The Yale Medieval Lunch Series is an interdisciplinary colloquium that meets regularly throughout the academic year. It is the program’s primary forum for exchanging ideas, sharing research findings, and presenting work-in-progress within Yale’s broad and diverse Medieval Studies community.
The colloquium draws on the skills and expertise of departmental faculty members, graduate students, research scholars, postdoctoral fellows, librarians, curators, and occasional visitors from outside Yale. In the past few years, presentations have included new research from the fields of English; linguistics; history of art; religious studies; history; Judaic studies; numismatics; legal studies; economic history; paleography and manuscript studies; textual criticism; and Italian, Spanish, French, Slavic and Near Eastern languages.
Medieval Lunch takes place on Tuesdays from noon to 1:00 in HQ 276 (320 York St).
2022-2023
September 13
Meet & Greet
September 27
Áine Palmer (Music) – “Human Voices, Animal Eyes, Divine Ears: Understanding the Experience of Medieval Devotion through a Thirteenth-Century Lyric”
October 11
Stephan Sveshnikov (History) – “Heresy, Fantasy, and Black Humor in the Old Russian ‘Dracula’ Tale”
October 18
Hannah Lloyd (History) – “The Influence of Prestige and Dietetics in Medieval Recipes for Lamprey”
January 24
Marcia Colish – Anselm’s Boethius: the View from De concordia 1
February 7
Alexander D’Alisera – (TBD)
February 14
Ahuva Liberles – Can we talk about diversity in the Middle Ages?
February 21
visit from Volker Drecoll (Universität Tübingen)
February 28
visit from Bruce Holsinger (UVa)
April 11
Kevin Kiernan - A Preview of the Fifth Edition of Electronic Beowulf
April 25
Megan Perry – Tangles with Gnomes in the OE Pastoral Care
2021–2022
October 5
Nicholas Aubin (University of Warwick) – “Medieval Arabic Medical Summaries and their Role in the Transmission of Medical Knowledge”
October 19
Howard Bloch (French) – “John the Baptist Heads to Amiens”
November 2
Kristen Herdman (Medieval Studies) – “Wisdom in Warp and Weft: the Sages of the Past Tapestry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art”
November 9
Carla Neuss (Institute for Sacred Music) – “Theorizing the ‘Mystery’: Transnational Medievalist Performance in the 20th Century and Beyond”
November 16
Carson Koepke (Medieval Studies) – “E-ustace: Using GIS mapping and network analysis to study the Latin manuscript tradition of St. Eustace”
November 30
Noel Lenski (Classics and History) – “Slavery and Violence in Visigothic Society, c. 500-700 CE”
December 7
Frank Griffel (Religious Studies) – “’…true according to philosophy but not true according to the Catholic faith.’ A New Explanation of the Double Truth Theory and Its Roots in Arabic-Islamic Philosophy”
December 14
Ahuva Liberles (Judaic Studies) – “Jewish Adolescents and their Religious Choices in Late Medieval Christian Europe”
February 15
Marie-Ange Rakotoniaina (Institute for Sacred Music) – “The Geopolitics of Liturgy: The Baptism of Clovis and the Genesis of French Royalty”
March 1
Kristen Herdman (Medieval Studies) – “Sisters Stitching Stories: Narrative and Exegesis in the Embroideries of the Lüneburg Heath”
March 8
Camila Marcone (Medieval Studies) – “Open Season: local knowledge and recreational hunting in Alfonso XI’s Libro de la monteria“
March 15
Jacqueline Jung (History of Art) – “The HU: Mongols, Medievalism, and Metal Music”
April 5
Ephraim Shoham-Steiner (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) – “Jewish Life in Medieval Cologne: A Fresh Look”
April 12
Sophia Schmitt (Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University) – “Fire and Brimstone: Navigating Disasters in Late Medieval Germany”
April 26
Megan Perry (Medieval Studies) – “Whose Hierdeboc? Building a Politics of Consent in the Old English Pastoral Care”
May 3
Tamar Rotman (Classics, Columbia University) – “Contextualizing the Martyrologium Hieronymianum”
2020–2021
October 6
“Johannes Vetulus de Anangia’s Celestia Hierarchy of Music”
October 20
“Before barcodes there were…bookworms! Reconstructing a manuscript codex from the collection of Thommaso Spinelli”
November 3
“Image, Text, & Control: Articulating Tensions in Medingen Prayer Books”
November 10
“Riccoldo of Montecroce and the Construction of Islamic Temporalities in Medieval Latin Christendom”
November 17
“The Hohenburg Liturgical Fan as a Ritual Object in Parchment”
December 1
“Reading Seneca with Walahfrid, Abbot of Reichenau”
December 8
“Social Identity and Emotional Community in Ephrem the Syrian’s Necrosima”
February 23
“Making Things, Making Up For Things, Making Things Up: Female Creativity in a Middle English Romance”
March 16
Kristen Herdman (Medieval Studies) – “Medieval Embroidery Mini-Workshop”
March 23
Phoenix Gonzalex (Yale Divinity School) – “Yett Wee Wyll Drinke Atyte”: Queering Time and Order with Chester’s Uxor Noe”
March 30
Larissa Tsukamoto (Medieval Studies) – “Heimdallr: Not the Whitest of the Gods”
April 6
Burt Westermeier (History) – “The Anti-Episcopal Uprising at Toledo and its Aftermath, 1313-4”
April 13
Jacqueline Jung (History of Art) – “All the Single Ladies: The Pleasures and Perils of Female Autonomy in Konrad’s Büchlein von der geistlichen Gemahelschaft”
April 20
Sebastian Rider-Bezerra (History and Medieval Studies) – “To Pay the Price of His Tongue: Judicial Appeals and Audience in Medieval Welsh Law”
May 4
Travis Zadeh (Religious Studies) – “The Best of All Divisions: Cartographies of Race and Monstrosity in Islamic Natural Philosophy”
May 11
Trisha Gupta (NYU) – “An Excess of the Repressed: Medieval Monsters as Expressions of Excess Human Sensation in the Beowulf Manuscript”
2019–2020
September 10
Phoenix Gonzales (Yale Divinity School) – “Thoughts on the ecology and cosmos of the Chester and Wakefield Noah plays”
September 17
Sophie Quander (University of Bonn) – “Language and Power Dynamics in the Reformatio Sigismundi, 1439 (Marston MS 273)”
September 24
Claire Bowern (Linguistics) – “Linguistic Structure in the Voynich Manuscript”
October 1
Amelia Kennedy (English) – “ ‘Do Not Relinquish Your Offspring’: Abbatial Retirement in Twelfth-Century Europe”
2018–2019
September 11
Lunch and lecture with medievalists
September 18
Lunch and lecture with medievalists
September 25
Lunch and lecture with medievalists
2017–2018
September 19
Welcome back and Introductions
September 26
Ardis Butterfield (English, French, Music) – “Passion, exegesis and song in John Grimestone’s notebook”
October 3
Chris Forney (History) – “Imaginary Jewish Kingdoms in the Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela.”
October 10
Alexander Peña (Medieval Studies) – “Fortune-tellers, Deviant Abbots, and Mutinous Monks: the Carta Caritatis Prior and Early Cistercian Normativity”
October 17
Gina Hurley (Medieval Studies) – ” ‘Over thine eyes pull they hood’: The Case of the Innocent Penitent and the False Confessor”
October 24
Meredith Ringel-Ensley (Southern Connecticut State University) – “John of Plano Carpini Learns Sign Language at the Court of Güyük Khan”
October 31
Howard Bloch (French) – “The Miracle of Theophilus”
November 7
John Burden (History) – “A Bishop and His Law Book”
November 14
Annie Killian (English) – “Preacher, Poet, Venerabilis Vir”
November 28
Rebecca Hill (UCLA) – “ ‘Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got’: Appraising the art of embedded gemology in vernacular poetry”
December 5
David Murray (University of Oxford) – “Looking and Listening through the Virgin and Child in Central Europe circa 1400”
January 23
Carson Koepke (Medieval Studies) – “The Legacy of Vergil’s Dido in the Waltharius”
January 30
Chihiro Tsukamoto (Medieval Studies) – “Reconstructing Norse music of the Viking Age”
February 6
Will Watson (Music) – “Toward New Histories of Fifteenth-Century Polyphonic Song”
February 13
sigridur.sigurdardottir@yale.edu">Sigridur Sirry Sigurdardottir (Linguistics) – “Some notes on weather expression in Old and Modern Icelandic”
February 20
Kristen Herdman (Medieval Studies) – “Reordering the Psalms: Beinecke MS 1171”
February 27
Sara McDougall (CUNY) – “Illegitimacy and Infanticide in Late Medieval France”
April 2
Kyle Conrau-Lewis (Classics) – “The Muses and Redacted Antiquity: Rodulfus Totarius’ Versification of Valerius Maximus”
April 9
“Death by Gospel”
2016–2017
September 13
Welcome back and Introductions
September 20
Shu-Han Luo (Medieval Studies MPhil, and English PhD) – “Tears for Abraham”
October 4
Marcia Colish (History and Medieval Studies) – “John Cassian’s ‘Semi-Pelagianism’ Reconsidered”
October 11
Alexander D’Alisera (Yale Divinity School) – “An Ethical Breaking of the Ranks:Thomas Aquinas’ Fraternal Correction and the Soldier’s Doctrine of Disobedience”
October 18
Mireille Pardon (History) – “Fear and Fascination: the Perception of Criminal Organizations in Late Medieval Flanders”
October 25
John Burden (History) – “Penitential or Canon Law Code?”
November 1
Sebastian Bezerra (History) – “Gascon Monasteries and Medieval Metadata”
November 8
Sarah Ifft Decker (History) – “Credit and Crisis after the Black Death”
November 15
Katherine Hindley (English) – “How to Win Friends and Influence People Using Only the Alphabet”
December 6
Kevin Lord (History) – “Revisiting Lay Piety in the Late Middle Ages”
January 24
Sara Torres (Medieval Academy) – “Swords of Peace: Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Sovereign Desire in Lancastrian Verse”
January 31
Constantin Cless (History) – “The Poore- Treasurers, Dynastic Policy of a 12th and 13th century Family of English Clerics”
February 7
Jackie Jung (Art History) – “The Work of Gothic Sculpture in the Age of its Photographic Reproduction”
February 14
Brianne Dolce (Music) – “Realizing Repetition in the Later Cambridge Songs: Song Structure and Layout in a Twelfth-Century British Songbook”
February 21
Clara Wild (Medieval Studies) – “Bryngyth to hym a chalys with an host þerin:” N-Town’s Agony in the Garden
February 28
Darcy Kern (Southern Connecticut State University) – “Jean Gerson’s Conciliarism and Fifteenth-Century Spain”
April 4
Anna Marra (Italian) – “The River and the Bread. Boccaccio’s Notes on Meditation
April 11
Maria Doerfler (Religious Studies) – “Children and the Sword: The Holy Innocents and the Death of Children in Late Antiquity”
April 18
“Handling Knowledge: Drama and Authority in Late Medieval England”
April 25
“How a Demon’s Son Became a Saint”
2015–2016
September 15
Welcome back and Introductions
September 22
Marcia Colish (History) – “End Time at Hand: Innocent III as Apocalyptic Joachite?”
October 6
Ray Clemens (Beinecke Library) – “New collections, new directions”
October 13
Anna Zayaruznaya (Music) – “A bossy tenor”
October 20
Sara McDougall (History) – “John Jay College. Bastards and their mothers in medieval Europe”
October 27
Eleonora Buonocore (Italian) – “The Paradox of Paradise: Dante’s Memory Loss in Paradiso I”
November 17
Sarah Ifft Decker (History) – “Men’s Dowries: Flexibility in the Dotal Regime”
December 1
Howard Bloch (French) – “Legal Proceedings in the Old French Fabliaux”
December 8
Giuseppe Mazzotta (Italian) – “Emperor Frederick II’s Castle in Castel del Monte”
December 15
Harvey Goldblatt (Slavic S&L) – “Imitating the Two fold Nature of Scripture: On the Expositional and Compositional Use of Biblical Elements as Literary Strategies in Old Rus ́(XI-XIII centuries)”
January 26
Anya Adair (English) – “The Trouble with Technology; or, What Puts William Caxton Out of Sorts?”
February 2
Liran Yadgar (Judaic Studies) – “A Fourteenth-Century Polemic against non-Muslim Physicians from Mamluk Egypt”
February 9
Justin Park (English) – “Vercelli VII and Making Room for Disgust at the Daily Feast”
February 23
Paul Freedman (History) “The Royal Academy of Belles-Lettres of Barcelona and the Catalan Middle Ages”
March 8
Annie Killian (English) – “The Riddle and the Refrain”
March 29
Carol Chiodo (Italian) – “The Italian Lesson”
April 5
Alex Reider (English) – “Charles d’Orleans and his English books”
April 12
Sarah Ifft Decker (History) – “Over Land and Sea: Gender in Commenda Contract”
April 19
Eleonora Buonocore (Italian) – The Poet’s Forgotten Dream: Dante’s Oblivious Memory in Paradiso XXIII
April 26
Taylor Cowdery (English, Harvard University) – “Critical Terms in Middle English Poetic Theory”
2014–2015
September 9
Jackie Jung (Art History) – “ ‘The Boots of Saint Hedwig’ or ‘the Fascinating Presence of Absences in Medieval Art’ ”
September 23
Emily Ulrich (Medieval Studies) – “A Scribal Scop: The Textual Trappings of Beowulf”
October 7
Alexandra Reider (English) – “The Beauty of Medicine: Takamiya MS 33”
October 14
Jonathan Morton (French, Columbia University; Juliana Cuyler Matthews Junior Research Fellow in Modern Languages, New College, Oxford) – “The Fiction of Genius in the High Middle Ages”
October 21
Scott Davis (Religious Studies) – “The Buddha: Canoni. “Historiography and Political Culture in Early Fourteenth-Century England”
November 4
Barbara Shailor (Classics) – “Shedding Light on Medieval Manuscripts”
November 11
Henry Parkes (Institute of Sacred Music) – “Musical Portraits of St. Guthlac”
December 2
Eleonora Buonocore (Italian) – “The Ethics and Politics of Time in Dante’s Ante-Purgatory”
February 3
Daniel McCann (Leverhulme Fellow at Oxford) – “Words of Fire and Fruit: Grammar and Affect in the Cloud of Unknowing”
February 10
Anders Winroth (History) – “Is Global Medieval History Possible?”
February 17
Thomas Schmidt (Religious Studies) – “Medieval Sources as a Window to the Ancient Past: Agapius and Michael the Syrian on the Life of Jesus”
February 24
Clio Doyle (Renaissance Studies) – “Names and Naming in 15th -Century Commentaries on Virgil”
March 3
Kevin Poole (Spanish and Portugese) – “Seeking Wisdom, Seeking Sin in the Libro de buen amor”
March 31
Joseph Stadolnik (English) – “Who’s That ‘Philosofre’?”
April 7
Sarah Spence (Medieval Academy, editor Speculum) – ”Poetic Negotiation: Sicily and the Myths of Empire from Cicero to Dante”
April 14
Eleonora Buonocore (Italian) – “From the Solidity of Memory to the Fluidity of Forgetting: The New Liquidity of Consciousness in Dante’s Earthly Paradise”
April 21
Elizabeth Hebberd (French) – “A New French Romance of Alexander…Sort of.”
April 28
Brianne Dolce and William Watson (Music) – “Ten Things Your Didn’t Know About Medieval Music Writing (Number 4 Will Shock You!)”
2013–2014
September 10
Liza Anderson (Religious Studies) – “The Saint, the Heretic and the Naked Prostitute: Re-imagining the Nestorian Controversy in a Medieval Syriac Narrative”
September 17
Anya Adair (English) – “Shedding Light on William Darker: A Solution to the Problem of Otiose Strokes in 15th Century “
October 1
Marcia Colish (History and Medieval Studies) – “Self-Baptism in the Middle Ages?”
October 8
Caroline Hughes (Art History) – “Another Murderous Foundress: The Medieval Figure of Albina as a Classical Heroine”
October 15
Jackie Jung (Art History) – “Painted Churches in South Tyrol”
October 29
Eleonora Buonocuore (Italian) – “The Trap of Infernal Memory: The Dangers of Remembrance in Inferno XIII”
November 5
Kevin Poole (Spanish and Portugese) – “Aristotle Made Me Do It: Looking for Love in the 14th Century”
November 12
Colleen Farrell (Medieval Studies) – “The Long Shadow of the Gelasian Decretum: St. Anne in the West”
December 3
Clare Monagle, (History, Monash University, Melbourne) – “Poor Maternity: Clare of Assisi’s Letters to Agnes of Prague”
January 28
Ann Killian (English) – “What is a Wycliffe Book?”
February 4
Katherine Hindley (Medieval Studies) – “Re-Writing Religion: Superstition, Indulgences, and the ‘Arma Christi’ Poem”
February 18
Stacie Vos (Yale Divinity School) – “Miraculous Milk: Bodies of Women in Medieval and Early Modern Exempla”
February 25
Carol Chiodo (Italian) – “Come da corda cocca - The Flotsam and Jetsam of Metaphor in Inferno 16”
March 4
Sarah Ifft (History) – “Translating Divorce: Jews and Christian Notaries in Medieval Iberia”
April 1
Agnes Rec (History) – “April Fool’s Gold”
April 15
Andrew Kraebel (History) – “Wyclif ordinator”
April 22
Johanna Fridriksdottir (Germanic Languages and Lit, Harvard) – “Heroes and Humour”
April 29
Alexander C. Loney (Classics, American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow) – “Blood Vengeance from Hesiod’s Ouranos to Shakespeares’s Lady Macbeth”
2012–2013
September 11
Marita von Weissenberg (History) – “What man are you?” ‘Artisan and nobleman’
September 18
Ray Clemens (Beinecke Library) – “Manuscripts for Fun and Profit”
October 2
Greg Roberts (History) – “Policing and the public interest in communal Bologna”
October 9
Madeleine Saraceni (English) – “The Poetics and Cultural Politics of Bocaccio’s On Famous Women”
October 23
Susan Gibbons (University Librarian) – “What’s the Future of Data Curation in Medieval Studies?”
November 6
Carol Chiodo (Italian) – “When Wayland’s Work is Worn Away. Technology and Transcendence”
November 13
Jonathan Cayer (French) – “My Dad’s Your Mom”
December 4
Sarah Ifft (History) – “Women Lending to Women? An Aspect of Medieval Credit”
January 22
Cherie Woodworth (History) – “What is Wood Worth?”
January 29
Arvind Thomas (English) – “ ‘Of Whom has Thou Thy Cunning?’ - The Practice of Canon Law in the Book of Margery Kempe”
February 5
Elizabeth L. Anderson (Religious Studies) – “Repentant Demons, Contrite Cannibals, and Vengeful Crocodiles: Sin and Salvation in Medieval Arabic Christian Narratives”
February 19
Junius Johnson (Yale Divinity School) – “The Theology of the Eucharist in Bonaventure’s Sentence Commentary“
February 26
Madeleine Saraceni (English) – “Excluding the Female Audience: Boccaccio’s Corbaccio and the Poetics of Exclusion”
March 5
Mike Widener (Yale Law School Law Library) – ”Marketing and Medieval Manuscripts”
March 26
Lauren Mancia (History) – “Reading John of Fécamp in an Eleventh-Century Monastery”
April 2
Ana del Campo (History) – “Physician and Priest at the Bedside”
April 9
Shannon Beddingfield (English) – ”Parhomoeon in Ælfric’s Prose”
April 16
Harald Buchinger (Institute of Sacred Music) – “Easter in the Middle Ages: Historical Phases and Hermeneutical Layers”
April 23
Hadi Jorati (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) – “Penny Politics and Presumed Piety”