IMS Logo Banner
  Institute for Medieval Studies
 
Giving to IMS
Home Academics Events

Spring Lecture Series 2003

 

"Barbarian Europe: The Creation of a Civilization"
March 24-27, 2003
All lectures free and open to the public
All lectures in Woodward Hall 101


 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 


The spring lecture series features a team of five acclaimed
experts delivering seven lectures exploring major transformations and achievements of the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. The lectures will cover history, literature, women’s studies, art and archaeology and music.

"Barbarian Europe: The Creation of a Civilization" is the eighteenth Spring Lecture Series offered by the Institute for Medieval Studies. As in previous years, the lectures should appeal to a large cross-section of the Albuquerque community. Most of the lectures will focus on the critical period from the sixth to the ninth century, when the groundwork was laid for the emergence of a vibrant new civilization out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. The ideas, the political configurations, the legislative norms, and the artistic and spiritual forms of expression that developed during this period were to have a huge impact on the subsequent course of western history. Barbarian Europe was a multicultural melting-pot that produced remarkable, larger-than-life individuals such as Balthild, the Anglo-Saxon slave who rose to become queen of France; the missionary St. Boniface, who helped to transform the politics and culture of eighth-century Europe; and the Emperor Charlemagne, who brought a new unity to western Europe. From the Frankish kingdoms to Anglo-Saxon England to Pictish Scotland to Moorish Spain, ideas, traditions, and forms of expression emerged that revived and recreated Europe, fusing with the Greco-Roman heritage to produce a hybrid culture that has retained its power, influence, and creativity to this day.

Now that Europe is seeking once again to forge a unity that overrides national borders, the legacy of barbarian Europe and its major political creation, the reinvigorated, transformed Holy Roman Empire, has a special relevance and resonance. That legacy includes the formation of values that have helped to define western culture and to provoke admiration while also bringing the West into confrontation with other cultures. The seven lectures of "Barbarian Europe: The Creation of a Civilization" will offer a stimulating and informative overview of this most important historical period.


The Lecturers

Henry Mayr-Harting is Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University. Born in Prague, Professor Mayr-Harting studied at Merton College, the oldest college at Oxford, and held teaching appointments at the University of Liverpool and at St. Peter's College, Oxford, before being named Regius Professor in 1997; the Regius Professorship is one of Oxford's most distinguished appointments. While specializing in the field of ecclesiastical history, Professor Mayr-Harting also made a major contribution to the study of medieval illuminated manuscripts with his 1993 monograph, Ottonian Book Illumination. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford for 1987-88. A Fellow of the British Academy, he was Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1983, and Brown Foundation Fellow at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., in 1992. He holds honorary doctorates from Lawrence University, Wisc., and from the University of the South, and is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Martin Carver is Professor of Archaeology at the University of York and editor of Antiquity, the prestigious archaeological journal. He enjoys a distinguished international reputation for his large-scale archaeological field projects, which have included excavations in Italy, France, and Algeria, and, more recently, at Sutton Hoo in England and Portmahomack in Scotland. Before his career as one of England's best known archaeologists, Professor Carver was for fourteen years an officer in the British Army, serving in the Middle and Far East. He is the author of Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings? and The Painted People: The Kingdom of the Picts. He has been a frequent presenter on BBC Television.

Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg is Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The special focus of her research is on women in the medieval church, female saints and monasticism, and gender and sacred space. She is the author of Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100, and is currently working on Gender and Constructions of Sacred Space in Medieval Society: From Womb to Tomb, ca. 500-1200. For the last twenty-eight years she has been active in international programs at the University of Wisconsin and has organized and led medieval Continuing Studies tours to England, France, Ireland, and Spain. She is also a needleworker who has frequently exhibited her medieval embroidery work, executed in the "opus Anglicanum" style.

Charles Atkinson, Professor of Musicology at the Ohio State University, is an alumnus of the University of New Mexico, having received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at UNM before going on to his Master's degree at the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. A specialist in the music and music theory of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Atkinson has received several major awards, including the Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society and the Elliott Prize of the Medieval Academy of America. He has also held Distinguished Scholar and Distinguished Lecturer awards at Ohio State, and was recently Visiting Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is the author of a major forthcoming study of medieval musical theory, The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in Early Medieval Music.

Eugene Vance is Professor of French, Comparative Literature, and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington, having previously held teaching appointments at Yale University, Emory University, and the University of Montreal; he has also held visiting appointments at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of California at Berkeley, Duke University, the University of Toronto, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A distinguished expert on late classical and medieval literature and culture, Professor Vance is the author of Reading the Song of Roland and From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages.


Lecture Schedule
Monday, March 24, 2003   7 PM   Woodward Hall 101
Henry Mayr-Harting, Oxford University
"Doing Business with Barbarians"
In his keynote lecture, Henry Mayr-Harting, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University, will propose that Germanic and other barbarian tribes - the Huns, the Goths, the Burgundians, the Franks, and others - far from destroying the late Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries, actually helped to sustain it. Professor Mayr-Harting will show that the Romans and the so-called barbarians needed each other to survive economically, and will describe how the barbarians succeeded in laying the foundations of a vibrant new civilization that would dominate western Europe in the early medieval period.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003   4 PM   Woodward Hall 101
Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Women in Early Medieval Society: Saints, Heroes, and "Transgressors"
Medieval writers were especially interested in heroic women in both the secular and spiritual realms; female heroes were often described in medieval literature as "manly" or "virile." Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will show in this lecture how, for the moral authorities of the early medieval period, there was often a fine line between the heroic, virile acts of formidable queens, saints, abbesses, and nuns, and transgressive behavior. Women who dared to challenge traditional male hierarchy or authority by cutting their hair and assuming male dress and male roles were seen as "crossing the line." Professor Schulenburg will examine the fascinating tradition of early medieval women in England, France, and the Viking world who were remembered for their heroic, virile behavior and virginal defense.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003   7 PM   Woodward Hall 101
Martin Carver, University of York
"Sutton Hoo: The Burial Rites, the Poetry, and the Politics"
Martin Carver, "Sutton Hoo: The Burial Rites, the Poetry, and the Politics" In this lecture, Martin Carver, Professor of Archaeology at the University of York and Director of the Sutton Hoo Project, will describe the remarkable finds made in the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo in south-east England, the richest and most important of all medieval archaeological sites. The mounds were explored by local landowner Edith Pretty on the eve of the outbreak of World War II; underneath one of them were discovered the remains of a large ship in which a king had been buried amid a huge mass of gold, silver, and other treasures. Why did the Anglo-Saxons dispose of such wealth in this remarkable burial site? What did the ship mean? Professor Carver will describe the story of an early English population whose loyalties were torn between allegiance to pagan Scandinavia and Christian France.

Wednesday, March 26, 2003   4 PM   Woodward Hall 101
Charles Atkinson, Ohio State University
"A Matter of Scale: On the Origins of the Tone-System of Western Music
Charles Atkinson, Professor of Music at Ohio State University and an alumnus of UNM, will discuss in this lecture the fascinating topic of why scales play such a large part as the "building blocks" of Western music when they do not have the same importance in other musical traditions. He will show that the crucial period for the development of the Western musical scale was the Middle Ages: major, minor, and chromatic scales were not a self-evident component of Western music from the beginning, but were the result of a centuries-long process of development in which the early Middle Ages were a focal point. Without this process, the sound of Western music would not have been the same.

Wednesday, March 26, 2003   7 PM   Woodward Hall 101
Eugene Vance, University of Washington
"Holy War and 'The Song of Roland,' Then and Now"
Eugene Vance, Professor of French, Comparative Literature, and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington, will examine how The Song of Roland, the earliest and greatest epic of medieval French literature, exemplifies critical issues of war and peace that emerged in western Europe in response to a confrontation with the Islamic religion. The Song of Roland describes the Emperor Charlemagne's campaign against the Moors of late eighth-century Spain; but the poem was not composed until the eleventh century and reflects themes that emerged in the era of the First Crusade, when the Christian ideology of Holy War gathered force and when the Islamic discourse of Jihad veered from its traditional system of values toward the same ideals of militant aggression and martyrdom that Roland himself incarnated. A critical reading of the poem shows that it embodies tragic elements reflecting how the violence of Holy War turned France itself into an abyss of anarchic conflict.

Thursday, March 27, 2003   4 PM   Woodward Hall 101
Martin Carver, University of York
"Processes of Conversion: The Early Pictish Monastery at Portmahomack, Tarbat Ness, Scotland"
Professor Carver's second lecture will describe his current archaeological excavations at Portmahomack, a fishing village on the shores of Dornoch Firth in north-east Scotland. Early in the twentieth century, a most unusual find came to light there: a fragment of stone carved with a Latin inscription. This is the only such inscription yet discovered in the land of the Picts, the pagan people who occupied the eastern part of Scotland between the fourth and the eighth centuries; it appears to offer the first evidence for a monastery in Pictland. Excavations conducted since 1994 have revealed, not only a church, but workshops for making parchment and artifacts of bronze, gold, silver, and glass. The monastery appears to have been founded in the sixth century as part of the Irishman St. Columba's mission to the Northern Picts.

Thursday, March 27, 2003   7 PM   Woodward Hall 101
Henry Mayr-Harting, Oxford University
"St. Boniface and the Creation of Carolingian Europe"
Henry Mayr-Harting, "St. Boniface and the Creation of Carolingian Europe" St. Boniface (d. 754), called "the greatest Englishman" in the title of a recent book, was an Anglo-Saxon monk who felt impelled to undertake the conversion of the pagan Saxons of Germany. His missionary work on the continent of Europe brought him into contact with the major political figures of his time, including the pope and the progenitors of the Carolingian dynasty. Boniface helped to shape Carolingian relations with the papacy and the Carolingian monastic ideal; he also has a claim to be considered one of the creators of Germany. No less fascinating than Boniface's missionary and political career is his correspondence, including letters he wrote to and received from female admirers and disciples. Boniface's life and literary remains offer a full, luminous insight into the culture of his time.


2003 Spring Lecture Series Sponsors
Sponsored by: New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities, KUNM, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of International Programs, the Bainbridge Bunting Memorial Slide Library, the College of Arts & Sciences, the European Studies Program, the Religious Studies Program, the University Honors Program, and the Departments of Anthropology, Art & Art History, Earth and Planetary Sciences, English, Foreign Languages and Literatures, History, Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Psychology, and Spanish and Portuguese.


Monday, March 29, 2004

7 p.m.
The Origins of Medieval Russia
Robert O. Crummey (University of California, Davis)

 

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

4 p.m.
Men’s Religion/Women’s Religion:
The Christianization of Medieval Russia

Eve Levin (University of Kansas)

7 p.m.
The Formation of Ancient Russia:
Geographical Background, Trade Routes, and First Towns
Evgenij Nosov (Institute for the History of Material Culture, St. Petersburg)

 

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

4 p.m.
Exploring the Exotic World of Medieval
Russian Music: The Znamenny, the Strochny, and the Demestvenny

Vladimir Morosan (Musica Russica)

7 p.m.
Reawakening to a Spiritual Past:
The Holy Icons of Medieval Russia

Scott Ruby (Courtauld Institute of Art, London)

 

Thursday, April 1, 2004

4 p.m.
Kiev and the Origins of Russian Architecture
Robert G. Ousterhout (University of Illinois)

7 p.m.
The Emergence of Muscovite Russia
Robert O. Crummey (University of California, Davis)

PARKING INFORMATION:

Throughout the Spring Lecture Series, free parking will be available in UNM's South Parking Lot, on the south-west corner of the intersection of Avenida de César Chávez and Buena Vista Drive (see inset panel in the top right corner of the map above). A free shuttle service will be available to bring you from the parking lot to campus and to return you to the parking lot after the lectures. Shuttle buses will drop you on the south side of main campus, on Yale Boulevard, from where it is a very short walk to Woodward Hall; there will be signs pointing the way to Woodward Hall.

Driving directions from I-25 to the South Parking Lot

From I-25, take exit 223, Avenida de César Chávez. Proceed east along Avenida de César Chávez through the University Boulevard intersection and make a right turn into the South Parking Lot, which borders the east side of the Football Stadium.

Alternative parking

Visitor parking is now available on main campus in the new visitor parking structure, about five minutes' walk from Woodward Hall. The visitor parking structure is located on Redondo Road, close to the intersection with Stanford Drive (see map above). Visitor parking rates are: up to three hours, $3; three to four hours, $6; four to five hours, $8.

For a pdf map of the UNM campus click here.

 

 

Institute for Medieval Studies
University of New Mexico
2045 Mesa Vista Hall | (505) 277-2252 | medinst@unm.edu