Tuesday, January 29, 5:30pm — Campbell 158

The Body in the Map, the World Embodied: Reflections on the Medieval Figuration of Space

Marcia Kupfer author of The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town (PennState University Press, 2003).

Wednesday, February 13, 6:30pm — Cabell Hall 138

Sociolinguistics in Twelfth-Century Spain: three kinds of text

Roger Wright, University of Liverpool

Friday, February 22, 2:30 PM — 1 Dawson's Row

Acknowledgment and Confession in Cymbeline

Sarah Beckwith, Marcello Lotti Professor of English, Duke University
Sarah Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing. She is particularly interested in middle English religious writing in its fully cultural dimensions and in the intersections of writing and religious practice. She has published on Margery Kempe, the literature of anchoritism, medieval theatre and sacramental culture, in numerous essay collections and journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly and Exemplaria. Her book, Christ's Body: Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing was published by Routledge in 1993. Her book, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi was published by the University of Chicago Press in the summer of 2001. She is currently working on a book on medieval and Renaissance drama centering on Shakespeare and the transformation of sacramental culture. The book is tentatively entitled The Mind's Retreat from the Face.
Click here for a Dawson's Row map
Sponsored by the English Department Medieval Colloquium.

Wednesday, April 2, 12:00pm — Maury 110

Lunchtime Works-in-Progress Colloquium

Roger Wright a distinguished visiting medievalist on Grounds this year who teaches at the University of Liverpool. Professor Wright specializes in the relationship between Latin and vernacular literatures and languages, particularly Spanish, in the European Middle Ages. He has written on early Ibero-Romance, the "sociophilology" of Late Latin, bilingualism and diglossia in medieval Spain, and many other topics. For us he will deliver a paper titled "The relationship between ballad and epic in Medieval Spain."

The Program in Medieval Studies will be furnishing a Take Away lunch (sandwiches, chips, drinks) for the first twenty attendees who RSVP. If you can make the colloquium and would like lunch, please contact Gabriel Haley at gabrielhaley@gmail.com, letting him know your sandwich/drink preferences, such as they are (and particularly about any dietary restrictions).

Wednesday, April 9, 3:00 PM — English Department Faculty Lounge, Bryan Hall

Sex and the City: Sacred and Social Epistemologies in the Chester Slaughter of the Innocent

Theresa Coletti is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Her books include Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory (Cornell, 1988); Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Pennsylvania, 2004); and an edition of The Digby Mary Magdalene forthcoming from TEAMS (Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University).

Abstract: The biblical story of the Slaughter of Innocents recounted in Matthew’s gospel provided late medieval English urban communities the opportunity to gaze upon a symbolic image of social and political relationships in which they might discern their own likeness. Vernacular dramas on the Slaughter appropriate themes and tropes associated with medieval interpretations and celebrations of the Innocents’ feast to critique social and material categories of late medieval urban life. This paper examines the Slaughter of the Innocents in the Chester mystery cycle, the most provocative of the English plays on this subject. In the Chester Slaughter, dramatic reflexivity involves an elaborate comic subplot in which mothers of the Innocents struggle verbally and physically with soldiers of Herod seeking to murder their children. In one such contest, a mulier attempts to thwart the soldier who threatens to attack her child if it has a “pintell” (penis); the woman insists that the child has “two holes under the tayle.” Her challenge puts into play a series of substitutions that focus on questions of social and sexual identity, exposing their intersections with power and knowledge. Analyzing the web of social and symbolic relationships signified by the mulier’s act, this paper contends that the challenge of counting holes under the tail encodes an anxious critique of the major categories of difference on which civic authority and social structure were based.

Reception to follow

Friday, April 18, 2:00 PM — The Gibson Room, Cocke Hall

Medieval Studies Program's 3rd Annual Robert L. Kellogg Lecture

Myth in the Middle Ages: Fulgentius and his Later Readers

Gregory Hays, Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, has published numerous articles and reviews on Greek poetry and later Latin literature, as well as a translation of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. His research interests center on late antique and medieval Latin, and he is currently finishing a project involving the fifth-century African mythographer Fulgentius, the subject of his Kellogg Lecture.

Annual Medieval Studies End-of-the-Year Reception to Follow

Friday, April 25, 5:00-6:30pm — Cabell Hall 138

The Marriage of Philology and Huitzilopochtli: On Medieval Christian Iconography and Mexican Pictorial Catechisms

Barbara De Marco, Editor, Romance Philology
When the Franciscans first arrived in Mexico in the early 16th century, the first and fundamental obstacle to their program of catechesis was language itself. Pictorial catechisms were one means of overcoming that obstacle. Pictorial representations of the fundamental texts and tenets of the faith (the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, the Credo, some formula of confession, the Ten Commandments, the seven Sacraments, and so on), were sketched into small, portable notebooks. Extant examples of these catechisms are relatively few in number, modest in dimension, and rudimentary in technique. Nonetheless, they are precious witnesses to the incorporation of Christian European iconography into indigenous narrative practices.

The presentation will be heavily illustrated by a selection of images drawn, in turn, from several different pictorial catechisms, from medieval European prototypes, and from central Mexican pictorial codices. Some parallel evidence from the art and architecture of the early Franciscan conventos will also serve as a point of reference. Textual evidence of catechetical practices will be drawn from the testimonies of early Franciscan missionaries and chroniclers, among them, Pedro de Gante, Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, and Bernardino de Sahagún. The discussion of these materials will focus on the extent to which any evidence of iconographic syncretism in the pictorial catechisms may color our interpretations of the encounter between late medieval Europe and early colonial Mexico.