Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group  – Trinity Term 2025 

Fridays 5 pm (unless otherwise stated) 

Week 1, 2 May              

Merton College Library Visit

Previous experience of handling medieval manuscripts is desirable

Limited places, write to the email below by 30/04/2025

Week 3, 16 May, 14:00       

Sara Charles, School of Advanced Studies, University of London

Gold in Medieval Illumination: Practiced-based Workshop

All materials are provided. £10 fee. In association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Faculty of History

Limited places, write to the email below by 10/05/2025

Week 4, 23 May ONLINE     

Reading Group: Connoisseurship

Sonja Drimmer, Connoisseurship, Art History, and the Paleographical Impasse in Middle English Studies (2022)

Jonathan Alexander, Art History, Literary History, and the Study of Medieval Manuscripts (1997)

Sydney Cockerell, The Gorleston Psalter (1907)

Write to the email below to join      

Week 5, 30 May, Merton College, Hawkins Room              

Work-in-Progress Session

Irene Van Eldere | Leiden University          

Designing Devotion: Characteristics of Early Middle Dutch Books of Hours

Elvira Miceli | Wolfson College, Oxford

Kingship and the Question of Iconography in the Liber ad honorem Augusti: Bern, Burgerbiliothek, Cod. 120 II

Week 6, 6 June, 15:00, Venue TBC     

Connoisseurship and Medieval Manuscripts: A Roundtable

Michael Michael (University of Glasgow) | Emily Guerry (St Peter’s College, Oxford) | Peter Kidd (Independent Researcher)

For all enquiries, please write to: oxfordmedievalmss@gmail.com 

Organisers: Irina Boeru, Fergus Bovill, Ana Dias, Charly Driscoll, Antonia Delle Fratte, Elena Lichmanova, Mathilde Mioche, Celeste Pan, Klara Zhao  

The Centre hosts the following lecture – Professor Tamara Atkin (English Faculty & The Queen’s College, Oxford): ‘On Fragments’

The Centre hosts the following two speakers:

1. Dr Laure Miolo (Lincoln, Oxford): ‘Predicting and observing eclipses in fourteenth-century Paris: what the manuscripts tell us‘

2. Dr Shazia Jagot (University of York): ‘Astrolabe as archive and an archive of astrolabes: Chaucer’s astrolabe and its Islamic affordances’

The Centre hosts the following lecture:

Dr Elizabeth Frood (Oxford), ‘An unexpected script for an unexpected text: the tomb autobiography of the Egyptian Royal Secretary Tjay’

Abstract: Sometime between 1213 and 1204 BC, Tjay, a high official responsible for royal correspondence, commissioned an autobiographical text as part of the decoration of his monumental tomb cut into the desert escarpment on the west bank of Thebes (modern Luxor). This alone would have been a surprising choice: autobiography, which been a central monumental genre since the third millennium BC, was not popular for elite self-presentation at this time. Even more extraordinary was the decision to carve the text in hieratic, the cursive, ‘documentary’ form of the Egyptian script, rather than hieroglyphs, the monumental script par excellence. This seminar presents some of the work in progress of Fredrik Hagen (Copenhagen University) and myself to reconstruct and analyse what remains of this damaged text, drawing especially on epigraphic drawings held in the Griffith Institute archive in Oxford. I consider features of this script in the tomb context and in relation to the few other known monumental uses of hieratic, exploring themes relating to materiality of script, display of artistic and scribal creativity and virtuosity, and implications for Tjay’s self-display. 

Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group – Hilary Term 2025

Fridays 5 pm (unless otherwise stated)

Week 1, 24 January, 15:00            

Balliol Historic Collections Centre Visit

Previous experience of handling medieval manuscripts is desirable

Limited places, write to the email below by 22/01/2025

Week 3, 7 February, 17:15            

The Queen’s College Library Visit

Limited places, write to the email below by 1/02/2025

Week 4, 14 February, ONLINE     

Reading Group: Interpretation and Meaning

Beatrice Kitzinger, ‘Working with Images in Manuscripts’ (2020)

Paula Mae Carns, ‘Making and Unmaking Love in the Macclesfield Psalter’ (2023)

Michael Camille, ‘Introduction’, in The Medieval Art of Love (1998)

Write to the email below to join         

Week 5, 21 February, Merton College, Hawkins Room          

Work-in-Progress Session

Emma Nelson | University of Manchester           

Book Owners and Donors in Twelfth-Century Lincoln

Blanche Darbord | University of Cambridge

Alexander the Great and Chivalry in Plantagenet England

Week 7, 7 March, Merton College, Mure Room   

Nancy Thebaut | Art History Department and St Catherine’s College, Oxford

Learning to Look: (Mis)reading the Visitatio sepulchri, ca. 900-1050

Organisers: Irina Boeru, Fergus Bovill, Ana Dias, Charly Driscoll, Antonia Delle Fratte, Elena Lichmanova, Mathilde Mioche, Celeste Pan, Klara Zhao.

For all enquiries, please write to: elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk                     

The Centre hosts the following two speakers:

1. Dr Riccardo Montalto (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), ‘From manuscripts to history: The reconstruction of the Greek manuscript library of Achilles Statius (1524-1581)’

Achilles Statius was a Portuguese humanist active in Rome in the second half of the sixteenth century. Committed to editorial and propaganda activities and, in particular, in the edition of the texts of the Fathers of the Greek Church, Statius set up one of the largest private libraries in Renaissance Rome, peculiar for its size and intellectual value. Starting from the material data detectable from the manuscripts, compared with the data available from different sources – primarily historical, archival and library science – the research aims to reconstruct a part of Achilles Statius’s library and to identify some methods and working practices of the late Renaissance humanists.

2. Holly Dempster-Edwards (University of Liverpool), ‘Emotions, Gender and Crusading in Fifteenth-Century Burgundian Prose Epics and Chronicles’

This paper will give an overview of my PhD thesis, which examines the social function of emotions at the fifteenth-century court of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy (r. 1419-1467). My methodology is based on that of the historian Barbara Rosenwein, whose concept of ‘emotional communities’ has been highly influential within Medieval Studies. My study is based on emotion words in three Burgundian mises en prose Les Croniques et Conquestes de Charlemaine by David Aubert, La Belle Hélène de Constantinople by Jehan Wauquelin, and Mabrien (attrib. Aubert). I have built on Rosenwein’s framework by employing quantitative analysis of the gendered and ‘racial-religious’ distribution of emotions within each text, alongside qualitative textual analysis and examination of text-image relations. This paper demonstrates how emotions have a social function within this specific emotional community of Burgundian knights and would-be crusaders in response to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and how these texts function as literary propaganda which presents itself as didactic; in so doing they attempt to achieve their more subtle aim of maintaining emotion norms within the context of Burgundian chivalric masculinity, hoping to persuade Philip’s courtiers to go on crusade with him in response to the defeat of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.

The Centre hosts the following lecture: Christopher Whittick,‘“I found it in a skip” – provenance and priorities in British archives’

In a career in county archives spanning 44 years, Christopher Whittick has had plenty of opportunity both to observe and deduce the often tortuous and occasionally dubious routes by which documents eventually reach their destination in an archive repository. These journeys will be examined, and placed in the context of the immediate concerns and priorities of archivists in the Britain of today, and of the wider question of the debatable ownership of the past.     

The Centre hosts the following lecture: Dr Annick Payne (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), ‘Anatolian Hieroglyphs: Drawing a Picture of the Ancient Mind’

The Centre hosts the following two speakers:

1. Dr Laure Miolo (Lincoln, Oxford): ‘Predicting and observing eclipses in fourteenth-century Paris: what the manuscripts tell us‘

2. Dr Shazia Jagot (University of York): ‘Astrolabe as archive and an archive of astrolabes: Chaucer’s astrolabe and its Islamic affordances’

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

1. Julia Lorenz (Merton College, Oxford), ‘Konrad of Wüzrburg’s Herzmaere: An Instruction on How (Not) to Love’

Konrad’s of Würzburg short narrative Herzmaere is one of the most transmitted Middle High German short narratives and follows a trajectory (re-)familiarising the audience with the emotion of love. To this end, he tells a short but tragic story about a lady, her husband, and her lover. My paper argues that the love in Herzmaere is simultaneously successful and unsuccessful: while the lady and the knight are not granted a happy ending, the narrative achieves its goal of illustrating intense love for the audience to see. Due to the diversity of transmission, this paper uses the sample manuscripts Heidelberg cpg 341, Karlsruhe Cod. Donaueschingen 104, and München cgm 714 as its analytical basis. The differences between transmission provide additional insight into the distinct ways in which Herzmaere was framed, adapted, and understood by different scribes.

Herzmaere employs different narrative strategies to offer an unobstructed view onto the emotion of love by eliminating potentially distracting story elements. The emotion of love is further intensified through acts of love performed by the lovers. These acts of love are presented in analogy to religious and devotional acts adding narrative depth and specific functions to each of them. After completing multiple devotional acts such as pilgrimage and martyrdom of love, the religious analogy fails in the last instance, as the lady is unable to complete a eucharist of love. Here, the worldly love between the lady and the knight is denied transcendence. So, despite the intensity of their love, the lovers fail on an intradiegetic level as minne fails to develop religious transcendence. On an extradiegetic level, however, the narrative strategy succeeds as their love and love-death causes Herzmaere to radiate love which is subsequently absorbed by the recipients.

2. Dr Alan Darmawan (SOAS, London), ‘Reconstructing a Sumatran royal manuscript library: thinking through landscapes, objects, and performances’

In this presentation, I will share my experience in reconstructing a royal manuscript collection of Palembang Sultanate in southern Sumatra, Indonesia. Displaced by colonial collecting in the 19th century, the royal manuscripts are now dispersed in the institutional libraries in Europe and Southeast Asia, while partly left as private and public collections in situ. Using certain features of the local style of bookbinding and ownership notes in my investigation, I trace the surviving royal manuscripts and attempt to situate them in their relations with sites, landscapes, ritual performances, and collective memory that resonate with colonial history of the region.

The session will be chaired by Professor Henrike Lähnemann (St Edmund Hall, Oxford).

The Centre hosts the following lecture: P. Toth (Oxford), ‘In Quest of a Medieval Best-Seller: The Authorship of the Meditationes Vitae Christi’.

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

1. C. Gluchowski (New College, Oxford), ‘Revising Devotion: Exploring Church Reform through Prayerbook MS. Lat. liturg. f. 4’.

The revision of prayerbooks stands as a significant yet often overlooked aspect of church reform. This article delves into this topic using the Easter prayerbook MS. Lat. liturg. f. 4 from the Bodleian Library in Oxford as a focal point, shedding light on its broader implications. Crafted in the Latin/Low-German tradition, this Easter prayerbook, a fusion of paper and parchment, hails from the Cistercian convent of Medingen near Lüneburg, Germany. This convent, renowned for its scriptorial output, contributed 64 manuscripts to history, spanning from the early 15th to the mid-16th century. Against the backdrop of two pivotal church reforms—the Northern German monastic reform of 1479 and the Lutheran Reformation of 1524/1544—the Medingen convent experienced a profound evolution. Surprisingly, over half of the Medingen manuscripts underwent revisions akin to the Easter prayerbook MS. Lat. liturg. f. 4. This article contends that these revisions serve as a testament to the Medingen nuns’ deliberate cultivation of their convent’s devotional ethos, shaped by the transformative waves of reform. By closely examining the Easter prayerbook MS. Lat. liturg. f. 4, this study seeks to unravel the nuanced role of these nuns as agents of reform—reformatrices—in the late medieval church. Employing the lenses of reframing and recycling, this article illuminates how these women navigated the complexities of religious change, leaving an indelible mark on the ecclesiastical landscape of their time.

2. P. Rea (Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Napoli / Universitat de València), ‘Non ti maravigliare che io non mi distenda nelo scrivere: Female Autographs and Kinship in an Early-Modern Italian Epistolary Corpus’.

In order to ascertain that the scribe is really a woman, palaeographers must often rely on a combination of circumstantial arguments. The aim of this paper will be to discuss some of the possible arguments on the basis of a study of a collection of charters that has just come to light in the Niccolini private archive. These charters, revolving around the Florentine Strozzi family between 1519 and 1572, include numerous letters signed by women: mainly Oretta, wife of Zanobi Strozzi, and her sisters (Caterina, Cassandra, Costanza, and Maddalena), her daughters (Smeralda, suor Alessandra, and suor Dianora), and her sisters-in-law (Lucrezia and Francesca). After identifying the autographs, I will discuss the literacy level of the individual writers, paying particular attention to any hints of a common writing education.

The session will be chaired by H. Lähnemann (SEH, Oxford).

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

1. A. D’Angelo (Rome ‘Sapienza’), ‘Catullan marginalia in the 16th century: the books of Piero Vettori’.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich preserves three printed editions of Catullus’ Liber with marginal notes by Piero Vettori (1499-1585). This important scholar edited dozens of Classical authors, but never published anything on Catullus: thus, these books are the main extant evidence of his work on this poet. The notes contain variant readings, original conjectures and loci similes, and they offer new insights on Vettori’s philological method and his library. Through these marginalia, I will try to point out Vettori’s main interests in Catullus’ poetry and the sources he used for his Catullan studies.

2. M. Schilling (Oxford), ‘A special form of devotion – personifications of time in late medieval prayer books from Northern Germany’.

Addressing liturgical holidays, for example welcoming Mr Easterday, is a particular characteristic of late medieval vernacular prayer-books from North German female convents. They highlight a distinct form of poetics, because describing and interacting with specific points in time – personifying them – allows an intercommunication with the divine that conveys a certain form of agency to the speaker. In this paper, we explore the particular type of prayer-books these personifications are found in, talk about their material indicators within the text, and think about the special role of the prayer-books from the Cistercian convent Medingen within this distinct manuscript landscape.

The talks will take place in the Memorial Room of The Queen’s College on the 13th of February (5.15-6.45pm).

The Centre hosts the following lecture: Patrick Finglass (Bristol), ‘Edgar Lobel and the text of Sappho’.

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

1. A. Ellis (Bern), ‘“Greek” in the Medieval Latin Manuscripts of Josephus: Reconstructing the Philological Workings of a Late-Antique Translator’

This talk begins with a series of “Greek” annotations in the margins of a manuscript in Bern (Bern Burgerbibliothek 183), produced in Fleury in the late 10th century by a lay scribe called Rotbertus. The manuscript contains the late-antique Latin translation of Josephus’ Jewish War and its handful of Greek marginalia annotate Josephus’ description of the Essenes, an ascetic community who inhabited the Judean deserts in the first-century BCE. In this talk, I reconstruct the original Greek behind these marginalia and ask how these snippets of garbled Graeca made their way into a medieval Latin manuscript. I trace them back through the manuscript tradition and, after weighing up several possibilities, suggest that we are dealing with Greek words left in the Latin translation by its anonymous author, reflecting unsolved philological quandaries.

2. S. De Martin (Oxford), ‘Reassessing the transmission of Strato com. fr. 1 K.-A.’

In this paper I will discuss the textual transmission of the only extant fragment ascribed to the comic poet Strato. In these hilarious forty-seven lines, a man reports a dialogue he had with a cook who speaks using Homeric glosses – a conversation which resolves in a series of misunderstandings. The fragment is preserved in book 9 of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, as well as in P.Cair. 65445, a ‘schoolbook’ that includes a literary anthology. Besides some lacunae due to material damage, the papyrus’ version lacks five lines that are extant in Athenaeus, though the text does not present major linguistic or semantic difficulties. Does Athenaeus preserve an interpolated version of the text? Or is the papyrus’ text abridged? Things are complicated by the fact that in book 14 Athenaeus cites again the first four lines of the text and ascribe them to Philemon.

The talks will take place in the Memorial Room of The Queen’s College on the 7th of November (3.30-5pm).

The Centre hosts the following lecture: Mary Carruthers (NYU and Oxford), ‘Understanding Solid Figures in Early Medieval Manuscripts: how Rhetoric and Geometry interact’.

If you are planning to attend online, please register at this link: https://forms.gle/SCHWcQbHQgCL6XWi7

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

1. Marius Del Core (Pisa/Oxford), ‘Omitti possunt. Evidence for abridgement and athetesis in Plautine manuscripts’

2. Stefano Milonia (SSM Naples), ‘Super and Contra. Conversion and resemantisation of mediaeval French lyric in the Ludus super Anticlaudianum’

Please register at this link (whether you are planning to attend in person or online): https://forms.gle/7h5zno5cABGe1Q6o6

The Centre hosts the following lecture: Prof. Jean-Luc Fournet (Collège de France): ‘The End of a Script and the Beginning of a Myth: Hieroglyphs and the Greeks’.

The lecture will be chaired by Amin Benaissa (Christ Church).

Please register at this link (whether you are planning to attend in person or online): https://forms.gle/dLarnLdUU5HZ1fgH9

Abstract: The Egyptian language coexisted with Greek from the time of the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great (332 BC). This cohabitation had a decisive impact on the use of Egyptian scripts (hieroglyphs and their cursive versions, hieratic and demotic) and led to their disappearance and replacement by Coptic, whose writing is almost purely Greek. At the same time as these scripts were declining, the Greeks developed conceptions about them which influenced the vision that modern Europe came to have of hieroglyphs until Champollion refuted it decisively. This lecture will outline the development of this myth.

In celebration of the release of vol. 2 of the Journal of Manuscript and Text Cultures (MTC), which takes an explicitly experimental approach of involving digital tools for the presentation of research in manuscript cultures, the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC) is holding a round table on Wednesday the 26th of April (week 1 of Trinity Term), 5.15pm UK time, at the Memorial Room of The Queen’s College, Oxford. The topic of the round table will be digital publishing and future research in manuscript studies.

The round table will be chaired and moderated by Richard Ovenden, OBE, Professorial Fellow and Bodley’s Librarian. Members of the round table are Yegor Grebnev, Lesley Smith, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, and Simon Aldridge.

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh is professor of Celtic and medieval studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at St John’s College. Her research stands at the interface of history and literature and focuses on connections between Ireland, England and Scandinavia and the wider western world. Máire is currently working on a complex multi-manuscript corpus of medieval Irish landscape literature, as part of a Leverhulme project which she leads, and she co-directs ongoing research on the electronic dictionary of medieval Irish (www.dil.ie) funded by the AHRC.

Lesley Smith is professor of medieval intellectual history at Oxford and Fellow of Harris Manchester College. Her research centres on the medieval Bible as both an intellectual and a material object, as it was studied in the schools and proto-university of medieval Paris. Lesley is the co-editor of vol. 2 of MTC and a member of the board of CMTC.

Yegor Grebnev is Distinguished Associate Research Fellow at Beijing Normal University (Zhuhai) and an assistant professor at BNU-HKBU United International College. Trained as a specialist on early China, he has initiated multiple collaborative projects with scholars of history, texts, and manuscripts from various regions of pre-modern world. Yegor is the co-editor of vol. 2 of MTC and a member of the board of CMTC.

Simon Aldridge is professor of Main Group Chemistry at Oxford and Fellow of The Queen’s College. He is the Director of the OxICMF CDT and will bring the perspective of the exact sciences to the table.

If you are planning to attend online, please register at this link: https://forms.gle/aMSksCmTsV8Msq9C7. Zoom links will be sent by email by 10,00am (UK time) on the day of the talk.

All welcome

The Centre hosts the following lecture: Yannis Assael (Google DeepMind), ‘Predicting the past with deep neural networks’.

The lecture will be chaired by Dirk Meyer (Queen’s).

Please register at this link (whether you are planning to attend in person or online): https://forms.gle/qrdgtwBXKnLy1Leg7

Abstract: Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. To address these challenges we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how recent advances in the field of Deep Learning can assist and expand a historian’s workflow, and highlight the importance of joint interdisciplinary research.

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

1. Giulia Colli (Pisa), ‘How to Rewrite Greek Tragedy: Oedipus’ parting words in the end of Euripides’ Phoenician Women’

2. Enrico Prodi (UCL), ‘Commentary by excerpts: Didymus’

The talks will be chaired by Chiara Meccariello (Exeter).

Please register at this link (whether you are planning to attend in person or online): https://forms.gle/dARYUHzX1a9iA2EU9

Abstracts:

1. Tragic endings are a very problematic issue, as our understanding of how ancient authors conceived the end of their plays rests on uncertain data and is likely to be influenced by our modern literary taste. In addition, final lines are often liable to textual corruption and omission. These objective limitations, together with the increasing awareness that the tragic texts have been widely interpolated by readers and actors, has led critics to question the authenticity of the extant endings. This critical trend has led radical intervention (e.g. Ritter expunged all of Sophocles’ endings), but tragic endings have been shown, beyond reasonable doubt, to be a favourite target of interpolators.
The finale of Euripides’ Phoenician Women has surely been tampered with additions and rewriting by ancient actors who wanted to create an intertextual as well as intervisual connection with the other famous plays by Sophocles on the Theban saga. Oedipus’ parting lines (1758-63) in particular are very similar to the last lines delivered by the chorus at the end of Oedipus the King (1523-30), which have also been suspected of interpolation. An investigation of the language, content, and dramaturgy of these closing lines will allow us to shed light on the agenda and poetics of interpolators, as well as on the relative chronology of these two texts. I will argue that Oedipus’ parting lines are likely to be the result of adaptation of Sophocles’ model to a new context, since they fit less into the dramatic action and show a systematic use of patchwork technique with less meaningful variation.

2. Didymus ‘Khalkenteros’ was one of the most prominent commentators of Greek texts in the late first century b.C. and early first a.D. Material from his commentaries survives in the scholia to many works of poetry, but a papyrus published in 1904 gives us a large chunk of a complete work: a commentary of Demosthenes. Almost half of the text consists of quotations, mostly from historical sources. The paper investigates Didymus’ use of, and explicit reflection on, excerpts.

The Centre hosts the following lecture: Mykola Tarasenko (Kyiv/Trinity College, Oxford): ‘What Can the “Greenfield Papyrus” (pLondon BM EA 10554) Tell Us about Its Owner?’

Please register at this link (whether you are planning to attend in person or online): https://forms.gle/nEye2odPFrqV3DKGA

Abstract: In this lecture I shall discuss the papyrus of the Egyptian priestess Nesi-ta-nebet-asheru (pGreenfield), pLondon BM 10554 (21–22^nd Dynasties).  The unique composition of the text and the illustrations in this roll, along with its impressive length (40.53 m), will be contextualised by different factors, such as the social rank/status of the owner, their inclination for “innovative” actions in funerary ritual that was marked on the burial goods, and the anxiety about their real and posthumous position at the end of the Dynasty and possible family fraction.

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

Benedetta Bessi (Venice/Stanford): ‘Towards a Digital Edition of the Liber insularum by Cristoforo Buondelmonti’

Joseph Mason (New College, Oxford): ‘Oral and Written Transmission in Old French Song: a reassessment’

Details will be provided soon!

The event will be hosted on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87842150494?pwd=ZXdibzA1d3R1RG1hN3BqcWdGOXJSdz09

1. Amin Benaissa (Classics, Lady Margaret Hall): Ancient Slavery from the Perspective of the Papyri. New documents from Oxyrhynchus

After a brief introduction to the Oxyrhynchus papyri for non-specialists, this talk will discuss some documents relating to slavery recently published in vol. 86 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. These new texts illustrate some typical life-patterns of the enslaved: slavery from infancy, repeated sales, in some cases displacement across the Mediterranean, employment in weaving and wet-nursing, and, for the fortunate, manumission. Of particular note are two sale contracts concluded outside Egypt (one of them in Lycia in modern-day Turkey), which would have reached Oxyrhynchus along with the slaves concerned. In other sales, we encounter slaves brought from Crete, Mauretania, and Phrygia – stark examples of the deracination of slaves in the Roman world and Egypt’s integration in the Mediterranean-wide slave trade. There are also more unusual texts, such as a letter about a missing slave and a record of proceedings of an auction.

2. Katherine Olley (English, St Hilda’s College): Liminal Landscapes: Childbirth and the Uncanny in Old Norse Literature

Childbirth scenes in Old Norse literature frequently involve negotiating a liminal space, whether it be the dreamscapes of Sverris saga and Ectors saga, straddling the worlds of waking and sleeping, or the burial mounds present in Óláfs þáttr Geirstaðaálfs and Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga, which intertwine the worlds of the living and the dead. The paper explores these liminal landscapes in more depth, taking as its central focus Óláfs þáttr Geirstaðaálfs, in which a man called Hrani is visited by Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr in a dream. Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr instructs Hrani to break into Óláfr’s burial mound and take his ring, his knife and belt, and his sword. Before leaving the mound, Hrani is to cut off Óláfr’s head with the sword. He is then to take the belt to Ásta Guðbrandsdóttir, who is labouring with a difficult childbirth. When he wraps the belt around her, she will be delivered and he is to claim the honour of naming her son as a reward. Everything happens as Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr predicts and the boy, the future Saint Óláfr, is named by Hrani after Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr. By close analysis of Óláfs þáttr Geirstaðaálfs, the paper argues that Old Norse childbirth narratives are not just liminal but specifically ‘uncanny’, loosely defined as the disquieting or eerie sensation evoked by the alienation of something once familiar⁠. Recognising the uncanniness of childbirth in Old Norse literature allows us to advance beyond simplistic ‘rites of passage’ analyses to a more nuanced understanding of childbirth and its role in Old Norse literature and life.