Elissa Hansen, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, will present her work on "Reading Revelations: Reception Histories for Julian of Norwich." Two short primary source readings are available in advance of the workshop. The first is a compilation of responses to Julian's life and work and the second is a .pdf file of the first several pages of a seventeenth century edition of Julian's life. The workshop will be held at 12:30 p.m. in 235 Nolte Center.

What Persian historian, responsible for writing (or at least commissioning) a history of the Mongols that became an entire chronicle of world history, served as Chief Minister of the Ilkhanate before being executed in 1318?

Please send trivia responses by email to umn.cms.trivia@gmail.com.

According to Stephen of Bourbon, what was the name of the animal venerated by a local tradition north of Lyons where otherwise orthodox Christians observed a rite that they claimed could heal sick or injured children?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line "trivia" directly to Gabriel Gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com).

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Professor of Middle English at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman, (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and, with Linda Olson, Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), will talk to us about "Gender, Authorship and Social Injustice: Some Major Middle English Poetic Manuscripts and their Marginalia."

4:00 p.m. 140 Nolte Center.

In Dante Alighieri's conception of the afterlife, where can you find the souls of sinners with their eyes sewn shut as disembodied voices shout about the fate of Cain?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line "trivia" directly to Gabriel Gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com). Previous weeks' trivia results will be announced en masse NEXT WEEK. We apologize for the continued delay.

David Morgan, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will speak to us about "The Mongols in Iran." Prof. Morgan is the author of two seminal books Medieval Persia 1040-1797 (1988) and The Mongols (1988) among many other publications. His lecture will explore the nature of the Mongol impact on Iran, from the time of the invasions of 1219-23 until the end of the Mongol kingdom in the 1330s. Was it wholly destructive, as traditionally believed, or were there positive elements that historians, without minimizing the death and destruction that the Mongols brought with them, ought also to consider? The workshop will take place at 4:00 p.m. in Nolte 140.

What early medieval saint did Pope Benedict XVI defend in a recent speech?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line "trivia" directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com). Previous weeks' trivia results will be announced en masse NEXT WEEK.

"The Use of Documents of European Archives for the History of the Maghreb during the Colonial Period": A workshop with Dominique Valérian (Paris, History)

"Merchant Identities in the Medieval Mediterranean World": A talk by Dominique Valerian

Dominique Valérian is maître de conférences at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is the author of Les sources italiennes de l'histoire du Maghreb médiéval (2006) and Bougie, port maghrébin, 1067-1510 (2006), and a co-editor of Chemins d'outre-mer (2005) and Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée médiévale (2007).

The paper for the workshop can be downloaded ValerianTexts.doc.

Additionally cosponsored by the Identity in the Mediterranean World Collaborative.

What is the given name of the titular figure in an Anglo-Saxon poem about a sea creature that can pretend to be an island in order to lure sailors to their doom?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line "trivia" directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com). Previous weeks' trivia results will be announced en masse once a new prize has been decided on.

What book, surviving from the early 10th century, consists of just a palimpsest of a few wooden tablets and wax pages, but suggests the early origins of an Eastern European heresy as the author records prayers in which the place of God is taken by that of an Armenian prophet named Alexander?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line "trivia" directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com).

Name the eighth century settlement on the Volkhov River that served as an important trading post and later as a capital city for a dynasty that then moved to Kiev and went on to survive in one form or another until shortly after the death of Ivan the Terrible.

Answers to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) with the subject line "trivia" by noon on Wednesday, 30 September.

Stephen Martin of the University of Minnesota, Duluth will be speaking on Vetting the Variorum for French-Language Studies.

Where: Nolte Center 140
When: Tuesday, October 6 at 4:00 p.m.

"Religion and Law in the Global Middle Ages" brings together internationally distinguished scholars, faculty and students from the University of Minnesota, and community members including high school teachers, to discuss the period when some of our most compelling contemporary issues were first formulated.

To be held from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, 140 Nolte Center.

Click here to view the program for the event!

According to popular legend, what British insult was first used by English and Welsh longbowmen after they had won the battle of Agincourt in 1415?

Answers to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) with the subject line "trivia" by noon on Wednesday, 23 September.

Trivia questions will be posted again starting on the 16th!

Conrad Rudolph of the University of California, Riverside will be speaking on Time, Space and the Progress of History in the Medieval Map.

Where: Nolte Center 140
When: Tuesday, 22 September at 4:00 p.m.

Join us for the Center for Medieval Studies fall picnic!

Where: Nolte Center courtyard
When: Tuesday, 15 September 2009 at 4:30pm

Mona Burkett from the Department of History recently passed her MA exams. Chris Flack in English passed his PhD preliminary exams. Congratulations to you both!

Department of French and Italian Professor Susan Noakes has been named the first holder of the University of Minnesota Arts and Humanities Chair. This two-year award provides Susan with a research fund which she plans to use for the SCGMA (Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the “Middle Ages”) project.

For more information on the project, please see: the CMS website or SCGMA's site.

Many of our Center for Medieval Studies minors have received fellowships, been awarded travel grants, passed preliminary examinations, or defended their dissertations in recent weeks. Congratulations to all of you!

--History graduate student Philip Grace has received a Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to complete his dissertation on fatherhood in late medieval Basel.
--History graduate student Tovah Bender successfully defended her dissertation, “Negotiating Marriage: Artisan Women in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Society.”
--History graduate students Gabriel Hill and Kevin Mummey passed their preliminary examinations.
--English Department graduate student Elissa Hansen was awarded CMS funding for travel to Waukesha, WI to study contemporary reading practices in the Order of Julian of Norwich.
--History graduate student Kevin Mummey was awarded funds to travel to Mallorca for archival work on his dissertation on women slaveholders in 14th century Mallorca.
--History grad student Tiffany Vann Sprecher received a grant for travel to Cambridge, MA to work with a manuscript of Jacques de Vitry’s sermons.
--French and Italian graduate student Rachel Gibson was awarded funds from CMS to travel to Rome this summer in order to pursue an advanced course in Italian.
--CMS has also awarded travel funding from the Carl Shepard Memorial Fund to Ashley Deering, an undergraduate at U of M Morris, to travel to the International Medieval Congress at Leeds to present her research on “Saving Faith in Languedoc: the Dominican Practice of Medieval ‘Doctors of Souls’.” She worked on this project as a UROP with Professor Stephen Martin.

What was the name of the wife of the Emperor who created the corpus juris civilis?

Answers to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) with the subject line “trivia” by noon on Wednesday, 20 May.

At the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, how is the sponsoring “Societas Fontibus Historiae Medii Aevi Inveniendis, vulgo dicta” more colloquially referred to (bonus points for knowing what they do as well)?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia” directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com).

We have a very impressive presence at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo this year. Please join us in supporting and congratulating such an impressive range of research by UMN professors and students.

The following sessions are sponsored by the Center for Medieval Studies:

--Session 428, “Globalizing the Middle Ages I: What Have We Done So Far and Where Should We Go Next?” (A roundtable).
--Session 485, “Globalizing the Middle Ages II: Mapping the Medieval World,” includes a paper by Maggie Ragnow from the James Ford Bell Library on “Mapping Asia: Perspectives from East and West.”
--Sesson 542, “Globalizing the Middle Ages III: Ghazni, Tabriz, and Samarkand: Sounds and Images from Western and Central Asia,” includes papers by Iraj Bashiri on “Divine and Personal Will in the Thought of Nasir-I Khusrau” and Gabriela Currie on “Imagining Sound in Ilkhanid and Timurid Miniatures.”

Other UMN students and faculty present:

--Session 155, “Law and Life in Occitania: Considering the Costuma d’Agen in Its Contexts” (A roundtable) features Professor Ron Akehurst.
--Session 318, features Professor Akehurst’s paper “Before the South of France Was the pays de Droit Ecrit.”
--Session 344, Diane Anderson will present "Walahfrid Strabo and Hellen Waddell: Re-editing a Queer Icon."
--Session 522, Professor Bernard Bachrach’s “Some Observations on the Merovingian Economy.”
--Session 29, Steve Bivans will present “Viking Warfare in the Ninth Century: The Contributions of the Annales Xantenses and Annales Vedastini.”
--Session 612, Mary Frances Brown’s “The Lyric Encyclopedia: Courtly Song and Fromal Innovation in Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’Amor.”
--Session 264, Erik Carlson will read “Drinking, Speaking, and Acting in Beowulf.”
--Session 291, Ashley Deering "Saving Faith in Languedoc: The Dominican Practice of Medieval "Doctors of Souls."
--Session 282, Philip Grace presents “Motive, Means, and Opportunity: Fathers in Late Medieval Didactic Treatises.”
--Session 391, Elissa Hansen and Lindsay Craig will present, respectively “The ‘Pilgrim Way’: Travel, Ecclesiastical Authority, and Regional Identity in Two Eighth-Century Hagiographies” and “By the Saints and by the Book: Invocations, Implications, and Transmission in Roman de la Rose.”
--Session 457, Jeff Hartman, “Depending on the Utlands: Food and Famine in Fourteenth-Century Iceland.”
--Session 379, Professor Ruth Karras presents “Servanthood and Age at Marriage in England and France.”
--Session 157, Mollie Madden reads “Army Finance: The Accounts of John Henxteworth for 1355-1356.”
--Session 244, Professor Stephen Martin participates in "The Place of Digital Work in Medieval Studies: Where are we Now, Where are We Going?" (a panel discussion)
--Session 291, Professor Stephen Martin reads "Imagining Love and the Middle Ages in Modern Editions of _Aucassin et Nicolete_."
--Session 31, Adam Oberlin presents “’Translating’ Tristan: Hakon Hakonarson’s Norway and the Possibilities of Translatio.”
--Session 344. Stephanie Van D'Elden reads "Deception as Translation: Examples from the Tristan Romance."
--Session 533, Tiffany Vann Sprecher, “’You will be called priest of the Lord’” A Model Sermon by Jacques de Vitry.”

This is not even to mention those who are organizing or presiding over sessions, or the vast number of UMN alumni who have moved on to other places who are presenting this year. We have good reason to be proud.

History graduate student David Crane will be studying Arabic at UCLA this summer, with the support of a FLAS grant.

Congratulations, David!

Basit Qureshi has received a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) from the US Department of State. The scholarship fully funds a number of individuals to travel overseas during the summer in order to study what have been deemed critical need languages. From June 11th to August 9th, he will be studying intensive Arabic at the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), which is located in Cairo.

Ann Zimo, graduate student in the Department of History has received both a summer-term and year-long FLAS fellowship to study Arabic.

She plans to do her summer study in Chicago before returning to us in the Fall. Congratulations, Ann!

History Professor and CMS Director Ruth Karras was recently made a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

MAA Fellows are scholars who have made notable contributions to the Academy's goals to "support research, publication and teaching in medieval art, archaeology, history, law, literature, music, philosophy, religion, science, social and economic institutions and all other aspects of the Middle Ages." There are only a maximum of 125 Fellows at any given time.

More kudos are in order for History Department graduate students Gabriel Hill and Tiffany vann Sprecher.

They've each been awarded a Graduate Research Partnership Program (GRPP) grant. This CLA program encourages graduate students to partner with a faculty advisor on projects of shared interest. It provides Fellows with a summer stipend.

Please join us in congratulating Don Swanbeck, from English and Rachel Gibson, from French and Italian on their reciept of FLAS Fellowships.

The FLAS supports a graduate language studies, with preference given to students who would like to study less-commonly taught languages and advanced work in more common languages.

Don applied to study Arabic, and won both the summer FLAS (to study a specific language only) and the school-year version (which comes with a full tuition waiver and stipend for the year). He hopes to apply the skills he learns to working with medieval Arabic romances.

Rachel won the summer FLAS, for advanced study in Italian and will be headed all the way to Rome to do so.

Who is widely credited as having invented the form of musical notation that we still use today?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia” directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 8 April.

Answer: Guido of Arezzo

Which Canterbury Tale has a possible reference to the tradition of April Fool’s Day?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia” directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 8 April.

Answer: The Nun's Priest's Tale, which makes reference to "March 32nd."

The life of Alexander the Great, written in Czech in the late 13th or early 14th century, is known as what?

Answer: The Alexandreis, based on a Latin version of Alexander’s life.

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia” directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 1 April.

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group invite you to join them for their Annual Spring Colloquium. Three graduate students will present short selections of their work, a
question and answer session will follow, light lunch provided.

What: The Medieval and Early Modern Research Group (MEMRG)'s
Annual Spring Colloquium
When: This Friday 27 March 2009, 12:00pm
Where: Pillsbury Hall, 110

Our three presenters are:

Adam Oberlin (German, Scandinavian, and Dutch)
"Wandering Glosses for Gothic runa and Their Old English Cognates."

Eric Carlson (English)
"Drinking, speaking, and acting in Beowulf."

Elissa Hansen (English) "The 'Pilgrim Way': Travel, Ecclesiastical
Authority, and Regional Identity in Two Eighth-Century Hagiographies."

Please join us for an intellectually stimulating afternoon.

Generously sponsored by the Office of Student Unions & Activities and Coke.

Ermengard, the first wife of Louis the Pious, died while traveling to what city along with her husband and the court?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia” directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 25 March.

Answer: She was on route to Tours, but took sick in Angers, where she died.l

What famous thing, depicting the Norman invasion of England in 1066, was parodied during the opening sequence of The Simpsons?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia” directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 18 March.

The Center is pleased to welcome Professors Stephen Martin (French--Morris) and Steve Matthews (History--Duluth) to the Medieval Studies Graduate Faculty.

Professor Martin joined the faculty at Morris in 2007, becoming Assistant Professor in 2008, when he also received his PhD from the University of Virginia. He is at work on a digital edition of “Aucassin et Nicolete.” His areas of specialization are Old French, Paleography, Codicology, Editorial Theory, and Early Medieval Literature.

Professor Matthews is Assistant Professor of History at Duluth and was just named a McKnight-Land Grant Professor for 2009-2011. His book Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon was published by Ashgate in 2008. A number of his courses, including on the history of Christianity and the history of Science, cover the Middle Ages.

In “The Short Lay of Sigurd,” what does Brynhild do when she hears that the man she loves is dead?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia” directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 11 March.

Answer: She laughed.

Join us on Saturday, April 4, 2009 for a sampler of presentations specifically targeted to undergraduates, but of interest to many others about the fascinating and often unexpected world of the Middle Ages.

Place: The President's Room, Coffman Memorial Union
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities East Bank Campus

Time: 10:00 am to 4:00 pm

Schedule (subject to change)

10:00am - Registration & Welcome
10:15am - Introduction to Exhibit of Medieval Books
10:30am - On the Road with the Crusades
11:15am - Food, Feasting & Fasting
12:00pm - Lunch
1:15pm - Beowulf: Fact, Fiction, & Film
2:00pm - Exploring a Medieval City
2:45pm - Readers' Theatre: The Chase: Harts & Hearts

To reserve space for you or your students, please contact Pat Eldred (PMEldred@stkate.edu)

Deadline: March 18, 2009

Sponsored by the Medieval Research Group, Metro State University, and the University of Minnesota's Center for Medieval Studies and James Ford Bell Library.

Medieval Mosaic: Spain & Morocco is a Global Seminar. Global Seminars are short-term study abroad programs led by University of Minnesota faculty. Instruction is in English by UMN French & Italian Professor Susan Noakes.

Through lectures, readings, and various excursions students will take an interdisciplinary approach to learning about medieval studies. History, literature, visual art, and music will be explored in order to develop a broad sense of how cultural contact worked in the Middle Ages.

This course will examine how the Iberian Peninsula's earliest inhabitants, the Celts, encountered the Romans, as well as the changes that came with the arrival of the Western Goths. Students will explore how the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures coexisted together from the 8th to the 15th centuries.

Prior to departure, students attend a pre-departure orientation and receive pre-departure readings and assignments. Classes consist of lectures, discussions, and excursions. Students will journal daily and develop a creative project or essay as their final project.

Travel the routes and explore the cities of medieval Spain and Morocco. Vast movements of population during the “Middle” Ages, approximately 350 to 1500, often led to tensions when one group met another. On this program you will discover the ways people dealt with these interactions, the reasons these encounters differed, the results of various cultural strategies, and lessons that can emerge for today's global migrations and diasporas.

Students receive 3-credits of 3000 level coursework during this May term course.

Deadline for applications has been extended to 13 March 2009! For further information and applications, see

If you are a student traveling to the International Congress on Medieval Studies and would like to ride along with a fun group of us in the CMS-sponsored van, please RSVP to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com).

The cost for the van will be 50$ per student. This fee is waived if you would like to volunteer to help drive; we’ll take the first three volunteers. Please RSVP and arrange a time to drop off your fee by 1 April 2009.

IAS is proud to announce that Professor Enders from the Departments of
Theater and French & Italian at the University of California at Santa
Barbara will join them to speak about "The Devil in the Medieval Theatrical
Flesh." Friday, 6 March 12:00-1:30pm, 125 Nolte Center.

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Medieval Studies.

In the romance Yvain, the knight Yvain comes across a palace gate that is described as functioning like what sort of device?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia” directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 25 February.

Answer: A rat trap.

What English charter promised the immediate return of all Welsh hostages?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia" directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 4 February.

Answer: The Magna Carta.

The research of Department of Anthropology and CMS core faculty Professor Peter Wells was featured in the latest online UMNews, which highlights his newest book, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered.

To read the full text of the article by Deane Morrison, please see here.

What 7th century legal code mandated that a woman may only wed a man older than herself?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia�? directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by noon on Wednesday 4 February.

Answer: The Visigothic Code

Over a typical Romanesque monumental portal, in what position does Christ appear?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia�? directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com)

Answer: In the "axial" position (ie, the horizontal center).

Wednesday 15 April, 2009 at 4:00pm in the Weber, David Wallace will deliver a talk entitled "Women Living with Women: Nuns in English History and Literary Imagining, 934-1674."

Nuns were few in medieval England but exerted powerful, long-lived effects on literary imagining. Even when they were gone, or moved abroad, their social functions were still lived out by generations of English women. Enclosure proved a defining issue: how did religious women negotiate the clerical principle of /aut virum aut murum/, implying that they should either marry or be permanently immured? And how were their struggles for self-directed, educated living perpetuated in the lives of those women who first sought university education?

This talk begins and ends with poet Andrew Marvell, contemplating the ruins of a former Yorkshire nunnery during the English civil war. It considers the activity of women, up to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, in the southwest of England: the heartland both of Arthurian romance and of English female communities. Syon Abbey, the most significant religious foundation in England between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation,was an élite community of female readers and worshippers; the nuns of Syon returned to England in 1557 and then returned again in the nineteenth century. The possibilities of women living with women, in circumstances at once liberatory and confined, continue to haunt the imagination-- and to leave traces on the English landscape-- down to our present moment.

On Friday, 17 April, there will also be a "Rap Canterbury Tales" performance by Baba Brinkman, at 3pm in the Weber.

Who devised the "floating man" thought experiment, and where was he at the time?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia�? directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com)

Answer: Avicenna, while imprisoned in the castle of Fardajan near Hamadhan.

The brochure and application for the 2009 Minnesota Manuscript Research Library co-sponsored by UMN's Center for Medieval Studies and the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's University is now available. Please visit: http://www.tc.umn.edu/%7Eander002/MSS%20Research%20Lab%20web.htm for details and to apply.

Funding may be available for declared UMN Medieval Studies minors.

In the 13th century, short pieces of Occitan prose were written as introductory pieces to poetry. These detailed the life of the troubadour or provided a preface to or commentary on the poem that followed. What were these two sorts of introductory pieces called?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia�? directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com)

Answer: vidas and razos.

Last year, Professor Anatoly Lieberman from the department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch created a website for the study of Old Norse with the help of graduate student Paul Peterson and gracious support from the UMN Language Center. That site is now available to those who are enrolled in the Old Norse course through the WebCT system.

This year he received another grant from the Center ($2,500) for the production a Middle High German website, which will be ready by mid-May. Congratulations to Professor Lieberman, and what great news for his students.

In the medieval romance “The Youth of Alexander the Great,�? Alexander has a troubling dream. In it, he is represented by an animal. What is that animal and what does it emerge from?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia�? directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com)

Answer: A dragon which emerges from an egg.

CMS will sponsor a conference on Religion and Law in the Global Middle Ages on October 23-24, 2009. More information will follow.

Kay Reyerson, professor of History specializing in Medieval Europe, Mediterranean Europe, Medieval France, Social and economic history, Legal history, and World History, has been elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, a wonderful testament to her accomplishments. The Medieval Academy was founded in 1925 and is the largest and most prestigious association committed to the study of the medieval world.

Tom Gallanis, Professor of Law and a member of the Core Faculty in Medieval Studies, has been named Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the Law School starting January 1. He will have a two year appointment there.

Who was the Governor of Tripoli in 1565?

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia�? directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com)

Answer: Dragut or Turgut Reis.

A colloquium by Antoinette Healey of the University of Toronto co-sponsored with the Celtic Studies Endowment, Department of English.

A talk co-sponsored by the Celtic Studies Endowment, Department of English.

This week’s eNews trivia: what nation’s people invented the ‘traction trebuchet?’

Please send trivia responses in email with the subject line “trivia�? directly to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@umn.edu)

Answer: China! Winner of the contest this week: Steve Bivans.

I am presently exploring medieval Jewish versions of scripture and associated rabbinical commentaries as a background for political thought, as expressed in certain polyphonic motets of the first half of the fourteenth century. This approach casts a different light on the influence of Jewish sacred literature in the intellectual milieu of the French court at that time, suggesting that it was more significant than had been supposed. I am concentrating on the evidence of the texts and music of selected ars nova, French polytextual motets with Latin liturgical tenors.

The polyphonic motets I have chosen are constructed over patterned repetitions of a fragment of Gregorian chant. The upper voices simultaneously sing two different melodic lines with two different texts, which may be in French or in Latin. The polytextual aspect makes the French motet an ideal vehicle for sensitive, complex political argument because it can make polemical assertions without providing amplification or justification, as would be necessary in normal discourse, especially political speech.

Close study of the Jewish readings that contribute to the substrates of these motet texts, and also number-symbolic clues in the music, reveal that this group of motets are essentially "position papers" on some of the fundamental issues leading to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War: legitimacy, inheritance, and liege homage. For example, the Jewish commentary explains the nature of the rights given by Isaac to Jacob, but the Christian commentary does not. The motet masks the fact that the poet makes use of one, and not the other.

The Center for Medieval Studies would like to wish a fond farewell to Susan Noakes, Professor in the Department of French and Italian, who stepped down as CMS Director this summer. Professor Noakes took the CMS helm in 2002 and successfully steered us through some big changes including moving offices and administrative units; starting a Medieval Outreach program in local schools; and co-editing the journal Medieval Encounters with Professors Kathryn Ryerson and Barbara Weissberger. Continue Reading.

We would like to congratulate UMN History PhD candidate Jeff Hartman for receiving an award for best conference paper by a historian at the 98th Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS) in Fairbanks, Alaska this past spring. His paper, “Deforestation and Driftwood: Icelandic timber imports in light of the archaeology of dwelling construction,�? won the graduate student paper prize given by the Society for Historians of Scandinavia, and he received a cash award as well as a free lunch at the next conference. Jeff’s paper is also in the running for the Aurora Borealis Prize for best conference paper overall. Wish him good luck!

This week’s eNews trivia question is: What did Odin whisper in Balder's ear while Balder lay on his funeral pyre? Please submit answers in email to Gabriel Gryffyn ( href="mailto:ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com">ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by Friday, 24 October at 12:00pm.

This summer, English Department PhD student Gabriel Gryffyn traveled to Ireland to attend the Summer School in Mediaeval and Modern Irish Language and Literature at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The intensive two week program included courses in Modern and Old Irish in the morning with lectures on Medieval and Early Modern Irish Literature and its Transmission and Early Irish Law and Society, and the Learned Orders in the afternoon.

Gabriel was able to begin her foray into learning the twisty but beautiful mess that is Old Irish as well as use the excellent resources in the libraries both at DIAS and Trinity College, Dublin. She also had the opportunity to visit the medieval buildings at Glendalough in County Wicklow.

Location: Walter F Mondale Hall (formerly Law Bldg), 45 Medieval Studies Colloquium joins the LAW 6702 Seminar: Legal History Workshop. Speaker will be Daniel Smail, Harvard, on the topic "Goods and Debts in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe". See the abstract (DOC).