Science, magie et technologie

Science, Magic and Technology

Biennial London Chaucer Conference

10-11 July 2015

Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London

Generously supported by the New Chaucer Society and by Boydell & Brewer

Registration fees: Standard fee: £65; IES students/members concessionary fee: £45

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER



PROGRAMME

Friday 10 July

09.30- 10.00: Registration

10.00 -11.30: 3-paper sessions

1. Nature 

• Kellie Robertson (University of Maryland): Speaking in Nature’s Voice

• Andrew Higl (Winona State University): The Nature of Nature in the Parliament of Fowls

• Karen Gross (Lewis and Clark College): The Science of the End: The Use of Anglo-Norman Apocalypses in Medieval Reference Works


2. Science: patronage and communication 

• Hilary Carey (Bristol): Eleanor Cobham, Duke Humfrey and the Patronage of Science and Medicine

• Seb Falk (University of Cambridge): “I wel wot it is figured boistosly”: didactic writing in the Equatorie of the Planetis

• Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr): “I n’am but a lewd compilator:” Translatio and Scientific Knowledge in Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe


11.30 -12.00:Refreshments

12.00 -13.30: 3-paper sessions


3. Theories of Knowledge 

• Anke Bernau (University of Manchester): ‘Crafty and Curious’: Seeking the Boundaries of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages

• David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania): in limine

• Bernhard Hollick (University of Cologne): Ovidian Psychology: Poetry, Literary Criticism, and Science in 14th Century England


4. Astrology and Divination 

• Anne Mathers-Lawrence (University of Reading): The weather and the stars: astro-meteorology in late medieval England

• Jo Edge (Cambridge): Chaucer’s poure scoler, the quadrivial curriculum and the ‘Sphere of Life and Death’

• Clare Fletcher (Trinity College Dublin): 'Al is thurgh constellacion': Planetary Influence in John ‎Gower's Confessio Amantis


5. Psychology and Literature 

• Megan Leitch (Cardiff University): Ricardian Dream Visions and the Science of Sleep

• Connie Bubash (Pennsylvania State University): Poetics of the Plague: Melancholia and Prescriptive Reading in The Book of the Duchess

• Alastair Bennett (Royal Holloway): The Franklin’s Tale and the technology of consolation


13.30 -14.30:Lunch

14.30 -16.30: 4-paper session


6. Elemental

• Hetta Howes (Queen Mary, University of London): ‘April with his shoures soote’:
Watery Tropes in Late Medieval Literature’

• Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) ‘Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ
and askez’: The City on Fire in Middle English Literature

• Sophia Wilson (King’s College London) ‘Nothinge is fix but earth alon’: The
Uncertainty of Earth and Anxiety of Animacy

• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (George Washington University): Heavy Atmosphere


7. Medical Narratives and Images

• Marion Turner (University of Oxford): Illness and the Limits of Narrative: Arderne, Hoccleve, and Chaucer

• Peter Murray Jones (King’s College Cambridge): Medicine and narrative in the later Middle Ages

• Sarah Griffin (University of Oxford): Ordering the Internal Body: Constructing the organ diagrams of an English thirteenth-century medical compendium

• Lea Olsan (University of Louisiana at Monroe): Artists’ recipes and medical remedies: useful knowledge in Cambridge University Library MS Dd.5.76


16.30-17.00: Refreshments

17.00 -18.00: Sponsored by the New Chaucer Society


Plenary 1: 
Allan Mitchell (University of Victoria)
'Chaucer’s Translation Machine, or, Astrolabes and Augmented Bodies of Science'

18.00 Reception


Saturday 11 July

09.00- 10.30: 3-paper session


8. Magic and Technology

• Carolina Escobar (Reading): Technology is not magic, or is it? A twelfth-century debate

• Alison Harthill (Cardiff): Necromantic Mechanics: Misunderstood Medieval Technology

• Sara Tagliagamba (Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris): Bewitched by demons and angels: Automata, magic and technology in the Renaissance


9. The Science of Experience and the Experience of Science in Chaucerian Dream Poetry

• Charlotte Rudman (King’s College London): Soundscapes in Chaucer’s Dream Poems

• Charlotte Knight (King’s College London): Exploring the Science of Memory in Chaucer’s Dream Poems

• Koren Kuntz (Durham): Ekphrasis, Cognition, and Multimodality in Chaucer’s Dream Poetry


10. Literary Technologies

• Juliette Vuille (University of Oxford): ‘Don’t Shoot the Messenger’: Chaucer’s Experimentation with Messenger Figures

• Jenni Nuttall (St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford): The Techne of Verse-Making: Poetry’s Termes in Middle English

• Sarah Noonan (Lindenwood University): Silent Emendations: Modern Foliation and the Obscured Sophistication of Late-Medieval Technologies of Mise-en-page


10.30 -11.00:Refreshments

11.00 -12.30:3-paper sessions


11. Magic and Medicine

• Katherine Hindley (Yale): ‘Mak a rynge and wryte with in’: Text as Technology in Late Medieval England

• Elma Brenner (Wellcome) 'Between Magic and Religious Culture: Charms in Late Medieval English Medical Manuscripts'

• Mike Leahy (Birkbeck): Relics and Urinals: The Power of Objects in The Canterbury Tales


12. Time in Chaucer

• Kara Gaston (University of Toronto): “Quid enim non carmina possunt?”: Magic and the Poetics of Time Management from Metamorphoses 7 to The Franklin's Tale

• Dawn Walts (Lewis University): The Monk’s Chilindre and the Merchant’s Reckoning in The Shipman’s Tale

• Simon Meecham-Jones (Birkbeck): Technophobia in ‘The Former Age’


13. Philosophical Questions

• Tekla Bude (Newnham College Cambridge): Fetheres of Philosopye: Chaucer and the Metaphysics of Music

• Alexander Gabrovsky (Trinity College Cambridge): Chaucer and the Physics of Sublunary Transformation

• Wan-Chuan Kao (Washington and Lee University): Salvific Energy, Sustainable Faith


12.30 -13.30:Lunch

13.30 -15.00: 3-paper sessions


14. Fertility and Infertility

• Catherine Rider (University of Exeter): Magic, Science and Fertility in Late Medieval England

• Anita Obermeier (University of New Mexico): Birth and Birth Control in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

• Jennifer Alberghini (CUNY): ‘Unkynde Abhouminaciouns’: Monstrous Birth in the Man of Law’s Tale


15. Matter, Spirit and Alchemy

• Susanna Fein (Kent State University): Perceptions of Matter and Spirit: Corpus Christi in Two Canterbury Tales

• Shazia Jagot (University of Southern Denmark): Senior, Sufism and Secrets: The Alchemy of Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale

• Sandy Feinstein (Penn State University): Teasing Science, Teasing Love: “Dalliance” in “To Rosemounde”


16. Scientific discourses in Chaucer

• Roberta Magnani (University of Swansea): Astronomical Discourse and Queer Identities in the Glosses to The Man of Law’s Tale and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

• Rebecca Pawel (Columbia University): Chaucer’s Science Fiction

• Ben Parsons (University of Leicester): The Windmills of the Mind: Milling, Madness and ‎Merry-making 


15.00-15.30:Refreshments

15.30 -17.30: 4-paper sessions


17. Magic and Morality

• Jacqueline Borsje (Amsterdam): Gluttony and magic

• Tara Williams (Oregon State University): Moral Chaucer and Magical Gower

• Carole Maddern (Goldsmiths): 'In Rome was swich oon': Virgil the Necromancer

• Robert Epstein (Fairfield University): Magical Properties: The Anthropology of Sorcery and Ownership in Medieval Romance


18. Vision

• Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University): Lyric Devices: Toward a New Cultural History of Medieval Eyeglasses

• Victoria Flood (Phillips-Universität Marburg/ University of Durham): ‘With a look his herte wex a-fere’: The ‘Aggressive Eyes Topos’ and Chaucerian Tragedy

• Jacqueline Tasioulas (Cambridge) Recognition and the ‘Idole of ane Thyng’ in Henryson and Chaucer

• David Raybin (Eastern Illinois University): Stories of Canterbury: Chaucer and the Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral


17.45-18.45 Plenary 2
Lisa H Cooper (University of Wisconsin-Madison), On Location: Agronomy and Other Affective Arts


19.00 Conference dinner at Antalya