Online Lecture: 2021 Anselm Lecture – Practices of Writing in England, 1050–1250, Professor Elaine Treharne, Thursday 8th April, 6pm (BST)

This talk will follow one line of research attempting to date a bilingual manuscript from the second half of the twelfth century. From exploring the aspect, duct, and shapes of individual letters, the study moves outward to consider the grade and formality of later twelfth and earlier thirteenth-century manuscripts and charters, before focusing on twelfth-century commentary hands. As the thread of research unravels, the issues of scribal training and professional writing become significant, involving discussion of Leofric of Exeter, Saints Anselm, Thomas Becket and Hugh of Lincoln, the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, and a host of other writers and scholars both past and present. In the final analysis, she asks: what uses does palaeography serve? What do we really know about writing practices in England in the central Middle Ages? And while access to digitised handwritten materials is a boon, what else can digital tools and methods now do to advance scholarship in medieval manuscript studies?

To join the seminar, please DM @MEMS_UKC on Twitter for the Zoom link and password. Please email E.Guerry@Kent.ac.uk with any further questions.

Job: Junior Professor ‘Economic History of the Middle Ages’, University of Mannheim – Deadline: 30th April 2021

The School of Humanities at the University of Mannheim offers a position as Junior Professor (W1) “Economic History of the Middle Ages”

The future holder of the position is expected to cover Economic History of the Pre-Modern Period at the University of Mannheim in both research and teaching.

The duties of the professorship will include:

* conducting courses (4 / 6 teaching hours (LVS); as German and English are both languages of instruction, proficiency in both languages is required) and examinations and supervising bachelor’s and master’s theses as well as doctoral dissertations.

* raising funds for and managing a research and/or collaborative project in Economic History of the Middle Ages.

The School of Humanities offers:

*international cooperation opportunities in the context of existing networks, a working group on Economic History of the Pre-Modern Period, interdisciplinary university-wide co- operation in research and teaching as well as collaboration with regional and international archives. The currently running DFG project “Microfinance and market participation” is to be continued in the next phase with a focus on historical sustainability research (in social, eco- logical, and economic terms).

*a well-functioning team, digital infrastructures for economic and social data, support from the research department as well as assistance in the promotion of early-stage researchers at the University of Mannheim.We are looking for a dynamic personality exhibiting the qualifications and potential for a research-oriented career in academia. A qualified doctoral dissertation in the field of medie- val history or economic history is required. Experience in teaching and/or raising third-party funds (collaboration in relevant research projects or proposal writing) and/or in the organi- zation of conferences, workshops, summer schools etc. is highly desired.

The eligibility criteria are stipulated in section 51 (2) and (3) of the act on the higher educa- tion institutions in the Land of Baden-Württemberg (Landeshochschulgesetz, LHG). In addi- tion to a completed higher education degree and proof of an outstanding doctorate, peda- gogical aptitude as well as the qualification for assuming the position of junior professor, which is to be proven by additional scientific achievements, are expected. Provided that the general professional requirements are met, the successful applicant will be appointed as junior professor with civil servant status for a fixed term of three years. Following a positive interim evaluation in accordance with the statutory provisions (see section 51 (7) and (8) LHG), the appointment can be extended to a total of six years.

The University of Mannheim places great importance on comprehensive guidance of its stu- dents and therefore expects professors to be present at the university for their students. Moreover, the University of Mannheim expects the successful applicant to relocate to Mannheim or the greater area in order to become an active member of the university com- munity. The University of Mannheim is committed to increasing the quota of women in re- search and teaching and thus encourages women with adequate qualifications to apply. Ap- plications of disabled applicants are given preferential consideration in the event of equal qualification.

Please submit your application online at sekretariat@phil.uni-mannheim.de (reference “Bewerbung W1-Wirtschaftsgeschichte Mittelalter”) as one pdf file (file size: max. 2 MB). Your application should include the following documents: cover letter, CV, list of publica- tions, certificates and records, teaching evaluation, brief description of your future research project.

If you cannot submit your application online, please send the above-mentioned documents to:

University of Mannheim
Dean of the School of Humanities Prof. Dr. Philipp Gassert, 68131 Mannheim
E-mail address: sekretariat@phil.uni-mannheim.de.

For more information, please contact annette.kehnel@uni-mannheim.de.
All applications received before 30 April 2021 will be given full consideration.

Data protection: If you apply by e-mail, please note that protection of confidential data can- not be guaranteed as unauthorized third parties could gain access to unencrypted e-mails during transmission.
Please find detailed information on your rights regarding the collection of personal data according to article 13 of the General Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO) on the University of Mannheim website. (https://www.uni-mannheim.de/universitaet/stellenanzeigen/datenschutz-bei-bewerbungen/)

Conference: London Medieval Society – Medieval Life Cycles, Zoom, Saturday 22nd May 2021, 10:20-14:30 BST

A belated celebration of the London Medieval Society at 75 years, LMS is proud to announce their third online colloquium, where they will be discussing the human life cycle from embryo to the grave, and beyond.

The programme of the day is as follows:

10.20 Welcome and Introduction 

10.30 Isabel Davis (Birkbeck, University of London) – Like a Hare in its Form: Embryology in Medieval Saints’ Lives

11.00 Ben Parsons (University of Leicester) – All Boys Once: Medieval Londoners at School in William Fitzstephen’s ‘Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae’ (c. 1174)

11.30 Break 

11.45 Jeremy Goldberg (University of York) – The Time of their Lives? Adolescence to Adulthood in Late Medieval England

12.15 Lunch

1.00 Jo Edge (University of Manchester) – Walking the Tightrope: Learned Physicians and the Prediction of Death in the Later Middle Ages

1.30 Marianne Wilson (University of York) – Peacock Feathers and Pater Nosters: The Post-Mortem Commemorative Identity of Sir Thomas Burgh (c. 1430–1496) 

2.00 Round Table (all speakers)

2.30 End of Event

Tickets are free of charge. A link to the Zoom meeting will be sent via email.

Register for your tickets here.

Online Lecture: ‘Hybrid’, ‘transcultural’, ‘eclectic’? Some thoughts on conceptualising the art of the Latin East, Dr Michalis Olympios, April 5th 2021,19:30 (EET)

55th Public Lecture Series | Spring Semester 2021 | ARU 1991-2021: Celebrating 30 Years of Archaeological Research

The Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus invites you to an online ZOOM public lecture on Monday, April 5th 2021, at 19:30 (EET) by Dr Michalis Olympios Associate Professor, History of Western Art

Summary:

Modern historiography on the art of the late medieval and early modern Eastern Mediterranean has repeatedly bemoaned the nationalist and colonialist bias with which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship approached the visual culture of the multicultural and multiconfessional societies of the Levantine Crusader states, Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus, Frankish Greece, Venetian Crete and other polities of the Latin East. Beginning in the latter half of the previous century, critical theorists and social scientists have provided art historians with a series of novel conceptual models, which have allowed the field to move beyond its erstwhile preoccupation with ‘purity’ of style and form – and, by extension, of race and ethnicity – towards a more fragmented, pluralistic and comprehensive view of artistic production in this culturally diverse region. Though the dust has far from settled on these developments, the present talk will attempt to take stock of recent advances and offer some thoughts on the ongoing quest to develop an apposite analytical framework for the study of the art of the Latin East.

All Monday lectures are free and open to the public, but registration is required for access to the Zoom lecture.

For registration, please, click here: https://ucy.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvd-GopjoiHtG0fdJHxFc18F5hm_-CXcf8

New Publication: Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art by Robert Couzin

Robert Couzin’s Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art is the first in-depth study of handedness, position, and direction in the visual culture of Europe and Byzantium from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Heretofore largely unnoticed or ignored, the pre-eminence of the right and lapses or intentional departures from that norm in medieval imagery are relevant to such major themes as iconography, visuality, reception, narrative, form, gender, production, and patronage. The author’s investigation of right and left in visual culture is informed by modern experimental research on laterality and contextualized within prevailing theological doctrines and socio-cultural practices.

Illustrations in the text are complemented by hundreds more made available on Brill’s Arkyves platform here.

See inside the book.

Readership

Scholars and students of early Christian and medieval art, as well as historians of other periods or of medieval culture generally, and researchers in laterality interested in its artistic manifestations.

Online Lecture: Art in Cathedrals: Norwich Cathedral – New Perspectives in Medieval Sculpture, Rob Hawkins (Zoom, 15th April 2021 7pm)

This is the first in a new series of online lectures, Art in Cathedrals, organised by Art+Christianity. Please follow this link to book your tickets.

All talks are fully illustrated and begin at 7pm fortnightly on Thursday evenings, beginning on April 15th. A full programme of events is listed below.

Rob Hawkin’s will discuss the 15th-century bosses from Norwich Cathedral cloister, posing big questions concerning pictorial space, point of view, and the assumptions we make when we approach pre-modern sculpture.

The elaborately sculpted vault bosses of Norwich Cathedral Cloister (built 1297-1430) are one of the glories of English medieval sculpture. The later bosses (1410-1430) are particularly virtuosic in their distortion of pictorial space: straight lines are rendered as curves; cuboids are radically warped; figures twist through crazy angles, each boss forming a bulbous hemisphere of intricate narrative. Visiting the cloister it becomes obvious that no single viewing position will suffice to make any one boss comprehensible: their curved surfaces demand that the viewer move in iterative orbits, gradually compiling an image of the whole scene in the mind’s eye.  

Most of our art-historical language for discussing ‘perspective’ and ‘pictorial space’ comes from our study of the Italian Renaissance, and is bound up with the supposed norm of rigid, geometric perspective. This paradigm assumes an ideal static observer. We are much less well equipped to discuss sculptural style, which tends to assume an embodied viewer moving in real space. Medieval theologians who discussed point of view and perspective, however, may offer some cognate concepts as we try to engage with these sculptures in less anachronistic ways. 

This talk presents some findings from new research into these fascinating pieces of sculpture. It makes use of photogrammetric modelling undertaken in the cloisters, which offers a way of reproducing the bosses in all their three-dimensionality in order to better communicate the complexity of their forms. We will also consider some theological connections both medieval and modern, using the bosses as a prompt to think about perspective theologically, asking what it might mean to have a notion of perspective fit for discussing our lived experience of the world.  

Rob Hawkins is an ordinand at Westcott House, reading the theology Tripos. Before training for ordination he studied and wrote about art history, completing an MPhil and PhD at King’s College, Cambridge under the supervision of Paul Binski, on questions of sculptural space and style in medieval craftsmanship. He enjoys making things, gardening, and thinking and writing about the place where theology, art, and matter meet.

For information about other events in this cycle, click here.

Programme:

Norwich Cathedral: New perspectives in medieval sculpture
by Rob Hawkins, art historian and ordinand, 15 April, 7pm 
A discussion of the 15th-century bosses from Norwich Cathedral cloister looking closely at sculptural space, point of view and style in medieval craftsmanship.

Coventry Cathedral: Icon and Inspiration 
by Alexandra Epps, art guide and lecturer, 29 April, 7pm 
The extraordinary story of the rebuilding of the Cathedral as a symbol of peace and reconciliation and its inspiring commitment to the modern.

Salford RC Cathedral: A Hidden Identity
by James Crowley, architectural historian, 13 May, 7pm 
How modern conservation and a traditional approach to re-ordering might re-establish the splendour of this highly significant building and the identity of the Catholic community.

Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral: conceived in the round 
by Dominic Wilkinson, Principal Lecturer in Architect at Liverpool John Moores University, 27 May, 7pm 
Exploring the integrated conception of art and architecture envisaged by Sir Frederick Gibberd and the artists he worked with.

St David’s Cathedral: Teiliau Tyddewi – The Tiles of St Davids
by Martin Crampin, artist and art historian, 10 June, 7pm
A journey from the pattern and imagery of the late medieval ceramic tiles at St Davids Cathedral into Gothic Revival reproduction, interpretation and abstraction.

Online Lecture: ‘Auro, argento, aere perennius: Byzantine Art in & through Coins 4th–15th Centuries’ with Dr Cécile Morrisson, 9 April 2021, 12pm (EST)

Join Yale for their up-coming Lectures in Late Antique and Byzantine Art and Architecture series. In this online lecture, Dr Cécile Morrisson (CNRS and Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres) presents ‘Auro, argento, aere perennius: Byzantine Art in & through Coins 4th–15th Centuries’.

Respondent: Benjamin Dieter R. Hellings, Yale

This event is free, but you must register in advance here.

Post-Doctoral Fellowship: ‘Demarginalizing Medieval Africa: Images, Texts, and Identity in Early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270-1527)’, University of Hamburg, deadline 15 April 2021

The applicant shall conduct research on the manuscript and literary culture of Ethiopia in the frame of the project “Demarginalizing medieval Africa: Images, texts, and identity in early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270-1527)”. The project intends to shed new light on the art, history, and culture of the Ethiopian Empire during a period going from the rise of a new dynasty which claimed to descend from the biblical King Solomon in 1270 to its near collapse in 1527, through a series of collaborations with libraries and institutions across the world, and to set up a platform for exchange between scholars working on the history of manuscript illumination – with a particular focus on the Oriental Orthodox traditions of the Armenian, Coptic, and the Syriac worlds – and on the Christian arts of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

For more details on the project, visit their website. Go to the University of Hamburg website for the specification, applicant requirements, and details of how to apply.

Online Conference: Clarendon Palace Conference 2021, 10-11 April 2021

A two-day free Zoom conference to celebrate recent excavations at the medieval palace of Clarendon, Wiltshire.

Dubbed ‘the most important medieval secular building in Wiltshire’, the medieval royal palace of Clarendon is a unique time capsule, occupied from the Norman Conquest but abandoned by 1500.

This conference will showcase some results of the first truly archaeological and scientific modern exploratory excavations, which took place in June-July 2019 enabled by Historic England & resourced by the Heritage Fund.

This event is free but booking for the conference is essential.
Each day of the conference must be booked separately.

Day 1: Saturday 10 April 2021

Chair: Mandy Richardson

09.30-10.00 Cindy Wood. ‘Weeding and Writing: the work of Friends of Clarendon Palace’

10.00-10.30 Tom James. ‘Clarendon: Why Another Dig?’

10.30-10.40 BREAK

10.40-11.10 James Wright. ‘Parallels at King’s Clipstone’

11.10-11.40 Lorraine Mepham. ‘Clarendon’s Pottery and Other Ceramic Finds’

11.40-12.10 Chris Woolgar. ‘Feasting and the elite in late medieval England’

Booking for Day 1 via Eventbrite

Day 2: Sunday 11 April 2021

Chair: Cindy Wood

09.30-10.00 Jamie Armstrong. ‘Excavations at Clarendon Palace, 2019’

10.00-10.30 Naomi Sykes. ‘Excavations 2019: The animal bones’

10.30-10.40 BREAK

10.40-11.10 Mandy Richardson. ‘Leaps & bounds: hunting in Clarendon Forest and Park’

11.10-11.40 Mary South. ‘Medieval merriment at Clarendon and elsewhere’

11.40-12.00 Tom James. Summing up and close.

Booking for Day 2 via Eventbrite

New Publication: Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, by Verena Krebs

This book explores why Ethiopian kings pursued long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe in the late Middle Ages. It traces the history of more than a dozen embassies dispatched to the Latin West by the kings of Solomonic Ethiopia, a powerful Christian kingdom in the medieval Horn of Africa. Drawing on sources from Europe, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it examines the Ethiopian kings’ motivations for sending out their missions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – and argues that a desire to acquire religious treasures and foreign artisans drove this early intercontinental diplomacy. Moreover, the Ethiopian initiation of contacts with the distant Christian sphere of Latin Europe appears to have been intimately connected to a local political agenda of building monumental ecclesiastical architecture in the North-East African highlands, and asserted the Ethiopian rulers’ claim of universal kingship and rightful descent from the biblical king Solomon. Shedding new light on the self-identity of a late medieval African dynasty at the height of its power, this book challenges conventional narratives of African-European encounters on the eve of the so-called ‘Age of Exploration’.

Verena Krebs is Professor for Medieval Cultural Realms and their Entanglements at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, where she also co-directs the Bochum Centre for Mediterranean Studies. She holds a bi-national PhD from the universities of Konstanz, Germany, and Mekelle, Ethiopia; her primary research focus is on the late medieval Solomonic Kingdom of Ethiopia and its connections to the wider Mediterranean region. 

Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe is published by Palgrave MacMillan.