Colloquium Report for 'Converting the Isles'

Dr Brittany Schorn writes:

The ‘Converting the Isles’ Research Network held its fifth and final colloquium in Cambridge on September 19–21.  The theme of ‘The Isles and the Wider World’ was fitting, as we sought to situate our findings on Insular conversion in a broader geographical, chronological and disciplinary context and to look forward to new directions for future research.  That said, the work of the Network is far from finished.  Two edited volumes are well under way.  These will incorporate material from not only the colloquia, but also the special lectures and Leeds IMC sessions sponsored by the Network. Together with the website, these volumes will represent the most visible legacy of the Network.

Another part of the Network’s legacy is less tangible, but certainly no less valuable.  The ‘Converting the Isles’ colloquia were designed to facilitate discussion between scholars who work in adjacent but not always intersecting fields.  This has led to productive conversations and new collaborations that will advance the discipline in years to come. 

‘The Isles and the Wider World’ left many of us inspired by new questions as well as new answers. The Right Honourable Rowan Williams opened the colloquium by posing the question of what we, and medieval writers like Bede, actually understand by ‘conversion’.  Chris Wickham’s keynote lecture then articulated especially well the complexities inherent in the subject and the advantages and potential pitfalls of a comparative approach.

The second keynote lecture, by Jean-Michel Picard and Sébastien Bully, used recent archaeological discoveries at Luxeuil and Annegray to question the reliability of hagiography and illuminate literary tropes. The other ten speakers presented papers which ranged widely across the conceptual and historical phenomenon of conversion: from converts from Islam to Christianity through to anthropological considerations of religious conversion in the modern world; and from liturgical and literary witnesses to conversion in early medieval northern Europe, to archaeological traces of paganism in southwest Germany.

A full programme remains available on the Network’s website (http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/conversion/), where podcasts of papers from the conference are now accessible, along with podcasts from past colloquia and other resources for the study of conversion which will continue to be developed and updated. News about forthcoming and past events can be found on our homepage.  Please do get in touch with Brittany Schorn (bs321@cam.ac.uk), Roy Flecher (roy.flechner@ucd.ie) or Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (mnm21@cam.ac.uk) with any questions, comments or suggestions for the website or if you wish to be added to our mailing list.

Conference report: 'Converting the Landscape'

Dr Brittany Schorn writes:

The ‘Converting the Isles Network’, based in the Department and supported by the Leverhulme Trust, held its fourth colloquium on the 22^nd and 23^rd of March at Bangor University. Despite somewhat hazardous travel conditions due to an unexpected freeze, all participants managed to make it to what turned out to be an extremely productive gathering. The subject, ‘Coverting the Landscape’, was considered from the perspective of different regions and methodologies, and led to an extremely productive and stimulating discussion of fundamental questions about the nature of Christian conversion.

The colloquium began with a session on burial evidence and problems of interpretation. Elizabeth O’Brien considered the variety of burial practices in early Christian Ireland, focusing in particular on the practice of inserting burials into ‘ferta’. She stressed that this could be read as a political rather than a religious statement, as it provided a means by which important people and newcomers could be incorporated into the existing landscape. Adrián Maldonado provided a fascinatingly nuanced discussion of Pictish barrow types, highlighting regional differences and also pointing out the difficulty in identifying the influence of Christianity itself with certainty. 

In the second session of the morning, Tomás Ó Carragáin and Morten Søvsø spoke on the difficulties involved in identifying ecclesiastical landscapes. Tomás Ó Carragáin examined the problem of how scholars can quantify the density of churches in the landscape in relation to secular sites, pointing out methodological problems that may significantly skew the broad pattern. Morten Søvsø spoke on recent and ongoing excavations at the church-site in Ribe, likely the oldest church in Denmark, which have important implications for our understanding of the history of the church in Viking-Age Denmark. 

Friday afternoon Nancy Edwards led a freezing, but fascinating, excursion to view inscribed stones on Anglesey. Moving through the southwestern part of the island, we took a chronological tour of the development of these inscriptions.

Our discussion of stone monuments continued as the subject of the opening session of the second day of the colloquium. Meggen Gondek discussed the distribution of the different classes of Pictish symbol stones, focusing in particular on a series of sites in Aberdeenshire, demonstrating what they can reveal as evidence of changing religious practice. Cecilia Ljung then examined a phase of early Christian stone grave monuments in Sweden, dated to a very limited period in the 11^th century. She considered their relationship to the already significant runic memorial tradition and using Västergötland and Øland as case studies, stressed regional differences in the nature of the church and conversion.

The next session, on technology as a tool of conversion, looked at the way that the conversion affected agricultural organisation and production. Thomas McErlean described the revolutionary changes that accompanied the introduction of mechanical mills at Nendrum, as well as improvements to the exploitation of fishing, forest clearing, and agricultural organisation that monasteries brought. Gabor Thomas then looked at the relationship between monastic foundations and intensification of rural production in Kent, taking the case study of Lyminge: a monastery which is currently the subject of a major interedisciplinary research project.   

Rory Naismith continued the theme of technology and economic impact through examination of monetization in relation to Christianization. He examined a series of areas across northern Europe, in each of which coinage enjoyed a different relationship with religious development. Finally, Lesley Abrams closed the colloquium’s papers with a review of the fascinating question of when and how the Vikings of Dublin converted to Christianity. Several important questions emerged of how conversion is to be defined and contextualized, which led effectively into the closing discussion.

The colloquium ended with a lively roundtable discussion of questions such as: is it possible to distinguish belief from the institution of the Church in the surviving evidence? What is the minimum requirement to identify as Christian and how did missionaries perceive their goals? And to what extent did economic change follow ideology?

The Network now looks forward to our final colloquium to be held in Cambridge on the 19^th–21^st of September 2013. The subject will be ‘The Isles and the Wider World’ and confirmed speakers include Rowan Williams, Bernhard Maier, Chris Wickham, James Palmer, Sven Meeder, Ingrid Rembold, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, Jörn Staecker, Stanislaw Rosik, Jean-Michel Picard, Sébastian Bully, Krisztina Szilagyi, and Tomas Sundnes Dronen. A full programme will shortly be available from our website here, along with registration information.

Conference report: 35th California Celtic Conference 2013

Myriah Williams, a doctoral student in ASNC, writes:

As we gathered on the patio of Stephens Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, flying champagne corks and a cake aptly decorated with the Welsh draig goch reminded attendees of the California Celtic Conference (March 15–17, 2013) that this year marked the event’s thirty-fifth birthday.  Giving a small speech, organizer Dr Eve Sweetser remarked that as a student assisting at the first annual meeting of the conference back in 1979, she never expected to be running the show thirty-five years later.  Yet she was, and this is a testament to the passion for Celtic Studies felt by the staff and students of UC Berkeley, and equally of UCLA, where the conference is held on alternate years.  It is also a testament to the success of the conference itself, which this year hosted speakers not only from California but from Massachusetts, Canada, England, Wales and Ireland; no small feat for a program so far removed from the native homelands of its subject.

Festivities began earlier in the morning not with champagne, however, but with tea, coffee and an engaging paper by Dr Brynley Roberts, Emeritus National Librarian of Wales.  In ‘A Web of Welsh Bruts’, he illustrated his attempts at untangling the transmission of Brut y Brenhinedd, and reminded us all of the difficulty of such a task.  Transmission of a different sort was also highlighted by Roberts’ presence at the conference, for he had been a mentor to Berkeley’s own Dr Annalee Rejhon during her time in Aberystwyth, and it was his method of teaching Medieval Welsh that she passed on to her own students.  Among these students was Georgia Henley, currently a PhD student at Harvard University and a former ASNC, whose paper ‘The Origin of the Welsh Chronicle Brut y Tywysogion: Questions of Translation, Transmission and Adaptation’ arose from a conversation that she once had with Roberts.  In her paper Henley presented us with a comparison of several Welsh versions of the Brut, as well as a Latin chronicle, and inspired a lively question session regarding issues of variant textual traditions as opposed to editing at the scribal level.

Following the Bruts, a wide and varied array of topics was presented over the course of the long weekend.  We heard about issues of narrative, from the nature of description and characterization in medieval Celtic tales, to considering the origins of the Arthurian legend, to the waning tradition and preservation of storytelling in Doolin, County Clare, Ireland.  ASNC Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh explained ‘How Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill was Formed’, and, despite using terms seemingly borrowed from particle physics, Jim McCloskey of UC Santa Cruz told us ‘How to Make an Inflected Verb’ in a way clear enough to be understood by the non-linguist (or non-particle physicist).  Dr Roberts was invoked again on Saturday in ASNC PhD candidate Myriah Williams’ discussion of the Medieval Welsh poem Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin, this time for his views on the classification of Welsh dialogue poetry.  This same poem was also analysed by Stephanie Ranks, an undergraduate in the Celtic Studies Program at Berkeley who adopted a metrical approach and concluded that it is possible that the second half of the poem was composed according to the older stress-based metre and not the later rules of syllable count.

Dr Joseph Nagy of UCLA began the day Sunday by exploring the role of seditious figures in medieval Irish literature, and then brought them to life with a Bollywood-style dance number (not performed live).  Inter-cultural connections of a different sort were made by Dr Thomas Walsh of UC Berkeley, who drew attention to parallels between the laments of the female narrators of the Irish poem ‘The Old Woman of Beare’ and a Greek poem attributed to Sappho (No. 58).  Swansea University’s Dr Jasmine Donahaye, on the other hand, considered the nature of the relationship between Wales and Palestine and nineteenth-century Welsh views on colonialism and conversion in ‘A Welsh Colony in Palestine?’.  We also learned from Leslie Jacoby of San Jose State University that the art of falconry has been little changed since the days of Hywel Dda, despite the much altered state of the world.  Indeed, it was the current state of the earth in comparison to its situation during the time of the events of the Mabiniogion that formed the topic of a paper given by Dr Kathryn Klar and Elizabeth Tolero, graduate of the Celtic Studies Program in Berkeley.  The pair’s argument that, due to climate change, the coast lines and weather patterns of Britain and Ireland would have been very different at that time than what they are today was convincing, as was their assertion that scholarly analysis and mapping of medieval texts should reflect these differences.

The conference concluded fittingly with a series of presentations from current Berkeley undergraduates working on a project initiated and run by Dr Klar to edit an unpublished book of twenty-four Old Irish tales translated by Dr Brendan O’Hehir, a founding member of the Celtic Studies Association of North America and the first chair of the Celtic Studies Program at Berkeley.  The project, which has been in the pipeline for several years, is providing the students with valuable research skills as well as editorial experience that they might not normally receive at the undergraduate level.  Once finished, the work will be a suitable tribute to the late Dr O’Hehir, whose influence continues to be felt by many in the Celtic Studies Program and who is still so fondly remembered by many of its faculty.

Report: Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community

Sarah Waidler, a doctoral student in ASNC, writes:

On 2^nd March, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic hosted a seminar entitled ‘Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community’. Held in St John’s College, this lively and intellectually stimulating event focused on the related topics of medieval commerce and the economy within this geographical area. The seminar also touched on many other forms of exchange, including cultural, intellectual, familial and political ties between the lands joined together by the North Atlantic waters. Ranging from the actual process of trade and use of currency to how crafts and ideas travelled, to the memory of specific events and preservation of literary and historical traditions, this day presented much food for thought and presented many useful insights, while at the same time highlighting how much work still needs to be done in these areas.

The event was divided into two parts. In the morning, four speakers gave 45-minute talks on different aspects of contacts in this region. The day kicked off with a presentation by Andy Woods, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, on ‘An economy of scale? Considering the volume and use of coinage in Ireland c. 995 -1170’. Andy presented his work on coinage in Ireland and demonstrated how it was possible to make fruitful comparisons between Dublin and many other commercial centres in the North Atlantic world in the medieval period. As well as showing the considerable variation in Ireland’s use of coinage both regionally and chronologically, this paper answered old queries and raised new questions on the nature of currency in Ireland. Dr Colmán Etchingham of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, was the next speaker of the morning and presented a paper entitled ‘The myth of the Irish monastic town’, in which he revisited a topic which he has discussed in other publications, including in his Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture at Cambridge in 2010.  Dr. Etchingham provided further evidence in support of his argument that ecclesiastical centres in medieval Ireland did not function as commercial hubs. This included a very worthwhile investigation into the semantics of terms such as ‘óenach’ and ‘marggad’, which took account of the sources in which they appear.

The Lewis Chessmen, image © Trustees of the British Museum

After a short tea break, the third speaker of the morning, Dr Alex Woolf of the University of St Andrews, discussed ‘The bishops in the Lewis chess sets’ and looked in particular at the question of provenance of these famous pieces. This paper also considered the identity of the craftsman who made such pieces as well as other high-quality goods and how the basic materials for manufacture were obtained. The morning was rounded off with a lecture by Professor Helgi Þorláksson, from the University of Iceland, on ‘Between Oddi and the Orkneys: on Icelandic Orcadian connections, c. 1180-1240’. Professor Þorláksson examined the complex relationships between families in these areas and how much insight could be gained from the extant sources regarding their relationships.

In the afternoon, a text seminar was held to investigate three primary texts which had been circulated prior to the seminar. This discussion was led by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe of the Department of ASNC and Dr Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir of the University of Iceland. Dr Rowe introduced a text entitled ‘Gísls þáttr Illugasonar’ in which an Icelander, Gísl, comes to the court of the Irish king Muirchertach as a hostage. Dr Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Óskarsdóttir presented the Irish text ‘Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh’ and the Icelandic text ‘Njáls saga’ and examined how these texts represented the battle of Clontarf. These two sessions proved how bringing together experts from multiple disciplines to examine textual traditions can provide new insights into the material and help elucidate difficult textual quandaries. The discussion covered a range of topics, including the way in which the Irish language was portrayed in ‘Gísls þáttr Illugasonar’ and the transmission of material about specific events and wider culture phenomena between Ireland and the Norse-speaking world.

This seminar was attended by many of the members of the Faculty from the Department of ASNC, several distinguished speakers and visiting academics, as well as post-graduates and students.  This event was an excellent example of how interdisciplinary approaches can hugely benefit research and present new findings. I’m sure that much of what was discussed at this seminar will go on to influence many of the attendees’ work and it is hoped that the many fruitful discourses that began at this seminar will continue for some time to come!

Conference report: Linguistic Encounters and Educational Practice

Razvan Stanciu, a PhD student in ASNC, writes:

On 29 and 30 November, St John’s College was host to a symposium organised by the Department’s own Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Michael Clarke of NUI Galway. They brought together six scholars of medieval literature who presented their work to an eager audience of lecturers and students, from Cambridge and beyond, all under the theme of ‘Linguistic Encounters and Educational Practice in Medieval Europe’. Rosalind Love of the Department kick-started the proceedings and warmed up the audience (on what was otherwise a crisp winter’s day) with a spirited and at the same time inspiring talk on glosses and commentary in the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. What otherwise could be mistaken for a terse topic caught the audience’s ear with its wider implications for early medieval intellectuals’ relationship to textual authority, but also with the abundance of involuntary humour emerging from some of the glosses. Abigail Burnyeat (University of Edinburgh) provided the second act of the day, an analysis of a single manuscript (British Library Egerton 1782) in which colloquy-type texts can be read as evidence for classroom practice. Elizabeth Tyler (University of York) took advantage of the most privileged of talk slots (i.e. after the first tea-and-cookies break) to grab attention with her study of Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts, in which she used a comparison between the Latin Cambridge Songs (Cambridge University Library Gg 5.35) and the vernacular Exeter Book to illustrate the symposium’s general theme of multilingualism. Michael Clarke illuminated one of the lesser-known aspects of the Middle Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of the Takings of Ireland’), its connections with the early medieval texts of commentary on Classical authors. His talk and Rosalind’s worked like two sides of the same coin, enabling listeners to see how the same kind of material was re-worked in a Latin and scholiastic context and in a vernacular and narrative context respectively. After a long lunch (and especially dessert), Jan Rüdiger (Goethe University, Frankfurt) and Lars Boje Mortensen (University of Southern Denmark) wrapped up the day, the former talking to us about a research project surveying the political vocabulary of medieval languages and the latter about the emergence of historiographical prose in various European literatures. 

Jan Ruediger's talk, chaired by Michael Clarke

After such a full day, we came back the next morning to experience a refreshing insight into the world of Chinese textual culture of the ninth and tenth centuries offered by Imre Galambos of the University of Cambridge. Imre’s talk was a highlight, especially since he emphasised some specific aspects of the material he is working with (i.e. geographical periphery, complex multilingualism) which are highly relevant to many medievalists too and to ASNC in particular. The two-day symposium concluded with a free round-table discussion, where the various participants, particularly the PhD students and postdocs, had a chance to exchange impressions about the issues raised during the two days and about the way in which the talks provided food for thought for their own work. And food for thought they indeed provided, through the often intriguing nature of the general theme and the unusual internal cohesion of the schedule of talks. The specific focus of the research group meant that in every presentation the issue of medieval education and of its interplay (or indeed interface) with textual multilingualism was given centre stage and harmonised with the particulars of each scholar’s work. It was thus a rather rare opportunity for many students and researchers to take part in an academic conference where the celebrated ‘And now for something completely different’ could not cross their minds.

Conference report: Literacy, Memory and the Conversion of the Isles

Dr Brittany Schorn, network facilitator for the 'Converting the Isles' network, reports on their recent conference:

The Leverhulme Trust Converting the Isles Network, based in the Department, held its colloquium on ‘Literacy, Memory and the Conversion of the Isles’ on November 2–4 at University College Dublin.  The conference was one in a series, each considering a different aspect of conversion. This weekend historians, archaeologists, linguists and literary scholars brought their expertise together to produce a groundbreaking reassessment of the relationship between the conversion to Christianity and another revolutionary development with which it is intimately associated: the rise of literacy in northwestern Europe.

It was therefore fitting to begin Friday morning, after a warm welcome from John McCafferty, himself a church historian and head of the School of History and Archives, with a paper on the origins of ogham by Dr Anthony Harvey of the Royal Irish Academy. Dr Harvey challenged long-held assumptions about the chronology of the writing system, and suggested that contact with Latin in Ireland before St Patrick’s mission has been underestimated. His paper was complemented by Professor Anne-Sofie Gräslund’s on Germanic pre-Roman script. Professor Gräslund, of the University of Uppsala, demonstrated how the runic monuments of the late Viking Age reveal the effects of conversion to Christianity on a Scandinavian cultural practice.

The theme of continuity as well as change continued into the second session of the day. Dr Mark Stansbury of the Classics Department at the National University of Ireland, Galway, considered the evidence of script itself to demonstrate that the infrastructure of writing shows remarkable continuity with the Roman world. He argued that rather than a symptom of isolation, the development of the distinctive features of Insular script represents continued contact. Dr Alan Thacker then turned the discussion to the individuals responsible for transmitting literacy and Christian learning. Focusing on the Cuthbertine corpus, he showed how the ways in which saints were remembered in early Anglo-Saxon England was shaped by the changing circumstances of the monastic communities that wrote their stories.

In the afternoon, art featured alongside inscription in a pair of papers by Professor Nancy Edwards of the University of Bangor and Dr Lise Gjedssø Bertelsen of the University of Uppsala. Dr Edwards brought together the evidence of inscriptions, images and symbols from Wales and Pictland to paint a contrasting picture of conversion in the two regions. Evidence from Scandinavia was then brought in by Dr Bertlesen who drew out the meaning of the images of the great Jelling Runestone, on which inscriptions, images and symbols work together to convey a powerful message of a new, Christian royal identity.

The day was brought to a close by a thought-provoking keynote lecture from a rather different perspective, delivered Dr Joseph McMahon of the Irish Franciscan Province. Speaking on his own experiences as a missionary, Dr McMahon offered valuable insights into what conversion means to a Christian evangelist.

The second day of the colloquium opened with a session on the written law, a phenomenon Dr Roy Flechner of UCD observed is ubiquitous within Christian culture across Europe. Professor Liam Breatnach of the Dublin Institute for Advanced studies examined the thoroughly Christianised society revealed by Ireland’s early laws and raised important questions about the use of medieval law texts. These questions were also central to the next paper, on the earliest Anglo-Saxon laws, by Dr Helen Forbes of the University of Exeter. Here too the laws, though strikingly different to the Irish material in other ways, painted a picture of a thoroughly Christian land and monarchy. A lively discussion ensued and was continued in the roundtable at the end of the afternoon.

The next session was opened by Dr Connor Newman, of the National University of Ireland, Galway, who brought archaeological evidence back into the discussion with a paper on conversion through the prism of art. He demonstrated the adaptation of older traditions for Christian purposes, often to significant and sophisticated effect. Dr Alex Woolf of the University of St Andrew’s continued the session by looking at the word plebs, which became the normal word for ‘parish’ in Welsh and Cornish. Taking a broad view across the post-Roman West, he examined how this common noun was used an adapted in both Insular Latin and vernacular languages.

Dr Siân Grønlie of the University of Oxford and Dr Barry Lewis of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth looked at the role of saints in conversion of Iceland and Wales. Dr Grønlie explored their curious absence in the Old Norse sources, which portray the men responsible for bringing Christianity to Iceland as complex and somewhat morally problematic individuals.  Dr Lewis then discussed the literature of the Brittonic regions, in which national conversion is of only marginal interest.  Instead of pagans, these texts were more interested in the problem of converting bad Christians.

The themes and questions arising from the various sessions were finally brought together by Dr Elva Johnston of UCD, who re-assessed what literacy in early medieval Ireland actually meant, with important observations applicable across Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia. She reminded us of how small the literate class would have been, confined to, but not encompassing, the social elite whose primary mode of communication remained oral. It is important, she argued, to envisage a more complex model than is often supposed, with a much larger society interacting with literacy and supporting it, if not reading or writing themselves.

Podcasts and other materials arising from this fascinating conference will shortly be available on our website. We look forward to continuing the discussions begun in Cambridge and Dublin at Bangor University on March 22–23, 2013 in a colloquium on. Further information can be found HERE.

Linguistic Encounters and Educational Practice in Medieval Europe

Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh is hosting a colloquium on 'Linguistic Encounters and Educational Practice in Medieval Europe' at St John's College, Cambridge, on Thursday 29th - Friday 30th November. Featuring leading scholars working on the intersection of Latin and the vernacular languages of medieval Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, there will also be a comparative lecture on ninth- and tenth-century Chinese manuscripts. The programme is available online, and details on how to register can be found here.

Literacy, Memory and the Conversion of the Isles

Dr Brittany Schorn writes:

Literacy, Memory and the Conversion of the Isles

November 2-4, 2012 

University College Dublin 

The Leverhulme Trust Converting the Isles network, based in ASNC, looks forward to our next colloquium this week at University College Dublin. Its theme of 'literacy, memory and the conversion of the Isles' will explore conversion and literate culture. We will ask how literacy developed in the context of the spread of Christianity, whether there was ever an independent non-ecclesiastical literate culture, and how we can use written texts to gauge the interaction between Christian and traditional cultures. Please see our website for a full programme, registration information and, in due course, podcasts and other materials from the colloquium. We hope to see you in Dublin!

Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic continues to be very proud of its association with the Sutton Trust, a philanthropic organisation which seeks to promote social mobility through education. Each year we host a Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC for a small group of talented young people, from non-privileged backgrounds, who are about to begin their final year of school. The purpose of the Summer School is to allow them to experience university life, attending a range of lectures, seminars and classes on all aspects of the ASNC undergraduate course: from Anglo-Saxon history to Old Norse literature, from palaeography to medieval Welsh law. This year we welcomed eleven teenagers from a wide geographical area, including students from Wales, Yorkshire and London, all of whom were bright, enthusiastic and willing to sacrifice a week of their summer holiday in order to learn about all things medieval.

The Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC, 2012

One of the highlights of the Summer School, as ever, was the afternoon spent in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College. The Parker sub-librarian, Dr Suzanne Paul, introduced the students to the Parker collection, and then the students spent an hour preparing presentations on manuscripts including the Parker Chronicle and the Old English Bede. After giving their presentations, the students had the opportunity to study the manuscripts in detail, as well as looking at other important items from the collection.

Admiring medieval manuscripts in the Parker Library

In Old Court, Corpus Christi College

 

Participants also had the opportunity to experience a supervision, the small-group teaching which is characteristic of Oxford and Cambridge. Each of them had chosen the topic in which they were most interested, and were supervised individually or in pairs by doctoral students and early career researchers in the ASNC department.

 

Finding Anglo-Saxon things to stand in front of ...

 

During the Summer School the students stayed at St John's College, and were able to indulge in typical Cambridge activities, such as punting on the river and attending a 'formal hall' dinner. We hope very much that this week will inspire them to apply to elite universities, such as Cambridge, for their undergraduate studies.

The grown-ups (allegedly): Ollie (residential supervisor), Becky (CAMbassador and ASNC graduate), and Lizzie (academic co-ordinator of the Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC)

And, despite the fact that most of the students had never studied a word of Latin before they arrived on the course, the expert teaching of Dr Rosalind Love ensured that, by the time of the disco on the last night of the Summer School, they were all able to get into trouble for swearing profusely in Insular Latin. No matter what the participants go on to do in life, that is one invaluable skill which will always stay with them.