From ASNC doctoral student Myriah Williams:
The
sun was out in Dublin last week, as were a good number of Celticists hoping to
enlighten or be enlightened on the subject of Genre in Medieval Celtic
Literature. The School of Celtic Studies
at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies hosted the colloquium, organized
by doctoral student Nicole Volmering. The aim of the conference was to open a
dialogue about the role of genre, both within modern scholarship in the field
and within the minds of medieval authors and editors. The need for such a discussion was evidenced
by the terrific turnout at the conference, with a crowd composed of both new
and very familiar faces alike.
Proceedings
began on Friday afternoon, with the first session on cycles and cyclification
in Irish literature, specifically in the Fenian lays and in Acallam Bec (‘The
Little Colloquy’). The papers provided a
good start to a good conference, but in retrospect perhaps they should have
been split, with one paper in the last session, to bring the whole thing
full-circle... The half-day was rounded
out with an analysis of the sub-genre of tecosc (‘teaching’) and its
relation to kingship, and a consideration of the role of women in both saints
lives and epic narrative. Feasting as
befits Celtic scholars of course concluded the first day’s festivities.
Saturday
presented a full day of papers, four sessions worth in fact. Continuing on from Friday’s theme, three out
of the four were focused on further Irish material. Concerning aspects of modern scholarship, we
heard about editing practices and the theory and application of genre
methodology onto medieval texts. In
other papers, we were asked to put ourselves into the place of medieval
scribes, to question how they were organizing and categorizing their texts, or
into the minds of medieval readers, to consider how they were processing them.
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| This'll be worth a few bob one day: conference programme signed by the likes of Fergus Kelly, Liam Breatnach, Greg Toner, David Stifter, David Dumville, Jenny Rowland, Lizzie Boyle, Barry Lewis, David Callander and Geraldine Parsons (a few ASNCs past and present in there...) |
The
first session on Saturday, however, was concerned with Welsh material, and I am
glad to have been a part of it. Our own
ASNC David Callander began the morning with a discussion of narrative verse as
a medieval Welsh literary genre. In his
paper, David asked us to reconsider the traditional view that medieval Welsh
verse is non-narrative and, having made the argument for narrative verse in
Welsh, considered the implications for how the verse might then be regrouped
for a discussion of genre. This
conclusion provided a nice segue into my own paper, where I dealt with issues
that have been present in the definition of ymddiddanau or dialogue
poems as a genre. I sought to clarify
the genre by refining the definition, and in doing so also to highlight the
potential danger of trying to explain inconsistencies in the texts in a way not
supported by their manuscript context.
Barry Lewis, former ASNC and present researcher at the Centre for
Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (who will be giving a lecture at the Graduate
Seminar on 25 November – mark your calendars!), concluded our session by
reminding us about the importance of analyzing the categories into which we put
medieval texts. He addressed the factors
that modern editors consider in distinguishing between religious and secular
verse, and argued that such distinctions would not necessarily have been made
by the medieval people who were dealing with these texts.
Questioning
the validity of our modern editing practices is indeed a topic that ran through
a number of papers, and was perhaps one of the most important issues to take a
away from the conference for further thought.
Though the matter of genre can certainly stand to further discussion and
debate, the colloquium was productive for raising the profile of the
topic. Hopefully in time we will begin
to see an expansion of critical thinking on the matter of genre in medieval
Celtic literature.
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| And there's always time for a visit to the National Museum of Ireland. Pictured is the Ardagh Chalice, possibly eighth century, from Co. Limerick. |
