Workshop Report: ‘The Hagiography of Conversion'

From Robert Gallagher and Sarah Waidler (both ASNC PhD students):

The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and the Leverhulme Trust Project ‘Converting the Isles’ supported a workshop that took place in the English Faculty on November 27th, 2013. The aim of the workshop was to consider recent, on-going and future research concerning Insular saints, their cults and hagiographies. The day began with a wonderfully thought-provoking presentation by Professor Pádraig Ó Riain, who argued that the Irish O’Donohue Lives make far more sense as products of the twelfth century (or later) than the eighth or ninth centuries, for which Richard Sharpe previously argued in his book Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives. Professor Ó Riain presented further evidence, concerning the cult and Life of Colum of Terryglass, to augment his recent article on this subject in Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley and significant discussion followed which addressed the implications of his thesis. The second speaker of the day was Dr Barry Lewis, who offered an overview of his current collaborative research project, ‘The Cult of Saints in Wales: Medieval Welsh-Language Sources and their Transmission’, which aims over the next four years to construct a comprehensive database of vernacular material on medieval Welsh saints. He in particular focused on a the corpus of vernacular poetry which has previously remained unedited, and allowed us to see a sample of some of the poetry on which he is currently working. Following lunch, Gilbert Márkus treated us to a preview of the newly constructed online database of ‘hagio-toponyms’, which is the culmination of three years’ work by a team of researchers at the University of Glasgow on the project ‘Commemorations of Saints in Scottish Place-Names’ and which, as Gilbert demonstrated, has tremendous potential for understanding the development of cults and their relationship with the Scottish landscape. Both Gilbert’s and Barry’s projects received an overwhelming response from the audience, and one participant summed up the general feeling with ‘I only wish this was available before!’. Clearly, the tools for the study of hagiography and the cult of saints are still being crafted and are much appreciated by the scholars of the field!

After an afternoon tea break, two more projects were introduced, one making its debut onto the academic stage. Julianne Pigott presented the project ‘Mapping Miracles’, which is in its very first stages and is being shaped by four PhD students in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and the School of English at the University of St Andrews. This project seeks to create an online database and taxonomy of miracles found in saints’ Lives in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the early and central medieval period. Julianne was joined by Robert Gallagher and Sarah Waidler in answering questions about the proposed project, which met with a very positive response. The day was then rounded off by a roundtable conversation on the depiction of conversion in saints’ Lives, which has been one of the topics explored by the three-year Leverhulme Trust project ‘Converting the Isles’. This was led by Dr Rosalind Love and Sarah Waidler and texts such as the Life of Cadog and Life of Ninnian were discussed in detail, along with such concerns as how depictions of the conversion period changed in hagiography and how hagiographers imagined conversion to have taken place.

Each of the presentations stimulated much discussion amongst the workshop participants. Points of comparison were drawn between varying hagiographic traditions, while the logistics and potential values of online databases and collaborative projects provoked lively debate. All in all, this was an extremely fruitful day for those interested in all aspects of the cult of saints and demonstrated how much is being done and still needs to be done in this vibrant field. The organisers are very grateful to all speakers, participants and the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and ‘Converting the Isles’ for making this such a successful day!

Cambridge University Festival of Ideas

Myriah Williams writes:

On Saturday, the 26th of October the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic participated in the University of Cambridge's Festival of Ideas, an event held annually since 2008 designed to encourage the community and anyone with an interest in Cambridge’s work and research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, to come over, check us out and meet the faculty and students.

Several events were held within our department on the Saturday, with two well-attended lectures by faculty members Dr Richard Dance and Prof Simon Keynes, speaking on ‘Frontiers in Anglo-Saxon England’, on the Tuesday following.  The majority of Saturday's events, organized under the theme ‘Beyond Borders: Exploring the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Worlds’, were run by graduate students, led by Christine Voth.  Upstairs in the department itself, attendees could enjoy a re-enactment of Groenlendinga saga, have a look at the work being carried out by the Orkney Project, or, for the young (and young at heart), there was a colouring session where future ASNCs were invited to hone their artistic skills with a variety of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic art, or to try their hand at the runic and Ogham scripts.

Downstairs we were happy to present two brief lectures.  The first was a discussion of the Otherworld in Celtic mythology and literature, including a dramatic retelling, in English and Welsh, of a tale from the Mabinogion, a celebrated collection of Medieval Welsh prose texts.  The second lecture was an exploration and appreciation of the importance of borders and marginalia in a selection of medieval manuscripts originating from each of the cultures covered by our research.

Running concurrently with the lectures was a poster session, encompassing a wide variety of topics within the fields covered by ASNC, where attendees of the Festival were welcome to browse at their leisure.  Use of the English Faculty Library’s iPad, generously loaned for the occasion, to explore high-resolution digital images of manuscripts was a popular feature of this session, and was helpful in demonstrating the increasing value of new technology in the study of medieval artifacts.

It’s not every day that we get to share our enthusiasm in our research with the general public, so we hope to see the Festival of Ideas continue to celebrate the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for many years to come!

October Computus Workshop

 ASNC doctoral student Tony Harris writes:

On Monday 28^th October ASNaC was treated to a visit by Immo Warntjes, Lecturer in Irish Medieval History at Queen’s University, Belfast. Immo originally worked as a postgraduate researcher in the Foundations of Irish Culture Project at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he also completed his Ph.D. under Professor Dáibhí Ó Cróinín in 2007.  Immo’s primary field of interest is early medieval scientific thought but he is probably best known for his work in the field of computus (medieval time-reckoning). His PhD thesis later became his monograph and is published as The Munich Computus: Text & Translation. Irish computistics between Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede and its reception in Carolingian times (Stuttgart: Steiner 2010). In addition to this work, Immo has also been extensively involved with the International Conference on the Science of Computus which happens every two years in Galway (next one in 2014)

Immo kindly spent last Monday in the department where he met with members of staff and graduate students and his day culminated in a paper for the ASNC graduate seminar entitled 'Willibrord the computist: harbinger of the Carolingian renaissance?'. The paper provided significant food for thought and argued quite convincingly that the 7^th century missionary saint Willibrord had a much more far reaching influence on the study and application of medieval European computistics than had previously been thought.

There are a number of ASNC post-graduate students who are either working directly in the field of medieval computus or in fields that are allied to it. Computus is an area that is under-researched and there is a general dearth of workshops, courses and scholarly material outside of original manuscript sources. It was therefore very kind of Immo to run a two hour computus workshop on the Monday morning (thoughtfully arranged by Dr Rosalind Love) and this was well attended by some twenty students from the faculty. During the workshop Immo discussed the ‘Easter Controversy’ which had occupied the thoughts and minds of the early church fathers and is something that, even today, gives rise to disagreement. Immo also discussed the basis for the calculation of the date of Easter and the differences between Roman and Celtic computistical methods. Latin terminology and manuscript evidence was presented along with relevant historical background. The workshop was extremely enjoyable and highly interactive with lots of opportunities for students to participate. Immo introduced the various types of Easter tables (Celtic and Roman) focusing on differences with interpretation and calculation in a session which was highly informative and provided a significant  amount of useful information. Immo came to medieval studies with a background in mathematics and he has an impressive amount of experience in the area of computistics. His delivery and content was both clear and concise as well as engaging, incisive, and directly relevant to graduate study.

After the workshop a number of ASNC graduates agreed together that a ‘self-help’ workshop focused on working through and interpreting computistical tables would be an extremely useful extension to Immo’s session and something along these lines will be arranged separately. If you would be interested in attending and/or contributing to such a workshop please ask to be added to Tony Harris’s Facebook group on Medieval Computus.

ASNCs on University Challenge

At least four current and former ASNCs have squared up to Jeremy Paxman on the current series of University Challenge. In the episode broadcast on Monday 14th October, recent ASNC graduates Owain Jones and Daisy Le Helloco helped Bangor defeat Aberystwyth. Their victory, together with Paxman's entertainingly inconsitent pronunciation of Aberystwyth, can be seen on BBC i-Player here until Monday 21st October.

Charter for ten?

Meanwhile, back in August, ASNC second-year Rachael Gregory helped Queens' College to a close-fought victory over Durham. The final score was 190-170. Congratulations, Rachael! A few weeks later, Lizzie Colwill, another second-year, gave a fine performance for Pembroke against Somerville College, Oxford. We are very proud of both of them.

ASNCs on the Road: Celtic Literature in Dublin

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.

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.

 

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.

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.