Convivium: PhD Candidates Jack McCart and Matthew Reid
When and Where
Speakers
Description
The CMS Convivium presents PhD Candidates Jack McCart and Matthew Reid who will present their in-progess work.
Jack McCart, The Patronage of John de Pulteney (d. 1349): Commerce, Commemoration, and Corruption in Fourteenth-Century London
Biography
Jack W. McCart is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies. His research focuses primarily on the economic, social, and material histories of the later-medieval world, with an emphasis on England, c. 1200–1500. Here his interests include commerce, testamentary practice, and the patronage and provenance of manuscripts and material culture. Forthcoming work in these areas explores and reconstructs familial and commercial networks in fourteenth-century London. His research has been supported by a Canada Graduate Scholarship (Doctoral), and, most recently, by the John Munro Doctoral Fellowship in Medieval Economic History.
Matthew Reid, A Dialogic Approach to an Old English Boethian Metre
Abstract
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy enjoyed a rich scholarly tradition in the Middle Ages. Its rediscovery during the Carolingian Renaissance led to a wide dissemination of manuscripts across continental and insular Europe. This dissemination resulted in its translation into Old English during, or shortly after, the reign of King Alfred in England. The purpose of this talk will be to use Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism, authoritative discourse, and re-accentuation to analyse the extralinguistic features of the text’s translation into Old English. This analysis will show that the many added glossematic and overtly Christianising elements of the Old English Boethius support the continued use of Late Antique theories of translation, chiefly Jerome’s, in England. It will also show how externally dialogized interpretations of the text, such as glosses, become absorbed by the main text through the process of translation. This reading will provide a more nuanced understanding of how complex internally dialogized texts like the Consolation of Philosophy are re-accented by later authors for an audience which is removed from the ideological and political debates of the time of the source-text’s production. Furthermore, this analysis will show that the use of translation strategy to determine the corpus of Alfredian Old English translations requires reconsideration in light of the relationship between the perceived authority of the source-text and that of the translator.
Biography
Matthew Reid is a fourth-year PhD Candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies. Matthew’s research focuses on the literary and manuscript reception of Late Antique Latin poetry in Pre-Conquest England. Matthew’s research aims to bring the tools of modern critical theory to the fields of Medieval Studies and Latin Philology as a means to broaden the scholarly conversation and methods used to analyse early medieval literature. In particular, Matthew’s dissertation work uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of extralinguistics to analyse various modes of textual reception. These modes include grammar, glosses, genre, translation theory, and intertextuality. Aside from these scholarly interests, Matthew is an avid hiker, chess player, and piano player.
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