Somerville Medievalist Research Group

For the last three years, I have been involved in Oxford’s first Marie Curie international training network in the humanities: the project on ‘Mobility of Ideas and Transmission of Texts’ (MITT) studies the medieval transmission of learning from the univiersities to the wider readership that could be reached through the vernacular.

Together with partners in Antwerp, Freiburg, Lecce, and Leiden, we have built up a network og 20 graduates and post-docs and held regular interdisciplinary workshops. One of the early stage researchers, Racha Kirakosian, is based at Somerville, and together,we organized a conference on ‘Medieval Women and their Books’, held jointly at the Talyorian and at Somerville.

Arising from this project, I have completed a series of articles on the use of song in mystical writing, and am planning a joint colloquium with a musicologist on the ‘Jenaer Liederhandschrift’ and the ‘Carmina Burana’ manuscript, as well as a project on voice and style as medieval literary concepts. I am interested more generally in the relationship between cultures in the middle ages – Latin and the vernacular, manuscript and voice, lay and institution, and in the role which gender plays in negotiating such cultural tensions.

Further details of my research interests, as well as an updated list of my publications, can be found on my departmental page.

At Somerville, I teach Old English to first-year students and Middle English to the second years.

I also supervise finalists who have chosen to write dissertations on Anglo-Saxon or later medieval topics and authors.

In the English Faculty, I teach a wide variety of medieval literature to undergraduates, though I particularly enjoy lecturing on religious texts and cultures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In conjunction with these lectures, I regularly take students to workshops in the Ashmolean, where we have the opportunity to view, handle and discuss the Museum’s extensive collection of devotional objects. I also play a role in the provision of teaching for second and third-year students who have chosen to specialise in the literature and language of the medieval period (we call this Course 2). At graduate level, I supervise a range of MSt and DPhil students, particularly those who work on religious and biblical literature, and on devotional texts written by and for women. Current and recent DPhil students have worked on the language of suffering in thirteenth-century pastoral texts for women, the practice of prayer in early medieval and contemporary contexts, the manuscripts of devotional texts, and the Wycliffite translation of the Bible.

In my own research, I am interested in English religious literature of the early Middle Ages, particularly that which was intended for the use of female audiences. At the moment I am working on a collection of thirteenth-century prayers which were apparently composed for (and possibly by) a group of women living on the borders between England and Wales. These women seem to have been highly intelligent individuals, very possibly from wealthy backgrounds. Yet they chose to spend their lives in seclusion, voluntarily locked into small cells in which they could focus their attention on God. I am fascinated by what motivated them to live such lives, and by the books that they read in their isolation. My edition of these prayers (known collectively as the ‘Wooing Group’) is to be published by Liverpool University Press. Below is a list of my further publications.

Benjamin Thompson (FHRS) is a medieval historian who specialises in the role of the church in society and politics between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation in England.

He is working on a book provisionally titled The Alien Priories Transformed: Church, Society and Politics in Late Medieval England which examines the ‘alien’ priories, lands and monasteries in England owned by French abbeys as a result of the Conquest.  These came under increasingly xenophobic scrutiny during the Hundred Years War, which provoked a public debate about the correct use of ecclesiastical resources.  Their eventual confiscation – more than a century before the Dissolution of the Monasteries – established the legitimacy of the secular power’s intervention in re-ordering the church.

Professor Thompson has investigated these broad themes across a range of material.  Recent articles have focused on the underlying ideology of the church in its relation to society and politics, for instance the tension between the clergy’s sense of difference from the laity based on their spiritual function of ministering to souls, and their practical integration into a society which embraced religious culture and practice, and in which they were powerful officials and landowners.

He explored the ‘polemic’ of ecclesiastical reform as part of the Somerville medievalists’ interdisciplinary research group’s second project: their book on Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse was published in 2015: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472425089

http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/faculty/staff/profile/thompson/index.html

Natalia Nowakowska is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on the history of Poland in its European context.

She is a University Lecturer in History, and a Tutor & Fellow in History at Somerville College.

Brought up in the Polish post-WW2 diaspora community in London, Natalia read History at Lincoln College, Oxford (1995-8). After a spell working in social policy research, she returned to Oxford to complete a doctorate on a Polish Renaissance cardinal, and subsequently held postdoctoral research positions at King’s College London and at University College, Oxford. She joined the Oxford History Faculty in 2007.

Natalia has published on religious change in Renaissance Europe, and on the role which the Polish monarchy and its Jagiellonian dynasty played in those processes. Her first book Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland (co-winner of the Kulczycki Prize in the USA, 2008) explored the career of the allegedly syphilitic Polish cardinal-prince Fryderyk Jagiellon (d.1503). Her current book, Elusive Church: Luther, Poland and the Early Reformation, is the first major research project in over a century on the early Reformation in this sizeable sixteenth-century monarchy, and asks how the Polish story can inform our understanding of the European Reformations as a whole. Natalia has been awarded a British Academy Mid Career Fellowship for 2012-13 for this project.

Natalia teaches a range of late medieval and early modern papers at Oxford, encompassing European, British and South American history. She gives a lecture course on Jagiellonian Central Europe in the Renaissance period.

Natalia has a regular blog, Somerville Historian, about teaching and writing History at Oxford. While on British Academy leave in 2012-13, she has a new blog about the ups and downs of writing a historical monograph, History Monograph.

Professor Southerden’s main area of research is in medieval Italian literature, particularly the works of Dante and Petrarch, and the relationship between language and desire in lyric poetry.

Academic background

Francesca Southerden holds a BA (Honours) in Italian and French from Somerville College, Oxford and a D.Phil in Italian literature from Hertford College, Oxford. Her thesis considered the modern poet Vittorio Sereni’s relationship to the preceding lyric tradition and his reframing of a discourse of desire that goes back to Dante and Petrarch. Before joining Oxford she was Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval-Renaissance Studies at Wellesley College, MA (2010-16) and Mary Ewart Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Somerville College (2007-10). She was made a full professor of the university in the 2023 Recognition of Distinction.

Research

Francesca Southerden’s research focuses on the relationship between language and desire in the works of Dante and Petrarch. Her current book, Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language (forthcoming with Legenda), explores the significance of the garden for Dante and Petrarch’s thinking about language and desire and how the authors reimagine Eden in their poetic works. This book develops, within a medieval context, the concern with the relationship between desire, subjectivity, and poetic space that was at the heart of her first monograph, Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is interested in the relationship between literature and critical theory, and in the concept of lyric from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Teaching

Francesca Southerden teaches a broad range of topics within medieval Italian literature. She is interested in hearing from graduate students who would like to work on thirteenth- or fourteenth century Italian literature and culture, especially Dante, Petrarch and the early lyric tradition. She is also happy to supervise projects with an interdisciplinary focus within medieval Italian literature.

In addition to being Professor of Medieval Italian at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Somerville College, Professor Southerden holds the post of Lecturer in Italian at St Catherine’s College and at Lady Margaret Hall. Prior to Oxford, she held the post of Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval-Renaissance Studies at Wellesley College, MA (2010-2016).

A list of publications can be found on Professor Southerden’s departmental page.