Date/Time
Date(s) - 23 Mar 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Monday, 23 March
Workshop in the History of Material Texts.
5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center
on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Marie Turner
Forms of History: Genealogy, Continuity, Materiality in the
Late-Medieval Chronicle Roll
“This presentation considers the relationship between genealogy, history,
and material form in fifteenth-century genealogical chronicles. My main
focus is University of Pennsylvania MS Roll 1066, a Latin genealogical
chronicle roll of the kings of England to Edward IV. Part of a large but
understudied corpus of fifteenth-century genealogical rolls, this
manuscript and its others provide us with a snapshot of English
historiographical anxiety at a crucial political juncture: the Wars of the
Roses. While the propagandistic function of these rolls seems fairly clear,
such an ideological project is far from straightforward, requiring the
complete breakdown and reconstruction of history itself as Edward’s line of
descent becomes a fiction of genealogical desire. I will discuss these
rolls from two perspectives: first, I consider the continuities and
discontinuities inherent in their project, asking how MS Roll 1066
reorganizes and manipulates history in unexpected ways, using the past to
account for the present and making claims about the present as a way of
understanding the past. Second, I will look to how the roll format mediates
content, asking how constraints of form demand new and inherently multiple
modes of readership within a single document.”
*Marie Turner is the Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material
Texts at the University of Pennsylvania, where she recently earned her PhD
in the English department. Her dissertation on medieval historical
fictions, entitled *Beyond Romance: Genre and History in England, 1066-1400*,
explores romance as a historical genre in the medieval period. She is
currently beginning a new project focused on genealogical rolls and
genealogical literature in later medieval England, tentatively titled
*Genealogical
Literature and the Forms of History in Late Medieval England*. Her research
on genealogical chronicle rolls has been graciously supported by the
Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania, and the Richard III Society.*
All are welcome! Please forward this email widely to any who might be
interested. Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards
should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the
library building.