Earlier this year, Matt Lampitt (Project PDRA) spoke at the Mortimer History Society’s Spring Conference on the topic of ‘Imagining Landscapes in Medieval Ludlow’. The talk is available on their Youtube channel here:

Abstract

From greenwood glades harbouring beastly outlaws to Welsh forest passes exploited by rebellious lords to seas that shelter castaway exiles, literary texts from the medieval Welsh Marches imagine worlds full of vibrant land- and seascapes. Ranging across texts in Latin, English, and French, this paper focusses on the works copied and rewritten by the so-called ‘Harley scribe’, an elusive figure active in and around Ludlow in the first half of the fourteenth century. In texts such as the Song of Trailbaston, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, and Kyng Horn, land- and seascapes are no mere backdrop to the main action; rather, they act on their narrative worlds in politically meaningful ways, often colluding with the heroes in their resistance to unjust foes. Situating these texts in their manuscript contexts, we will explore the agential environments that they imagine and consider further what it means for such texts to elaborate political ecologies that include, but are by no means limited to, the human.

CALL FOR PAPERS
University of Bristol, 9–11 April 2025
Organisers: Dr Luciana Cordo Russo and Dr Matthew Siôn Lampitt

In recent years, much scholarship has been devoted to exploring medieval francophonies outside of France, including across the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, in Flanders and the Low Countries, as well as in different regions of Outremer. As a region of early and prolific Francophone textual production, England has received especial attention, most recently under the rubric of the ‘French of England’.

Within and alongside this work, scholars have been increasingly exploring further francophonies, including in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Under the rubric of ‘The French of the Celtic Worlds’, this conference seeks to bring together and develop further these fields of research. Our aim is to (re)assess French-language works––whether administrative documents or literary texts––produced, circulated, or translated in Celtic-speaking territories, to consider various modes of cultural and linguistic contact, and to attend to the wider contexts and dynamics in which these processes are implicated. Possible questions for consideration include, but are not limited to:

• Which cultural and political actors are of relevance to ‘The French of the Celtic Worlds’? Which texts, manuscripts, authors, patrons, scribes, nobles, institutions, etc., could be framed or reframed in this way?
• What are the roles of translation, multilingualism, and other forms of literary or linguistic borrowing,interfacing, and exchange?
• How might we best identify and conceptualise spaces, vectors, and networks of contact? What are the politicaldynamics at work in these?
• What is the value of ‘The French of the Celtic Worlds’ as a heuristic category? What methodological challengesand opportunities are at stake in it? What might be its wider implications (intellectual, political, ethical, etc.)?

We invite abstracts (200 words) from researchers at all career stages for 20-minute papers to be submitted by Friday 1 November 2024 to french-of-celtic@bristol.ac.uk. Papers are encouraged to be presented in person, but may be presented online if necessary. We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers will be:

Dr Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, FLSW

Honorary Fellow, University of Wales Trinity St David; formerly Head of Manuscripts and Visual Images, National Library of Wales

Professor Keith Busby

Douglas Kelly Professor of Medieval French Emeritus, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America

We are pleased to announce that a limited number of travel bursaries (up to £250) will be available for postgraduate, unwaged, or retired speakers. We would be grateful if you could indicate your intention to apply for these bursaries when submitting your abstract.This conference is organized by the projects ‘Mapping the March: Medieval Wales and England, c. 1282-1550’ (ERC– UKRI) and ‘Charlemagne in Wales: The Transmission, Reception, and Translation of Charlemagne Narratives in Medieval Wales’ (British Academy Newton International Fellowship).

Link to PRj Article Volume 20 (June, 2024)

The Medieval March of Wales, Mapping Literary Geography in a British Border Region (Pages 110-113)

‘Mapping the March’ is a major research project selected by the ERC and funded by UKRI. Each semester we invite speakers to present papers on topics related to borders and borderlands in medieval and early modern Europe.

13/05/2024 – ‘Ferlyes on Folde’: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Contemporary Imaginings of Alderley Edge talk by Dr Vicky Flood.

This paper draws on research undertaken as part of the AHRC-funded Invisible Worlds project, exploring the medieval legacies at work in twentieth and twenty-first-century popular understandings of mythic and legendary space at Alderley Edge, a non-built heritage site in NorthEast Cheshire. It explores postmedieval literary and creative conflations of the site with ‘Gawain country’, the Cheshire/Staffordshire locations some forty miles to the west of Alderley Edge, understood from the mid-twentieth century onwards to have fired the imagination of the fourteenth-century author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.