Medieval Matters: Manuscript Culture and the Five Senses in the Middle Ages

Medieval Matters: Manuscript Culture and the Five Senses in the Middle Ages, a full day roundtable, brings together senior and junior faculty from leading East and West Coast institutions to present and discuss current research and methodologies in Old French studies. The roundtable will include a response by Ardis Butterfield (Yale), as well as presentations by Eliza Zingesser (Columbia), Mary Channen Caldwell (Penn), Henry Ravenhall (Berkeley), Ariane Bottex-Ferragne (NYU), Fay Slakey (Princeton), and Julien Stout (Princeton).

The title of the roundtable plays on the verb to matter, the medieval French term matiere—used to designate thematic cycles (matiere de Rome, de Bretagne, etc.)—and the modern concept of materiality. The theme foregrounds the physicality of manuscripts, textual fragments, and amulets—objects produced, circulated, and handled in the Middle Ages—while also approaching poetry and literature as forms of “matter” that resist reduction to mere metaphor. The roundtable aims to explore how literary and poetic forms invite multisensory engagement, often simultaneously.

Guiding questions include:

• How does a song, narrative, or idea move in and out of different forms of materiality in medieval French manuscript culture?
• How does this (im)materiality interact with the senses in the production, transmission, and reception of medieval French culture?
• What happens when, within a poem, some senses stand in for others, or when they converge into “multisensory nodes” that create an intermedial space—perhaps echoing an abstract or “vertical” realm?
• How are (im)material or (non-)corporeal beings—or parts of beings—involved in the experience of manuscript culture?

The event will conclude with this year’s Medieval Studies Faber Lecture presented by Marisa Galvez (Stanford University).

Presented by the Department of French and Italian. Co-sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies.