This interdisciplinary symposium interrogates the presuppositions of open/closed distinctions in Medieval culture with a view to exploring the semantic field of openness through such related notions as inclusivity, vulnerability, unfinishedness, permeability, excess, profanity. These conceptualizations of openness in the period have had profound influence in a wide array of disciplines such as literature, material culture, hermeneutics, religion, linguistics, history, and history of art.
What does it mean to speak of an open text, an open body, an open mind, an open cosmos in the period? What kind of creative tension was there between the privileged spaces of the monastic cloister, the walled city, the moated castle, and their environments? What role did images of fluidity play in conceptualizing non-binary frames of reference? How did high medieval literature negotiate the exclusive experiences of the court, mystical excess, and sexuality with rhetorical strategies of inclusion toward a broader audience? How did manuscript culture and scholastic hermeneutics contribute to opening up texts to interpretation? How did texts themselves welcome uncertainty, open-endedness, and unfinishedness in their materiality and form?
Interdisciplinary conversations will aim to open up channels of communication between the Middle Ages and present discourse. Can such present ideas as open source, open access, open education, open society, and open relationship be brought into productive dialogue with conceptualizations and practices of Medieval Studies? Can openness be constituted as critical method?
In English
9:30 Morning Coffee
9:45 Welcome by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum
10:00 Ed Wareham
Opening the Gates: The Circulation of Texts and Images in Northern German Convents in the Later Middle Ages
10:30 Oren Margolis
The Book Half Open: Humanist Friendship in Hans Holbein’s Portrait of Hermann von Wedigh III
11:00 Almut Suerbaum
Including the Excluded: Strategies of Opening up in Late Medieval Religious Writing
11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break
12:00 Francesco Giusti
An Interminable Work? The Openness of Augustine’s Confessions
12:30 Pippa Byrne
What Was Open in / about Early Scholastic Thought?
13:00 Mary MacRobert
Early Church Slavonic as a Type of Open Tradition
13:30 – 15:00 Lunch break
15:00 Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden
Becoming Laurel: Openness and Intensity in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta
15:30 Nicolò Crisafi
Open-Ended and Unfinished: The Vulnerable Dante of the Commedia
16:00 Monika Otter
Merlin’s Open Mind: Madness and Knowledge in the Vita Merlini
16:30 – 17:00 Coffee break
17:00 Discussion of
Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal
Moderated by Damiano Sacco
10:00 Morning Coffee
10:30 Benjamin Thompson
The Monastic Enclosure
11:00 Johannes Wolf
The Point of Compassion in The book of Margery Kempe
11:30 Annie Sutherland
Becoming Open in Anchoritic Literature
12:00 – 12:30 Coffee break
12:30 Brian McMahon
Speech-Wrangling: Shutting Up and Shutting Out the Oral Tradition in Some Icelandic Saga Manuscripts
13:00 Alastair Matthews
The Multiple Languages of Medieval Denmark: Towards a More Open Literary Historiography
13:30 Jonathan Morton
In One Hole and Out Another: The Sexual Politics of Psychic Interpenetration in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiary of Love
Organized by
Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum
An ICI Berlin and Somerville College, Oxford Event
The event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.
Please register by 20 June 2019 if you would like to participate. Only a few spaces are available and those who are interested in joining should enclose a brief CV.