Medieval Round Table
Committee
Prof. Stephanie Trigg, School of Culture and Communication, sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au
Andrew Stephenson, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, andrewws@
unimelb.edu.au
The Medieval Round Table is an informal discussion group open to interested students, academics and independent scholars. The Round Table meets monthly, usually at 6 pm on the first Monday of the month, for presentations of papers, discussions of participants' work in progress, discussions of readings etc.
Venue: Most meetings will be in Graduate Seminar Room 2 (room 209), which is in the east corridor, first floor, Old Arts. The meetings for March and April will be in Graduate Seminar Room 1, which is next door to Graduate Seminar Room 2. The meeting for May will be in the South Theatre, first floor, Old Arts.
To be added to the mailing list please email Andrew Stephenson, andrewws@ unimelb.edu.au.
Papers for 2013
4 February
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts
Professor Stephen Knight, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
Histories, Heroes and Early Britain
National and Christian histories from the early British and English period are not normally considered in the context of the secular heroic narratives also deriving from those cultures. Yet there are some interchanges of detail between the two genres, and the ultimate text from this period, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, can be seen as a condensation of the two genres into historicised heroic narrative – which may in itself be an explanation of the remarkably dynamic force of the story of Arthur in the subsequent period. This talk will study the nature of the historic and the heroic genres in early Britain, and in particular examine the process of their hybridisation and ultimate condensation.
4 March
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 1, Old Arts
John Crossley, Monash University
Old-fashioned Versus New-fangled: Reading and Writing Numbers, 1200–1500
MCMXIX is hard for us to read; 1919 is much easier. On the other hand, for medieval readers the opposite was the case. Changing from the old-fashioned Roman numerals to the new-fangled Hindu-Arabic numerals seems to have been a slower process than is generally accepted.
In this paper I consider how people slowly changed their ways of reading and writing numbers and give some examples ranging from amusing to abstruse. Often people in the Middle Ages were like us reading a Latin text: when they came to a number such as XVIII they used their vernacular, just as most of us would say ‘eighteen’, rather than ‘duodeviginti’ when reading the text in Latin - and they even wrote in the same style if they were French: Roman numerals were manipulated to write ‘Quatre-vingts’ in the French way.
Standard books on palaeography usually briskly dismiss the introduction of these new numerals with a remark to the effect that Hindu-Arabic numerals first came into significant use about 1200 and were in general use by 1400. Closer examination shows that there was a mixture of styles, including combinations of the two systems, used in the period 1200-1500 and that the uptake of the new numerals was slow, problematic and spasmodic. I shall give an account of my first steps in quantifying the evolution of the change of practice.
8 April (second Monday due to Easter)
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 1, Old Arts
Melissa Raine, University of Melbourne
Personal Taste and Social Threat in Malory’s Morte Darthur
Examples of luxurious food consumption are not hard to find in late medieval English texts and records; however, strikingly few subjective descriptions of taste are recorded, and those that do exist often signify exceptional circumstances. This paper explores the expression of potential threats to social order through the representation of individuated bodily pleasure in food, focusing on the "Poisoned Apple" episode in Malory's Morte Darthur. At Guinevere's "privy dinner', personal pleasure is associated with bodily imbalance and excessiveness, which subverts the communal logic of feasting and the chivalric ideals upheld by this activity. I will also discuss the significance of Launcelot's death by starvation in light of Malory's food symbolism, particularly in relation to the Tale of Gareth.
6 May
Venue: South Theatre, Old Arts
Anne McKendry, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
PhD Completion Seminar
Sacrificial Knights, Extravagant Kings, Emotional Christians: Discourses of Excess and Restraint in Late Medieval Literature
Discourses of excess and restraint inform medieval social practices, political systems and literary texts. This thesis applies three methodological approaches to the literature of fourteenth-century England in order to explore how medieval authors express, negotiate and occasionally resolve these contradictory impulses.
The first section considers two canonical texts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, through a psychoanalytic framework. Following scholars who have “medievalised” literary theory, part one invokes Lacan’s analysis of courtly love and Bataille’s economics of waste to explicate the narratives of extravagance and sacrifice that structure both texts.
Part two’s historicist approach interrogates the political upheavals of Richard II's government, the disintegration of feudal hierarchies and fourteenth-century sumptuary laws. Troilus and Criseyde hints at an unusual intervention by Chaucer into this political turmoil, while The Clerk’s Tale counterbalances Griselda’s suffering with contempt for the “peple.” Similarly, the debate poem Wynnere and Wastoure and Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal rehearse the economic, political and social implications of laws that attempted to constrain conspicuous consumption.
The final section of this thesis explores medieval religious emotion. Penitential treatises such as Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne describe excessive sins and punishments so improbable they begin to resemble narrative entertainment. But this rhetorical excess is absent from secular didactic texts such as “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” that recall the burgeoning middle class. Finally, religious emotion is explored in relation to Margery Kempe’s turbulent conduct and Julian of Norwich’s austere contemplation.
The discourses of excess and restraint that pervade medieval social, political and religious practices reflect the significant economic and cultural changes affecting England in the late Middle Ages. This thesis interrogates their literary embodiments through the methodological frameworks of psychoanalysis, historicism and religious emotion.
3 June
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts
Bob DiNapoli, University of Melbourne
Can’t a Guy Get Some Sleep Around Here? A Re-Reading of Bede’s Account of Cædmon
Bede’s account of how the illiterate and tone-deaf cowherd Cædmon came by the gift of song has long served as a foundational narrative in the modern study of Old English poetry. And for good reason: its compelling picture of this hapless nobody, so implausibly singled out, finishing his life composing vernacular religious poetry in a monastic scriptorium, remains iconically apt. Whatever its value as literal, documentary history, it offers us an uncannily plausible account of the circumstances that allowed the majority of the extant Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus to be composed and preserved. For this very reason, along with Bede’s status as an early medieval pillar of orthodoxy and the near-universal anthologizing of his Cædmon-story in introductory student texts on Old English, we tend to overlook just how odd a tale he tells.
In this talk I wish to consider it as an untypical miracle story that borrows any number of elements from biblical and hagiographical narrative but employs them tangentially to the usual arc of any edifying religious narrative of the period. From the wry humor of the socially-embarrassed cowherd fleeing a party because he couldn’t sing (and being harried into his dreams by a figure commanding him to do just that) to the mystery of his nocturnal visitor’s identity, Bede’s carefully crafted narrative embodies the formative ambivalences that must have attended the inception of vernacular religious poetry in Anglo-Saxon England, a genre whose deeply traditional and deeply pagan elements of vocabulary, diction and imagination frequently complicate the expected smooth flow of Christian orthodoxy.
1 July
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts
Sarah McNamer, Georgetown University
5 August
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts
Dr Stephanie Downes, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
2 September
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts
Mary Flannery, Lausanne
7 October
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts
Victoria Emery, Deakin University
Queen Competitions and the First World War
11 November (second Monday due to Melbourne Cup)
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts
Ineke Langhans-Cornet, University of Melbourne
2 December
Venue: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts