Heroic Age Issue 17

On behalf of the Heroic Age board and my co-editor, I would like to announce the first parts of Issue 17!!  That will be further explained below. We are very happy to release these well-deserving materials out to our readers.

The forgoing also means the completion of Issue 16 of the journal. Truth be told, this issue has been done for some time, and I am just getting around to announcing it.  We have two articles in the general section and two related to Alcuin along with a translation of Alcuin’s De Virtutibus et Vitiis. The issue is rounded out with two columns and book reviews.

There have been a number of changes here at HA. Brad Eden who was our book editor, and has been since the beginning of The Heroic Age, has moved on to other projects. He does so with our very great and deep thanks for all the service he has done for the journal. For a time, Thjis Porck acted as our book review editor, but he too has moved on to other projects. So we now welcome Krista Murchison of Leiden University.

In addition to book review editor, columnist John Soderberg is now an associate editor as is Heather Flowers. Melissa Ridley Elmes and Richard Scott Nokes join our editorial board.  In addition we have new columnists!  Mary Kate Hurley joins us taking over and rethinking the Babel column. Richard Ford Burley takes over the Electronic Medievalia column from Dan O’Donnell who also has moved on to other projects though remains a stalwart board member.

Looking ahead, the editorial team has decided to change our release policy. Whereas since our inception we have released whole issues as the issue has been completed, we are now moving to a model that, at least in my view, is more consistent with our open source, internet environment. Now, we will release each column, article, or review as it completes our process and is ready, called a “rolling release.” Each issue will be a calendar year. And as fortune would have it, the current issue number coincides with the century’s year: 17.  So that’s all good!

We have growing pains. We have issues with not enough hands to do the work. Both co-editors teach 4/4 loads at their respective institutions plus carry on their own research and service requirements. Some who help are graduate students trying to finish dissertations. Some are undergraduates. Some are senior scholars lending a hand.  In short, HA is an all-volunteer organization and receives no support from any institution: neither in the form of graduate assistants nor in release time for the editorial team. So any help is appreciated.

The above paragraph outlines some of the issues we have in producing the journal. We welcome any new volunteers who would like to lend a hand. We need social media people, copy editors, section editors, coders, and of course authors! Both Deanna and I are working hard to ensure that the journal begins to appear more regularly, but that depends largely on how many capable hands we have assisting us.

Throughout the rest of this calendar year, additional articles, columns, and reviews will appear under the “current issue” tab, and I will try to make announcements as each is added. We are already in the planning stages for Issue 18, so if you have something you would like to submit for that issue, now is the time to send it in.

Thank you all for your support and patronage of The Heroic Age through the years. Believe it or not, our first issue was in 1999! I would like to especially thank my longsuffering co-editor Deanna Forsman, our associate editors, Heather Flowers and John Soderberg, my production assistant, Sarah Sprouse, and one of my former students, Nicole Mentges who provided copy editing services. And thank you for reading!

Heroic Age Papers!

Merovingians and Their Neighbors

Sponsor: The Heroic Age

Session Organizer: Deanna Forsman

Contact: Deanna Forsman North Hennepin Community College 7411 85th Ave. North Brooklyn Park, MN 55445 Phone: 763-488-0405 dforsman@nhcc.edu

Recent scholarship has suggested that the political landscape of early medieval northwestern Europe owed a greater debt to the Huns, as opposed to the Romans or Germanic peoples. This session invites paper proposals that examine the Merovingian Kingdoms within the context of their relationships with their neighbors. We are particularly interested in papers that examine traditionally studied relationships from new perspectives and papers that examine little-studied interactions.

Echoes of Columbanus

Sponsors: The Heroic Age, ASIMS

Session Organizers: Deanna Forsman and James Lyttleton

The Irish ascetic Columbanus is the most famous example of the classic peregrinus: an individual who chooses a life of exile among foreigners as a form of religious devotion. Columbanus is also famous for his monastic establishments and Rule, as well as his interactions with royalty and the bishop of Rome. This session seeks to further explore the long-term influence of Columbanus in multiple venues. Papers will examine the influence of the Columbanian Rule on ascetic practice, the relationship between monastery and royalty, sources of spiritual authority, the practice of peregrinatio, etc.

Contact: Deanna Forsman North Hennepin Community College 7411 85th Ave. North Brooklyn Park, MN 55445 Phone: 763-488-0405 dforsman@nhcc.edu

Monsters III: Monstrous Acts of HeroismCo-sponsors: MEARCSTAPA, The Heroic Age
Session Organizers: Deanna Forsman and Asa Simon Mittman

Contact: Asa Simon Mittman California State Univ.–Chico Dept. of Art and Art History Chico, CA 95929-0820 Phone: 530-898-6885;asmittman@mail.csuchico.edu

Are there times when heroic acts might, from another perspective, be seen as monstrous? How are Crusader tales narrated in Muslim sources, expulsion tales in Jewish sources, battles from the losing side, slaying tales told by dragons? If we listen for the subaltern to speak, what will we hear? Can we hear the legitimate laments of Grendel's mother, or understand the actions of Lanval's fairy lover? How didretinues of “Saracen” princes perceive the oft-valorized scenes of conversion? Should we praise St. Patrick for cursing inlets and killing the local “wizards” upon his arrival in Ireland? Other saints are valorized for acts of mortification, self-mutilation, and willful starvation. What do we learn if we shift our perspectives, if we re-view these images and narratives from other angles? We invite panelists for a roundtable on “Monstrous Acts of Heroism,” and welcome analysis of surviving texts and image, as well as creative and speculative retellings of medieval tales.

Modern, Medieval, preserved for posterity

Prof Awesome hears some of my wild and wide-eyed theories!!  See it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVjE_fS-plg

A New Conversation

Yeah, so.....I just noticed it has been a year plus since one of us has posted here.  But that's not what I want to reflect on......

I wanted to start a conversation on whatever platforms we use now re: a problem many of us face.  Many of us medievalists, fresh from the Congress, feel like medieval impostors.  No, not the usual impostor syndrome where we think we have nothing to say in spite of our years of training, but that because we have such big teaching commitments (4/4 or more) and the accompanying grading plus the service requirements, etc etc that many of us are unable to do any research during the school year.  This in fact gives rise to that problem of finishing one's Congress paper en route or even during the conference: we have no time no matter how well we plan to get it researched, written, and done for 3/4 of our year.

So I wanted to open a discussion on strategies and ways to deal with the problem of being full plus time teacher and only part time scholar.  Comments here, or on Facebook, etc welcome.

ENGL 4183 Intensive Latin Online 2015

Dr. Larry Swain 

Bemidji State University 

http://www.bemidjistate.edu/academics/summer/

 Course Description: This course is an intensive introduction to Latin, covering in nine weeks a full academic year’s worth of the language. This will require a lot of work and dedication on the part of both instructor and student. By the end, however, the student should be able to read Latin prose with the aid of a grammar and a good dictionary or lexicon. There will be a great deal of memorization. Via our online tools, discussion board, online office hours, recorded lectures, live lectures, exercise sharing and corrections, and Q&A sessions delivered via D2L, power point presentations, and other tools, we will go through the entire text and master basic Latin. The course will require a commitment from the student. A MINIMUM of 2 hours and preferably 4-6 hours a day will need to be spent working on the exercises, in class, interacting with the professor etc. Because delivery is online rather than in a traditional classroom, the need for each individual student to apply him- or herself diligently daily is even more important than in a face-to-face class.  We will meet virtually in an online classroom for each lesson to explain the grammar lesson, to do some in class exercises, to correct exercises, and so on, for approximately an hour, more if necessary or if student interest. The rest of your time will be spent working on exercises, translating sample passages of actual Latin, memorizing the forms. 

Texts: Intensive Latin by Floyd Moreland and Rita Fleischer 

Other materials as assigned

(I will have advice about students’ dictionaries, additional grammar aids in print and online and so on as well throughout the course). 

Highly Recommended: English Grammar for Students of Latin: The Study Guide for Those Learning Latin by Norma Goldman and Ladislas Szymanski 

This course is six credits; I think a full year of Latin deserves a full year of credit.  The above URL at the top is the Center for Extended Learning Admissions website.  This URL is for the tuition calculator: http://www.bemidjistate.edu/offices/business/tuition_fees/tuition_calculator/.  

Charlie Hebdo and Neighborliness

I'm cross-posting this from my personal blog. There is a lot more to say, and a lot more to tease out, but these brief thoughts seem like an important reminder while so many are so busy with the Clash of Civilizations narrative.

___

Today, I began reading David Nirenberg’s Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today, and the attacks in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the all-too-expected violence against Mosques provide an unsettling and imminent backdrop for what is otherwise some light research reading. Even if I were not horrified by these propagating acts of violence, my professional interests would already be raised in light of Salman Rushdie’s invocation of a “medieval form of unreason” as a way to describe Islamic radicalism. As many others have noted, the labeling of something as “medieval” is a comforting fantasy of casting the present (and our own responsibilities to it) into the darkened past. See this piece for an excellent take on it.

Of course, this event has brought back “The Clash of Civilizations” (as if it ever left). As a perfect example, Senator Lindsay Graham has stated that “Our way of life doesn’t fit into their scheme of how the world should be. If you stopped talking about radical Islam, if you never did a cartoon again, that’s not enough. What people need to get is they can’t be accommodated. They can’t be negotiated with. They have to be eventually destroyed.” It’s them or us.

These stark terms and boundaries, boldly-colored in lines of a rather cartoonish portrait, obscure the interdependence of Christianity and Islam. Nirenbeg describes this interdependence as “coproduction,” that religions coproduce each other in a dense network of identification and dis-identification. Another phrase he uses here is “ambivalent neighborliness,” an array of responses to the neighbor “ranging from love and toleration to total extermination” (2).

Senator Graham and many others would do well to heed Nirenberg’s analyses concerning the interrelationships between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam:

My goal in them [the ensuing chapters] is simply to convince you that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have never been independent of each other: that is as neighbors, in close relation to one another, that they have constantly transformed themselves, reinterpreting both their scriptures and their histories. Their pasts are not discrete, independent, or stable, and neither are their presents or their futures. (12)

Total annihilation can never be good public policy, and most importantly, it’s a blood-tinged fantasy that ultimately seeks to forget how much our neighbors mean to us, even (and sadly, perhaps especially) when we kill them.

9/11, the Qur'an, and Sympathy to Diversity

Toward the end of last week, I sat down to look ahead at my teaching topics for this week, looked at the syllabus for my World Literature I course (antiquity to early modern), and realized that I had scheduled the Qur'an on 9/11. When I had made the schedule weeks before, I had taken my pre-made template and populated the empty slots with the reading trajectory that I imagined for the course, without regard for dates--more concerned with overall and weekly organization. At first, I was daunted by the prospect of teaching the Qur'an on the historic date that had practically introduced American culture to Islam through an international tragedy; eventually, I came around to hoping that it would be a good opportunity.

The Qur'an,
Walters Art Museum, MS 567, fol. 1b
(1230 AH / 1814-15 CE, Iran),
Courtesy of The Digital Walters.

As it turns out, the class went wonderfully--thanks to great students. They were engaged, interested, and some of them knowledgeable about the Qur'an and Islam from previous reading (on their own or in other classes). They identified the nuance of the Qur'an as a religious text, acknowledging the complicated nature both in comparison with and distinct from some of the other world religious texts we've read over the past few weeks (the Hebrew Bible, Christian gospels, Confucius' Analects). Discussion was lively. About halfway through the class, the elephant in the room finally reared up when students began to confront multiple interpretations of certain passages in the text itself, the historical spread of Islam, and themes of militant conversion in both the text and the history of Islam--and in the history of world religions more generally.

I took the opportunity to underscore one of my key goals in the class: to instill a sense of diversity and sympathy for world cultures and various representations of what it means to be human. I was honest: I told them that I had no idea about the date when I had put the Qur'an on the scheduled, but that I thought it was a good opportunity for rethinking and revising some of our assumptions and expectations on a day when those thoughts may be very present in our minds. I told them that we had to understand culture and literature through interpretation; that we had to understand cultures not as monolithic (there is no single "Islamic culture" just like there is no single "Christian culture"); that all of our readings and discussions lead us to consider diversity and sympathy. As I said all of this, I watched as they took in what I was saying--nodding, smiling, taking notes, agreeing. They chimed in, echoing some of my words, extending my ideas, and our discussion turned to reflections on how we live in a moment ripe with possibilities for cross-cultural, multi-faith, ecumenical conversations. It gave me hope, and one more reason to remember why I love teaching.

On Teaching Bisclavret

I originally wrote this for my personal blog, ParaSynchronies, but I've decided to cross-post it here as well.

Like many people I know, I've been reading article after article on the Isla Vista shootings last Friday. When I haven't been reading articles, I've been delving into the heartbreak and poignance of #YesAllWomen. I get like this (I'm certainly not alone). When an event like Isla Vista or Newtown happens, I always seem to have difficulty escaping the event horizon of such senseless tragedy. Well, I wish I could say it was always senseless. There is too much sense (I do not, in any way, mean reason). Rather, there is too much to be read, too many free-floating signifiers of hate and violence that demand to be interrogated, if not interpreted. It's in this state that I finally poked my head out to get back to work prepping Marie de France's "Bisclavret" to teach in a summer British Lit I Survey course.

This text has always struck me as a deeply troubling one. The first time I taught it, I selected this lai because of its werewolf.  I was teaching my first upper-level medieval lit class (in fact, the last such course of its kind I have taught), and I chose as my theme "The Monstrous Middle Ages." A short text about a werewolf seemed like an obvious and perfect choice. For those of you who aren't familiar with the tale, here is a brief summary:

A Lord seems to have a wonderful life --  status, nobility, and a lovely wife; however, he has a secret. For three days a week he disappears into the forest to become a werewolf. His wife, anxious about these frequent disappearances, confronts him and asksHim and him what is going on. She fears that he has a lover on the side (I would add that this is a fairly justifiable fear given the evidence she had) and so she needs to know. At first, he refuses to tell her but after much coaxing he relents. He also reveals, after initial resistance, where he hides his clothes. He runs about naked in the forest, subsisting on whatever prey he can find, but he needs his clothes to once again resume human form. The lady, aghast at this state of affairs, convinces a knight (one who has attempted to woo her) to steal her husband's clothes. In return, she marries the knight. The husband is then trapped in his wolfish form, and is eventually taken in by the King who recognizes the seeming nobility of the animal. The story comes to a climax when the lord sees his connubial usurper and attacks him. Next, the wolf sees his wife and, in a fit of rage, launches himself at her and swipes off her nose. At this point, it seems like the wolf is going to be punished for this, but one of the wise counselors of the King suggests that the animal has never acted so viciously before and so there must be a reason. Agreeing, the King has the lady tortured until she reveals everything. Ultimately, the lord is returned to his human form and his one-time wife, now disfigured, is exiled. As a sign of her crimes, future generations of the women in her line are born without noses.

Whenever I teach this text, there is always an excellent conversation about the tensions between the spaces of the forest and the court, between civilization and wildness. The early going consensus in class often seems to be that the werewolf is not the true monster of the text, but rather the lady exhibits more monstrosity in her actions. Now, part of the reason we reached such conclusions might be because of how I lead class discussion, choosing to focus on some questions, and not others, but I also think that Marie de France provokes her readers to both overlook certain key details and to be rattled by that act of overlooking. After we've talked for a while about the working of monstrosity in the text, I often pose the following question: "Is there any way we can discover a sympathetic reading of the Lady?" When I first posed this question, there was silence for a considerable duration. Finally, someone raised the point that there was very little evidence to merit the lady's being tortured. This conversation soon turned to the idea that torture was extreme regardless.

Then, the ball got rolling. We returned to the prologue, which tells of the savage nature of werewolves, and the seeming contrast to Bisclavret (except for that whole disfiguring thing). If this is what people knew about werewolves, why wouldn't the lady be a bit freaked out? Why wouldn't she take extreme measures to extricate herself from such a situation? And, why include a prologue that seems to be contradicted by the tale, allowing for it to be easily forgotten?  We discussed how, in her vulnerable position, she had few options. It no longer seemed that easy to pinpoint where monstrosity could be found in the text.

Last night, I posted to twitter that I was unsettled prepping this text in the wake of UCSB. Someone then asked me if I'm not always unsettled by "Bisclavret." I certainly am always bothered by it, but somehow I had missed a few details before that I couldn't ignore now. After being told how praised and how good and handsome the lord is, the lady confronts him about his curious, alarming behavior. What I hadn't thought too much about before was the lady's first words:

"My lord," she said, "my friend, my dear,
There's just one thing I might care
To ask, if only I might dare--
But I'm afraid that you'll get angry,
And, more than anything, that scares me" (From Judith Shoaf's translation)

Sure, his later anger may seem justified, but does that justify such savage bodily violence? And, what do we do with the statement that the lady fears, "more than anything," that her husband will get angry. On one hand he is great and noble and praiseworthy, but we must not forget the threat of his anger. She was right to fear not only the anger of men, but also how others would normalize and justify the action taken from such masculine anger.  Surely the wolf would only show anger if there was just cause, even though the court had no data for this, and so the lady must automatically be at fault. The torture is retroactively justified because of her guilt, but it is clear that this justification was already accepted before her confession.

After writing out this blog post, I realized that I really have nothing new to add at this moment to the critical discussion of either a.) teaching Marie de France's "Bisclavret or b.) the toxic sludge of misogyny that the UCSB shooter seems to have waded in.  I am just struck by how the nice guy so suddenly turns violent, and how his virtue is taken at face value.  Yes, this is an imperfect analogy between this text and the state of affairs today, but I find it necessary to note that it seems all too easy to find contemporary resonance in a text which can be read to interrogate 12th-century notions of masculinity, violence, and patriarchal culture. And, I'm not saying that last Friday's act of violence should be described as medieval. I'm saying that "Bisclavret" is all too modern.

Modern Medieval at Kalamazoo 2014

And so it comes around again, Spring, when medievalists long to go ... to Kalamazoo. The blog has been a bit quiet of late, but as you can see from the run-down below, we've all been very busy! We're organizing, presiding, and presenting like crazy over here!

Matthew Gabriele

The Exegetical Turn: Exegesis as a Paradigm for New Understandings of the Middle Ages
Thursday 3:30 p.m. Schneider 1320

Sponsor: Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Virginia Tech


Organizer: Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ.
Presider: David M. Perry, Dominican Univ.

Kissing Christ: Judas’s Mouth as Biblical Exegesis

Rabia Gregory, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia

The Exegetical Diplomas of King Philip I of Francia (1060–1108)

Matthew Gabriele

Read! Think! Engage! How Luther’s Exegesis of Genesis Exhorted People out of the Cloister and into Family and Society

Jennifer Hockenbery, Mount Mary Univ.

Writing the Middle Ages for Multiple Audiences (A Panel Discussion)
Friday 3:30 p.m. Fetzer 1045

Sponsor: CARA (Committee on Centers and Regional Associations, Medieval Academy of America)
Organizer: Michael A. Ryan, Univ. of New Mexico
Presider: James M. Murray, Western Michigan Univ.

A panel discussion with David M. Perry, Dominican Univ.; Ellen F. Arnold, Ohio Wesleyan Univ.; Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Tech; and Laura Saetveit Miles, Univ. i Bergen.

 Rick Godden

Disability Studies and the Digital Humanities (A Roundtable)
Friday 3:30 p.m. Schneider 1155

Sponsor: Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages
Organizer: Joshua R. Eyler, Rice Univ.

Presider: Tory Vandeventer Pearman, Miami Univ. Hamilton

A roundtable discussion with John P. Sexton, Bridgewater State Univ.; Cameron Hunt McNabb, Southeastern Univ.; Jonathan Hsy, George Washington Univ.; and Richard H. Godden, Tulane Univ.

#;()@?”:—*! (A Roundtable)
Saturday 1:30 p.m. Fetzer 1005

Sponsor: BABEL Working Group

Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group
Presider: Richard H. Godden, Tulane Univ.

Seeing Spaces

Chris Piuma, Univ. of Toronto

The Divorce of Punctuation and Diacritics

Meg Worley, Colgate Univ.

, (A Breath)

Joshua R. Eyler, Rice Univ.

D’oh: A Brief History of Misusing the Apostrophe and Why Its So Annoying

David Hadbawnik, Univ. at Buffalo

‽: Interrobanging Chaucer

Corey Sparks, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington

*


Robert Rouse, Univ. of British Columbia

&

Jonathan Hsy, George Washington Univ.

Medieval Literary Ethics
Sunday 8:30 a.m. Schneider 1350

Organizer: Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara
Presider: Emily Houlik-Ritchey

“Doctrine by ensample”: Literature’s Ethical Problem and Spenser’s Aesthetic Solution

Maria Devlin, Harvard Univ.

By Writing Amended: The Ethics of Interpretation in Hoccleve’s Series

A. Arwen Taylor, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington

The Virtues and the Will in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls

Sarah Powrie, St. Thomas More College

Prosthetic Neighbors: Enabling Community in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle

Richard H. Godden, Tulane Univ.

Brandon Hawk

New Methods in Anglo-Saxon Homiletics
Thursday 10:00 a.m. Schneider 1325

Sponsor: Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics (SSASH)
Organizer: Brandon W. Hawk, Univ. of Connecticut

Presider: Stephen Harris, Univ. of Massachusetts–Amherst

“It maie be Alfricus for al my conninge”: Authorizing Ælfric in the Long Seventeenth Century

R. Scott Bevill, Univ. of Tennessee–Knoxville

Ut quidam perverse opinantur: Bede’s Criticism of Unnamed Sources

Damian Fleming, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ.–Fort Wayne

People of the Bread and the Book: Ecclesiology and the Eucharist in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies

Rae Grabowski, Cornell Univ.

Universal Saints Located in Anglo-Saxon England
Thursday 7:30 p.m. Bernhard 204

Organizer: Kevin R. Kritsch, Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
Presider: Bryan Carella, Assumption College

An Old Testament Saint? Judith in Anglo-Saxon England

Brandon W. Hawk, Univ. of Connecticut

How to Read a Saint: Agatha and Interpretation

Ann D’Orazio, Univ. of New Mexico
Univ. of New Mexico Graduate Student Prize Winner

Using Swedish Fragments to Shed Light on the Anglo-Saxon Marian Conception Feast

Sean Dunnahoe, Royal Holloway, Univ. of London

How Was Bartholomew Killed? Apocryphal Traditions of Saint Bartholomew in Anglo-Saxon England

            Kevin R. Kritsch

Medievalists and the Social Media Pilgrimage: The Digital Life of Twenty-First- Century Medieval Studies (A Roundtable)
Sunday 8:30 a.m. Schneider 1280

Sponsor: Massachusetts State Universities Medieval Blog
Organizer: Kisha G. Tracy, Fitchburg State Univ.

Presider: Kisha G. Tracy

A roundtable discussion with John P. Sexton, Bridgewater State Univ.; Peter Konieczny, Medievalists.net; Brandon W. Hawk, Univ. of Connecticut; Andrew M. Pfrenger, Kent State Univ.–Salem; Joshua R. Eyler, Rice Univ.; and M. Wendy Hennequin, Tennessee State Univ.

Jennifer Jordan 

Irrationality as a Fruitful Methodology (A Roundtable)
Sunday 8:30 a.m. Schneider 1220

Sponsor: Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe
Organizer: Deanna Forsman, North Hennepin Community College

Presider: William Schipper, Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland

A roundtable discussion with Deanna Forsman; Jennifer Jordan, Stony Brook Univ.; Richard Scott Nokes, Troy Univ.; Larry Swain, Bemidji State Univ.; and Silas Mallery, North Hennepin Community College.

Larry Swain

Of the Same Bone and Blood: Anglo-Saxon and Other Germanic Literature in Comparative Perspective
Saturday 3:30 p.m. Schneider 1155

Organizer: Larry Swain, Bemidji State Univ.
Presider: Larry Swain

It’s All in Your Mind: The Power of Intellect, Psychology, and Choice in the Vatican Genesis and Genesis B

Mary Breann Leake, Univ. of Connecticut

An Examination of Queens and King Slaying in Germanic Society

Sarah Barott, Bemidji State Univ.

A Moment Left Unwritten: Problematizing “Caedmon’s Hymn” and Moving Towards a Better Understanding of Early English Christianity through the Lens of Continental (and North) Germanic Literature

David Carlton, Univ. of Victoria

Community in Anglo-Saxon England: A Multidisciplinary Approach
Sunday 10:30 a.m. Fetzer 2030

Organizer: Deanna Forsman, North Hennepin Community College
Presider: Deanna Forsman

Community Matters: Burial Practices and Religious Identity in Conversion-Era England

Mark Alan Singer, Luther College

Re-membering Community: Mortuary Ritual as Social Strategy in Early Anglo- Saxon England

Heather Flowers, Minnesota State Univ.–Mankato

Bede’s Multiple Textual Communities in Anglo-Saxon England

Larry Swain, Bemidji State Univ.