Medieval Round Table 2024

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

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

Compilation as Composition: Breton Influence on the Content and Structure of the Glossae Floriacenses in Vetus et Nouum Testamentum in Orléans 182 and Reims 395

Though the two witnesses to this exegetical compilation are separated by time and distance, their respective recensions evidence a distinct set of responses to the archetype.  Even looking solely at the Old Breton glosses that appear in these manuscripts reveals three distinct layers of textual  interaction: the three embedded in the main text appear in both the tenth-century Orléans, Médiathèque, 182, and in the late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Reims, BM, 395; the single interlinear gloss and two glosses embedded in marginal materials appear in Orléans 182 alone.  A thorough  in-depth analysis of the composition of the exegetical materials on Genesis in each of the manuscripts, as well as their sources, demonstrates the dynamic nature of this compilation as an ongoing work-in-progress and indeed the persistent nature of the Breton impact on it.

6 May

Via Zoom.  Email andrewws@unimelb.edu.au to receive the Zoom link.

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

Venue: Ian Maxwell Library, John Medley East Tower Room 261 and via Zoom.  Email andrewws@unimelb.edu.au to receive the Zoom link.

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

Venue: William MacMahon Ball Theatre, Room 107, Old Arts

The event is free but booking is required. Please visit this page to reserve a spot.

Professor Nick Terpstra, University of Toronto

Executions and the Theatre of Punishment in Early Modern Italy

In the medieval and early modern periods, Bologna’s ‘conforteria’ of the Compagnia della Morte worked to ensure the condemned a calm death. This was as much a political as a pastoral goal: the inequities of the judicial system and the volume of executions created a situation ripe for protests which could undermine the legitimacy of the political order. When elite comforters worked hard through the sixteenth century to get condemned prisoners to accept their sentence and fate, even if unjust, they were also working to get Bologna’s populace to accept a judicial system rife with injustices. The civic rituals of comforting as applied to the theatre of punishment validated the emerging social order of absolutism by dampening protests against it, particularly by those losing their lives to it. As that order took firmer hold through the seventeenth century and the volume of executions declined, the political demands placed on the theatre of punishment also shifted. It became more dramatic, more bloody, and more confidently punitive. And more frankly exploitative of the corpses of the condemned, whether providing them as necessary teaching tools for the public and private anatomy lessons that were critical to university reputation and enrolments, or as entertainment at summertime spectacles like the Festa della Porchetta. Officials became less concerned with the cries and protests of the condemned. One could wonder whether they found these dramatic elements more necessary as the number of executions declined, adding awe, terror, and entertainment value to a form of judicial theatre that Bologna’s elite still found profitable and usefully instructive.

Nicholas Terpstra is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He holds cross-appointments with the Centre for Medieval Studies, Department of Italian Studies and Department for the Study of Religion. Professor Terpstra’s research explores questions at the intersection of politics, religion, gender and charity, with a focus on issues dealing with poverty, institutional structures of charity, and urban space and the senses in Renaissance Italy. Recent works include Senses of Space in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: 2023) and Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge: 2015). Earlier works include the award-winning Cultures of Charity: Women and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Harvard: 2013) and the microhistory Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins: 2012) which explored how the politics of charity frequently silenced women’s voices.

5 August

Via Zoom.  Email andrewws@unimelb.edu.au to receive the Zoom link.

Professor Stephanie Trigg, University of Melbourne

Rehearsing Words and Gestures in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers many rhetorical lessons and models in how to speak and behave well according to the medieval conventions of fin’amor. The first three books of the poem are especially concerned with the best ways to control and express deep feeling. The two lovers prepare nervously for their first meeting at the beginning of Book III. Troilus, in particular, rehearses and seeks to memorise the best words, gestures, and facial expressions to use when he first speaks with Criseyde. In Book V, Diomede enacts very similar practices in his seduction of Criseyde, but the reader is encouraged to read this as a different kind of deliberate performance. Using the work of Monique Scheer and other theorists of emotional practice and the history of emotions, this essay explores the ambiguity of performance as both a rehearsed theatrical mode; and as the practice and affirmation of conventional forms of emotional expression. It concludes by proposing that Thomas Hoccleve’s “mirror scene” in his Compleinte draws on Troilus’s rehearsals, adopting the performance anxiety associated with romantic love for his own more social and public concerns. (Some people might want to look again at the end of Book II and the beginning of Book III, and the mirror scene in Hoccleve’s Complaint.)

2 September

Via Zoom.  Email andrewws@unimelb.edu.au to receive the Zoom link.

The Decameron

Dear all,

It’s been many years since we’ve held a session that isn’t organised around the presentation of a research paper, but let’s experiment with a true “round table” discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

I think we should hold this meeting by zoom alone, as that is a better format for group discussion than trying to negotiate the hybrid format.

No one has volunteered any particular tales for discussion, so I’m going to propose we read the following sections:

  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • First Day, First Story (Ser Cepparello and the friar)
  • First Day, Fourth Story (the monk tricks the abbot)
  • Third Day, Introduction
  • Third Day, First Story (Masetto the deaf-mute gardener)
  • Third Day, Tenth Story (putting the devil back into hell)
  • Fourth Day, Introduction
  • Fourth Day, First Story (Tancredi and his daughter Ghismunda)
  • Tenth Day, Tenth Story (Griselda)
  • Conclusion

Some of Boccaccio’s stories are funny; some obscene; some are pitiful; some are upsetting in other ways, so perhaps read the summaries carefully before you begin each tale... In the first translation I owned, the Tenth Story of the Third Day was left untranslated: that will give you a foretaste
of what to expect!

I imagine we all have different texts and translations available. This site https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/DecShowText.php?myID=d01intro&lang=eng has both English and Italian: you can switch from one to other at the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

Here’s another link to Catherine’s essay from Pursuit:  data-linkindex="1">https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-decameron-medieval-lockdown-project-or-wine-soaked-sex-romp?in_c=articlelistingblock

So how shall we proceed? We don’t have any formal presenters, but if anyone would like to open up with a comment about issues or questions the text raised for them, that would be great. If you feel there are other tales we should discuss, please feel free to email Andrew (andrewws@unimelb.edu.au) and Stephanie (sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au), or just come along on the 2nd and
be prepared with a summary and to tell us what we have missed. I think this will be an extremely informal session. I certainly don’t claim any expertise here, but am looking forward to re-reading and chatting about this amazing text!

Possible topics for discussion:

  • The Decameron as plague literature and as a cure for melancholy.
  • How does Boccaccio represent narrative voicing and genre? Male/female voices and characters? How do different genres relate to each other in this collection?
  • Who is Boccaccio writing for?
  • Chaucerians will recognise the story of Griselda from the Clerk’s Tale (that’s why I included it: someone might want to talk about the history of this story in Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer)
  • And for historians of emotion, I’m attaching an essay of mine that includes discussion of the tears and weeping of Tancredi and Ghismunda, in the context of late medieval literature and the expression “weeping like a beaten child” from Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion, ed. Holly C. Crocker and Glenn D. Burger (Cambridge UP, 2019). No one should feel obliged to read this essay!  But we might find it useful to discuss the  Decameron in the light of the history of emotions.What can
    the Decameron contribute to that history?
  • Your own personal responses to particular tales (these or others)?
  • Has anyone watched the new Netflix series? Responses? Critiques?
  • Again, if you’d like to pose other questions, please add them in, or send to Andrew and Stephanie

Folk with  unimelb library access might want to look at the series of volumes that begin with Elissa B. Weaver’s volume: The Decameron: First Day in Perspective (University of Toronto Press, 2004). There’s a good essay on the Proem, as an overview, by Robert Hollander. (I think to circulate a pdf would infringe copyright restrictions.) If you don’t have unimelb access, much of Weaver’s intro
and Hollander’s essay is available through google books, courtesy of UoT Press: https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Decameron_First_Day_in_Perspective/L-HMcbXVveQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
Other volumes on other books are also available.

As ever, do let Andrew know if you would like to join in this session, and he’ll circulate the zoom link next weekend.

Best wishes,

Stephanie.

7 October

Venue: via Zoom.  Email andrewws@unimelb.edu.au to receive the Zoom link.

Katy Barnett, University of Melbourne

The Clameur de Haro and Interests in Land: What This Shows Us About the Modern Common Law

In Guernsey, Jersey and Sark, a Norman French law called the ‘clameur de haro’ remains part of the modern law.  It allows an aggrieved person (the criant) to literally call for their grievance to be recognised, by saying variations upon, Haro! Haro! Haro! À l’aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort. (Hear me, hear me, hear me, come to my aid, my Prince, for someone does me wrong.)  The wrongdoer must stop until the criant’s grievance is determined.  While this may seem of limited relevance in the modern day, it is suggested that the fact that the clameur is limited to possessory interests in property reflects a Norman privileging of possession of land over other interests, the shadows of which continue in our modern common
law of remedies in Australia.

4 November - no meeting

2 December

Venue: via Zoom.  Email Stephanie Trigg - sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au - to receive the Zoom link.

Friendship and Enduring Connections

Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Studies Joint Celebration

This will take the form of a kind of virtual convivio: a celebration of community and friendship. We encourage you to pour a glass of a celebratory beverage, to fill a plate of tasty comestibles to snack on, and to gather by zoom for a feast of ideas, stunning images, poetry, history, languages, and memories. Our theme is “Friendship  and Enduring Connections,” and we have a fabulous line-up of speakers from a range of disciplines and topics, from Byzantine Studies, the work of Dürer, a discussion of friendship in fifteenth-century humanism, voices from Medieval and Early Modern culture, and the reading of some specially relevant but rare works of medieval literature in French and English. This will be a feast of the (virtual) senses.