You can download this programme here - Gender and Medieval Studies conference Programme
Monday
9.00 – 11.00
Postgraduate workshop with Dr Elma Brenner
11.00 – 11.30
Registration and tea / coffee
11.30 – 11.45
Welcome talk
11.45 – 13.15
Session 1: Gendered Histories of Medicine
Chair: Amy Morgan (University of Surrey)
Jennifer Borland (Oklahoma State University), ‘Gendering Treatment: Female Practitioners in Late Medieval Scenes of Cupping’
Hilary Burghardt (Swansea University), ‘Gendered Differences in Medieval Epilepsy Diagnoses’
Minji Lee (University of Texas, Galveston), ‘Make the World Clean with your Body: Hildegard of Bingen’s Understanding of Woman’s Bodily Fluids as Re-Creational and Salvational’
13.15 – 14.00
Lunch
14.00 – 15.30
Session 2: The Secret Life of Stones
Chair: Jennifer Borland (Oklahoma State University)
Michelle M. Sauer, ‘Generation, Purity and Lithic Agency in The Revelation of St Birgitta, Books 1 and 3’
Róisín Donohoe (University of Cambridge), ‘“This stone in vertu is a cordial”: The Use of Precious Stones in English Childbirth Rituals, 1450-1550’
Diane Heath (Canterbury Christ Church University), ‘Recreating the “Natural World”: The Medieval Oyster as Wandering Womb and her Pearl as Microcosm’
15.30 – 16.00
Coffee
16.00 – 17.30
Plenary 1: Dr Elma Brenner (Wellcome Trust, London), ‘Nature Distilled: Raw Materials, “Artificial" Remedies and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages’
Chair: Laura Kalas Williams (Swansea University)
5.30
Drinks reception with poster presentations and announcement of 2019 GMS student essay prize winner
6.00 – 7.00
‘In Conversation with Elizabeth MacDonald’
Chair: Laura Kalas Williams
Elizabeth MacDonald is a journalist and the author of Skirting Heresy: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe. This comprises a Q&A session about Liz’s interest in medieval history, Margery Kempe, and how her journalistic background resonates with the medieval inquisitional culture.
7pm Dinner (own arrangements)
Tuesday
9.00 – 11.00
Session 3: Positions on the ‘Natural World’
Chair: Jennifer N. Brown (Marymont Manhattan University)
Ruth Worgan (Swansea University), ‘“Nought oo man amonges hem nis”: Spaces of the Feminine Collective in Sir Orfeo’
Jacek Olesiejko (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland), ‘Nature and the Unmaking of Sexual Identities in Old English Elegies’
Daisy Black (University of Wolverhampton), ‘Playing with your Food: Farming and Fratricide in the Towneley Mactacio Abel’
Maria Zygogianni (Swansea University), ‘May Medica: Divine Healing and the Garden in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’
Rachel Moss (University of Northampton), ‘“He ladde him in to an orchard . . . To speke wiþ him priueliche”: Male Solidarity and Outdoor Space in Late Medieval England’
11.00 – 11.30
Coffee
11.30 – 13.00
Session 4: (De)Gendering the Body
Chair: Michelle M. Sauer (University of North Dakota)
Antoaneta Sabau, (University ‘Lucian Blaga’, Sibiu), Adunatio Sexuum as Path to Resurrection in Eriugena’s Periphyseon
Lucy Allen-Goss (Trinity College, Dublin), ‘Conceptions of “Woman” and the Unnatural Womb of the Virgin Mary’
David Carrillo-Rangell (University of Bergen), ‘Text(ure)s of Blood and Memory: Un-remembering Loss, Love and Desire’
13.00 – 14.00
Lunch
14.00 – 15.30
Session 5: Monsters and Hybrids
Chair: Maria Zygogianni (Swansea University)
Amy Louise Morgan (University of Surrey), ‘Natural/Unnatural: Hybridity and the Forest in Bisclavret’
Vicki Blud (University of York), ‘Animals within Animals: The Nature of the Beast in Women, Wombs and Werewolves’
Tim Wingard (University of York), ‘Nicole Oresme, Human/Animal Monsters, and Scholasticism’s Science of Sex’
15.30 – 16.00
Coffee
16.00 – 17.30
Plenary 2: Professor Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (Swansea University and Shizuoka University, Japan), Nature, Topography and Spiritual Health: Holy Women’s Writing at Helfta and Siena'?
Chair Liz Herbert McAvoy
19.30
Conference dinner
Wednesday
9.30 – 11.00
Session 6: Early Medieval Corporalities
Chair: Liz Herbert McAvoy (Swansea University)
Theresa Pilgrim (University of Surrey), ‘Gendered Temporalities in the Built and Non-Human Landscapes of The Kentish Legend; Beowulf; Wulf and Eadwacer; and The Wife’s Lament: an Ecofeminist Reading’
Ugnius Mikucionis (University of Bergen), ‘How (Un)Natural is the Family Life of Old Norse Dwarfs?’
Inna Matyushina (Russian State University / University of Exeter), ‘Deformed Bodies and Verbal Art: Monstrous Females in Old Norse Legendary Sagas’
11.00 – 11.30
Coffee
11.30 – 13.00
Session 7: Women and Perceptions of the ‘Natural’
Chair: Trish Skinner (Swansea University)
Theresa Tyers (Swansea University), ‘At Their Mother’s Knee: Nature and Nurture in an Early Fourteenth-Century Manuscript: MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale fr. 400’
Linda E. Mitchell (University of Missouri – Kansas City), ‘Intersections of (Un)Natural Power, and (Dis)Order: The Presentation of Elite Women in Medieval Chronicles’
Elizabeth Kinne (American University of Paris), ‘The Nature of Conduct and its Orientations in Fourteenth-Century France’
13.00 – 14.00
Lunch and GMS Business Meeting
14.00 – 15.30
Session 8: Metaphor and Materiality
Chair: Roberta Magnani (Swansea University)
Jonah Coman (Glasgow School of Art), ‘A Natural-Born Woman’: Visual Sexing of the Medieval Body or Was the Medieval Christ Biologically Female?’
Jennifer N. Brown (Marymont Manhattan College), ‘Devotional Poetics: Worldly Metaphor and the Union with the Divine’
Kathryn Loveridge (Swansea University), ‘The Abject and the Sublime: Auda Fabri and Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Responses to Christ’s Wounded Body’
15.30
Conference close and announcement of the poster competition winner
