Kalamazoo 2014
Kalamazoo 2014

Kalamazoo 2014

I’m home safe from this year’s Congress, though we were flanked by some pretty spectacular lightning through much of the drive back through western Illinois and into Iowa. There’s probably some way for such an epic journey to be connected to a medieval pilgrimage, but it’s going to take me a lot more than this one cup of tea to revive me enough to find it, alas.

Thursday

Session 142: Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age

“An Archive of Early Middle English”
Dorothy Kim (Vassar) and Scott Kleinman (CSU Northridge)

Kim and Kleinman presented on their current project, which is creating a digital archive of the corpus of Early Middle English manuscripts (some 162 texts, including multilingual ones). This archive will engage with texts not solely on the basis of their aesthetic or linguistic value (which has led to the dismissal of EME by past scholars), but also as material objects. The emphasis here was definitely on access and adaptability, ways of ensuring that this project could grow and change in the future and be useful to a variety of different scholars. The list of problems to be overcome was a little daunting to me—everything from the eye-watering cost of paying to use some images, to the minutiae of, say, how to encode the difference between poetic and manuscript line breaks. That said, while some of the finer points of coding did go a little bit over my head—okay, while almost all of the code went over my head, because I know almost nothing about coding—the prospect of being able to “densely” encode a text to show diplomatic, linguistic and contextual elements is very enticing.

 

6a013486c64e2e970c01a3fd057012970b“Disbinding the Manuscripts, and Rebinding Some Others”
Dorothy Carr Porter (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania)

One of the things which has sometimes frustrated me about working with scanned versions of a manuscript is that it gives you little sense of what the manuscript is like as a constructed, physical object. Dorothy Porter had that same frustration, but then went out and did something about it—in this case, spearheading the SIMS Collation Project (see photo right). The Project will ultimately provide a means for scholars to visualise manuscripts quire by quire, accounting not just for the folios which have survived but also for those which haven’t, or to bring together fragments from multiple collections to visualise a now-lost original. Porter hopes to eventually provide an online form which will allow scholars an easy way to Disbind/Rebind Their Manuscripts, which is a very tantalizing prospects—I can think of a couple of cartularies I’d like to run through it.

 

“Scattered Leaves: New Approaches to Digital Manuscript Studies”
Benjamin Albritton (Stanford) and Bridget Whearty (Stanford)

Albritton and Whearty discussed another effort to digitise and make accessible a manuscript collection, though in their case, the collection with which they were working at Stanford has the quirk of consisting of far more fragments than it does bound manuscripts. This obviously creates many challenges and makes collaboration with other institutions even more important. Albritton discussed the process of digitally “recreating” one of the manuscripts which was disassembled and dispersed by Otto Ege, while Whearty described the ways in which the project could open up the scholarly process to include undergraduates.

 

6a013486c64e2e970c01a73dc07d5c970dFriday

Plenary Lecture

“The Libel of the Lamb: Violence and Medieval Metaphor”
Susan L. Einbinder (University of Connecticut)

This was such a thoughtful exploration of a fraught and often overlooked aspect of late medieval Cretan history: the particular charge made against the island’s Jews known as the Libel of the Lamb, which alleged that Jews had crucified sheep in a mockery of Christ’s crucifixion. Einbinder contextualised this as occurring within a period of rapid social change and hybridisation spurred by the Venetian colonisation of Crete. Jews were, for example, conscripted as civic executioners, and executions were carried out in a Jewish cemetery—this unsurprisingly caused a lot of tension between the Jewish and Christian communities. Writings from across the southern Mediterranean as a whole during this period also betray a deep anxiety about the consumption of meat and draw heavily on the languge of cultic sacrifice. Some of these concerns, Einbinder argued, derived from theological writings which encouraged Christians to identify with the agnes Dei, the Lamb of God; others may well have been spurred by the social, economic and psychological consequences of the great famine which swept across Europe from 1315-1320. The famine was accompanied by a contagion (possibly rinderpest) which killed the majority of European sheep and cattle (see image left, BL Add 27210, f. 12v). It’s perhaps little wonder that such a cataclysm would cause intense anxiety across large swathes of the Latin West, an anxiety which was then projected eastward and given material form as the Libel of the Lamb.

 

Session 216: Colette of Corbie: Spiritual Reformer or Reactionary at the Turn of the 15th Century

“Colette of Corbie and the Formation of a Religious Identity”
Anna Campbell (University of Reading)

Anna Campbell focused on the ways in which Colette’s early life shaped her later religious identity and actions. Early vitae of Colette discuss the fact that her father was a carpenter, and stress the relative humility of her origins—but this is relative humility indeed. Colette’s father was technically a carpenter, but he was the Master Carpenter for the wealthy Benedictine abbey of Corbie, which was lavishly patronised by the French royal family. Growing up in the monastery’s shadow, Colette gained an ease at interacting with aristocratic women which was of great use to her when she later sought patronage for her foundations. Campbell also discussed Colette’s extant letters, and the insights which they give us into the development of Colette’s beliefs in relation to her Franciscan mentors.

 

“Colette of Corbie: Role and Functions of a “Living Saint” during the Age of the Mendicant Observant Reforms”
Ludovic Viallet (Université Blaise Pascal – Clermont-Ferrand)

This densely argued paper (delivered in absentia) considered the representation of Colette in writings produced as part of the drive towards the Franciscan Reform Movement. Viallet discussed the ways in which Colette’s sanctity was defined as one specifically marked by discernment, by prudence, and suggested that this was in part a reaction to a general suspicion of female mystics. Her intelligence and pragmatism were praised, and shaped the ways in which Colette was used as a spearhead of the movement.

 

“Malleable Sanctity: Saint Colette, Politics, and Forms of Holiness in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”
Nancy Bradley Warren (Texas A&M University)

Warren discussed the ways in which Colette’s achievements were facilitated by a transnational network of women—one of her patrons, for instance, was Margaret of York, as were many of the women of the Burgundian ducal family. Colette was part of a generation of politically-involved and mobilised female saints. In fact, Warren, suggested, Colette could be considered a sort of Burgundian counterpart to Jeanne d’Arc. I thought this was a really fascinating evocation of the kinds of political and secular networks within which even a truly devout women like Colette was inextricably—and perhaps even willingly—embedded.

 

Session 231: Advances in Medieval Archaeology I

6a013486c64e2e970c01a3fd05737b970b“Objects in medieval graves: social identity and spiritual well-being”
Roberta Gilchrist (University of Reading)

A full afternoon of Reading-based archaeology was kicked off by Roberta Gilchrist with a reappraisal of a scholarly tendency to dismiss later medieval Christian burials as largely devoid of information about social identity. Gilchrist instead argued for a reading of burial practice as a “pararitual”. While the fact that only 2% of English graves in the 12th-15th centuries had grave goods makes them statistically insignificant, that doesn’t render them meaningless. Gilchrist showed some fascinating finds—everything from shells brought back from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, to timber “wands” possibly thought to help the soul on their journey through purgatory, to Roman or Anglo-Saxon items reburied as perhaps votive offerings.

 

“Child Health in Medieval England: Work and the Adolescent”
Mary Lewis (University of Reading)

Mary Lewis presented on some of the findings of a larger project to explore the osteology of adolescence and migration in medieval Europe, looking at how migration and lifestyle affected the health of teenagers. An examination of over 2000 sets of remains, mostly in urban but also in some rural contexts revealed the kinds of wince-inducing traumas suffered by these young people—trauma, infection, respiratory illnesses, damage to joints and spines caused by repetitive strain or carrying heavy loads. The findings seem to correlate the documentry evidence, that in the aftermath of the Black Death, children began their working lives later, towards the end of their teens rather than before puberty.

 

“Adolescent Life in Medieval England: Biology and Society”
Fiona Shapland (University of Reading)

The next paper continued in this vein, with Fiona Shapland trying to assess the average ages of adolescence in medieval England. An examination of 1200 skeletons for signs of pubertal and skeletal maturation at 5 different sites (primarily the graveyards of St Peter’s at Barton-upon-Humber and St Mary Spital in London) showed that most medieval people went through the onset of puberty at about 11—not much later than their late 20th century descendants, something which surprised me. Where the differences lie is the age at first menarche (about a year or two later than nowadays) and in the end of puberty. A medieval adolescent’s growth spurt ended about two years after the modern standard. This longer process of physical maturation is reflected in a long process of social maturation.

 

“You are what you eat: Isotopic Approaches to Medieval Identity”
Gundula Müldner (University of Reading)

I will not pretend to follow the science behind isotope analysis. What I do know is that you can use it to do some pretty cool things involving identifying an individual’s geographical origins and diet. As Gundula Müldner said, it’s rather a blunt tool but a powerful one. For instance, isotopic analyses of remains found at Whithorn Cathedral Priory in Dumfries and Galloway showed that bishops enjoyed a diet much heavier in marine foods than did their lower status counterparts; they also grew up outside of the area, again unlike their lower status counterparts. Similarly, a comparison of remains at Sinningthwaite Priory, a Cistercian nunnery just to the west of York, showed that nuns consumed more fish than other people buried there—but also that they had raised nitrogen levels in their bones, which may be the result of repeated bouts of excessive fasting.

 

Session 284: Advances in Medieval Archaeology II: Archaeological Approaches to Medieval Religious Identity

“A Window on Early Medieval Christianisation: the Social Dynamics of Monastic Foundation at Anglo-Saxon Lyminge, Kent, England”
Gabor Thomas (University of Reading)

Based on the work of the excavations at Lyminge, Kent, over the past few years, Gabor Thomas argued for the utility of incorporating settlement archaeology and its insights into analyses of the development of religious identity in conversion-era England. The monastery of Lyminge was founded on the coast of Kent, supposedly by Queen Athelburga but certainly within a royal context. Excavations at the site have uncovered the remains of a series of high status halls which link the monastery with the site’s antecedent structures. There are no clear dividing lines here between “settlement” and “religious” archaeology.

 

“Old Gods and new worldviews: Ritual Action and negiotiating Christian conversion in Anglo-Saxon England”
Alexandra E.S. Knox (University of Reading)

Knox’s presentation centred on artefacts and rituals, and dismantling the ways in which the prior historiography has often focused on ritual as something unusual rather than part of everyday life and praxis. Ritual action is rather functional and part of the everyday, often occurring in the domestic space. Knox also called for a reconsideration of the assumption that things are fixed and meanings are fluid—things are impermanent, capable of decay or being refashioned.

 

“In the Shadow of the Militarised Church: Crusading and Pagan-Christian Interfaces in the Medieval Eastern Baltic”
Aleks Pluskowski (University of Reading)

We then swung east to the Baltic coast, with Aleks Pluskowski’s exploration of environment as a means of assessing the impact of a militarised Christian theocracy on pre-Christian practices. This isn’t a region about which I know much, so I found this all quite fascinating. The Treaty of Christburg of 1249 required the conversion of the local population to Christianity, and archaeological findings do give credence to at least some of that text’s presentation of indigenous religious practices. Horses are often found buried by themselves in large circular pits, covered in dolomite slabs, in the region’s cemeteries—perhaps reflecting a belief that the deceased rode horses into the afterlife. The fortified monasteries built by the Teutonic Order incorporated wood from a number of 200-year-old oaks—far older than the kinds of trees usually used in construction, making this look like a calculated archaeological insult.

 

“The Permeable Precinct: Late Medieval Monastic Identities: Bordesley and Beyond”
Grenville Astill (University of Reading)

This paper examined the claims for a kind of monastic Indian summer in early sixteenth century England, based on the prevalence of rebuilding projects at that time. Astill used the example of the Cistercian Bordesley Abbey in Worcestershire (excavated 1968-97) to push this date back to around 1400. The abbey saw a number of changes around this time, including the construction of a new, arcaded cloister which Astill reads as an attempt to reinvigorate a fragmenting monastic community.

 

Saturday

6a013486c64e2e970c01a3fd05ea21970bSession 373: Beyond Medieval Women and Power (A Roundtable Discussion)

Panellists: Constance Berman (University of Iowa); Lois L. Huneycutt (University of Missouri–Columbia); Marie Kelleher (California State University Long Beach); Kathy M. Krause (University of Missouri–Kansas City); and Elena Woodacre (University of Winchester).

 

Session 385: The Rules of Isabelle of France: An English Translation with Introductory Study by Sean Field (A Roundtable Discussion)

Panellists: Kate E. Bush (Catholic University of America); Holly Grieco (Siena College); Anne Lester (University of Colorado–Boulder); and Joseph McAlhany (Carthage College).

 

Session 452: Premonstratensian Houses: Their Foundations, Socio-Economic and Cultural History

“The Foundation of Notre-Dame de Beauport Abbey: Myths and Realities”
Claude Evans (University of Toronto–Mississauga)

Beauport was the lone Premonstratensian abbey in Brittany, founded ca. 1202/3. Evans sought both to tease apart the house’s earliest history and to look at the ways in which the canons had deliberately mythologised that history. Beauport was established in a time of conflict between Angevins and Plantagenets, and in an area which nurtured a distinct form of Celtic-inflected Christianity; by identifying itself with earlier monasteries in the region, which had themselves claimed Irish roots, the Premonstratensians were able to establish themselves more securely in the area.

 

“Les chanoines de Beauport et la société bretonne au moyen âge”
Cédric Jeanneau (Université de Bretagne Occidentale)

Jeanneau’s presentation took the story of Beauport a stage further, analyzing the way in which the house was part of a dense monastic network. Located near the boundaries of three bishoprics, and given the charge of a number of parish churches, Beauport played a key role in solidifying the Gregorian reforms in Brittany. Jeanneau highlighted in particular the ways in which Beauport gained the support of local seigneurial families, and the ways in which it invested in regional infrastructure such as mills.

 

6a013486c64e2e970c01a511b59c50970c“An Archaeological and Archival Reconstruction of the Baroque Retable at the Abbey of Beauport”
Harriet Sonne de Torrens (University of Toronto–Mississauga)

The panel’s last speaker leaped forward somewhat in time, analysing how the community at Beauport rebuilt in the seventeenth century in the aftermath of the devastating Wars of Religion. Using the extant ruins, some construction contracts and comparisons with other contemporary Premonstratensian structures, Harriet Sonne de Torrens offered a reconstruction (see picture right) of the now-destroyed Baroque retable altar commissioned by the canons. Its scale gives a glimpse of a community very much invested in its own reinvigoration.

 

Sunday

Session 509: The Afterlives of Medieval Women

“Hiding in Plain Sight: Early Medieval Women and Modern Biases”
Hailey LaVoy (University of Notre Dame)

We’re used to thinking of medieval men as the ones who work (consciously or otherwise) to marginalise and make obscure medieval women—but, as Hailey LaVoy pointed out in this paper, modern scholars are often just as guilty of this. The decisions of scholars who publish primary sources often relegate women’s writings to a secondary rank based on an unfair and gendered logic—the letters of Einhard are known from a single manuscript, but are famous among historians of the early medieval period. The letters of Theuthilde, abbess of Remiremont (ca. 825-40) and correspondent of Louis the Pious and the Empress Judith, among others, are hardly known even to specialists—because the single manuscript copy of her writings mean she “must have been” a marginal figure to her contemporaries. This drew groans from the audience, though not as big as those which greeted LaVoy’s discussion of a recently-discovered, female-authored letter in the archives of Verona. Despite the letter being written by one Hirmindrut (Ermentrude), an “emptrix”, modern scholars have unanimously referred to Hirmindrut as a man. Hiding in plain sight indeed!

 

“The Lives and Afterlives of the Liègeois Mulieres Religiosae
Barbara Zimbalist (University of Texas–El Paso)

The vitae of this paper’s eponymous women have come into wide circulation over the past few decades as scholars have begun to explore the particular religious nexus which they occupied. Zimbalist had a two-pronged focus here: first the texts themselves, which betray a far more collaborative, female-inclusive mode of authorship than has previously been appreciated; second, the ways in which the texts were used in the later medieval and early modern period. Many of the vitae, for example, survive in late medieval manuscript collections whose composition show that women’s sanctity was seen as important in many ways because of its distinct local nature. In the seventeenth century, a number of the vitae were reprinted in collections which were using to promote both the Counter-Reformation and Hapsburg imperialism in the Low Countries.

 

“Julian of Norwich, Medieval Nonsense in the Early English Enlightenment”
Vickie Larsen (University of Michigan–Flint)

Vickie Larsen’s paper also explored the ways in which women’s writing/voices have been appropriated by later (male) writers as a means of working through contemporary anxieties. The first printed edition of Julian of Norwich’s works appeared in 1670 (edited by the fabulously named Serenus Cressy) as a means of encouraging a mass English return to Catholicism. This was, of course, a nightmare scenario for Protestant preachers, and Julian was variously hailed as a model of female sanctity and denigrated as a hysteric. One Scottish minister even wrote some hilariously terrible doggerel about Julian—ironically, about how poor her prose was.

 

“A Desperate Housewife, a Cat Lady, and a Witch: Afterlives of Medieval Women in Heidi Schreck’s Creature
Tara Williams (Oregon State University)

I was unaware of this, but there is a recent play—Heidi Schreck’s “Creature”—about the life of Margery Kempe, a re-imagining which seeks to flesh out her lifestory and provides her with what sound like very energetic (and funny!) interactions with Julian of Norwich. It was so interesting to hear about this play in light of the previous papers in the panel, as Tara Williams not only discussed how Schreck fleshed out some elements of Margery’s life, but how many modern reviewers of the play characterise Margery in misogynist language which is very familiar to medievalists. A woman acting in non-normative ways is still unsettling, disruptive, uncomfortable. Plus ça change?

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