The Medieval Studies Program’s visiting speaker series for 2024-25 is “‘Authenticity’ and the Middle Ages.” In a moment when the rapid spread of A.I. into virtually every domain—political, social, economic, creative—has fostered not only excitement but serious concern about how to define as well as preserve the “real” and “true,” it is worth remembering that anxieties about the “authentic” (Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year” for 2023) from its opposite are centuries old, for the medieval era was as invested in drawing, policing, and creatively traversing the fraught borders of the bona fide as we are today. At the same time, ever since the Middle Ages came to a close, what is and is not authentically medieval has been a perennial issue for scholars of the period. The visiting speakers who will join us on campus this year will help us to consider the apparently perpetual quest for the “authentic” as both a stumbling block and an opportunity to discover what we value most in our study of the Middle Ages, and, in turn, to think about how those values resemble, but also depart from, those held by our medieval counterparts. Events in this series, generously co-sponsored by multiple campus partners, are marked with an asterisk.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7: Professor Rachel Friedman (Arabic Language and Muslim Cultures, University of Calgary)
Public lecture, “Establishing Authenticity: Language, Style, and Theorizing the Qurʾānic Miracle”
Time: 1:30 pm CST (US and Canada)
Place: https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/94725317126
Islamic thought has normatively construed the Qur’an to be the Islamic miracle par excellence. What precisely was the Qurʾānic miracle has been the subject of much discussion and debate. A central idea that developed during the medieval period held that the Qurʾān’s eloquence—its very literary form—was miraculous. The discourse about the Qurʾān’s rhetorical properties has been studied as a central component of medieval Arabo-Islamic thought on literary style, but it also served an important theological function. Establishing that the Qurʾān was more eloquent than what humans could produce served as evidence of its authenticity—that is, of its divine origin. The Qurʾān being the direct word of God was crucial to its status as an authoritative source of knowledge. Indeed, the status of the Qurʾān as the first source of Islamic law and theology meant that a lot rested on its authenticity. This talk examines this under-studied link between the idea of Qurʾānic authority and the linguistic ‘proof’ of its divine source.
Rachel Friedman is Associate Professor (Teaching) of Arabic & Muslim Cultures at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on the status of the Qur’an in medieval Islamic thought, with particular attention to cross-disciplinary connections between Islamic legal theory, rhetoric, and theology. She is currently completing a monograph on debates about the Qur’an in Islamic theology during the 10th-11th centuries, a particularly significant time in the history of Islamic denominations and schools of thought. Friedman was previously the 2022-23 McCready Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, where she researched medieval texts on the Qur’an’s rhetorical and literary qualities, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Classical Arabic Literature at Williams College. She currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Arabic Literature.
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Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, the Middle East Studies Program, the Religious Studies Program, and the Departments of African Cultural Studies and History.
THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, MARCH 6-7: Professor Suzanne Preston Blier (Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University).
6 pm, Thursday March 6, Conrad. A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140: Public Lecture (Howard S. Schwartz Memorial Lecture): “1325: Mansa Musa, Al-Saheli, and How Medieval Africa Helped Shape Modernity”.
Abstract: During the famed 1325 Hajj journeys of Mali Emperor Mansa Musa and Granada poet Al Saheli, their travels Individually or together cross three continents – Europe (Spain), Asia (Arabia), and Africa (Egypt, the Sahara, Mali and Morocco), providing key insight into these centers and related events. These men and this journey offer vital insight into how Medieval Africa helped to foster the changes that shaped modernity.
11:30 am – 1:00 pm, Friday March 7, Workshop “From Igbo Ukwu to Igbo Landing: How Medieval African Objects Speak” Open to Graduate Students and Faculty. Lunch will be provided. RSVP by Friday, February 28, 2025 to Prof. Thomas Dale (tedale@wisc.edu) to register for lunch and workshop and receive a link to the reading.
Abstract: The well-known Medieval Nigerian archaeological site of Igbo-Ukwu has long been recognized for its one-of-a-kind bronze sculptures and other works. In this lecture I re-examine this art corpus from the vantage of the work of contemporary Igbo engagement through the literary arts of Chinua Achebe and others, arguing that the works message the importance of holding Igbo leaders in check. I then take us to the site of Igbo Landing, the Sea Islands site near Savannah, Georgia where a group suicide of recently arrived enslaved Igbo took place in 1803. I example the plantation slavery context of this tragic incident and related Gullah visual arts that appear to have Igbo connections, returning to the Igbo and Southeastern Nigeria in this same 1803 era to explore the contexts of enslavement and related visual references there.
Sponsored by the Department of Art History.
FRIDAY, MARCH 14: Professor Derek Krueger (Religious Studies, University of North Carolina-Greensboro)
2 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop for graduate students and faculty on “Monastic Desires: Homoeroticism, Homophobia, and the Love of God in Medieval Constantinople,” a chapter of Professor Krueger’s forthcoming book by this same title. Please contact Professor Leonora Neville (leonora.neville@wisc.edu) for the reading.
5 pm, Elvehjem L150: Public lecture: “Was The Medieval Roman Empire Heteronormative?”
Medieval East Roman Christianity offered alternatives to imperial society’s rigid gender roles and the sexual expectations that came with them. In monasticism, women and men abandoned marriage and procreation to heighten the orientation of their desire toward God and the saints. In some cases, monastic life transcended gender categories and was distinctly queer. Saints’ lives and spiritual instruction in particular, offered fabulations that presented religious life as a refuge from medieval Greek heteronormativities, although often in coded or ambiguous ways.
Derek Krueger is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has served as Senior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and as President of the United States National Committee for Byzantine Studies. His latest book, Monastic Desires: Homoeroticism, Homophobia, and the Love of God in Medieval Constantinople, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.
Click here to view the event poster
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, the Religious Studies Program, and the Departments of Art, Classical and Near Eastern Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History.
FRIDAY, APRIL 25: Professor Emeritus Richard C. Hoffmann (History, York University)
2 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop for graduate students and faculty. Please contact Professor Richard Keyser (rkeyser@wisc.edu) for the reading.
5 pm, Elvehjem L150: Public lecture: “Whispers of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Fisheries Texts from Medieval Europe”
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, the Center for European Studies (CES), the Center for History, Culture, and Environment (CHE), and the Department of History.
FRIDAY, MAY 2nd: Professor Holly A. Crocker (English, University of South Carolina)
2 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop for graduate students and faculty/staff. For the reading, which will consist of the introduction to Professor Crocker’s award-winning monograph The Matter of Virtue, pleasen contact Professor Lisa Cooper (lhcooper@wisc.edu).
5 pm, Elvehjem L140: Public lecture: “Eleanor Cobham’s Literary Downfalls, and the Problems of Women’s Authenticity in Premodern England”.
Depicted by the 15th-century poet John Lydgate as a witch more than a decade before she was convicted of witchcraft, Eleanor Cobham, wife of the powerful Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (uncle and heir to Henry VI), reveals the challenges of women’s authenticity in late medieval and Tudor England. Every fifteenth-century English chronicle includes the story of her downfall, and fifteenth-century ballads present the vaunted Duchess as a figure whose demise confirms the dangers of Fortune. In Tudor writings, her story becomes tragic, and she remains sympathetic, even if, in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, she conjures a spirit to bring about the king’s death. By recounting Eleanor Cobham’s destruction (she was convicted of witchcraft and exiled for the remainder of her life), writers of what I argue is a unified literary/historical era grapple with the unchecked ambitions of a powerful woman. By questioning her authenticity even before she was accused or convicted of wrongdoing, literary and historical sources show how women’s ambition becomes associated with witchcraft, then treason. Her storied downfalls are a warning to other women, but they also show why women are excluded from the model of selfhood still used to authenticate modernity.
Holly A. Crocker, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and Carolina Distinguished Professor of the University of Carolina System, is a specialist in the literature and culture of medieval and early modern England, with particular expertise in the representation of gender and the role of affect in premodern literary and social constructions. She is the author of the award-winning monograph The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer toShakespeare (Penn, 2019). With Glenn Burger, she is the co-editor of the ground-breaking collection Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge, 2019), and she is also the author of Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood (Palgrave, 2007), co-editor of Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge, 2014), and editor of Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Palgrave, 2006). Her articles have appeared in The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Medieval Feminist Forum, New Medieval Literatures, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, and in numerous edited collections.
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, and the Departments of English, Gender & Women’s Studies, and History.