CMS Research Seminars are held on Thursday afternoons and speakers are invited from across the UK and from abroad. In recent years, the CMS have hosted experts in archives and manuscript studies, history, art history, archaeology, and literature.
2024/5 Seminar Schedule
| 1 October 2024 | Joseph Mason | New College, Oxford | Heartbroken: Music, Violence and the Body in Thirteenth-Century France |
| 10 October 2024 | Elizabeth Lambourn | De Montfort University | Metals and Models: The Exchange of Technologies between Aden and the Malabar Coast as Recorded in Geniza Documents |
| 15 October 2024 | Miriam Wendling | Almaire Foundation, Leuven | Using Polyphonic Sources for Plainchant Research |
| 17 October 2024 | Catherine Léglu | University of Luxembourg | The Anglo-Norman Bible and Its Glosses: Exploring a New Context |
| 24 October 2024 | Jelmar Hugen | Utrecht University/Bristol Next Generation Visiting Researcher | Perceval Passing Borders: Adaptations and Continuations of the French Conte de Graal Outside Medieval France |
| 5 November 2024 | Emma Hornby | University of Bristol | Music in Its Intertextual Context in the First Millennium: Saint Michael the Archangel in Early Medieval Iberia |
| 7 November 2024 | Nick Havely | University of York | Book Presentation: Dante’s Mountains and Nineteenth-century Travellers (Co sponsored by the Departments of Italian and English) |
| 12 November 2024 | Marcus Jones, Melanie Shaffer, and Mariia Romanets | University of Bristol | Post-Doctoral Research |
| 14 November 2024 | Jaclyn Rajsic | Queen Mary University | Cross-Channel Histories: Picturing England’s Past in French and English Genealogical Rolls, 1415-1461 |
| 12 December 2024 | Justin Stover | University of Edinburgh | Texts and Transmission (Title TBC) |
Visiting Professorship, David Scott-Macnab
Professor David Scott-Macnab (NWU, South Africa) is coming to Bristol on 1 September (for 3 months) on a prestigious Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. David Scott-Macnab is an internationally renowned expert on medieval hunting and hunting treatises, will give the English Department’s Annual Tucker-Cruse lecture as part of the Centre for Medieval Studies seminar series and will give a further lecture for our undergraduates (open to anyone interested). He will also contribute a masterclass on editing, drawing on his current research project, an edition of The Master of Game for the Early English Text Society.
Details of the two Leverhulme Visiting Professor lectures taking place in TB1 of 2024-2025:
1. ‘The Natural World in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Tuesday 5 November 9:00-9:50am, Chemistry Building, Lecture Theatre 3
2. ‘Representations of Animals, Animal Communication, and Human–Animal Relations in Edward of York’s Master of Game’, Thursday 21 November, 4:00-5:15 pm in Arts Complex, Lecture Room 8. (The Annual Tucker-Cruse Lecture, hosted by the English Department and the Centre for Medieval Studies, to be followed by a drinks reception).
Thursday 7th December 2023
Literary Topographies and Historical City Maps: Bristol, Swansea, London at The Lord Mayor’s Chapel
About
FREE public talk by Prof Helen Fulton (University of Bristol) that is part of the Bristol650 anniversary celebrations. Everybody welcome!
The production of urban maps in Britain is largely an early modern phenomenon, arising out of the Tudor political project of creating a single nation called England that covered the whole of the island of Britain. Before then, medieval city descriptions formed verbal maps of towns which performed much the same function as cartographical maps. In the medieval project of mapping territory, whether visual or verbal, towns were major points of reference, standing as witnesses to historical and geographical claims of nation and empire. This talk will explore some classical and medieval urban descriptions with particular reference to the medieval cities of Bristol, Swansea and London. The medieval streets of each of these cities have recently been mapped in newly-published OS-style maps produced by the Historic Towns Trust, and the talk will use these maps to show how verbal descriptions can be turned into cartographic designs.
Book tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/literary-topographies-and-historical-city-maps-bristol-swansea-london-tickets-662911394827
Thursday 25th April 2024
Bristol and Ireland in 1373 at The Lord Mayor’s Chapel
About
FREE public talk by Prof Brendan Smith (University of Bristol) that is part of the Bristol650 anniversary celebrations. Everybody welcome!
In 1373, Bristol became the first English town to receive a charter from the king, raising it to the status of a county. The grant testified to the town’s established and growing importance in the politics and economics of the kingdom and to the influence of its leading citizens. The fortunes of Bristol at this time were shaped by its response to two great challenges: plague and warfare. The Black Death had hit the town hard in 1348-49, and again in 1361, reducing its population from around 20,000 when the pestilence first arrived to around 12,000 by the early 1370s. Mortality on such a massive scale inevitably affected all aspects of life in the town, but it was clear that by the time the charter of 1373 was granted, Bristol’s economy was flourishing. In large part this was because it was a major beneficiary of King Edward III’s military endeavours against the French. Underpinning England’s financing of the Hundred Years War (which began in 1337) was the promotion of a new cloth-making industry in England, designed to destroy the economy of France’s ally, Flanders. By the end of the 1340s, Bristol was the leading exporter of English cloth, and this, along with the revival of the importation of Gascon wine from Bordeaux, garnered for its merchants huge profits and increasing political power. But Flanders and Gascony were far from Bristol. Much closer was its oldest trading-partner: Ireland. In 1373, the king’s representative in Ireland was Sir Robert Ashton, a native of Long Ashton, and this was just one of many ties that continued to bind Bristol to the Irish lordship. The nature and strength of those ties in 1373 is the subject of this talk.
This talk is FREE to attend and open to all. Please book your FREE ticket as the venue has limited capacity.
Book tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bristol-and-ireland-in-1373-tickets-662915396797