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2005 Colloquium Paper Abstracts

The Character of Widsið
Leigh Harrison | Medieval Studies

The Old English Widsið, uniquely preserved in the famous tenth-century Exeter Book manuscript (though arguably quite a lot older than that), has long puzzled and intrigued those scholars who have chosen not to ignore it. But while its two great exponents in the twentieth century, R. W. Chambers and Kemp Malone, were in their rather exhaustive editions diligently to research and elucidate for posterity the poem's characteristic lists of early medieval peoples and somewhat involved poetic structure, neither they nor those to follow them have done much to interpret the poem in works of literary criticism—indeed, to see Widsið as much of a poem at all.

This paper, as its title suggests, will examine the poem as a poem on three levels: its general style and format (or character), its speaker's degree of self-presentation (as the poem's somewhat transparent main character), and most especially the rather unremittingly allusive manner through which the poem invites us to call its lists of heroes and tribes (its other characters) to mind. By comparing Widsið 's "character," thus broadly defined, with the style and substance of other analogous written and oral traditions, we can perhaps gain a better understanding of how the poem at least once functioned as a work of literature. No less importantly, a better understanding of the "character" of Widsið can, in turn, better inform us about the scantily-preserved æsthetic and literary-representational priorities of the early Germanic milieux from which such an anomalous work of English literature sprang.

The Unholy Pair:  The Specter of Cain and Eve in Beowulf
Caitlin Callaghan | Medieval Studies

The Beowulf poet develops an undeniable affiliation between Cain and Eve and Grendel and Grendel’s mother in his poem. But to what extent can this affiliation be extended to positive identification? Can we claim that Cain is Grendel, and Eve actually Grendel’s mother? By working with the two narrative frameworks—one Germanic and character-based, one Christian and audience-based—I will show through an examination of terminology, Augustinian commentary, and even English place-names that the connection between these four may be deeper than it appears.

An articulation of various characters’ genealogies establishes their integrity and reputation throughout Beowulf, and Grendel’s receives the same attention. The narrative development of Grendel as a combination of monster and man invites a careful examination of the ways in which his genealogy perhaps mirrors Cain’s. The terms grimma gæst and ides describe Grendel and his mother, respectively, in the poem, but we find these terms applied to other characters in other Anglo-Saxon texts, sometimes in positive ways. Similarly, the prevalence of peace-weaving females in Beowulf, and the possible identification of Eve as a failed peace-weaver after the Fall, suggests a different reading of Grendel’s mother. Is she the early English Church’s insinuation of the First Woman, a gross manipulation? Lastly, if Augustine’s assertion that the earthly city is the work of Cain and his heirs, and Heorot, according to Stephen Bandy, is such a city, then can we argue that Hroðgar and his men are in the service of Cain as well?

By drawing these various threads together, I will argue that Beowulf and the other Scandinavian warriors battle in the spirit of Cain and his kin, while the failed peace-weavers Wealhtheow, Hygd and Hildeburh struggle in the spirit of Eve.

What a Bitch!: genre, genitalia, and social-climbing in The Tale of Sarcastic Halli (Sneglu-Halla Þáttr)
Jeff Turco | German Studies

Two established ways of elaborating a "genre-system"of Medieval Icelandic literature are (1) through a relative chronology of the putatively-historical narrated events (i.e., sagas of ancient times, sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas) and (2) through the social status of the protagonist (i.e., kings, bishops, or knights saga, family saga, lying saga, folktale). To date, however, there has been little consideration of internal evidence for the
consciousness of such systems on the part of those who allegedly worked within them: are they just latter-day scholarly abstractions? I argue for an authorly awareness of one such system (a hierarchy of genres) on the basis of a (perilously) close reading of the Icelandic Tale of Sarcastic Halli, and arrive at the (tentative) conclusion that questions of genre are analytically useful for us precisely because they had real generative force for an Icelander writing in the thirteenth century. Sarcastic Halli, the unrelentingly raunchy tale of two Icelandic country-boys competing as court-poets in Norway, features a figure whose one-upmanship and sexual-defamation of his rivals (including his own royal patron) depend on his self-reflexive mastery--and his foes corresponding ignorance--of generic convention. Halli establishes his social position through a concerted manipulation of these conventions, ensconcing himself in a network of allusion to myth (which trumps even kingship, since kings are genealogically subordinate to the gods), while framing his peers and superiors as the sexual-deviants and low-lifes of an excrement-besmirched folktale-world. Hence, the risqué Tale is not simply a series of virtuoso vituperations based on sexual-cum-bathroom humor, but is only funny (or only really funny) from the perspective of considerable literary connoisseurship and an awareness of genre that reflects the concerns of social class and political power in thirteenth-century Iceland.

Kings’ Bodies and Legitimate Succession: Physical Propaganda in Late Anglo-Saxon England
Nicole Marafioti | Medieval Studies

In this paper, I will argue that usurping kings in late Anglo-Saxon England used their predecessors’ bodies to legitimize their own dubiously acquired authority, removing their deposed opponents’ corpses from the public eye while glorifying the relics of royal saints of previous generations. The remains of posthumously sanctified kings were enshrined in churches and celebrated by cults, often with the endorsement of reigning rulers who wished to reinforce their own authority by invoking the legacy of irreproachable monarchs of the past. Usurpers appropriated these relics to forge an association with a lawful royal line; but they also made efforts to deny the legitimacy of their immediate predecessors, depicting themselves as the true heirs to the saintly kings of the preceding generation. This was accomplished, in part, by depriving their deposed predecessors of the royal memorialization that legitimate kings deserved: without public burial, a king’s memory would presumably die out among the population, since his body could not become the center of religious devotion or the focus of political resistance against the new regime. My discussion will concentrate on two usurpers, Æthelred “the Unready” and William the Conqueror, who secured their positions through the violent deaths of their immediate predecessors: each king attempted to legitimize his own authority by concealing the resulting corpse while openly celebrating the sanctified remains of the previous king. The deposed kings’ bodies and the preceding kings’ relics were employed as physical propaganda, asserting that the new kings – and not their slain predecessors – were the legitimate successors to the realm.

Bifurcated Memories of a Medieval Borderland:  Remembering and Forgetting the Arrival of the Teutonic Knights in Poland
Paul Milliman | Department of History

In 1226 Duke Konrad of Mazovia invited the Teutonic Knights to Poland to help defend his duchy from attacks by the neighboring pagan Prussians.  He granted them the land of Chełmno, located on the right bank of the Vistula River, to serve as their base of operations.  According to the Teutonic Knights’ chronicler, Peter of Dusberg, writing in the 1320s, Konrad made this donation in perpetuity with the consent of his family, his nobles, and the Polish bishops who had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the area.  However, according to the arguments proposed by King Kazimierz the Great’s lawyers in 1339, Konrad (Kazimierz’s great-grandfather) had granted the land of Chełmno only for a period of 20 years; after the Teutonic Knights had conquered the Prussians, they were supposed to have returned Konrad’s grant and moved to the conquered Prussian lands. 

My paper will examine how these bifurcated memories were preserved and propagated by examining the tension and interplay between orality and literacy in the development of medieval historical consciousness.  The source materials pertaining to this dispute present us with a unique opportunity to examine the development of social memory, because in addition to charters and chronicles, we also have the lengthy testimonies of the 30 witnesses who testified about this matter in Kazimierz’s 1339 trial against the Teutonic Knights.  Some of these witnesses made reference to written documents, but the majority related memories passed on to them by their family members and friends.  Examining these testimonies in conjunction with the charters and chronicles allows us a possibility to analyze how over 100 years later the two sides in the dispute had come to believe such radically different versions of the same story.  Furthermore, this analysis can shed some light on the phenomenon of group identity formation in the middle ages as it is informed and transformed by the development of historical consciousness.

The Glory and the Lessons of the Past:  Rome and Etruria in Book I of Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People
Colleen Slater | Department of History

Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), chancellor of Florence (1427-44) was best known and most praised in his own time and the following decades for his History of the Florentine People. But while much of the text’s popularity then had to do with its glorifying portrayal of the city’s illustrious past, its interest for modern historians lies in the many breaks with tradition between Bruni’s History and those of previous generations. The topic of this paper is to examine one of these changes: how Bruni discusses the ancient history of Florence in the beginning of Book I. Although the space devoted to this topic in the text is relatively small, I will argue that Bruni makes several very important changes in his representation of Florence’s ancient past that reflect important political issues in his own day. First, for the first time, the history of the Etruscans is discussed in a Florentine history, glorified as the first great empire, and marked as the first communal government. Second, Bruni calls into question the long established medieval tradition of claiming that Rome was the ultimate founder of Florence’s glorious traditions and past, and instead links not only Florence’s greatness to the Etruscan state, but also Rome’s, and portrays Florence’s relationship with ancient Rome as ambiguous at best. Through these changes, Bruni is able to claim a new and celebrated heritage of a previous Tuscan empire unique to Florence, rather than sharing with other great city-states the heritage of Rome. Also, through examining in detail the fall of the Etruscan empire, Bruni warns contemporary Florentines against the factionalism and division within the Florentine territorial state in struggles against Milan and Naples in recent years that may hinder the rise of the second great Tuscan empire, with Florence at its head.

Practical Paradise: Love and Economics in a late Middle English poem
Elizabeth Walgenbach | College of Arts & Sciences

The Isle of Ladies has been called a love poem or a vision of male sexual conquest, in either instance, a fantasy framed by the conventions of the dream vision. Its value has been measured by its ability to unite a jumble of motifs and the “charm” of its narrator’s self-conscious blundering. As part of the Chaucerian apocrypha, the poem has also come under extensive and universally unfavorable comparison with the works of its alleged author. Missing from the discussion is a systematic investigation of how it relates to its contemporary, and not only literary, context.

This paper examines episodes and characterizations in The Isle of Ladies against the social and political backdrop of late fifteenth-century England, investigating its stylistic and thematic treatment of recognizable issues and phenomena. In love the poem’s narrator may be, but his “dream” is not impotent wishful thinking. His lamentations and lovelorn antics veil pragmatic reasoning. Whatever the narrator’s personal charms, his implicit arguments invoke third parties and stress the social, economic, and communal benefits of marriage. The Isle of Ladies is not, I argue, a timeless fantasy, but a vilification of a particular group’s earthy aspirations. This paper seeks to articulate these aspirations, identify their likely proponents, and define the circumstances that may have generated such a response.

Abundance and the Poetics of Praise in the Renaissance English Lyric
Bryan Lowrance | College of Arts & Sciences

Fictions of abundance exist in human thought almost as far back as recorded history stretches; imaginary spaces like the Garden of Eden mark religious and mythological complexes in Western Society and throughout the World. The Later European Middle Ages, however, witnessed a distinct shift in the imaginative treatment of abundance. Fictions of abundance (both spiritual and material) ceased to be fantastical projections towards imaginary locales and instead became linked with European perceptions of, and interactions with, overseas territories increasingly opened by colonial expansion. This paper is part of a broader project charting the development of the idea of abundance in late medieval and early modern European cultural history, especially as it pertains to the development of European Petrarchan love lyric. Petrarchan sonnets evidence a poetics of praise through description, and this description relies on generating images of abundance to convey the beloved’s value and elevate her (or him) above worldly concern and worldly commodity. But these very attempts betray themselves in the corporeal rudiments of their ethereal discourse, and material points of poetic comparison Petrarchan lyrics rely on frequently have important positions in both European in both European relations with (and exploitations of) the extra-Occidental world as well as the cultural mythologies that sustained them. Thus we can read in Petrarchan poetry both the participation of amatory lyric in many of the same cultural/material fantasies as those that sustained commerce and colonialism as well as the conscious resistance of the genre and its writers to these worldly associations. In my paper I focus on England particularly, sketching the development of Petrarchan lyric in the English sixteenth century through close readings of Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney and suggesting how shifts in the development of the English love lyric can be linked to the belated emergence of England as a colonial and commercial superpower.

The words we use: stallage in medieval England
Jenn Watkins | Medieval Studies

Modern scholars have been remarkably productive in writing about markets, commerce and their development over the long 13th century.  However, these very same scholars have not given much attention to the meanings of the words used in documents that relate to the physical marketplace.  For example, "stallage" is a word commonly used in fiscal documents with respect to markets.  Modern scholars like James Masschaele and Peter Sawyer tend to define it in general terms as a payment for stalls or not at all.  However, a proper understanding of stallage does contribute to how we understand medieval markets to have been arranged and organized.  This is particularly important in England as the word "stallage" appears to have been imported into the country after the Norman conquest.  By the 13th century, stallage, along with tolls, was used to distinguish formal markets, whether chartered or prescriptive in origin, from informal gatherings (at which trade, nevertheless, probably occurred).  This paper will trace the use of the word "stallage" and its definition from the 11th to 14th centuries to illustrate its development and adoption into use in medieval England, with all the implications to our understanding of the history of markets that it causes.

"With more addyng to":  Caxton and the 1483 Festial
Curtis Jirsa | Medieval Studies

Both Caxton’s 1483 and 1491 versions of John Mirk’s Festial have recently attracted critical attention on account of the supplementary texts that Caxton chose to issue with the popular fourteenth century sermon cycle. Although these textual compilations do inform us about Caxton’s fifteenth century audience, the very different nature of his two printings of the popular sermon cycle itself merit closer scrutiny than they have thus far received. The first version [STC 17957] was printed only once before Caxton abandoned his template in 1491, adopting instead the 1486 text of the Festial printed by Rood and Hunte, which was subsequently reprinted by both Caxton and his successor Wynkyn de Worde regularly until 1532. The differences between the 1483 and 1491 printings are stark, both in terms of layout (the latter favoring columns and decorative initials) and text. The 1483 printing seemingly contradicts Mirk’s original intention of writing for those suffering from “defaute of bokus and sympulnys of letture” by including lengthy passages in Latin, including a full indulgence issued by the Council of Basel (unrecorded in the STC) and references to the Corpus Iuris Canonici. This paper proposes to investigate the unique nature of Caxton’s 1483 Festial and to situate it within the Festial manuscript tradition (simultaneously scrutinizing and troubling the accepted A-B branches of the Festial stemma) and later 15 th century print editions in an attempt to determine why Caxton abandoned his original template.

Witchcraft: Not Just for Women Anymore
Chris Bailey | Department of History

Based on the observations of contemporary authors and witchcraft treatises like The Malleus Maleficarum, historians have traditionally assumed that members of early modern society conceived of witches only as female. Women comprised the majority of individuals accused of witchcraft; however, a significant number of men were accused as well. In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate the gender aspect of witchcraft in order to explain why the majority of accused witches were women. There has been, however, a paucity of research addressing why men were charged with witchcraft. In their groundbreaking analysis of male witchcraft, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe, Lara Apps and Andrew Gow assert that early modern society perceived witchcraft as a feminine crime because the diminished mental capacity of women left them more susceptible to Satan’s influences. They further posit that men who were accused of witchcraft were described as weak-minded, and implicitly feminized, since this trait had been so heavily associated with women. By investigating early modern concepts of feminized men, such as papists and sodomites, this essay will argue that, based on the attribute of mental weakness, men accused of witchcraft were not feminized because the characteristic of weakmindedness alone is an insufficient criteria upon which to suggest the feminization of men. A survey of witchcraft literature suggests otherwise; men, while described by the same terms as their female analogues, were accused of witchcraft as men, which may imply that the term ‘witch’ was perhaps more gender-neutral than previously thought.

Vox populi, vox dei, vox regis? Thomas Scott & the Idealization of Parliament in Early Stuart England
Matt Davenport | Department of History

Thomas Scott (d. 1626) a preacher, pamphleteer and self-styled prophet rose to preeminence, in both print and manuscript, during the debate swirling around the proposed Spanish marriage for Charles, Prince of Wales. In recent historiography Scott has been noteworthy for his implementation of two supposed and related consensus ideologies---anti-popery and Hispanophobia. While Scott’s arguments about the function of Parliament, and the relationship of that body with the English people have been under analyzed. A full analysis of Scott’s conception of Parliament will elucidate how a member of a highly debated ideological consensus viewed the purpose of Parliament and its relationship vis-à-vis the Sovereign and the English people. An analysis of this type could shed light on how pull of competing national and local interests affected a single pamphleteer and his audience. This paper will argue that on several levels—from selection of the titles of his works to selection of frontis pieces to his written argument—Scott was arguing for the centrality of popular participation in politics through their parliamentary representatives in all matters of state, even the so-called arcana imperii. A close reading of a progression of Scott’s pamphlets using structural, textual and visual analysis will lead to a more complete view of the texts as both ‘puritan’ polemic and constitutional critique.

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