Some information about upcoming events at KCL. For the full programme for the year, please visit the CLAMS website.
Upcoming events include:
Monday 29 September, 18.00-20.00
Meet the Medievalists Drinks
Council Room (K2.29), King's Building, Strand Campus
The CLAMS welcome event. All welcome.
Tuesday 7 October, 18.00-20.00
Writing Anglo-Saxon England & Hild
River Room, King's Building, Strand Campus
Nicola Griffith in conversation.
For more information, please click here.
Tuesday 7 October, 17.45-19.45
DigiPal Launch Party
Council Room (K2.29), King's Building, Strand Campus
With guest speakers Elaine Treharne (virtually) and Donald Scragg. In collaboration with the Department for Digital Humanities.
For more information, please click here.
Tuesday, 30 September 2014
Wednesday, 17 September 2014
Guest Post: ‘Weaponed’ men, impotent men, and ‘not-men’: sex and manhood in Anglo-Saxon England.
by Dr Chris Monk
It’s a great pleasure to be invited to guest blog for the Manchester Medieval Society blogspot, for which I’d particularly like to thank the Treasurer, Hannah Priest. Hannah suggested I write something about my specialism – medieval sex – as a previous post with ‘sex’ in the title had proved rather popular. Well, I’ll do my best to hold your interest.
What I want to talk about is as much about gender as it is about sexual intercourse, and my idea was prompted by the title of next year’s MANCASS conference: ‘Manhood in Anglo-Saxon England’.
So manhood ... umm. A rather loaded term, wouldn’t you say? Is it a status or an identity? A taxonomy, perhaps? Is it even a reality?
The Anglo-Saxons, as you may know, generally used the word mann, the etymological root of present-day English ‘man’, to mean a person of either sex; and the word had, from which ‘hood’ derives, had the sense of rank, status, or position, something that was conferred and indeed could be lost. So, for example, a priest or a monk who seriously strayed from his vow of celibacy could have his had removed.
Today, the word ‘manhood’ is distinctly gendered. We’re not talking ‘personhood’ here. But the idea of status – legitimate or otherwise – seems to be integral to the concept. However, we often question manhood, we challenge it, and we even laugh at it at times. We may see ourselves or others as either living up to or not living up to one’s manhood. And, of course, at times we link manhood directly to sexual performance, which is often where the humour creeps in.
So what about the Anglo-Saxons? Did they have a concept of manhood that shares any of our preoccupations? How important, for example, was sexual performance in defining manhood?
One of the most useful resources for understanding Anglo-Saxon ideas of sex and gender is the collection of texts known as the penitentials. These handbooks of penance contain lists of various sins with a corresponding ‘tariff’ of penance: usually specified amounts of fasting.
In the past, scholars were somewhat scathing of the penitentials, thinking of them, especially when they dealt with matters of sex, as prurient taxonomy, an obsession with categorising all sin, and therefore not representative of what medieval people actually got up to. This is rather a narrow perspective, I would suggest, and one which speaks more about mid-twentieth-century prudery than it does a desire to accurately understand the past.
I think it is fair to say that we can gain much insight into the Anglo-Saxon world by carefully considering what the penitentials have to say about sex. It is helpful to think of the penitentials as narratives of life, in the sense that they capture in condensed form the many interviews between confessor (priest) and sinner that took place for centuries in England, as well as in Ireland and on the Continent. In other words, though the penitentials are not actual transcripts of dialogue, their form and content evolved out of innumerable conversations between priests and laypersons.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, vernacular penitentials were produced to reflect English needs to equip priests with usable pastoral tools (the priesthood at the time was not considered especially skilled in Latin). Earlier Latin penitentials were not simply translated but were adapted to meet indigenous needs. The following two judgements, or canons, reflect a particular Anglo-Saxon take on manhood.
The first canon is arguably not even about penance, as no fasting is prescribed. This canon explains what a woman may do if her husband is impotent:
So what do we learn here about manhood? Well, imagine the scenario suggested by the language: if it is known about the man (here the word ceorl is used, by the way, meaning a freeman but not a man of nobility). A woman may well have had to prove somehow that her husband was impotent. A parallel canon in another penitential states just that – that the burden of proof was with the woman. How would she prove it? Would she have to subject herself to a physical examination of her hymen, for example? Whatever the case, the situation would have led to the husband’s status – his ‘hood’ we might say – coming under scrutiny. Since the Church’s model of marriage was that God created humans male and female, and that is why they were joined together, it is possible that an impotent man was not really seen as truly male. So it made no difference if the couple had been ‘joined’ in marriage: from the woman’s perspective the union was no longer viable or authentic. And as long as she could prove the man’s impotence, she would suffer no disapprobation from the Church should she choose to take another man as husband.
It is interesting that the word wæpnedman (literally, ‘weaponed man’) was not the choice of word by the writer of the penitential, but rather the basic word for man, wer, was selected. The euphemistic quality of wæpnedman (I assume I don’t need to spell out the euphemism) is important in another canon that relates to masculinity, where both virile men and ‘not-men’ are discussed:
I believe the bædling was probably understood as a person of problematic gender, one who didn’t fit into the Anglo-Saxon ideal of manhood but was not exactly a woman either. What we can say for sure is that the penitential canon above does not show the bædling to be a wæpnedman, a virile man.
The curious thing, however, is that the sinner under consideration here – the ‘he’ of the sentence – can have sex with ‘another wæpnedman’. Scholars, mistakenly I feel, often tend to emphasize that in terms of sexual sin this canon is about penetrator and penetrated. Yet here we are told about a ‘he’ having sex with another virile man, or with a bædling, or indeed with a beast. Confused yet? Well the canonist goes on to also speak about baedlings having sex with each other!
What are we to deduce? The point I want to make is that though this canon is about ‘deviant’ sex (deviant from the Anglo-Saxon Church’s perspective), it’s also as much about gender. I would suggest that in Anglo-Saxon society, there was a perceivable ‘virile man’, a kind of default figure of manhood but whose status was not entirely, or simply, determined by the one with whom he had sex. Two wæpnedmen could have sex together and still be men, we might say. However, there existed (in the mind of at least the writer of the penitential) another type of person who was effeminate or soft and probably thought of as promiscuous like a female prostitute. These bædlings, it may well be inferred, would have sex with virile men or with each other – it wasn’t their sexual acts per se that defined them.
So manhood? Anglo-Saxon manhood? Umm ... a difficult one, that. Perhaps I should sum it up like this:
If you couldn’t quite manage it on the wedding night, then from your new wife’s perspective – and perhaps from the local community’s perspective too – you were not viable as a ‘true’ man. But if you didn’t need the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Viagra, and no matter with whom you had sex, you could still be viewed as He-man. However, if you happened to be ‘a son of a hermaphrodite’, then you weren’t to even bother applying for ‘manhood’!
Useful reading: David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2009); R. D. Fulk, ‘Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore’, in Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C. Weston, pp. 1-34; Allen J. Frantzen, ‘The “Literariness” of the Penitentials’, in Frantzen’s The Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database; Christopher Monk, ‘Framing Sex: Sexual Discourse in Text and Image in Anglo-Saxon England’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Manchester, 2012), esp. pp. 127-40.
About the Author: Dr Chris Monk is a freelance consultant, researcher and writer. He obtained his PhD at the University of Manchester in 2012, where until recently he also lectured on medieval literature and narrative art. His area of research is broadly Anglo-Saxon culture, and his specialism is the history of sexuality in early medieval England (c.700-c.1100). He is presently a consultant for Rochester Cathedral’s ‘Hidden Treasures, Fresh Expressions’ project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, carrying out research on its great treasure, the twelfth-century manuscript Textus Roffensis. His monograph, Sex, Genesis and the Anglo-Saxons is presently under review at Manchester University Press. He also writes feature articles for magazines, most of which to date have not been about the Middle Ages, though he has a few medieval themed pieces in the pipeline. Over the next few months Chris will be producing ‘The Sex Lives of the Anglo-Saxons’, a series of video blogs for his website.
It’s a great pleasure to be invited to guest blog for the Manchester Medieval Society blogspot, for which I’d particularly like to thank the Treasurer, Hannah Priest. Hannah suggested I write something about my specialism – medieval sex – as a previous post with ‘sex’ in the title had proved rather popular. Well, I’ll do my best to hold your interest.
What I want to talk about is as much about gender as it is about sexual intercourse, and my idea was prompted by the title of next year’s MANCASS conference: ‘Manhood in Anglo-Saxon England’.
 |
| The Arundel Psalter (Canterbury, between 1012-1023), British Library, Arundel 155, fol. 93r Detail of historiated initial: David slays Goliath This image is identified by the British library as free from known copyright restriction. What did it take to be a man? A big weapon, apparently. |
So manhood ... umm. A rather loaded term, wouldn’t you say? Is it a status or an identity? A taxonomy, perhaps? Is it even a reality?
The Anglo-Saxons, as you may know, generally used the word mann, the etymological root of present-day English ‘man’, to mean a person of either sex; and the word had, from which ‘hood’ derives, had the sense of rank, status, or position, something that was conferred and indeed could be lost. So, for example, a priest or a monk who seriously strayed from his vow of celibacy could have his had removed.
Today, the word ‘manhood’ is distinctly gendered. We’re not talking ‘personhood’ here. But the idea of status – legitimate or otherwise – seems to be integral to the concept. However, we often question manhood, we challenge it, and we even laugh at it at times. We may see ourselves or others as either living up to or not living up to one’s manhood. And, of course, at times we link manhood directly to sexual performance, which is often where the humour creeps in.
So what about the Anglo-Saxons? Did they have a concept of manhood that shares any of our preoccupations? How important, for example, was sexual performance in defining manhood?
One of the most useful resources for understanding Anglo-Saxon ideas of sex and gender is the collection of texts known as the penitentials. These handbooks of penance contain lists of various sins with a corresponding ‘tariff’ of penance: usually specified amounts of fasting.
In the past, scholars were somewhat scathing of the penitentials, thinking of them, especially when they dealt with matters of sex, as prurient taxonomy, an obsession with categorising all sin, and therefore not representative of what medieval people actually got up to. This is rather a narrow perspective, I would suggest, and one which speaks more about mid-twentieth-century prudery than it does a desire to accurately understand the past.
I think it is fair to say that we can gain much insight into the Anglo-Saxon world by carefully considering what the penitentials have to say about sex. It is helpful to think of the penitentials as narratives of life, in the sense that they capture in condensed form the many interviews between confessor (priest) and sinner that took place for centuries in England, as well as in Ireland and on the Continent. In other words, though the penitentials are not actual transcripts of dialogue, their form and content evolved out of innumerable conversations between priests and laypersons.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, vernacular penitentials were produced to reflect English needs to equip priests with usable pastoral tools (the priesthood at the time was not considered especially skilled in Latin). Earlier Latin penitentials were not simply translated but were adapted to meet indigenous needs. The following two judgements, or canons, reflect a particular Anglo-Saxon take on manhood.
The first canon is arguably not even about penance, as no fasting is prescribed. This canon explains what a woman may do if her husband is impotent:
Wer 7 wif gif hig geþeodde beoð 7 se wer mid hire hæman ne mæge, þæt wif hine mot forlætan 7 hire oþerne niman, gif þæt on þone ceorl cuð byð.This canon may well be about unconsummated marriage, rather than about impotence after initial consummation, though this is not explicitly stated. The reason I say this is that Anglo-Saxon versions of Canon Law did not permit a man to leave his wife once they had sex, even if she was barren. (The presumption here was that barrenness was always seen as an issue of female infertility.) If the penitential statement above meant a woman could divorce her husband at any time that he was impotent, even if they had already had intercourse, then it would fly in the face of both Canon Law and Christian Scripture, which forbids divorce other than on the grounds of adultery. So it does seem that this penitential ruling anticipated later medieval laws in England that insisted on consummation as a requirement of marriage.
Man and woman, if they are joined [in marriage] but the man is not able to have sex with her, the woman may abandon him and take for herself another, if that is known about the man.
So what do we learn here about manhood? Well, imagine the scenario suggested by the language: if it is known about the man (here the word ceorl is used, by the way, meaning a freeman but not a man of nobility). A woman may well have had to prove somehow that her husband was impotent. A parallel canon in another penitential states just that – that the burden of proof was with the woman. How would she prove it? Would she have to subject herself to a physical examination of her hymen, for example? Whatever the case, the situation would have led to the husband’s status – his ‘hood’ we might say – coming under scrutiny. Since the Church’s model of marriage was that God created humans male and female, and that is why they were joined together, it is possible that an impotent man was not really seen as truly male. So it made no difference if the couple had been ‘joined’ in marriage: from the woman’s perspective the union was no longer viable or authentic. And as long as she could prove the man’s impotence, she would suffer no disapprobation from the Church should she choose to take another man as husband.
It is interesting that the word wæpnedman (literally, ‘weaponed man’) was not the choice of word by the writer of the penitential, but rather the basic word for man, wer, was selected. The euphemistic quality of wæpnedman (I assume I don’t need to spell out the euphemism) is important in another canon that relates to masculinity, where both virile men and ‘not-men’ are discussed:
Se þe mid bædlinge hæme, oþþe mid oþrum wæpned men, oþþe mid nytene, fæste x winter.This is one strange canon! First, what is a bædling? A number of scholars have discussed this very rare Old English word, for which there is no direct corresponding word in Latin. It may derive from OE bæddel which probably means ‘hermaphrodite’, thus making a bædling a descendent of a bæddel (the suffix –ing is used in Anglo-Saxon genealogies to mean ‘the son of’). The writer of the penitential above later explains that bædlings are ‘soft like a harlot’. The baedling thus seems to be considered effeminate in some way, which is the sense here behind ‘soft’ (OE hnesclic). David Clark considers bædlings as ‘not-men’, part of a continuum of gender including women, boys and effeminate men. There may be a clue of sorts to their identity in an earlier Anglo-Saxon text, Liber monstrorum (Book of Monsters), which refers to ‘the person of both sexes’ who looks physically more masculine than feminine in the upper body but loves feminine occupation (not specified), and who also goes around fooling ignorant men ‘in the manner of a whore’. Perhaps there is a link between this so-called ‘monster’ and the bædling.
He who has sex with a bædling, or with another virile male, or with an animal, should fast 10 years.
I believe the bædling was probably understood as a person of problematic gender, one who didn’t fit into the Anglo-Saxon ideal of manhood but was not exactly a woman either. What we can say for sure is that the penitential canon above does not show the bædling to be a wæpnedman, a virile man.
The curious thing, however, is that the sinner under consideration here – the ‘he’ of the sentence – can have sex with ‘another wæpnedman’. Scholars, mistakenly I feel, often tend to emphasize that in terms of sexual sin this canon is about penetrator and penetrated. Yet here we are told about a ‘he’ having sex with another virile man, or with a bædling, or indeed with a beast. Confused yet? Well the canonist goes on to also speak about baedlings having sex with each other!
What are we to deduce? The point I want to make is that though this canon is about ‘deviant’ sex (deviant from the Anglo-Saxon Church’s perspective), it’s also as much about gender. I would suggest that in Anglo-Saxon society, there was a perceivable ‘virile man’, a kind of default figure of manhood but whose status was not entirely, or simply, determined by the one with whom he had sex. Two wæpnedmen could have sex together and still be men, we might say. However, there existed (in the mind of at least the writer of the penitential) another type of person who was effeminate or soft and probably thought of as promiscuous like a female prostitute. These bædlings, it may well be inferred, would have sex with virile men or with each other – it wasn’t their sexual acts per se that defined them.
So manhood? Anglo-Saxon manhood? Umm ... a difficult one, that. Perhaps I should sum it up like this:
If you couldn’t quite manage it on the wedding night, then from your new wife’s perspective – and perhaps from the local community’s perspective too – you were not viable as a ‘true’ man. But if you didn’t need the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Viagra, and no matter with whom you had sex, you could still be viewed as He-man. However, if you happened to be ‘a son of a hermaphrodite’, then you weren’t to even bother applying for ‘manhood’!
Useful reading: David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2009); R. D. Fulk, ‘Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore’, in Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C. Weston, pp. 1-34; Allen J. Frantzen, ‘The “Literariness” of the Penitentials’, in Frantzen’s The Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database; Christopher Monk, ‘Framing Sex: Sexual Discourse in Text and Image in Anglo-Saxon England’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Manchester, 2012), esp. pp. 127-40.
About the Author: Dr Chris Monk is a freelance consultant, researcher and writer. He obtained his PhD at the University of Manchester in 2012, where until recently he also lectured on medieval literature and narrative art. His area of research is broadly Anglo-Saxon culture, and his specialism is the history of sexuality in early medieval England (c.700-c.1100). He is presently a consultant for Rochester Cathedral’s ‘Hidden Treasures, Fresh Expressions’ project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, carrying out research on its great treasure, the twelfth-century manuscript Textus Roffensis. His monograph, Sex, Genesis and the Anglo-Saxons is presently under review at Manchester University Press. He also writes feature articles for magazines, most of which to date have not been about the Middle Ages, though he has a few medieval themed pieces in the pipeline. Over the next few months Chris will be producing ‘The Sex Lives of the Anglo-Saxons’, a series of video blogs for his website.
Monday, 8 September 2014
CFP: Gaming the Medieval: Medievalism in Modern Board Game Culture (Leeds 2015)
Since the early 1980s, the medieval has proven to be a fertile source of narrative concept, artwork and play structure in popular board and card game culture. In recent years, games with medieval subject matter such as Carcassonne, Dominion and Shadows Over Camelot have increasingly graced the top of European and American board game award tables.
Yet the ‘Middle Ages’ of the game world is a broadly defined concept. Games taking a historical approach might chart the economical and political landscape of Medieval Europe during a set period of time, while others base their play around a specific event or series of events. In other cases, the medieval operates as a flexible cultural genre for games set in otherwise indeterminate times and places. Although board and card games frequently engage with concepts of medieval warfare, conquest and expansion, they also hold the ability to promote a rich understanding of medieval cultural, literary and social practices such as courtly love and chivalric narrative, Arthurian legend, guild, mercantile and political hierarchy, and alchemical motifs such as the magic circle.
While the role of the game in medieval society and literature commands a strong critical legacy (for example, in the works of Clopper, Huizinga and Vale), this session aims to evaluate what happens when the medieval is made present within modern game culture. This is an area that has been largely neglected by studies of medievalism, which have tended to chiefly focus on the use of the medieval in computer gaming. This session therefore intends to expand the cultural medievalism debate by drawing attention to the ways in which the materiality of board and card games produces new methods of intersecting with the medieval past.
Possible themes might include:
• What is a ‘medieval’ board game?
• Courts, cities, fields, monasteries
• Chivalry, courtly love and other ‘medieval’ ideals
• Materiality and play, medieval artwork, and the game as artefact
• Gender, power and characterisation
• Performance, roleplay, and crossplaying
• Narrative and playing structures
• Place, space and time
• Games and pedagogy – using games to teach ‘medieval’ concepts
• Figuring the medieval ‘orient’ in game culture
Please send abstracts of 250 words to Daisy Black and James Howard before the 15th September 2014.
Yet the ‘Middle Ages’ of the game world is a broadly defined concept. Games taking a historical approach might chart the economical and political landscape of Medieval Europe during a set period of time, while others base their play around a specific event or series of events. In other cases, the medieval operates as a flexible cultural genre for games set in otherwise indeterminate times and places. Although board and card games frequently engage with concepts of medieval warfare, conquest and expansion, they also hold the ability to promote a rich understanding of medieval cultural, literary and social practices such as courtly love and chivalric narrative, Arthurian legend, guild, mercantile and political hierarchy, and alchemical motifs such as the magic circle.
While the role of the game in medieval society and literature commands a strong critical legacy (for example, in the works of Clopper, Huizinga and Vale), this session aims to evaluate what happens when the medieval is made present within modern game culture. This is an area that has been largely neglected by studies of medievalism, which have tended to chiefly focus on the use of the medieval in computer gaming. This session therefore intends to expand the cultural medievalism debate by drawing attention to the ways in which the materiality of board and card games produces new methods of intersecting with the medieval past.
Possible themes might include:
• What is a ‘medieval’ board game?
• Courts, cities, fields, monasteries
• Chivalry, courtly love and other ‘medieval’ ideals
• Materiality and play, medieval artwork, and the game as artefact
• Gender, power and characterisation
• Performance, roleplay, and crossplaying
• Narrative and playing structures
• Place, space and time
• Games and pedagogy – using games to teach ‘medieval’ concepts
• Figuring the medieval ‘orient’ in game culture
Please send abstracts of 250 words to Daisy Black and James Howard before the 15th September 2014.
Saturday, 26 July 2014
CFP: Manhood in Anglo-Saxon England
Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (MANCASS)
Easter Conference 2015
Hulme Hall, University of Manchester, UK
7-9 April 2015
Proposals for 20 minute papers on this topic are invited. Topics that the conference will include, but are not limited to:
• Male identities and constructions of masculinity
• Literary presentations and representations of manhood
• Laws and Penitentials
• Male sexualities
• Manhood and Archaeology
• Representations of masculinity in art
We are looking for submissions (approx. 300 words) on these and related subjects to reach us by 30th November 2014. Please send submissions, and direct enquiries to the conference director, Dr Charles Insley, Department of History, University of Manchester.
Easter Conference 2015
Hulme Hall, University of Manchester, UK
7-9 April 2015
Proposals for 20 minute papers on this topic are invited. Topics that the conference will include, but are not limited to:
• Male identities and constructions of masculinity
• Literary presentations and representations of manhood
• Laws and Penitentials
• Male sexualities
• Manhood and Archaeology
• Representations of masculinity in art
We are looking for submissions (approx. 300 words) on these and related subjects to reach us by 30th November 2014. Please send submissions, and direct enquiries to the conference director, Dr Charles Insley, Department of History, University of Manchester.
Wednesday, 16 July 2014
CFP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2015
Gender, Dirt and Taboo
7-9 January 2015
Bangor University
The Middle Ages are synonymous with dirt – bodily, spiritual, linguistic and literary. People lived in closer proximity to the material reality of filth: privies, animal waste, the midden, and while walking city streets. Keeping one’s body and clothes uncontaminated by filth would have represented a challenge. The Church took great pains to warn about the polluting effect of sin, and the literal and metaphorical stains that it could leave upon body and soul. The Middle Ages remains (in)famous, to some, due to the perception that its comedy is simply ‘latrine humour.’ Women, with their leaky and pollutant bodies, lie at the heart of the medieval materiality of filth. Throughout her life course, a woman engaged with dirt; in bearing children, caring for the sick, working within the household and outside of the home, listening to sermons in church and to literature in a variety of contexts. In the misogynist discourse of Churchmen such as Odo of Cluny, woman was little more than dirt herself. Odo of Cluny did not acknowledge that manure is, of course, essential to healthy new growth.
We welcome abstracts from postgraduates and colleagues on all aspects of gender, dirt and taboo and from a broad range of disciplines, including history, archaeology, book history, literature, art history, music, theology and medicine.
Papers are particularly welcome on, but are not limited to:
The language of dirt
Dirt in texts/‘dirty’ texts
Landscapes of dirt
Bodily dirt
Dramatising dirt
Dirt and spirituality
Dirt and sexuality
Controlling/cleansing dirt
The comedy of dirt
The science of dirt
Please send abstracts of 200-300 words, for papers lasting 20 minutes, no later than 30 September 2014 to Dr Sue Niebrzydowski (School of English, Bangor University) for consideration. Please also include your research area, institution and level of study in your abstract.
It is hoped that The Kate Westoby Fund will be able to offer a modest contribution (but not the full costs) towards as many student travel expenses as possible.
7-9 January 2015
Bangor University
‘to embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure’
Odo of Cluny
The Middle Ages are synonymous with dirt – bodily, spiritual, linguistic and literary. People lived in closer proximity to the material reality of filth: privies, animal waste, the midden, and while walking city streets. Keeping one’s body and clothes uncontaminated by filth would have represented a challenge. The Church took great pains to warn about the polluting effect of sin, and the literal and metaphorical stains that it could leave upon body and soul. The Middle Ages remains (in)famous, to some, due to the perception that its comedy is simply ‘latrine humour.’ Women, with their leaky and pollutant bodies, lie at the heart of the medieval materiality of filth. Throughout her life course, a woman engaged with dirt; in bearing children, caring for the sick, working within the household and outside of the home, listening to sermons in church and to literature in a variety of contexts. In the misogynist discourse of Churchmen such as Odo of Cluny, woman was little more than dirt herself. Odo of Cluny did not acknowledge that manure is, of course, essential to healthy new growth.
We welcome abstracts from postgraduates and colleagues on all aspects of gender, dirt and taboo and from a broad range of disciplines, including history, archaeology, book history, literature, art history, music, theology and medicine.
Papers are particularly welcome on, but are not limited to:
The language of dirt
Dirt in texts/‘dirty’ texts
Landscapes of dirt
Bodily dirt
Dramatising dirt
Dirt and spirituality
Dirt and sexuality
Controlling/cleansing dirt
The comedy of dirt
The science of dirt
Please send abstracts of 200-300 words, for papers lasting 20 minutes, no later than 30 September 2014 to Dr Sue Niebrzydowski (School of English, Bangor University) for consideration. Please also include your research area, institution and level of study in your abstract.
It is hoped that The Kate Westoby Fund will be able to offer a modest contribution (but not the full costs) towards as many student travel expenses as possible.
Friday, 13 June 2014
WIN 3 BOOKS! Wolf-Girls Competition (International Entry)
A fantastic new competition from Hic Dragones, the Manchester-based small press run by our treasurer...
Enter now via the Rafflecopter widget below for a chance to win 3 wonderful paperbacks PLUS an exclusive WOLF-GIRLS tote bag!
Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lygogyny
edited by Hannah Kate
Feral, vicious, fierce and lost… the she-wolf is a strange creature of the night. Attractive to some; repulsive to others, she stalks the fringes of our world as though it were her prey. She is the baddest of girls, the fatalest of femmes – but she is also the excluded, the abject, the monster. The Wolf-Girls within these pages are mad, bad and dangerous to know. But they are also rejected and tortured, loving and loyal, avenging and triumphant. Some of them are even human…
Seventeen new tales of dark, snarling lycogyny by Nu Yang, Mary Borsellino, Lyn Lockwood, Mihaela Nicolescu, L. Lark, Jeanette Greaves, Kim Bannerman, Lynsey May, Hannah Kate, J. K. Coi, Rosie Garland, R. A. Martens, Beth Daley, Marie Cruz, Helen Cross, Andrew Quinton and Sarah Peacock.
In addition to this lycanthropic anthology, the prize also includes novels by two of the contributors: Kim Bannerman and Beth Daley!
The Tattooed Wolf
by K. Bannerman
Morris Caufield thought he’d seen it all…
Until the moment Dan Sullivan walked into his office. Dan needs a divorce lawyer he can trust, and he thinks Morris is the man for the job. The thing is, Dan wants Morris to represent his wife. Who tried to kill him. Twice. And as if that wasn’t enough, Dan expects Morris to buy some crazy story about werewolves…
As Dan reveals the truth about his life and his marriage, Morris listens to a captivating tale of lycanthropy, love and betrayal. It’s lunacy, he’s sure of that, but there’s something about Dan Sullivan that makes it all very easy to believe.
Blood and Water
by Beth Daley
Dora lives by the sea. Dora has always lived by the sea. But she won’t go into the water.
The last time Dora swam in the sea was the day of her mother’s funeral, the day she saw the mermaid. Now she’s an adult, a respectable married woman, and her little sister Lucie has come home from university with a horrible secret. Dora’s safe and dry life begins to fray, as she is torn between protecting her baby sister and facing up to a truth she has always known but never admitted. And the sea keeps calling her, reminding her of what she saw beneath the waves all those years ago… of what will be waiting for her if she dives in again.
Enter now!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Enter now via the Rafflecopter widget below for a chance to win 3 wonderful paperbacks PLUS an exclusive WOLF-GIRLS tote bag!
Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lygogyny
edited by Hannah Kate
Feral, vicious, fierce and lost… the she-wolf is a strange creature of the night. Attractive to some; repulsive to others, she stalks the fringes of our world as though it were her prey. She is the baddest of girls, the fatalest of femmes – but she is also the excluded, the abject, the monster. The Wolf-Girls within these pages are mad, bad and dangerous to know. But they are also rejected and tortured, loving and loyal, avenging and triumphant. Some of them are even human…
Seventeen new tales of dark, snarling lycogyny by Nu Yang, Mary Borsellino, Lyn Lockwood, Mihaela Nicolescu, L. Lark, Jeanette Greaves, Kim Bannerman, Lynsey May, Hannah Kate, J. K. Coi, Rosie Garland, R. A. Martens, Beth Daley, Marie Cruz, Helen Cross, Andrew Quinton and Sarah Peacock.
In addition to this lycanthropic anthology, the prize also includes novels by two of the contributors: Kim Bannerman and Beth Daley!
The Tattooed Wolf
by K. Bannerman
Morris Caufield thought he’d seen it all…
Until the moment Dan Sullivan walked into his office. Dan needs a divorce lawyer he can trust, and he thinks Morris is the man for the job. The thing is, Dan wants Morris to represent his wife. Who tried to kill him. Twice. And as if that wasn’t enough, Dan expects Morris to buy some crazy story about werewolves…
As Dan reveals the truth about his life and his marriage, Morris listens to a captivating tale of lycanthropy, love and betrayal. It’s lunacy, he’s sure of that, but there’s something about Dan Sullivan that makes it all very easy to believe.
Blood and Water
by Beth Daley
Dora lives by the sea. Dora has always lived by the sea. But she won’t go into the water.
The last time Dora swam in the sea was the day of her mother’s funeral, the day she saw the mermaid. Now she’s an adult, a respectable married woman, and her little sister Lucie has come home from university with a horrible secret. Dora’s safe and dry life begins to fray, as she is torn between protecting her baby sister and facing up to a truth she has always known but never admitted. And the sea keeps calling her, reminding her of what she saw beneath the waves all those years ago… of what will be waiting for her if she dives in again.
Enter now!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
CFP: 'Profitable and spedful to use': Medieval and Early Modern Prayer
A Postgraduate Conference
Friday 19th September 2014, Cardiff University
Generously funded by Cardiff University Graduate College, this one-day conference will address the theme of prayer in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Given its pervasive nature as an element of Medieval and Early Modern culture, prayer is often overlooked by scholars as a discrete topic of enquiry. Prayer’s very ubiquity in the literature, historical record and material culture of the time has led, perhaps counterintuitively, to a lack of sustained critical attention, at least in some disciplines. In the context of a religiously-literate society, prayer performs many functions beyond its role in worship, with its artistic, rhetorical and performative aspects often used for propagandistic, interrogative or subversive means, among others.
The topic of prayer has of late gained momentum amongst Early Modern scholars, but in Medieval Studies it is only just beginning to emerge as a field of enquiry. This conference aims to bring together researchers in this up-and-coming area. This theme is, by its nature, interdisciplinary, encompassing literature, history and religion, and we are seeking to reflect this interdisciplinarity throughout the day’s events. By inviting speakers from these, and related, disciplines, we hope that the day will offer a broad and rich insight into Medieval and Early Modern prayer.
We are delighted to announce that Dr Alastair Bennett (Royal Holloway, University of London) will be giving a keynote lecture.
We invite papers from researchers in the fields of archaeology, architecture, art history, history, language, literature, music, philosophy, politics, religion, and other relevant disciplines to submit abstracts of 300 words. Topics can include:
- Literary prayer
- Theory of prayer
- Prayer in liturgy
- Prayer and music
- Prayer and Biblical translation
- Prayer and rhetoric
- Prayer and violence
- Language of prayer
- Prayer as protest
- Prayer manuals
- Prayer books
- Prayer and politics
- Teaching on prayer
- Private devotion
- Prayer as magic
- Physical manifestations of prayer (e.g. objects, buildings, art, etc.)
- Any other related topic
Please send abstracts for papers of 20 minutes by the 9th of July 2014 to Judith Dray and Sheri Smith.
Friday 19th September 2014, Cardiff University
Generously funded by Cardiff University Graduate College, this one-day conference will address the theme of prayer in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Given its pervasive nature as an element of Medieval and Early Modern culture, prayer is often overlooked by scholars as a discrete topic of enquiry. Prayer’s very ubiquity in the literature, historical record and material culture of the time has led, perhaps counterintuitively, to a lack of sustained critical attention, at least in some disciplines. In the context of a religiously-literate society, prayer performs many functions beyond its role in worship, with its artistic, rhetorical and performative aspects often used for propagandistic, interrogative or subversive means, among others.
The topic of prayer has of late gained momentum amongst Early Modern scholars, but in Medieval Studies it is only just beginning to emerge as a field of enquiry. This conference aims to bring together researchers in this up-and-coming area. This theme is, by its nature, interdisciplinary, encompassing literature, history and religion, and we are seeking to reflect this interdisciplinarity throughout the day’s events. By inviting speakers from these, and related, disciplines, we hope that the day will offer a broad and rich insight into Medieval and Early Modern prayer.
We are delighted to announce that Dr Alastair Bennett (Royal Holloway, University of London) will be giving a keynote lecture.
We invite papers from researchers in the fields of archaeology, architecture, art history, history, language, literature, music, philosophy, politics, religion, and other relevant disciplines to submit abstracts of 300 words. Topics can include:
- Literary prayer
- Theory of prayer
- Prayer in liturgy
- Prayer and music
- Prayer and Biblical translation
- Prayer and rhetoric
- Prayer and violence
- Language of prayer
- Prayer as protest
- Prayer manuals
- Prayer books
- Prayer and politics
- Teaching on prayer
- Private devotion
- Prayer as magic
- Physical manifestations of prayer (e.g. objects, buildings, art, etc.)
- Any other related topic
Please send abstracts for papers of 20 minutes by the 9th of July 2014 to Judith Dray and Sheri Smith.
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