Five College Medieval Studies Seminar
Spring Events, 2011

Thursday, March 24. Ruth Dean Lecture
8:00 p.m. Lecture, Morrison Room, Willits-Hallowell Center, Mount Holyoke College
9:00 p.m. Reception, Living Room
Location: Mount Holyoke College

Professor Laurence Harf, Emerita, Paris IV, Sorbonne

"Un conte fantastique dans les Chroniques de Froissart : l'histoire du seigneur de Coarraze et de son serviteur Horton" (with images)

[Athough the lecture will be in French, an English summary or complete version will be distributed beforehand for those requiring one.]

Professor Harf is a renowned author and teacher in many realms of medieval French literature, specializing in medieval mythical beasts and beings, fairies and the fantastic, in such publications as Les Fées au Moyen âge and Mélusine, and is perhaps best known in the USA for her dual-language (Modern-French/Old French), and modern-French editions of Marie de France's Lais (Lettres Gothiques/Poche, 1998). She has also done groundbreaking work on medieval texts and manuscript illustrations in, for example, Chrétien de Troyes and Froissart. Her Ruth J. Dean Lecture on Froissart promises to combine many of these interests and accomplishments.

Wednesday, March 30
4:30 p.m.
Location: Bartlett 316

Professor Mary Dockery-Miller, English, Lesley University

"Judith of Flanders and Her Books: Patronage, Piety, and Politics in Mid-eleventh Century Europe"

Mary Dockray-Miller received her PhD in English from Loyola University Chicago after earning her BA in English at Vassar and an MAT in Secondary English at Boston University. Her research spans both the Old and Middle English periods. Her first book, Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (Palgrave, 2000), surveyed works by Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Beowulf to reveal mothers who created rituals, genealogies, and institutions for their children and themselves. Her book Saints Edith And Aethelthryth: Princesses, Miracle Workers, And Their Late Medieval Audience. The Wilton Chronicle and The Wilton Life Of St. Aethelt, offered translations of little-known Middle English poems; it was published by Brepols Academic Press in 2009.

Thursday, April 14
4:30 p.m.
Location Mount Holyoke (room TBA)

Professor Wesley Yu, English, Mt. Holyoke College

Title TBA

Wesley Yu teaches medieval literature and poetics.  His research covers early- to late-medieval poetic traditions to inquire into the mechanisms of poetic change.  His work especially examines how transformations in poetic composition coincide with epistemic changes that take place in medieval language logic.  He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Logic Making: Vernacular Poetics and the Medieval Theory of Topics.  Here he concentrates on the history of argumentation to magnify literature's role in the making of medieval intellectual history.