Call for Papers: Power and the Sacred in the Medieval World

Call for Papers: Power and the Sacred in the Medieval World
(5th - 15th centuries), 26th November 2011, University of Leicester

This conference will explore the origins and development of the relationship between ‘power’ and ‘sacred’ in the Medieval World (5^th to 15^th centuries) addressing the possible transformations and transitions of these terms within a broad time frame, and how they were realized in people, places and objects, and in different faiths, for example Christianity, Judaism and Islam. ‘Outsider’ perceptions of the ways in which power and the sacred were constructed or reconstructed according to context are also significant: how and what were the interactions between sacred objects/people/places by peoples of different faiths? how would these have been perceived? how did movements such as the Crusades affect notions of sacred and power? how did gender affect interactions between sacred objects/people/power? 

We would like to invite postgraduate students to contribute to this discussion at an interdisciplinary conference being held at the University of Leicester on 26 November, 2011. We are particularly keen to encourage debate between disciplines, and invite students of History, English, Archaeology, Theology and Art History, or any other aspect of medieval studies broadly construed, to attend and present a paper.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

·        The roles of religious institutions in channelling power, both sacred and political: Did these roles change depending on place and alliances with political figures? Where did monasteries ‘fit’ as a religious institution and how did they channel power?

·        Literary constructions of power and/or sacrality: How were these dynamisms recorded by whom, and why?

·        Conflicts between different types of sacralities and/or power: Who were the main agents for these conflicts? How did particular agents affect the construction of sanctity and power?

·        The role of saints in the Medieval World: how far did ‘national power’ align with ‘national’ saints or sacred objects? Are there noticeable transformations over time? How did these compare between regions (i.e. Britain and Francia/ Western Christendom and Islamic Near and Middle East), or in relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims?

·        The perceptions of ‘peripheral’ people on power and/or sacred: how did the poor, the ‘lower classes’ and foreigners perceive interactions between ‘State and Church’?

The principal aim of this conference is to create a forum for debate by exposing researchers to developments in and around their fields, and by creating a space for new ideas between disciplines to emerge.

Please send 300-word abstracts for papers (20 minutes long) to Shazia Jagot at sj82@le.ac.uk by the 26 August 2011. Proposals for Posters are also welcome.

Insular Economics: Ireland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Event Type: Early Career Workshop

Date: Saturday 10th September

Venue: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Address: Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER

This one-day workshop—hosted by the Department of ASNC and McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research—will be dedicated to exploring the economies and economics of Early Medieval Ireland and their wider Insular contexts.  Papers by early career researchers from Britain and Ireland will explore topics such as numismatics, exchange networks, administrative documentary traditions, settlements, environmental impact and the application of theoretical economic models.

Attendance is free and places are limited.  Please contact one of the coordinators (Denis Casey dc399@cam.ac.uk; Russell Ó Ríagáin rmo31@cam.ac.uk or Andy Woods arw66@cam.ac.uk) for more information.

Peter’s Pence and Beyond: Monetary Links between Anglo-Saxon England and Rome

Dr Rory Naismith writes:

Despite being separated by a thousand miles of sea, land and mountain, Anglo-Saxon England enjoyed a close connection with Rome: seat of the papacy and a leading beacon of spiritual and cultural authority in early medieval Europe. This special relationship went back to the first mission of St Augustine to the English in 597, sent at the behest of Pope Gregory I (590–604), but persisted in the centuries that followed as English kings, clergy, pilgrims and traders made frequent trips to the eternal city. Many kinds of evidence survive to show how large Rome loomed in the minds of early medieval Englishmen and women. One particularly vivid source for both their piety and their economic interests comes in the form of money brought from England to Rome in the Anglo-Saxon period. Written records show that such gifts were taking place as early as the eighth century, though by the tenth century they had assumed the more or less regular form of Peter’s Pence: a penny donated by every Anglo-Saxon household to St Peter at Rome.

House of the Vestal Virgins in the Forum Romanum, where a hoard of over 800 English coins dating to the tenth century was found in 1883. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RomaCasaVestaliDaPalatinoOvest.JPG]

Dr Rory Naismith, a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, and Dr Francesca Tinti, Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country and an honorary research associate of ASNaC, have recently been awarded a research grant by the British Academy to look afresh at the movement of money between England and Rome at this time. In the course of 2012, they will go on research visits to Rome to re-examine material in museums and archives. Finds of English coins have been numerous in Rome, among them such famous pieces as a unique gold coin in the name of Offa, king of the Mercians (757–96), made in imitation of an Islamic gold dinar (now in the British Museum). Also, there has been a glut of major hoards from the tenth century comprising about a thousand coins in total. Indeed, English coins constitute the bulk of all those found within Rome dating to between the late eighth and late tenth centuries. These have much to tell about England’s coinage at that time, and also about the nature of links between England and Rome: they say as much about economic activity as devotion, and should be seen as the residue of trade and exchange as well as pious donations. Dr Naismith and Dr Tinti’s research will shed new light on the significance of this material for bonds – cultural, religious and monetary – tying England to Rome at a formative stage.

Coins of Pope Hadrian I (772–95) and Wulfred, archbishop of Canterbury (805–32), the latter drawing inspiration from Hadrian’s earlier coinage. Both coins illustrated courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

A parallel strand of research will involve analysing the metallic content of a selection of silver coins from the Fitzwilliam Museum minted under the authority of the popes from the 770s to the 970s. These fall during the heyday of movement of English coins to Rome, and have never before been examined in this way. Determining the purity of these coins’ silver, and the quantity of other trace elements within them, might pave the way towards some understanding of where the popes looked for models and bullion in minting their coinage. This might in turn shed some light on the fate of English silver on arrival in Rome: was it melted down to provide local currency, or were other sources of silver drawn on? What was the final chapter of movements of English coin to Rome? 

More congratulations!

The awards and prizes are flooding in this month! Here are some more:

Dr Nick Zair, Research Fellow in Peterhouse and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge has been awarded the Johann-Kaspar Zeuss Prize for the best PhD in Celtic Studies of 2011. The title of his dissertation, which was completed in Oxford, is: ‘The reflexes of the proto-Indo-European laryngeals in Celtic’. The prize is awarded by the Societas Celtologica Europaea.

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Barraclough (ASNC) who has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford.  Dr Barraclough will hold her fellowship in the Faculty of English, with an affiliation to The Queen’s College, and will be working on a research project mapping the literary landscape and conceptual geography of the medieval Norse world, with close readings of the sagas at the heart of the investigation. This literary analysis will be supported by an interdisciplinary methodology that explores the links between the sagas’ literary designs and the geographical conditions, historical reality, socio-political conditions and cultural memories underpinning Norse society.

Widening participation

As part of the University of Cambridge's ongoing commitment to widening participation in higher education, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic runs a summer school in association with the Sutton Trust. In these 60-second videos, some of last year's participants talk about their experiences studying ASNC.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to a number of ASNCs who have receieved various awards and prizes in recent weeks:

At the end of May, Dr Rory Naismith became the youngest recipient (at the age of 27) of the Blunt Prize, awarded by the British Numismatic Society, for his exceptional scholarship on Anglo-Saxon coinage.

The Scandinvian Studies Fund awarded the 2011 Wallenberg Prize to two students: Moa Höijer (ASNC & Hughes Hall) for her essay on 'Perceptions of an outcast: Loki's motivation in Lokasenna', and to George Walkden (Dept of Linguistics & Clare College) for his essay 'The correspondence problem in syntactic reconstructon'. The Wallenberg Prize is awarded for an essay on some subject connected with the language, history or civilization of one or more of the Scandinavian peoples

And last but not least, Dr Denis Casey has been awarded a Fellowship by the Society for Renaissance Studies, to work on Christopher Nugent's primer of the Irish language, created for Elizabeth I, within the contexts of second language teaching during the Renaissance and the Gaelic grammatical tradition. Dr Casey wrote about this primer for the Irish Examiner recently.

—•—• ••— •— —•—• •••• ("cuach")

Dr Denis Casey writes:

In Acallam na Senórach, the dialogue between St Patrick and Caílte (an aged survivor of Finn Mac Cumail’s war band) on the places and lore of Ireland, Finn enquired of his companions what music was best.  Their answers conjured up a cacophony of the landscape: baying hounds, bellying stags, swords striking, ladies laughing, cuckoos calling.

                              

Like Caílte’s reminisces, Pat Collins’s film Tim Robinson: Connemara, based on the work of the current Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies, was dominated by sound and music, as much by the physical landscapes and seascapes that have been the subject of Robinson’s work.  The landscape filled the ears, while the camera panned slowly in soft focus over Robinson’s extraordinarily detailed maps of Connemara.  Funneled wind howling through the bearnaí and mámanna faded into a soft breeze over bogs where the naosc binn ’s an crotach glórach could be heard, before morphing into the cry of a gull by the shoreline’s contours, only to be drowned in rhythms drummed against wave-lashed cliffs.  Similarly, Susan Stenger’s soundtrack, inspired by Marconi’s wireless experiments in Connemara, strikingly encapsulated the natural themes, as the Irish word cuach (‘cuckoo’) was played in Morse Code while Robinson searched amid the denuded foliage of Derryclare wood for Cuach na Coille (‘The Cuckoo of the Wood’).

Tim Robinson: Connemara brilliantly brings to another medium the work of a latter day embodiment of both Caílte and Patrick, and is a film deserving of repeated viewing — and listening.  Finn’s conclusion is admirably justified: the best music is ‘the music of what happens’.

Adventures in a graveyard, Part 2

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

Following my adventure in search of the memorial cross erected at St Fintan's church, Sutton, Co. Dublin, to the Celtic scholar, Whitley Stokes (1830-1909), I decided to find the place where he is actually buried, in Paddington Old Cemetery, London. I was particularly interested to see whether his gravestone was similar in style, or whether it bore a similar inscription, to the cross at St Fintan's.

Stokes' memorial cross at St Fintan's, Sutton, Co. Dublin

Paddington Old Cemetery is located in the diverse district of Kilburn, north of Kensington (where Stokes lived after returning from India in 1882 until his death in 1909).

Paddington Old Cemetery, London

I found Stokes' grave in somewhat better condition than some of the others in its vicinity. The cross was indeed in the Celtic Revival style, although notably less ornate than the memorial cross at Sutton.

 grave of Whitley Stokes (1830-1909), Paddington Old Cemetery

 The inscription was also quite different from that at St Fintan's. First, there was no indication of Stokes' profession or scholarly interests.Where the St Fintan's cross had described him as 'Jurist, Scholar and Philologist', his London gravestone gave only the spare details of his name and dates, reflecting perhaps the more private, family-oriented nature of the memorial, as opposed to the more public, or scholarly, nature of the Sutton cross. The quotation chosen for the inscription was also quite different in tone. Where the St Fintan's cross stated:

DIE WAHRHEIT RUHT IN GOTT

UNS BLEIBT DAS FORSCHEN

('Truth lies with God; for us remains Research')

the Paddington memorial gave a biblical quotation, from Philippians 4:8:

WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE TRUE. WHATSOEVER THINGS

ARE HONEST. WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE JUST.

WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE PURE. WHATSOEVER THINGS

ARE LOVELY. WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE OF GOOD

REPORT. IF THERE BE ANY VIRTUE, AND IF THERE BE

ANY PRAISE, THINK ON THESE THINGS.

Stokes grave inscription

The overall effect was simple, but quite moving, and in striking contrast to the form and content of the St Fintan's memorial.  But having found Stokes' grave I decided that the next challenge would be to find his house. So I left Kilburn, and set off towards one of London's most affluent districts:

Grenville Place, Kensington

Perhaps rather fittingly, Stokes' home at 15 Grenville Place technically no longer exists, since 14 and 15 Grenville Place have been knocked together and turned into separate flats. However, the house still retains the impressive frontage, including the front door (no longer in use), which it would have had in Stokes' day. 

 

 15 Grenville Place, Kensington, formerly the home of Whitley Stokes (1830-1909)

In Stokes' time, as now, this was a prosperous part of London, and emphasises the wealth which Stokes accumulated during his time as a colonial jurist in British India, where he became President of the India Law Commission. A stark contrast indeed to the penniless young barrister who had to sell his furniture in order to buy his passage to India in 1862, and a reminder of the more problematic moral complexities of the life of Ireland's greatest Celtic scholar.

ASNC Open Day 2011

The next ASNC Open Day will take place on 29th June. All those interested in applying to study ASNC - and their parents/guardians - are welcome, but booking is essential: further details and the booking form can be found on the ASNC website. Lecturers in ASNC will give brief introductory talks on aspects of the ASNC Tripos, and there will be a visit to the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, to see some Anglo-Saxon and Celtic manuscripts.

Dr Fiona Edmonds addresses a previous Open Day audience

ASNC in the media

Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, University Lecturer in Scandinavian History of the Medieval Period, was one of Melvyn Bragg's guests on In Our Time on Radio 4 yesterday. The episode discussed the Battle of Stamford Bridge (1066). You can listen to the programme (for the next few days only) via the BBC's iplayer.

Dr Emily Lethbridge, Honorary Research Associate in ASNC, who is currently travelling around Iceland, visiting the sites of Old Norse saga literature, was interviewed for Radio Cambridgeshire. Again, you can listen to the interview via the BBC's iplayer (starts at 16:40), and follow Emily's journey via her blog.