October 2017 – Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society

IMS Open Lecture Series: ‘Medieval Cursing and Its Uses’

Tuesday 31st October 2017 at 17.30 in the Parkinson Building: Nathan Bodington Council Chamber.

Sarah Hamilton is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter. She researches religion and society in the early Middle Ages with an especial interest in liturgy. Her books include Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, edited with Helen Gittos (2015), Church and People in the Medieval West, 900-1200 (2013) and The Practice of Penance, 900-1050 (2001). She is currently PI for the HERA funded project, After Empire: Using and not using the past in the crisis of the Carolingian world, c. 900-c.1050.

‘Let them be above the face of the earth on a dung heap, so that they are an example of disgrace and cursing to present and future generations. And just as these lights are extinguished, thrown down from our hands today, so may their lights be extinguished in eternity.’

This paper explores texts like this one from early tenth-century Rheims to investigate the gap between the oral world of ritual performance and that of text. Anathema – the cursing and excommunication of obdurate sinners – was the most powerful spiritual weapon available to bishops. Its use is attested from the time of the early Church onwards, but the earliest surviving liturgical records date only from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Investigating how and why such records came to be made at this time, this paper suggests they can cast fresh light both on the development of episcopal authority in this period, and on how and why service books came to be compiled.

Holy but not healthy? Fish-eating in the Middle Ages

feeding the five thousand British Library Arundel MS 157 f.7

The next lecture in the programme of the Medieval Section will be given by Associate Professor Iona McCleery of the University of Leeds who will speak about fish eating in the Middle Ages. Dr McCleery has kindly sent the following summary:- ‘Medieval people seem to have started to eat a lot of fish from the 11th century onwards (what archaeologists call the ‘fish event horizon’). This is usually explained as widespread adoption of strict Christian dietary rules and/or the development of deep sea fishing technology. However, from around the same time medieval medical writings began to view fish as unhealthy foodstuffs. This talk will explore the ambiguous role of fish in medieval culture, drawing in particular on medieval miracle narratives as sources for the complex relationships between medicine, spirituality and daily life.’

Iona McCleery is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Leeds (since 2007). She researches the history of medicine, food, healing miracles and late medieval Portugal and its early empire. Between 2010 and 2014 she ran the Wellcome Trust-funded project You Are What You Ate, which was a collaboration of Wakefield Council and the universities of Leeds and Bradford on the history, archaeology, science and representation of food.

The lecture will be held at 2pm in the Swarthmore Institute in Leeds on 11th November.

Medieval Section Lecture – Looking for the Old Norse Influence in Leeds on 14th October

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In the early Middle Ages, Scandinavian influence on British life, language and culture was profound. The Vikings had a major and lasting impact, and their legacy still resonates strongly in modern constructions of British identity and heritage. Scandinavian settlement began in earnest in the late ninth century, especially in the North and East of England, and probably its most enduring and significant effect was on the English language. The Gersum Project is a three-year collaborative research project in English lexicography, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from 2016–19. It is named after the Middle English word gersum, borrowed from Old Norse gørsemi ‘treasure’, and it will be the fullest survey ever undertaken of the rich and varied body of English words derived from Old Norse.

English words with Old Norse origins certainly enriched the language. They include such basic modern-day items as sky, egg, law, leg, call, take, window, knife, die and skin, and the pronouns they, their and them, as well as medieval words as diverse and intriguing as hernez ‘brains’, muged ‘drizzled’, stange ‘pole’ and wothe ‘danger’. These are cultural artefacts which link us directly to the Vikings, and many of which English-speakers still use on a daily basis; and there are hundreds of other similar borrowings in standard and regional English usage, especially Northern dialects. The Gersum Project is investigating their early history to address questions about how we can identify Old Norse loans, and how and by whom these words were used in the first few centuries after their adoption into English, especially in the crucial Middle English period. The project’s research will result in a fully searchable online catalogue of the more than 1000 different words for which an origin in Norse has been suggested in a corpus of major Middle English poems from the North of England, including famous works of literature such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and The Wars of Alexander. Users of the catalogue will be able to explore, amongst other issues, each word’s etymology, meaning, textual attestations and dialectal distribution. The project also incorporates a number of events, including an inter-disciplinary conference in Cambridge and a series of talks open to the general public. The project team is Dr Richard Dance (Cambridge), Dr Sara Pons-Sanz (Cardiff) and Dr Brittany Schorn (Cambridge). For more information, please visit our website .

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Richard Dance studied in Oxford, where he completed a doctorate in 1997 on the Old Norse influence on early Middle English vocabulary. He is Reader in Early English in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College.

Brittany Schorn completed her doctorate on Old Norse poetry in Cambridge in 2012. She is Research Associate on the Gersum Project, and based in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in the University of Cambridge.

The lecture will take place at 2pm at Swarthmore Education Centre in Leeds in the main hall on the lower ground floor. This is because of the need to allow for a larger than usual turnout for the session, which is being held jointly with the Yorkshire Dialect Society.