Mélusine, a fourteenth-century snake-tailed woman who can fly, derives in part from medieval narrative traditions of fairies and mermaids. It is her excessive wealth, however, that strikes “wonder” and fear into onlookers at the court in Poitou. How might we draw on items of material culture used to characterize ​Mélusine’s lavish wedding celebration to help understand this ornately clad and bejeweled courtly woman in a more global context?

Arguably few playgoers today are aware that Act 4 of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet ends with musicians engaging in badinage with a clown. Treated generally as superfluous or insignificant, the Peter and the Musicians scene is now cut more often than not. Yet Shakespeare must have had some larger dramatic purpose for it in mind, as the same musicians appear as spectators in the preceding "false lamentations" scene, where key characters mistakenly mourn Juliet's putative death. Too...

The Catalan Dominican Ramon Martí (d. after 1284) was the most learned polemical author of the later Middle Ages. He was part of the thirteenth-century Dominican interest in missionizing and language learning in Aragon under the auspices of Ramon of Penyafort, interest that led to the famous Disputation of Barcelona in 1263 between Friar Paul Christiani and the great Rabbi of Girona, Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides).Following in the wake of this debate, Martí developed many of its key arguments...

Especially if one views the “commedia dell’arte” in its relationship to Italian scripted comedy of the day, Shakespeare thoroughly absorbed the Italian system of masks. Despite the fact that Italian professional actors, who scandalously had women actually play female roles, abruptly stopped visiting England in 1578, a professional interest in the Arte emerges in London theater of the early and mid 1590s, as Shakespeare explicitly deploys versions of Pantalone, the Dottore, the Capitano, and...

The arrival of Girolomo Savonarola in 1490 had serious implications for the traditional public ceremonies in Florence as well as the practices of music and art. The elaborate public ceremonial events were either eliminated or converted to sacred ceremonies; the sophisticated music was curtailed and professional choirs disbanded; and artists were encouraged to confine their work to sacred subjects. It is generally thought that the artistic community completely surrendered to the new...

A one-act commedia dell'arte performance

Virtually every discourse in the medieval period was constructed around the ideal of balance. In my recent book, A History of Balance, 1250-1375, published this past spring by Cambridge Press, I show that preoccupations with balance lay at the core of medieval economic thought, medical theory, political thought, and natural philosophy, but one could apply the same analytic focus on balance to a host of other disciplines. And yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the concern with balance (or...

In texts like the Lacnunga and the Leechbooks, Anglo-Saxon healers struggle to merge two extremely powerful and largely incommensurate ideologies, with the result that detailed herbal remedies, charms written on communion wafers, and magical incantations of broken Latin and Irish find themselves on equal footing. Rather than focusing on whether or not these remedies are scientifically valid, then, I want to explore how the dissemination of medical knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England can offer...

It is not a new insight that what is probably the early fifteenth century’s most sustained and thoughtful response to Piers Plowman, the alliterative, allegorical dream vision Mum and the Sothsegger, is also a sophisticated critique of political corruption in contemporary England. What has not yet been addressed among studies of the poem’s political allegory and use of personification, though, is the extent to which its critique hinges upon a specific medieval legal idea whose implications...

In the desperate winter of 1610, mass starvation reduced the settler population of colonial Jamestown from 500 to 60. This paper uses the specter of starvation at Jamestown to explore a larger and ongoing relationship between suffering and violence, hazard and horror at the site of colonial settlement. Connecting the misery of “Starving Time” to the viciousness of the first Anglo-Powhatan war, the paper will trace how, as structures of meaning crumbled in Jamestown, the colonial arena became...

This paper will trace attitudes to excessive consumption and fasting in the early modern period. By considering the church line on gluttony and fasting and how such excesses were regarded in sixteenth-century dietary literature we can get a sense of the strictures in place regarding this particular 'sin of the mouth'. Shakespeare was rather less judgemental than the Church and from his plays the paper will move to a close consideration of 'the hungry courtier' in Beaumont and Fletcher's The...

The music of early medieval Latin song has hitherto been known to only a handful of specialists. Notations survive in manuscripts from ecclesiastical centres across the Frankish kingdoms from the ninth century through to approximately the end of the eleventh, but the fragmentary written record has relegated wider appreciation to the occasional cum neumis found in the footnotes of the volumes of Monumenta Germaniae Historica and Analecta hymnica medii aevi. The difficulties involved in...

As part of an explosion of agricultural experimentation and innovation in seventeenth-century England, many “improvers” turned to composting as both an “ancient practice” and “newly born.” The composting practices they advocated resembled the very particular practices that characterized early modern reading, remembering, and writing. In comparing composting, commonplacing, and composition, amendment and revision, I hope to draw attention both to the importance of soil amendment in early...

It is standard to read Thomas More’s “Utopia” in terms of its classical roots in Plato’s Republic, and at the same time, to treat it as an inaugural text, that is, as the text that marks the beginning of utopian thinking and a significant cultural break from the Middle Ages. This lecture challenges the historical methods responsible for this narrative of utopianism, providing an alternative account of utopianism that includes medieval texts and thought. Instead of reading backwards from...

Medieval Jewish mystics drew on the same Neoplatonic lines of thinking as their Christian neighbors did, developing theology and practices that facilitated knowledge of, and union with, divinity. Much of the kabbalah of the Zohar, Judaism’s central and canonical mystical text, interprets biblical stories and rituals that deal with food as opportunities to explore the mystical possibilities inherent in Jewish lore and practice. Inevitably, manna, unleavened bread, wine for the Friday night...

By Derek Pearsall, part of Feast and Famine: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series

By Christopher Dyer, part of Feast and Famine: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series

By Timothy Tomasik, part of Feast and Famine: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series

Lecture by Luisa del Giudice, part of Feast and Famine: the 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series

In a discussion at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in 1667 on Nicolas Poussin's painting of Christ Healing the Blind (1650), the participants assumed that fidelity to the biblical text was part of the painter's brief, yet they could not account for several aspects of the painting or even agree on whether Poussin depicted the miracle at Capernaum (Matthew 9) or the one at Jericho (Matthew 20), a point still unresolved. Modern scholarship tends to view Poussin’s painting as...

Why was being distracted once synonymous with being mad? And why did distraction later come to figure as a much less radical disability? Starting with close analysis of some iconic Renaissance images, my talk will spotlight the entwined histories of curiosity, death, and the power to attend.

This lecture treats the use of bodies and body parts as they relate to kinship and social systems in Old Norse heroic legend and myth. In various ways, body parts can be appropriated for cosmic purposes or forfeited for enhanced abilities. But if an intact body represents an intact kin group (as language such as "within the knees" for "kin" suggests), appropriation or forfeiture of body parts suggests loss of kin, and also flaws in social systems in which kinship plays a role. Indeed, body...

The body is a useful instrument for medieval writers to charter desirable an undesirable traits. Physical features may be used as 'signs' so: how much can we rely on medieval writers when it comes to studying disability? Can they really tell us anything about attitudes? Also: how much do concepts connected with impairment create disabilities? Are differences made between congenital impairments and acquired illness? Some fine studies of medieval disability have been published of late, but...

What is poverty? What does it mean to label people as "poor"? Social scientists tend to reach for the measurable in their definitions. Equating poverty more or less with starvation, the inability to sustain life, they have often calculated the income required for this, and called it the "poverty line". The poor are those who live below this. Critics have long pointed out the many defects of such a view, but the language is nevertheless still in frequent use. And historians have tended to...

Around the turn of the fifteenth century it might well have seemed to many French people that the world was going quite mad. King Charles VI's scarcely mentionable mental illness was soon mirrored at every level of social experience, from the irrational civil war through which the body politic tore itself apart, to reports of elevated suicide rates among the common people. Allusions to suicidal impulses and acts recur in an astonishing number of works composed in the first three decades of...