This is the second of two posts about my attendance at the first day of MEMSFest2020.

After lunch, I chose to go to Patronage, Community, and Civic Participation, chaired by Cassandra Harrington. Chris Hopkins was the first speaker on the panel, talking about One Day in Canterbury: The Story of an Anglo-Saxon Charter.  Chris used the much-studied manuscript, Cotton Augustus II 91, to explore several questions.  The first of these was, why did Anglo Saxon kings give such valuable land to the church? The answer would appear to be that it was part of a programme of extravagant display.  He suggested four possible locations for where the charter was enacted at Canterbury, partly based on how charters were publicly ‘performed’ in that the charter was read aloud. It was interesting to hear about how a couple of the witnesses’ names were added beforehand, but others were added at the ceremony, which suggests that the scribes were able to predict the presence of some but not all of the witnesses to the event.

Next up was Noah Smith, on Bakers, Fishmongers, and Militant Brotherhoods: Reassessing the Guild Iconography of the Leugemeete Chapel in Ghent circa 1334. He argued that Flemish guild art was instructive in how they saw themselves.  He noted that the location of the paintings in the layout of the Leugemeete Chapel meant that you would process towards the altar flanked by the images of the militant brotherhoods.  Like Francesca’s, this paper was interested in the physical location and space of the building and how this affected the people who used it.

Ella Ditri’s Women and Landed Society in Conquest England looked at the changes to female landowning and the distribution of females’ landed wealth before and after the conquest.  Very few women retained control of their land after the Norman conquest.  This was felt more by secular women than religious women.  Much of the land went to William the Conqueror, with much of the rest going to his men.  There were a few new female landowners, but not enough to replace the number of women who were completely dispossessed.  The conquest brought about changes to inheritance patterns which reduced women’s opportunities to inherit. 

Finally, Eilish Gregory’s paper was entitled We Bless the Queen, and we Invoke the Saint’: Literary Dedications to Catherine of Braganza, Queen Dowager of England, 1685-1689.  Eilish started by discussing Aphra Behn’s support for Catherine after her husband’s death.  She then talked about Catherine’s lasting role as a patron during her time as queen dowager, suggesting that she had a significant impact on Catholic religious culture. Soon after Charles II’s death, several poems presented her as the grieving widow and appeared to share her woe.  In the final section, she looked at the sermons which were preached in front of Catherine.  The sermons preached at her private chapel at Somerset House caused the Privy Council alarm, because so many Catholics were attending and they could not control the messages they would hear in the preaching. Moreover, some of these sermons were printed by royal command.

In the last session of Friday afternoon, I started by attending the Literary Tradition and Criticism panel chaired by Michael Powell-Davies.  Grace Murray’s paper was Thomas Tusser’s “Mnemonic Jingles”:  Reading and Remembering the Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandry. Tusser was music master to Paget.  His Five Hundred Points of Husbandry was reprinted many times.  Originally printed as an almanac written in verse throughout.  It’s a genre-bending publication.  CS Lewis was particularly scathing about it.  Tusser was writing in verse because it was easy for reading aloud and remembering if your audience was semi-literate tenant farmers, but we know from annotated copies that readers from higher social ranks. Some read it as poetry, others as a manual.  She suggested that although it is a bit of a mish-mash (my words, not hers!), it is Tusser’s own authorial voice that makes the whole thing hang together.

Faith Acker talked about her work on manuscript collections of epitaphs in Beer, Sex and Life After Death in Early Modern Epitaphs.  The writer of Folger MS V.a.103 differentiated between laudatory and merry epitaphs.  She concentrated on the ‘merry and satirical epitaphs’, pointing out that food and drink featured prominently in the epitaphs, which themselves centred on men at Oxford colleges.  The examples she gave told us less about the individuals who had died than their role in providing food!  The butlers’ individual traits are forgotten when the food they had access to is supplied form elsewhere.

I then skipped across to Intellectual Networks and Early Modern Knowledge Communities, chaired by Anna Hegland, to catch Challenges of the Social Network Analysis in History: The Case of the Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado by Pelayo Fernández García.  Almost forgotten now, the Marquis was one of the foremost military writers of his age.  Pelayo described his research into the Marquis’s social networks, but he pointed out that even when you have almost complete epistolary records, you still can’t recreate the networks of face to face contacts.  By analysing the content of the letters, you can find out qualitative information about contacts. Finally, Emily Rowe’s Whetstones of Wit: Iron Wits and Cutting Words in Early Modern English Prose explored the ways in which the various metaphors of iron were employed to describe the workings of people’s minds.