News and Events
Forthcoming Events 2013
Events during 2013
July 2013
- Dr Louise Sylvester has been invited to give a lecture devoted to the role of medieval women at the Daniel Corkery Summer School in Inchigeelagh, Co Cork, in July
April 2013
- Dr Louise Sylvester will give a paper at the ‘Stasis in the Medieval World’ conference in the Early Medieval Interdisciplinary Conference Series at UCL. The title is ‘Dress, Fashion and Anti-Fashion in the Medieval Imagination’.
December 2012
- Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker attended, as Guest Speaker, the Thirty-Fourth Symposium on Old English, Middle English and Historical Linguistics in the Low Countries. She was also in London to record a programme for radio 3 in their series Anglo-Saxon portraits.Her book The Bayeux Tapestry: Collected Paperswas published on 24 Dec.
- Pam Walker has had her viva and passed her PhD subject to minor corrections. The work she has produced includes a collection of photographs of tomb effigies depicting dress and accessories from the Anglo-Saxon and early medieval periods. Congratulations to Pam, now Dr Walker!
- Dr Louise Sylvester and Dr Mark Chambers will shortly have their article, ‘The Medieval dress and textile vocabulary in unpublished sources project’, published in English Historical Linguistics 2010: Selected Papers from the 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL16), (Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
August 2012
- Dr Mark Zumbuhl will be presenting a paper on 'The imagery of cloth and clothing in Bardic Poetry' at the Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic Studies) conference at the University of Glasgow 21-23 August 2012. He will also describe the completion of the Lexis Project.
July 2012
-
From 9-12 July 2012, Dr Mark Chambers will attend the 3rd International Conference on ‘Language, Culture and Society in Russian/English Studies’, at the School of Advanced Studies, London, and will deliver a paper entitled ‘Clothing by Name: approaching the study of late medieval multilingualism through a specific technical lexis’.
May 2012
- At a session during the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, 12 May 2012. which included Professor Gale Owen-Crocker and Dr Louise Sylvester, Dr Mark Chambers spoke on, ‘A Household Bespoke: language and dress in Elizabeth Countess of Holland's 14th-century roll of liveries’.
April 2012
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker attended a conference on 'Textiles and Economy' at the University of Copenhagen, 18-21 April 2012, giving a lecture on 'Brides, donors, traders: imports into Anglo-Saxon England'.
February 2012
- Dr Mark Chambers spoke at a symposium at the English Dept, U of Vienna. The Symposium, entitled 'Studying Change in the History of English: New Directions in Linguistics', was organized in honour of Herbert Schendl's 70th birthday and was held in the English Dept of the University of Vienna on 24-25 February 2012. A detailed report on the symposium and details of the paper presented by Mark (a joint work with Dr Louise Sylvester, who was unable to attend) is available on our Advanced News of Events page.
Events during 2011
December 2011
-
Professor Gale Owen-Crocker attended the symposium'Designing the Body' at the University of Geneva 1-4 December 2011, when she gave a workshop 'Dressing the dead: reconstructing clothing from Grave-goods' and give a lecture on 'Making an Encyclopaedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles'.
October 2011
-
Professor Gale Owen-Crocker a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. While approving words in the database as the Research Assitant completes them.she took time to lecture at Bristol university on 27 October 2011 on 'The Bayeux Tapestry; Looking for Narrative Structure'. In addition she is crrently 'buried' under the 650+ two- column page proofs of the Encyclopaedia, now named: 'Encyclopaedia of Dress and Textiles in the British Isles c. 450-1450', ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth and Maria Heyward, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2012 which contains a considerable amount of output from the Lexis Project.
September 2011
-
Dr Mark Zumbuhl gave a talk at the 'Insular Economics in the 11th and 12th Centuries' event held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in the University of Cambridge on 10th September, speaking about clothing as a medium of exchange in the Middle Ages. Mark would like to thank Janilee Plummer and Christina Petty, two of Professor Gale Owen-Crocker's PhD students working in textiles, for their invaluable help in reconstructing the amount of labour required to produce woollen cloaks - this data was found to be a real eye-opener by several members of the audience, who were impressed by the length of time medieval women would have spent spinning, weaving and embroidering even basic garments. Mark will also be speaking at the Association of Dress Historians Research Day at the Art Workers' Guild in London on the 5th November, where he will discuss the Lexis Project and introduce some professional dress historians to the tools which will be offered by the online database.
August 2011
- Dr. Mark Zumbuhl and Professor Gale Owen-Crocker presented a Project report to the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at their 2-yearly conference, held this year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. Maja Stec from Germany has just finished a six-week stint helping to edit two forthcoming MANCASS conference publications.
June/July 2011
- Dr Louise Sylvester gave a paper entitled: ‘Linguistic choices relating to dress and textiles across different text types produced in medieval Britain’ at the 2nd International Conference on Language, Culture and Society in Russian/English Studies in London in July.
April/May2011
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker lectured on Old English poetry and Anglo-Saxon archaeology at the University of Seville and gave a paper arising from the Project at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo in May.
- Anne Kirkham will spend some of her time, after 1 May, in helping to build up the gallery of illustrations for the Project. She completed her PhD in 2007, was a research assistant to Dr. Cordelia Warr and is currently teaching two courses on medieval Art in Italy at the University of Manchester. Her knowledge of images from manuscripts and books of the 13th and 14th centuries will assist with the art historical features of the final Lexis Project database.
March 2011
- A Special Interest seminar on Medieval Dress and Textiles is planned to meet about once a month during semesters. Although this was initially aimed at people associated in some way with the University of Manchester, there has been some wider interest and we would welcome other people to our meetings, which will be held on Thursdays in the Poetry Centre, room A4, in the Samuel Alexander Building, The University of Manchester. At at meeting on 24 March, Anna Henderson spoke about her reserach on the Reading copy of the Bayeux Tapestry. For updates contact the seminar convener, Christina Petty on christina.petty@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker gave a lecture on ‘Continuity and Change: an Overview of Medieval Textile Production' at the Conference of the Medieval Dress and Textile Society, MEDATS: 'Making it: Textile Technologies in Medieval Europe' in London.
January/February 2011
- Dr Mark Zumbuhl spoke to Oxford University's medievalists at the Celtic Seminar in February, with a paper titled 'I never promised you a woad garden: some thoughts on queenship and 'woman's work' in medieval Ireland'. He has also completed an article on Middle English/Old French word calle 'headdress' (modern English caul) and is completing an analysis of clothing and textiles in medieval Gaelic poetry from Ireland and Scotland. Mark and David Risley, IT specialist for the Lexis Project, are also developing the advanced search features of the final user version of the Lexis database, and will be incorporating feedback from our test users working with the standard search and browse functions
- From 24 January to 4 February 2011 Professor Gale Owen-Crocker was Short Term Fellow at the Zentrum für Mittelalter-und Renaissance Studien Wissenschaftliche Koordination, University of Munich.
- From January to June 2011 the Lexis Project welcomes Johannes Gräbedünkel of the University of Hamburg as an intern. Johannes will be working on several projects whilst he is with us, but chiefly he will be conentrating on matters connected to the Lexis Project, as it enters its final year
Events during 2010
November 2010
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker lectured to the Department of Archaeology and History at Sheffield University on 7 November; her subject was 'Researching Medieval Dress and Textiles'. She will attend the Early Textiles Study Group in London on 19 November.
August 2010
- Dr. Louise Sylvester and Dr. Mark Chambers presented papers at the Interrnational Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16) in Hungary (an abstract is available on our 'Advanced News of Events' page).
July 2010
- At the 3 July Conference ‘Talking about Textiles’ at Northumbria University the keynote address: ‘The biggest and the best: The Bayeux Tapestry’was given by Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker.
June 2010
- At the Mon 7 June Medieval postgraduate conference on Conflict and Controversy c. 850-1550, Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker ran a workshop session on using material culture in research and giving aplenary lecture: ‘Public and personal rivalry in 1066: what the Bayeux Tapestry does and does not say’.
May 2010
- The International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo took place 13-16 May. Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker organised and chaired two DISTAFF-sponsored sessions there, associated with the Lexis Project. Speakers include Dr. Louise Sylvester, Dr. Cordelia Warr and Linda Sever. A paper was also given by Dr. Mark Chambers, whilst Dr. Stuart Rutten demonstrated screen shots from the lexis database. Abstracts from the papers by Dr. Louise Sylvester and Dr. Mark Chambers can be found on our 'Advanced News of Events' page. Also at Kalamazoo, there wasan editorial meeting to discuss the upcoming volume 7 of Medieval Clothing and Textiles, edited as usual by Robin Netherton and Gale Owen-Crocker.
April 2010
- Dr. Louise Sylvester and Dr. Mark Chambers gave papers for the 'Writing England: Books 1000 - 1499' conference in Leicester. At this conference they also advertised their three-year 'Wardrobe' project (full title 'The Medieval dress and textile vocabulary in unpublished sources project') funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
- Dr. Stuart Rutten left his full-time post with the Lexis Project at the end of March,for family reasons. He is however remiaining employed as a part-time consultant to the project, dealing with specific linguistic questions. The new full time Research Assistant is Dr. Mark Zumbuhl, formerly of Oxford.
March 2010
- Dr. Louise Sylvester was invited to give a talk at UCL as part of their research seminar series. Her title was 'The Lexis of Medieval Cloth and Clothing: projects and research questions' (an abstract of her presentation is available on our 'Advanced News of Events' page).
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker's schedule for March 2010 included: hosting the Toller Lecture on March 1 at the University of Manchester, for the Manchester Centre for Anglo-saxon studies, speaker: Professor Rolf Bremmer; a lecture in Durham on March 7 on the Bayeux Tapestry to the Architectural and Archaeolgical Society of Durham and Northumberland; on March 9-10, two lectures in Boston and Northampton USA, to an undergraduate and faculty audience on 'Anglo-saxon metalwork' and 'Anglo-Saxon Textiles' at the invitation of Professor Nancy Metzer and a lecture to students and faculty of Smith College and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on 'Beowulf and Archaeology' at the invitation of of Professor Craig Davies; on March 22 presiding over a meeting of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-saxon Studies, speaker:Professor Anne Klinck;and between 30 March-1 April directing the Easter 2010 Conference of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (see below).
- The annual Conference of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies took place between 30 March - 1 April. The theme of the Conference was 'The Anglo-Saxons in their World' and the twenty seven speakers included a keynote lecture by Catherine Karkov as well as a guest lecture by Kevin Leahy on the Staffordshire Hoard.
Events during 2009
- During 2009 three Newsletters have been produced, updating progres on the Lexis project. These have been titled very simply as 'Spring' , 'Summer' and 'Winter' Newsletters and if you wish to receive an e-mail copy of any or all of these please contact Dr. Brian Schneider at Admin.LexisProject@manchester.ac.uk
November 2009
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker will be presenting a paper 'Harold the Hero' in a group session on 'The Value of Visual Representations of Harold Godwinson' at the Haskins Society conference in Boston USA; presenting a paper 'The Bayeux Tapestry and the Sea' to the Manchester Medieval Society; and organizing and taking part in a round-table for CIDRA, Manchester, on Dress, Textiles and Fashion
October 2009
- Pamela Walker, PhD student connected to the Lexis Project, will be presenting a paper at the Medieval Dress and Textiles Society October meeting (Oct 31) on Jewellery on Brasses.
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker lectured at the annual Archaeology Day of the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, University of Lincoln: 'Researching Medieval Dress and Textiles'. Whilst in Lincoln, she examined the [remains] of the Washingborough Helmet in Lincoln Museumt. She also visited the exhibition of the Staffordshire Anglo-Saxon Hoard in Birmingham. Also during the month she attended the annual conference of TOEBI (Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland) at St Andrews, Scotland.
July 2009
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker organised two sessions at the14th International Medieval Congress at Leeds - ‘Decoration and disguise’ and ‘Copes and cloaks’ - on behalf of DISTAFF. She also delivered a plenary lecture in St John's, Newfoundland, Canada at the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Conference: her subject was ' "...Velis vento plenis...". Sea crossings in the Bayeux Tapestry'. (The theme of the conference was 'The Sea and all things Maritime').
- Dr. Stuart Rutten presented a paper at the Leeds Medieval Congress, entitled "Joseph's Coat of many descriptions: Descriptions of Joseph's coat in the medieval lexis." He is currently expanding this presentation to an article for a forthcoming edition of Medieval Clothing and Textiles as "Joseph's Coats of many forms and functions: Diverse representations of Joseph's garments in a medieval lexis."
June 2009
Dr. Mark Chambers, Project researcher, and Dr. Louise Sylvester, deputy Director of the Lexis Project, organised a one-day colloquium in Westminster for Friday, 5th June, entitled 'Multilingualism in Britain: Medieval & Modern'. Speakers included David Trotter (Aberystwyth, Editor and Project Leader of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary), Richard Ingham (Birmingham City University), Roxy Harris (Kings College London), Kacey Ihemere (Westminster) and Tope Omoniyi (Roehampton).
- Dr. Stuart Rutten presented a paper at The Third Conference of Ulster Cycle Studies (The University of Coleraine, Coleraine): "Blind luck in the killing of kin: foster brothers and the 'x and non-x' formula." Paper to be published in the Proceedings of the Conferenceto be out late 2010.
May 2009
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker attended the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, where she co-organised 4 sessions on behalf of DISTAFF: ‘Dress and Textiles I-IV’: ‘Threads and Fibers’; ‘Inside and Outside the Church’; ‘Heroes, ladies and fools; ‘Long ago and far away’. In addition she presented a paper: ‘Fur, feathers, skin, fiber, wood: representational techniques in the Bayeux Tapestry’.
- Dr. Stuart Rutten presented a LexisProject- related paper at Kalamazoo: "The Old-Englishness of the 'Cornish Vocabulary'. In addition,he has an online publication of the paper he gave at the 2008 Euralex Conference (see below).
March 2009
- Brian Schneider, Administrative Assistant to the Lexis Project, was awarded a PhD and thus another Dr. is added to the Lexis team.
Events during 2008
Social and other News concerning project members:
- The marriage took place on 2 August between Mark Chambers, researcher on Middle English and Latin textile terms for the Lexis Project, and Jessica Loveland. The ceremony was held at St. George's Church, Rhos- on Sea, followed by Reception, Dinner and dancing at St. George's Hotel, Llandudno. The couple will finish their honeymoon in Munich where Mark is presenting a paper and helping to run a workshop as detailed below (see August 2008). Representing the Lexis Project at the wedding were Professor Gale Owen-Crocker with her husband Richard, Dr. Louise Sylvester with her husband Tony and Brian Schneider with his wife Evelyn.
- Dr. Louise Sylvester is now Reader in English Language at the University of Westminster and took upher duties in September, 2008.
- Recently a second son was born to Dr. Stuart Rutten.
- We now have a new pamphlet dealing with progress on the Lexis Project during this year. To obtain copies please apply to the Project Administrative office by e-mail, phone or post (details on Contact Us page)
October 2008
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker presented a paper on The Lexis Project at the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI) conference in Nottingham on 25 October.
September 2008
- Pamela Walker presented a paper at the University of Aberystwyth's 15th Century Conference ('England and its Neighbours: Frontiers'). Her paperwas entitled 'Frontiers of Fashion: Geographical influences on medieval costume'. An abstract appears in Advanced News and Events.
August 2008
- The International Conference on English Historical Linguistics was held in Munich, 24-30th August. Professor Gale Owen-Crocker and Dr. Stuart Rutten prsented a joint paper entitled 'Body, Shape, Fibre, Homeland, User: the Naming of Garments and Textiles'. Dr. Louise Sylvester gave a paper on 'Multilingualism and Lexical Hierarchies' Dr. Mark Chambers presented a paper entitled ' “Surcot overt” and “surcot clos,”: The Specifics of Clothing in Some Late-Thirteenth and Early-Fourteenth-Century Petitions'. Dr. Stuart Rutten ran a workshop with Dr. Mark Chambers, entitled 'The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c.750-1450: Origins, Identification, Contexts and Change'. Read abstractsof all these items on Advanced News of Events page.
- The North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History held a conference between 31 July- 2 August at which Dr. Stuart Rutten delivered a paper entitled 'The Anglo-Cornish Vocabulary of Clothing terms in Manuscript A14, a late version of Aelfric's Glossary'.
July 2008
- A panel, chaired by Dr. Louise Sylvester, took place at the 2008 Leeds Medieval Congress (July 7-10th) with papers being presented by Professor Gale Owen-Crocker, Dr Stuart Rutten, Pam Walker and Dr Mark Chambers. Professor Gale Owen-Crocker also gave a paper entitled 'Natural and unnatural: colour in the Bayeux Tapestry' at a session organised by Carol Biggam. Pamela Walker's paper was entitled 'Illustrating a lexis project: challenges facing the researcher when collecting art sources for medieval costume'. An Abstract of this paper and reports on the Conference can be found on the Advanced News of Events page.
- Dr. Stuart Rutten presented a paper about The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project at the Euralex 2008 Conference in Barcelona (15-19th July). A precis of his report on the Conference can be found on Advanced News of Events.
- Professor Gale Owen-Crocker gave a paper on 'The Bayeux Tapestry: faces and places' at a two-day International Conference at the British Museum (15-16th Juy). The Conference theme was 'New research on the Bayeux Tapestry'. Read more on Advanced News of Events.
June 2008
- Pamela Walker presentd a paper at the University of Bangor Conference ('Women and the Sacred in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods', June10 -12). The paper was entitled 'Dressing the sacred: religious implications of women's costume on funerary monuments in fourteenth century England'. She also presented a paper at University of Sheffield Conference on 'Locating the Voice: Expressions of Identity in the Middle Ages',June 14-15. Her paper was entitled 'Wives, widows, and women: voicing identity in death through clothing on medieval funeral monuments'. Abstracts of both these papers appear on the Advanced News of Events page.
