“Transmitting Ideas to the Peripheries: Scandinavian Texts and their European Context in the Later Middle Ages”, Dr Kimberley Knight (University of Sydney)

Date: Wednesday 31 August, 2016
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Venue: SLC Common Room, Brennan McCallum Building (5th floor, Room 536), The University of Sydney

“City, Nation, and Globalisation in the Medieval World”, Professor Helen Fulton (University of Bristol)

Date: Wednesday 7 September, 2016
Time: 5:00-7:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building (A22), The University of Sydney
More information and RSVP: helene.sirantoine@sydney.edu.au

This lecture suggests that modern debates about globalisation and the decline of the nation state are prefigured by the medieval condition of loosely-defined nations which pre-dated the nation state. It discusses evidence of ‘globalisation’ as an economic and ideological phenomenon articulated in medieval literary texts. In the Middle Ages, before the establishment of the nation state as the dominant model of political organisation, city and empire were the defining frameworks of social and political relations, with international trade providing a global network of shared ideologies. Now, once again, in the ‘post-national’ age of globalisation, national boundaries are becoming permeable and the global city provides the major framework of social and cultural identity.

Helen Fulton is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. She is the Convenor of the Bristol Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and WUN Research Group, ‘Borders and Borderlands in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’.

“Game of Thrones! History, Medievalism and How It Might End”, Professor Carolyne Larrington (University of Oxford)

Date: Monday 17 October 2016
Time: 6:00–7:00pm
Venue: Alexander Lecture Theatre (G.57, Ground Floor, Arts Building), The University of Western Australia
Registration: Online bookings essential ($12 standard registration; $10 concession/unwaged/student)
Enquiries: Joanne McEwan (joanne.mcewan@uwa.edu.au)

In this lecture I’ll talk about watching and writing about HBO’s Game of Thrones as a medieval scholar. I’ll also explain some of the medieval history and literature from which George R. R. Martin chiselled the building blocks for the construction of his imaginary world. Game of Thrones has now become the most frequently streamed or downloaded show in TV history. I’ll suggest some reasons for its enormous international success as the medieval fantasy epic for the twenty-first century, and will undertake a little speculation on how the show might end.

This event is hosted by the Society for the History of Emotions and the UWA Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Proceeds will go towards the establishment of the new Society for the History of Emotions journal, Emotions: History, Culture, Society.

Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford, and teaches medieval English literature as a Fellow of St John’s College. She has published widely on Old Icelandic literature, including the leading translation into English of the Old Norse Poetic Edda (2nd edn, Oxford World’s Classics, 2014). She also researches medieval European literature: two recent publications are Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York Medieval Press, 2015) and an edited collection of essays (with Frank Brandsma and Corinne Saunders), Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature (D. S. Brewer, 2015). She also writes on the medieval in the modern world: two recent books are The Land of the Green Man (2015) on folklore and landscape in Great Britain, and Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2015), both published by I. B. Tauris. She is currently researching emotion in secular medieval European literatures, and planning a second book about Game of Thrones.