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2007 Colloquium Paper Abstracts

Miracles and Persuasion in Augustine
Erik Kenyon | Classics

Throughout the majority of his career, Augustine cited Christ’s miracles to establish Catholic authority; late in life, however, he came to argue from contemporary miracles as well.  Scholars posit miracles surrounding the arrival of Saint Stephen’s relics in North Africa as the cause of Augustine’s “change of heart.”   I argue that the significance of this change has been greatly exaggerated, as can be seen by looking to the role of authorities in Augustine’s epistemology.  The young Augustine found himself caught between Catholics requiring faith and Manichees promising understanding.   When the Manichees failed to deliver, Augustine concluded that faith in authority is a necessary step for humans to come to understanding, which is ultimately acquired by consulting the Truth within.   Christ, by virtue of his dual natures, is this Truth within as well as the human teacher whose miracles establish the authority of Catholic doctrine.   Miracles persuade us to submit to authority; Truth proves to us that the authority’s doctrines are true.   Augustine’s eventual adoption of arguments from contemporary miracles reflects a change neither of heart nor of doctrine, but a different set of opponents.   In the early De Utilitate Credendi, written contra paganos hereticosque, the basis for his arguments moves quickly from Christ’s miracles to the impressive scope and permanence of the tradition originally brought together by those miracles.   Apostolic succession thus insulates the persuasive power of Christ’s miracles from the claims of Augustine’s heretical contemporaries.   In the late De Civitate Dei 22, addressed solely to pagan opposition, Augustine is happy to cite miracles wrought by Christ and Stephen. Nevertheless, both works cite miracles, not to prove the truth of Catholic doctrine, but to persuade the reader that such an authority is worthy of faith.

The Double Life of P. Vergilius Maro
Ben Weber | Medieval Studies

One of the lesser-known products of the twelfth-century renaissance was a tradition of legends about the poet Vergil.  These legends, first appearing in Latin in the 1150’s, portray Vergil as a sage, magician, and adviser to kings.  The tradition continues throughout the middle ages, appearing more and more often as the centuries go by.  Scholarship has long neglected these legends.  There are only two major works that deal with the legends in a substantive way: one does so only to dismiss them as relics of a popular oral tradition, and the other studies the legends completely apart from their contexts, concerned only with finding patterns among them.  No scholar has considered any of the legends in context as an integral part of the work in which it appears.  In my paper, I will examine the Vergil legends which appear in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, the first work to include the legends, to show that situating the legends in context is exciting and useful work.  The Policraticus is the obvious choice to begin this investigation because John of Salisbury was an avid reader of the classics with a particular fondness for Vergil—he ends his Policraticus by allegorizing the first six books of the Aeneid.  John of Salisbury also developed a sophisticated theory of reading and the role of literature in Christian society, a theory which makes the inclusion of his stories about Vergil making magical objects that much more surprising and worthy of explanation.  Finally, by focusing only on the Policraticus, I will be able to concentrate on the question of context and avail myself of the large body of scholarship on John of Salisbury which will greatly enrich my study of those legends that appear in his work.

Does Vergil Read the Pilgrim’s Mind?  Trouble in the Epistemological Paradise of Dante’s Commedia
Ashleigh Imus | Medieval Studies

This talk will explore Vergil’s mind-reading abilities in Dante’s Commedia, a puzzling gift since telepathic powers are otherwise reserved for souls in paradise.  Because Dante marks telepathy as primarily a celestial phenomenon, scholars have either glossed over Vergil’s mind reading or have denied it as common-sense intuition rooted firmly in profane experience.  Yet if we unravel Dante’s masterful rhetoric, it becomes clear that Vergil indeed reads the pilgrim’s thoughts and that sometimes his powers are not so distinct from those of souls in heaven.  This discovery sheds new light on the dialectics of Vergil’s authority and reveals epistemological problems that arise at moments ostensibly dedicated to rendering telepathic communication as pure and uncomplicated.  Perhaps more importantly, from this discovery emerge new patterns of history in the poem, ways in which Dante historicizes his thinking on issues of authority, theology, and epistemology, both in the context of the poem and the late medieval culture in which it was produced.

Solomon and Saturn I :  An Anomaly?
Aaron Ralby | Medieval Studies

I propose to present a portion of my MPhil research from last year on Solomon and Saturn I.  In my dissertation, I argued that this Old English poem is not the bizarre and occult anomaly it has often been considered by modern scholars, but rather a deeply religious poem that conveys the power of the Our Father prayer through skilled use of language and heroic Germanic imagery.  The poem, excluded from many studies of Old English poetry and translated only once in the last 150 years, is not as disparate from the corpus of Old English poetry as it seems.  In this presentation, I will discuss textual difficulties based on the manuscripts, scholarly attitudes toward the poem, its Old English context, and finally formulaic language, specifically how such language links the poem to the Exeter Book’s Soul and Body II.  Categorical dismissal of Solomon and Saturn I, I argue, has caused such parallels to remain unexplored.  By presenting these parallels, I aim to show that Solomon and Saturn I contains similar content and style to other Old English poetry, and is not the outlier it has so often been named.  I gave this presentation in the spring, and have accompanying slides illustrating the verbal parallels; there are also images of digital facsimiles I made of the poem’s two surviving manuscripts, as well as a couple high-quality digital images of one of the A manuscripts.

Writing Socio-Cultural History from Medieval Records:  Methodological Notes from a Northern-French Case
Ionut Epurescu-Pascovici | Medieval Studies

This paper draws on archival research on thirteenth-century charters and records from the Amiens region (northern France). It aims to enter a dialogue with major methodological contributions to the uses of charters for social and cultural history, over the last two decades – from Chris Wickham to Dominique Barthélemy. Some palaeographical clues will be provided to illustrate the possibilities for interpreting charters. Furthermore, this paper relates the medievalists’ efforts to use charters for socio-cultural history to developments in social theory, specifically Charles Taylor’s concept of a ‘language-analogue of meaningful behaviour’. As such, this paper aims to participate in an interdisciplinary conversation, and should appeal, through its focus on methodology, to a multidisciplinary and diverse audience.

The Viking North Atlantic and the Settlement of Iceland
Rebecca Wall | History/Anthropology undergraduate

Iceland was originally settled in the late ninth century, a fact asserted in medieval Scandinavian documentary evidence and thus far also borne out by archaeological investigation.  The settlement's late date has led many modern scholars to assume that analysis of the landtaking and its participants can depend largely on written sources.  The wealth of indigenous written material dealing with the settlement era dates to an entirely different period in Icelandic history, some three centuries later, and as such is tailored to fit the needs of a later audience.  The sagas and the two historical compilations, Islendingabok and Landnamabok, while not purely fictional, tend to skim over or fabricate much of the history of the settlement in the interests of creating a meaningful and unified narrative of Icelandic identity.  Although historians no longer rely on these sources alone, much historiography of the settlement seems to have been drawn into the theme of Icelandic exceptionalism.  That is to say, the settlement is frequently taken out of its historical, geographical, political, social and economic context, crippling any effort to access the three centuries of development that lay between the beginning of the landtaking and the writing of the medieval narrative sources.

This paper is an attempt to start to replace the Icelandic settlement within the framework of Norse expansion into the North Atlantic, and to assess the impact of interactions with the other cultures of the British Isles on the timing and manner of the settlement.

Castle and Bones: 2006 Excavations at Tulsk and Carns, Co. Roscommon, Ireland
Stephanie Contino | History/English undergraduate

The Medieval Rural Settlement Project (MRSP) is a large-scale archaeological and historical study of rural settlement in late medieval Ireland funded by the Discovery Programme, Ireland’s research archaeology institute. This past summer, I participated in the Project’s excavations of two separate sites in County Roscommon: a ring-fort/castle tower-house at the village of Tulsk, and Carns, site of an abandoned settlement and complex field system with human activity possibly going back to the Iron Age. The project’s discoveries are beginning to challenge traditional interpretations of medieval Irish history.  

The subject of medieval rural settlement has been somewhat neglected by Irish scholars, especially concerning the native Gaelic Irish. The MRSP was initiated specifically to address this deficiency and does so particularly within its Roscommon module, in which the project seeks not only to determine rural settlement and land-use patterns but to also assess the nature of Gaelic lordship within the study region (which remained primarily under Gaelic O’Conor clan control in spite of frequent Anglo-Norman incursions from the 14th century onwards). 

I will present an overview of the Tulsk and Carns findings and set them within their broader historical and geographical contexts. The excavations present an intriguing story of continuity and change in the medieval rural Irish landscape.

"My joye watz sone toriven":  The Toil of Dreaming in Pearl
Melissa Winders | English

The transition between waking and sleeping is often a site of stress and conflict in Middle English dream vision poems.  While the vision itself may offer knowledge or revelation to the dreamer, the process of falling asleep and entering the dream world—and of returning to the waking world afterwards—is marked by shock, by bodily or mental pain.  Piers Plowman’s Will begins and ends some of his various dreams with tears, arguments, and bodily privation.  The dreamer in Gavin Douglas’s Palace of Honor initially reacts to his vision with terror and awakes after nearly drowning in a ditch, and even Chaucer’s dreamers frequently enter the dream-world with some sort of conflict, such as the dreamer’s sickness in Book of the Duchess or his “trial” at the beginning of Legend of Good Women.  In this paper I explore the ways in which Pearl shares this characteristic of dream visions and its particular deployment of the stress of dreaming as part of the dreamer’s process of mourning.  Pearl opens and closes with violent language of falling, of grief and loss.  These parallels not only form powerful bookends to the action of the dream but establish a pattern repeated within the dream, in which conflict precedes revelation.  Finally, they constitute a sort of toil on the dreamer’s part—a work of mourning and salvation—which is already underway before the dream begins and which continues after the vision is gone. 

Leute's Limits – The Performative Sovereign
Juan Sierra | Comparative Literature

This paper explores the limits of sovereignty as a linguistic performative sign within Leute's intervention in the vision in Passus XII (C-text). Following Carl Schmitt, the paper reads sovereignty not as exercised power but as the absolute utterance of the sign—the word as an absolute and not as the mere command of the absolute. The paper traces how this conception was implicitly formulated through fourteenth-century treatments of sovereign limitations, conditionals given to the absolute exercise of “Leute” and “trouthe” within coronation oaths, advice to princes, and canon law. I will argue that Leute's intervention in Passus XII, not only borrows from these traditions, but exercises a type of sovereign performance over the dreamer; this performance does not demand “leute” to a specific authority in behalf of the dreamer; rather, it forces the dreamer to enact political force itself through his speech.

This essay does not follow the well trodden path of reading Piers as a site of political and normative dissent or re-inscription. To do this, one would assume that the dream-satire does not perform so much as imagine or describe possible sites of sovereign appropriation. The poem, in this light, becomes a background for its own obsolescence and for its mere use as general political resistance. I wish to argue the reverse. Leute's performance makes any action of dissent in Piers only imaginable through authority. Therefore, the limits placed by Leute, regarding dissent against the clergy, do not simply deal with clerical reform but with sovereign speech proper, with the possible conditions of the absolute performer and his limits in the lengthy movements of will as performance. What occurs is not simply the performance of an action but the performance of the political proper—of authority.

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