Calendar: Lecture

As Emily Vermeule, Jean-Pierre Vernant and other scholars have demonstrated, in Greek, and more precisely in Homeric poetry, encounters of warriors on the battlefield and meetings of lovers in amorous contexts are described with the same language and images. An unarmed, defeated warrior may, for example, be compared to a woman. But there are many other […]

It is commonly supposed that the interrelated notions of guilt, remorse, penitence, and forgiveness are specific to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Did the Greeks and Romans in the pre-Christian era have a concept of remorse? If not, when and how did it arise? The problem is complicated because there was no change in terminology; rather, old terms were […]

Mary was the most important saint in European Middle Ages. Texts and images from all over Europe are depicting her in different positions indicating that people have perceived her differently in various contexts and periods of time. In this talk I would like to ask how a development in Mary’s positions can reflect societal and church political […]

Although the original performance of Pindaric poetry is still an open question, there are good reasons to understand the compositions as intended for choral performance. The numerous references to the chorus that the poems themselves include always address it as a group of men. Nevertheless, and in contrast to this, there are also several female choruses […]

In the 1440s the Norfolk-based Austin Friar John Capgrave completed his Life of St Katherine of Alexandria. Unlike earlier English versions of the Katharine legend, Capgrave’s 8624-line poem gives extensive coverage to the saint’s childhood, education and mystical marriage before providing a lengthy account of her passio, and provides us with a level of detail which was almost unprecedented […]

Pictorial hagiographic narrative plays one of the key roles in the medieval Christian imagination and didactics. Analysis of pictorial cycles is, however, traditionally focused just on following the extent of their connections to textual models. The prevailing view is that the pictorial legend can simply be ʻreadʼ as a story, like some kind of medieval comics. […]

In the 1340s, a London lawyer acquired a substantial, second-hand law book, and commissioned an ambitious programme of images to fill almost all of its 600-odd margins. Most of these marginal images have nothing whatsoever to do with the legal text: instead, they take the form of lively narratives, recounting stories involving saints, sinners, romantic heroes, beasts […]