• OCMH Home
• Seminars & Lectures
• Upcoming Events
• Research Fellows
• Research Projects
• Postgraduates
• Masters' Courses
• Visiting Scholars
• Past Events
• Past Seminars & Lectures
• Noticeboard
• Links
• Contact OCMH

________________

• History Faculty Home
• Faculty Members

Past Events

Listed below are events which have taken place since Hilary Term 2008. If you are a member of the Centre and would like to organise something similar, please contact the organisers

 

Tuesday, October 26th (3rd Week), 2pm-4pm Bostar Hall, University College

This informal workshop will be led by Thomas Charles-Edwards (Modern Languages), Hilde de Weerdt (Chinese Studies), Vivien Prigent (History) and Graham Barrett (History). The event represents a continuation of the 'Global Middle Ages' initiative begun last year by OCMH. Discussion will be initiated by consideration of four documents (see PDFs below). Those attending the event may wish to look at the documents in advance and bring copies with them to the workshop.

These documents all have their contexts. Some context to the examples from early medieval Ireland and Byzantine Italy is provided in the relevant PDFs. Meanwhile, in the Chinese case, readers should note that ‘Resistance to a Summons’ is one of over 100 entries in a collection of judgments dating to the mid-13th c. The collection, titled ‘Minggong shupan qingming ji’ (A Collection of Enlightened Judgments by Famous Men), was one of many such collections circulating in both manuscript and print and was most likely used by local administrators who were interested in buying model written judgments as an aid in their own judicial duties. 'A Collection of Enlightened Judgments' contained judgments from 28 officials addressing all manner of local problems ranging from official corruption to property and family disputes and religious gatherings. The ‘Cuenca Law Code’ belongs to a context of Christian expansion from northern Spain into Muslim-held territory during the 11th-13th c. At this time kings and counts issued charters called 'fueros' - collections of privileges and exemptions from the general law - to cities and towns along the frontier in order to promote their settlement and consolidate their conquest. Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158-1214) conquered the Muslim town of Cuenca from the Almohads in 1177, settling it with Christians but without expelling its Muslim population; c. 1189-1191 Alfonso granted the 'Fuero de Cuenca' (Code of Cuenca), which became a model for numerous other 'fueros' granted to frontier towns. Among the concerns addressed by the legislators are the protection of female honour and the regulation of the subject and free Muslim populations. Readers should focus on cc. XI.13-15, XI.19-51, XXX.1-6 of this document.

For further details about the workshop please contact catherine.holmes@history.ox.ac.uk

Papers (PDFs):

• Cuenca
• Troia
• Cairde
• Resistance

 

Contact and Exchange in Late Medieval Europe

The coats of arms of England and
Bordeaux, Collegiate Church of St-Seurin,
first half of fifteenth century

Workshop in honour of Malcolm Vale

10–11 September 2010, St John’s College, University of Oxford

This workshop marks the retirement of Malcolm Vale, fellow and tutor in history at St John’s College, and it will explore the theme of political, cultural and ideological contact and exchange across European frontiers in the late Middle Ages. Experts on different European regions will investigate the porousness of boundaries and the nature of exchange between European cultures, and discuss the usefulness and implications of a ‘transnational’ perspective on European history in the late Middle Ages.

Numbers are restricted, but anyone interested in attending is welcome to contact the organisers.

Organisers: Patrick Lantschner, Guilhem Pépin, Robert Shaw, Hannah Skoda, Tiago Viula de Faria

The Clerical Cosmos: Ecclesiastical power, culture, and society, c.900 to c.1075

Saturday 4 September 2010

10am-5:30pm, History Faculty

Organisers:
Bernard Gowers and
Hannah Williams

Email:
clericalcosmos2010@gmail.com

Poster with full details (PDF)

This informal gathering will focus on clerical life in Latin Europe, from c.900 to c.1075. Our aim is to explore the period on its own terms, rather than within more familiar narratives of a long sunset of the Carolingian world, or as a precursor to the Gregorian papacy and twelfth-century developments. We will seek to examine concepts such as ‘renaissance’ and ‘reform’, the role of France in wider historiography, and the distinction between monastic and cathedral communities, bringing together work on both clerics’ social-political power and their intellectual lives. Presentations will focus on France, Germany, and Italy, but discussion will be of interest to those working on all areas of Latin Europe.

 

OCMH 'Global Middle Ages' workshop on multilingualism

Friday 4 June 2010 (6th Week), starting at 2pm
Colin Matthew Room of the History Faculty

This informal workshop will be led by Dr Arietta Papaconstantinou (Oriental Studies), Dr Hannah Skoda (History Faculty), Dr Peter Ditmanson (Chinese Studies) and Dr Jay Lewis (Korean and Japanese Studies). This workshop represents a new stage in this year's Global Middle Ages initiative organised by the Oxford Centre for Medieval History.

All those with interests in the Global Middle Ages initiative and/or medieval multilingualism are encouraged to attend. Graduates and post-docs from ALL Faculties are particularly welcome.

Those who have been following the Global Middle Ages initiative over the past two terms will know that one of the reasons for adopting this globalising approach has been to encourage discussion and connections between those with medieval interests in different Oxford Faculties. The previous two workshops (one last term and one earlier this) have been concerned with overarching questions about the nature and scope of the Global Middle Ages. In contrast this workshop will adopt a rather more focused approach by taking a particular theme and by prioritising primary sources. At the workshop itself, the four historians indicated above will introduce a select number of primary sources as a way of exploring questions and themes within the field of multilingualism.

IIf there are any questions about this workshop or any other aspect of the 'Global Middle Ages' initiative, please address them to catherine.holmes@history.ox.ac.uk

Papers (PDF):

• Who speaks Egyptian in Greek, Roman and late Antique Egypt?
• Failed multilingualism: Les deus anglois et l'anel (fabliau)
• Korean script

 

Methodological approaches to Early Medieval Spain

A graduate colloquium organized by the Oxford Centre for Medieval History
with the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity

Tuesday 1 June 2010 in the Seminar Room, Institute of Archaeology, Beaumont Street

Poster and Programme (two-page PDF)

 

 

 

In Portingalia  . . . trans Neptunum
English and Portuguese in exchange (1100–1500)

A workshop on forms of ‘international’ contact in medieval Western Europe

Friday, 28 May 2010 at St John’s College (New Seminar Room), Oxford

PDF with full details

Marriage of João I of Portugal and Philippa Plantagenet
(detail from British Library MS Royal 14 E IV — Jean de Wavrin's 'Chronicles of England')

 

Global Middle Ages Workshop:
Prof R.I. Moore, 'Establishing global medieval history: challenges and experiences'

Hilary term's 'Global Middle Ages' initiative organised by the 'Oxford Centre for Medieval History' continued on Friday 30 April 2010 with a workshop called 'Establishing global medieval history: challenges and experiences'.

he workshop begab with a presentation by Professor R. I. Moore (Newcastle) about his experiences of establishing medieval history on a global footing at Sheffield and Newcastle Universities.

Burckhardt's Renaissance, 150 Years Later

A one-day symposium marking the 150th anniversary of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Held on Monday 19 April 2010 in Jesus College

Programme

After the Symposium, SSMLL is now making the conference proceedings available on line:

Burckhardt's Renaissance, 150 Years Later

Further details of this conference will be published in due course.

Oxford Centre for Medieval History:
‘Global Middle Ages’ workshop

ThIS workshop was held on 19 February 2010 in the History Faculty, and its purpose was to enable the conversation which began electronically in Michaelmas Term 2009 about the scope and direction of potential Oxford endeavours in the field of the Global Middle Ages to develop further. it took the form of a series of ten-minute presentations: Catherine Holmes (History) – "Introduction: what do we mean by 'The Global Middle Ages' "?; John Darwin (History) – "Global History: the early modernist's perspective"; Arietta Papaconstantinou (Oriental Institute) – "Global Late Antiquity"; Hilde de Weerdt (Chinese Studies) – "Questions of periodisation"; Sarah Foot (Theology) – "Historiography from China to the Maya: a case study in the Global Middle Ages".

 

Was there a ‘crisis of the twelfth century’?

 

This round table to discuss Tom Bisson's major new book was held on Wednesday 2 December 2009 in the History Faculty.

Panellists: Chris Wickham, Conrad Leyser, John Sabapathy and John Watts.

Rome Beyond the Pope: 800–1200

Conveners: Chris Wickham and Conrad Leyser

The aim of this one-day conference held at the Faculty of History, George Street, Oxford on Saturday 25 April 2009 was to place the city of Rome and its secular and ecclesiastical power-structures in a larger Italian and European context.

Speakers included Chris Wickham, Marios Costambeys (Liverpool), Caroline Goodson (Birkbeck) and Sarah Hamilton (Exeter).

Full details

The Oxford Medieval Graduates’ Conference

Lincoln College, 3–4 April 2009

This year’s Oxford Medieval Graduates’ Conference, sponsored by Medium Aevum, focussed on the theme of Play: Aspects and Approaches.

Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West

City of Jerusalem, Bodleian
MS Lyell 71, fol. 24v

University College, Oxford, 16–17 March 2009

This interdisciplinary conference explored the role of the imagination in the production and use of medieval maps and views of Jerusalem. Papers discussed the representation of the city and its buildings in manuscripts and early printed books from the Jewish and Christian traditions, with an emphasis on city maps and ground plans of the Temple and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The speakers were: Anthony Bale, Kathryne Beebe, Mary Carruthers, Catherine Delano-Smith, Evelyn Edson, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Bianca Kühnel, Thomas O’Loughlin, Kathryn Rudy, Lesley Smith, Hanna Vorholt, and Andrea Worm.

The conference was accompanied by a display of manuscripts and printed books from the collections of the Bodleian Library, on public view in the Library’s Exhibition Room from 23 February to 21 March 2009.

 

Oxford Byzantine Society: Facing East/Facing West

The Oxford Byzantine Society held its annual day conference for graduate students on 28 February 2009. The conference, entitled 'Facing East / Facing West', brought together several graduate students from Oxford, as well as a handful of students from Sussex, Budapest and Warsaw, to present their recent research in the fields of Late Antiquity and Byzantium. A total of fourteen papers were presented over the course of four sessions, making for a somewhat exhausting but consistently stimulating day. Rather than a strict chronological survey, each session was structured around a broadly conceived theme. The opening session dealt with iconographic representation in late antiquity and in the middle Byzantine period. The second session was centred around literary analysis and was bookended by two papers offering very different approaches to the sixth-century historian Procopius. The third session was firmly rooted in the historical approach and featured two fascinating papers on the under-explored subject of medieval Hungarian–Byzantine relations. The fourth session examined the intersection of art and religion with two excellent papers on early christian iconography and a final paper that looked at kontakaria, a series of manuscripts which contained musical notation. The conference was well attended by graduate students and senior fellows and, as a result, the Q&A sessions following each paper were consistently lively and well-informed. The range of topics discussed during the course of the day served as a welcome reminder that the story of Late Antiquity and Byzantium is still being written, and that the writing has clearly been entrusted to capable hands.

The Medieval British Isles: Interaction and Common Experiences

Copyright: The Bodleian Library
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/users/nnj/goughmap.htm

A colloquium on the theme ‘The Medieval British Isles: Interaction and Common Experiences’ was held in Jesus College on 7 November 2008. Six graduate students gave short papers, which were followed by discussion. The event was attended by approximately twenty-five graduate students and Faculty members, from both ‘Celtic’ and ‘History’ backgrounds. The papers covered a range of themes, stretching from the seventh century to the thirteenth. Four papers focussed on connections between different parts of the British Isles, examining problems relating to links between Galloway and Ireland, common themes in the perception of marine life in the seas between the Hebrides and Ireland, the dealings of tenth-century English kings with Wales and the ties between south-west Britain and the Irish Sea. Two papers were less overtly concerned with medieval interaction per se, but adopted comparative perspectives on evidence related to law and bloodfeud in different parts of the British Isles, using evidence from one geographical area to pose questions of the evidence from another. The papers demonstrated the importance of overcoming the traditional geographical units of historiographical investigation throughout the medieval period. Thanks to the work of Sir Rees Davies, a ‘British Isles’ approach is widely accepted for the period between c.1100 and c.1300; there is, however, much to be gained from considering the British Isles as a whole, even before the period of the ‘First English Empire’. In particular, several papers drew on evidence from one part of the British Isles to suggest possible interpretations of difficult evidence elsewhere; this is perhaps of especial value in the early medieval period, in which the scarcity and ambiguity of extant sources pose fundamental interpretative problems.

Sharing Sacred Space

http://www.chertseylocal.co.uk/History/
P4ChertseyHistoryNormanandMedievalEras.php

Saturday 1 November 2008, University College

This interdisciplinary workshop on the theme of ‘Sharing Sacred Space’ brought together nine speakers (graduate students and faculty members) from the fields of History, English, Art History, and Egyptology. Papers presented case studies from medieval Europe and the Mediterranean region, covering a broad temporal and geographical range. Four thematic sessions revealed fruitful points of encounter.

The first two papers examined the relationship between religious communities and pilgrims at cult sites in England and Austria, demonstrating how hagiographical texts and pilgrim guides encouraged particular ritual practices and harnessed the relics of the saints to create topographies of spiritual power within the church building and in the surrounding territory. The following two papers considered interaction between individuals and groups in the devotional landscape of late medieval England. A self-portrait of the hermit John Lacey and the Book of Margery Kempe were both shown to display a concern with interiority, whether in terms of physical enclosure or visionary activity, while also shedding light on the way in which personal religious experiences were shared with others through text, image, and performance.

Three speakers then focused on visual material to explore cultural and religious exchange across a wider area, discussing contact between Rome and the Byzantine world from the sixth to the thirteenth century with particular reference to Marian imagery. Both the movement of works of art and the placement of images within particular architectural settings were explored in the context of shifting patterns of power within the Central and Eastern Mediterranean. The final two papers addressed the role of the family in the creation and ownership of religious foundations in eighth-century Egypt and Norman Southern Italy. Tracing involvement in the sites over time illuminated processes of negotiation between family members, as well as between the clergy and laity, for control over land and dynastic commemoration.