Openness in Medieval Culture

This interdisciplinary symposium interrogates the presuppositions of open/closed distinctions in Medieval culture with a view to exploring the semantic field of openness through such related notions as inclusivity, vulnerability, unfinishedness, permeability, excess, profanity. These conceptualizations of openness in the period have had profound influence in a wide array of disciplines such as literature, material culture, hermeneutics, religion, linguistics, history, and history of art.

What does it mean to speak of an open text, an open body, an open mind, an open cosmos in the period? What kind of creative tension was there between the privileged spaces of the monastic cloister, the walled city, the moated castle, and their environments? What role did images of fluidity play in conceptualizing non-binary frames of reference? How did high medieval literature negotiate the exclusive experiences of the court, mystical excess, and sexuality with rhetorical strategies of inclusion toward a broader audience? How did manuscript culture and scholastic hermeneutics contribute to opening up texts to interpretation? How did texts themselves welcome uncertainty, open-endedness, and unfinishedness in their materiality and form?

Interdisciplinary conversations will aim to open up channels of communication between the Middle Ages and present discourse. Can such present ideas as open source, open access, open education, open society, and open relationship be brought into productive dialogue with conceptualizations and practices of Medieval Studies? Can openness be constituted as critical method?

Thursday, June 27

9:30 Morning Coffee

9:45 Welcome by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum

10:00 Ed Wareham
Opening the Gates: The Circulation of Texts and Images in Northern German Convents in the Later Middle Ages

10:30 Oren Margolis
The Book Half Open: Humanist Friendship in Hans Holbein’s Portrait of Hermann von Wedigh III

11:00 Almut Suerbaum
Including the Excluded: Strategies of Opening up in Late Medieval Religious Writing

11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break

12:00 Francesco Giusti
An Interminable Work? The Openness of Augustine’s Confessions

12:30 Pippa Byrne
What Was Open in / about Early Scholastic Thought?

13:00 Mary MacRobert
Early Church Slavonic as a Type of Open Tradition

13:30 – 15:00 Lunch break

15:00 Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden
Becoming Laurel: Openness and Intensity in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

15:30 Nicolò Crisafi
Open-Ended and Unfinished: The Vulnerable Dante of the Commedia

16:00 Monika Otter
Merlin’s Open Mind: Madness and Knowledge in the Vita Merlini

16:30 – 17:00 Coffee break

17:00 Discussion of
Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal
Moderated by Damiano Sacco

18:30 Zairong Xiang
Kaiqiao: On Porosity

Friday, June 28

10:00 Morning Coffee

10:30 Benjamin Thompson
The Monastic Enclosure

11:00 Johannes Wolf
The Point of Compassion in The book of Margery Kempe

11:30 Annie Sutherland
Becoming Open in Anchoritic Literature

12:00 – 12:30 Coffee break

12:30 Brian McMahon
Speech-Wrangling: Shutting Up and Shutting Out the Oral Tradition in Some Icelandic Saga Manuscripts

13:00 Alastair Matthews
The Multiple Languages of Medieval Denmark: Towards a More Open Literary Historiography

13:30 Jonathan Morton
In One Hole and Out Another: The Sexual Politics of Psychic Interpenetration in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiary of Love