of medieval women’s lives.