Meetings 2024
Online seminar: 20 May 2024 [video]
Dr Christina Cowart-Smith: Excavations on Lindisfarne, 2016-present
Christina was at Stanford as an undergraduate from 2012-2016. Her Classics BA thesis was advised by Jennifer Trimble and the late George Hardin Brown, both of whom nurtured her interest in Northumbrian archaeology. In 2016, Christina moved to the UK where she's been based ever since. Christina holds a master's degree in medieval Scottish history from the University of Glasgow and a master's and PhD in early medieval archaeology from Durham University. Earlier this year, she was on contract as a fixed-term Lecturer in the Department of Celtic & Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. Christina is now based in London and works as a freelance editor and content writer while awaiting news of postdoc funding. In her spare time she volunteers at the British Museum, creates social media posts for The Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, and sits on the committee of the Pictish Arts Society. For the past seven Septembers, she's had her head in the trenches on Lindisfarne, Northumberland.
Online seminar: 22 April 2024
Susan Murphy: What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? The Colorful, Musical, and Courageous life of Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen, who was born in 1098, near the Rhine river, was given to a monastery at the age of 8, and lived the monastic life until she died at 81 years of age. She was a prolific writer on theology, the natural world, health, illness, and biology, and wrote a morality play—a musical. She was a Jeremiah in her time who spoke out—“even though a woman”—for church reform. Religious and secular leaders of her day recognized her reliance on the Spirit for guidance and consulted her for discernment. This evening's presentation included discussion of the historical context, struggles, and issues of her life, with an opportunity to appreciate her music and visionary drawings, with time for reflection.
Online seminar: 4 March 2024
Prof. Virginia Jansen (Professor Emerita of History of Art & Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz): The Medieval Walled City of Avignon: More than just the Papal Palace
This talk comes from her long-standing project on urban medieval secular architecture. Years ago, while visiting the splendid medieval town of Nordlingen, in Germany, Professor Jansen noticed a huge building and wondered what it was. It turned out to be a late medieval granary. After that, she saw such buildings frequently and wondered why she had never seen them mentioned in publications on medieval architecture. She came to realize that there are many medieval building types that her field ignores, such as warehouses, market halls, shops, merchants' hostelries, etc. She also wondered how such buildings figured in medieval city planning. This led her to visit as many cities with extensive medieval remnants as she could. Avignon is an excellent example of such a city, which she was able to visit in April of 2023, and which was the focus of her talk.
Online seminar: 22 Jan 2024 [video available on request to members]
Prof. Elly Truitt (Dept. of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania): Timelines and Chronoscapes: Late Medieval Timekeeping Technologies and Christian Universality.
Why do clocks look the way they do? This talk aimed to answer this question by looking at the mechanical clock, which first emerged at the turn of the fourteenth century, as a technology capable of telling time in conjunction with presenting multiple timelines—sacred and secular, past and future—into one seamless narrative. Monumental clocks used lunar dials, astrolabes, zodiac charts, and armillary spheres to convey the present time in all its complexity, as well as things to come, such as eclipses, planetary conjunctions, and tides. Religious-themed automata, such as the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the Magi, depicted the events of the past, as well as the promised future of Jesus’ eventual return. The rapid proliferation of monumental astronomical clocks throughout northwestern Eurasia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is indicative of the prevailing interest in temporal narrative, and monumental clocks offered a new form of encyclopedic historiography that both cited and challenged earlier texts. By examining the possibilities that mechanical technology offered to fuse past, present, and future into a conceptually and visually seamless master narrative, Prof. Truitt explored and outlined how the history of technology is critical to understanding the technology of history.