Dean of the College Presents
Marisa Libbon
Assistant Professor of Literature
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Hegeman 204A
6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The Medieval Rumor Mill
In 1886, the artist, activist, and moonlighting antiquarian William Morris purchased a medieval manuscript: a psalter, or copy of the psalms, that contains some of the finest decoration in any surviving medieval English manuscript. Produced probably in late thirteenth-century London, the psalter is now held rather closer to (our) home, in New York’s Morgan Library. Morris referred to the manuscript simply as the “Windmill Psalter” because of an object painted by the manuscript’s illuminators on its second leaf: a small, slightly tilted windmill, which is, in fact, the earliest extant image of a windmill in an English book. Despite the peculiarity of its decoration, we know little for certain about the Windmill Psalter. Medievalists have attemptedto read its windmill in light of the psalter’s text, to no avail. So too, the psalter’s original owner has never been conclusively identified.
The windmill appears to us as a visual outlier, but what if its meaning was so obvious to the manuscript’s contemporary makers and readers that it required no explanation? The psalter’s windmill, Professor Libbon will suggest, can be understood as evidence of a rumor about thirteenth-century England’s glorious past—the twelfth-century crusading triumph of Richard the Lionheart—that circulated contemporaneously with the psalter, and long after. This pro-regnal, historical rumor about Richard pointedly perverted the terms of a line of anti-regnal hearsay, sprung from the civil war between England’s king and his barons that occurred some thirty years before the psalter’s production. Recovering this politically potent telephone game, or, better, rumor mill, points us to the Windmill Psalter’s owner, to its milieu of talk and text, and, more pressingly, to a new site and method of cultural recovery.
All seminars take place in Hegeman 204A
beginning at 6:30pm
Please join us for a reception prior to the event beginning at 6:00 p.m. in the Faculty Commons Room
Bard will make every effort to provide reasonable accommodations for accessibility needs. Hegeman 204A is an accessible space with elevator access. For more information about this event's location, please contact the Faculty Seminar Coordinator, Joseph Luzzi.
For more information, call 845-758-7150, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Hegeman 204A