Volume 10 (2023)

Memory is a complex concept, encompassing not only how individual minds store and recall the past, but how societies remember, perceive, and invent histories that extend beyond lived experience. In recent decades, memory—particularly cultural memory—has been widely theorised in medieval and early modern studies to deepen our understanding of ritual behaviour, art, literature, and other mnemonic artefacts. In proposing the theme ‘memory’ for Ceræ’s tenth anniversary volume, the editorial committee aimed to gather research that demonstrated this breadth of inquiry, showcased the continued vibrancy of memory studies within the medieval and early modern disciplines, and highlighted avenues for further investigation. We have not been disappointed and are proud to present volume 10 of Ceræ.

In our opening article, Lydia H. Hayes approaches the matter of ritual, one of the central elements of cultural memory, and turns to the that most widely observed ritual of medieval Christendom: the Eucharist. Hayes’ paper takes as its focal point the blood on the snow scene in Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and argues that Chrétien uses Blancheflor’s image as a symbol for the Eucharist to foreshadow Perceval’s absolution. Hayes suggests that this motif was specifically coded for an audience that was not simply familiar with the Eucharistic rite, but was entrenched within a cultural context that had burgeoning interests in affective piety and Marian literature. Literature is a prominent theme in the volume’s articles, the second of which examines the fourteenth-century poem The Awntyrs off Arthur. In it, Jacob Herrman considers how cultural memory shaped the poem’s depictions of Anglo-Scottish relations. Deploying an ethno-historical lens, Herrman proposed that the poem’s two primary episodes—a prophecy of the fall of the Arthurian empire, and an account of an Anglo-Scots land dispute—accessed and shaped memory of the borderlands through themes of imperial temporality and political instability. In so doing, Herrman argues, the poem promoted a model of peaceful subjugation of the Scots.

The volume’s third article moves away from matters of author and audience to topics of reception and transmission. Rosemary Kelly undertakes to assess some of the earliest modern English translations of Beowulf, examining how the language of emotion and violence in these redactions inject a sense of English nationalism. In particular, Kelly considers how these translations reconstructed the masculinity of key characters to ensure that it adhered to the cultural expectations of a heroic ideal then in vogue in Victorian England, but far removed from the poet’s own cultural milieu. Kelly argues that these early translations continue to affect modern Beowulf scholarship. In our final themed article, Kimberly Lifton moves away from written literature to carved literature: graffiti. In her examination of the graffiti of Carlisle Castle keep Room 22, Lifton analyses how the corpus of graffiti represents attempts by those garrisoned the castle to situate themselves in their political environment by identifying with the political networks within which they were involved.

In addition to these themed articles, Sophie Terakes offers a full-length study of the poem Pearl that proposes an innovative methodological approach to its depiction of mourning through the use of photographic theory. Finally, Leandro César Santana Neves and Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra supply a varium on the rise and fall of the Study Group of Medieval History based at the State University of Montes Claros in Brazil.

Our greatest debt is, as ever, is to our peer-reviewers for offering their time and expertise and for providing our authors with feedback that has been at once critical and collegial. Thanks must also go to our committee of volunteers whose efforts in running the journal have kept this project alive for the past decade. I am personally indebted to my deputy editor, Ashley Castelino, for his help in processing the submissions received for this volume. And finally, congratulations to our authors on the publication of the fruits of their research. Working as Ceræ’s editor for the past two years has been a very rewarding experience and I am confident the journal will continue to go from strength to strength as Ashley takes the helm.

Matthew Firth, Flinders University

Abstract: Religious rituals, especially the sacrament of the Eucharist, would be a common experience in the lives of many medieval Christians. Readers or auditors of romance literature would have the ability to recognize the deployment of religious symbolism through the memory of their own religious practices. This paper examines the blood on the snow scene in Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval or Le Conte du Graal, arguing that the author is using Blancheflor’s image as a symbol for the Eucharist to foreshadow Perceval’s absolution. Part of this argument hinges on the rise of affective piety and the increase in literature written on the Virgin Mary. The role that Mary plays for medieval believers is not unlike the role that Blancheflor plays for Perceval.

Lydia H. Hayes, Catawba College

Abstract: This article examines how collective memory shapes the perception of the English / Scottish relations in the fourteenth-century poem, The Awntyrs off Arthur. The poem is composed of two distinct episodes: In the first, Gawain and Guenevere encounter the ghostly apparition of Guenevere’s mother who provides a personal lament and warning about the fall of the Arthurian empire, and in the second, Gawain enters a conflict with Galeron of Galloway, a Scottish knight, over a land dispute. The first episode utilizes imperial time as it simultaneously invokes the past, present, and future of the Arthurian empire in the ghost’s speech and the physical description of her ‘black to the bone’ body. The second episode situates Gawain’s conflict with Galeron amid the historical political violence of the geographic space of the Anglo-Scots borderland. Juxtaposed, the two episodes explore the personal and political consequences of militarized violence in the Anglo-Scots borderland. Using an ethno-historical lens, I argue that the poem shapes the collective memory of the borderlands through themes of imperial temporality and political instability to promote a model of peaceful subjugation of the Scots.

Jacob Herrmann, Rice University

Volume 10 Essay Prize Winner

Abstract: This paper discusses some of the earliest Modern English translations of Beowulf to assess how these authors have affected scholarship surrounding masculinity. By assessing the violent and emotional elements of early Victorian translation, I am able to unveil how English nationalism is injected into the poem wherever possible. Such behaviours have been carried forth as the pinnacle of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic masculinity, with little room left to assess the contradicting behaviours such as Hrothgar’s shedding of tears or his settlement of feuds with gold instead of brute force. By conducting a close reading of the selected translations, namely John Mitchell Kemble and Benjamin Thorpe, I can identify elements of masculine-coded behaviours that translators have attempted to alter in order to construct a more consistently violent rhetoric in critical male characters, such as Beowulf, Hrothgar, and Wiglaf. This has had a profound effect on scholarship which, until the 1990s, excluded any major studies of masculinity, having been deemed too obvious to merit attention. By considering translation choices, we can further explore how masculinity is constructed within the poem and how these choices shape such identities. These translations are compared to one another using Bosworth-Toller online, as, by using a dictionary that was first published in the nineteenth-century, we can contrast translation choices within the confines of their contemporaries where possible, revealing the translators’ own self-interests and political ideologies that continue to bleed into twenty-first-century reception and scholarship.

Rosemary Kelly, Independent Scholar

Abstract: Despite its fruitfulness as a source, graffiti remains overlooked by many scholars within academia, and the majority of cataloging work has instead been carried out by local antiquarian and historical societies. An anachronistic stigma has impelled academia to disregard an entire corpus of material culture that has the capacity to illuminate the history of popular culture. Graffiti offers an access point, although fragmented, into studying the material and visual culture of those beyond the nobility. Through examining medieval graffiti, scholars have the potential to analyze a subset of people that has been nearly impossible to intuit in written records. As graffiti’s medium is inherently its context, graffiti has the potential to function as a history of how people interacted with their social surroundings and built environment. In this article, I modify Karen Langsholt Holmqvist’s model for studying utterances of the ‘self’ in textual graffiti, which combines cognitive and practice theory, to read the image‐based language of heraldic and para‐heraldic graffiti in Room 22 of Carlisle Castle Keep as emblems of political identity. I argue that the corpus of graffiti is representative of how those who garrisoned the castle situated themselves in their political environment by identifying with the political networks they were entangled with on a personal level. In displaying the signs of their lords, these men were expressing both a vertical relationship to the nobility alongside a horizontal one that encompassed a brotherhood‐in‐arms. The political emblems in graffiti form preserve a pictural record of how people less represented in written documents interacted with England’s tumultuous political environment. Graffiti lapidifies memory.

Kimberly Lifton, Yale University

Abstract: This article examines the anonymous medieval dream poem, Pearl, through photographic theory, chiefly employing Susan Sontag’s book On Photography. While the poem has been analysed as numerous different artforms including a painting, a piece of jewellery and a precious jewel, this article argues that photography (albeit anachronistically) offers an especially useful framework for examining mourning in the poem. Photography is a medium bound up by contradictions (as Sontag writes, the camera is both a scientific tool and an instrument of high art). It thus provides the language necessary to discuss the poem’s multivalent depiction of grief, and the tension between pleasure and pain that I argue resides at the heart of the poem. I will examine the poem’s photographic qualities in three sections, focusing first on light, then death, then iterability, using each concept to draw out the work’s emotive paradoxes. Photography, being a medium constituted by light, offers a rich analogy for the play between fantasy and reality at work within the Pearl‐maiden. Similarly, Sontag’s writing on the eternality and deathliness of all photographed subjects recalls the tragic relationship between remembering and forgetting that haunts the father’s dream. Finally, this article applies the philosophy of photographic reproducibility to the maiden, examining her contradictory status as an indistinguishable copy and priceless original. This article contends that photographs, in their materiality, fragility, ghostliness and (often) emotional pathos, analogise the vain paternal longing that underpins the poem.

Sophie Terakes, University of Sydney

A discussion of the fallout from controversy attached to the Brazilian research network and study group GEHM.

Luigi Andrea Berto, The ‘Other’, Identity, and Memory in Early Medieval Italy (Routledge, 2022). Print, 224 pp., $160 USD, ISBN: 9780367625375.

Reviewed by: Lorenzo Curatella, Ruprecht‐Karls‐Universität Heidelberg (cotutelle with Sapienza Università di Roma)

S.C. Kaplan, Women’s Libraries in Late Medieval Bourbonnais, Burgundy, and France: A Family Affair (Liverpool University Press, 2022). Print, 304 pp., $130 USD, ISBN: 9781800856325.

Reviewed by: Jenny Davis Barnett, University of Queensland

S.E. Kelly, ed., Charters of Barking Abbey and Waltham Holy Cross Anglo-Saxon Charters 20 (Oxford: British Academy, 2021). Print, 368 pp., $115 USD, ISBN: 9780197266885.

Reviewed by: Matthew Firth, Flinders University

Helen J. Nicholson, Women and the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). Print, vii, 287 pp., $34.95 USD, ISBN: 9780798806721; ebook ISBN: 9780191980701.

Reviewed by: Beth C. Spacey, University of Queensland

Hannah Ryley, Re‐using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England: Repairing, Recycling, Sharing (York Medieval Press, 2022). Print, 240 pp., $115 USD, ISBN: 9781914049064.

Reviewed by: Amanda Burrows‐Peterson, University of Saskatchewan

Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright, The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England (Penn State University Press, 2021). Print, 176 pp., $22.95 USD, ISBN: 9780271089294.

Reviewed by: Lindsay Church, Dalhousie University