Date/Time
Date(s) - 7 Dec 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
This semester’s last meeting of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts will take place on Monday, December 7, at the usual time and place: 5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Jenny Adams (University of Massachusetts Amherst) will give a talk entitled “Unlocking St. Frideswide’s Chest: Medieval Student Loans and the Value of Books.”
Jenny writes:
In 1240, Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln and former Chancellor of Oxford University, launched St. Frideswide’s Chest, the first documented
academic loan program. Located at St. Frideswide’s Priory in Oxford, the chest operated as a type of pawnshop in which students and faculty members could place their possessions as collateral for interest-free loans. The forfeited objects, usually books, would stay in the chest until the repayment term (usually a year) had expired; for unpaid loans, items would be sold. Although the loan chest system started slowly, it blossomed after the year 1300, and by the end of the century students and faculty could draw funds from 16 different chests. By 1400, the loan chests held a collective value of about £1,300 (roughly £5,000,000 today), a sum that exceeded the value of university’s land holdings with the extra benefit of being in a highly liquid form.
What does it mean that scholars collateralized textbooks they used as part of their own education? How do the accounts of pledges, or “cautio” marks
recorded in the volumes, change the meaning of a pledged book? In my paper I will consider the ways that academic loans, which had a clear impact on
Oxford’s physical infrastructure, also had less tangible (and therefore less noted) effects on the books that lay at the heart of university life and on scholars’ own understanding of their labor.
Jenny Adams is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst. She is at work on a monograph provisionally titled “Unlocking St. Frideswide’s Chest: Student Debt and University Life in Medieval Oxford.” With Nancy Bradbury (Smith College) she has also edited an essay collection titled “Objects of Medieval Women,” which will be published by the University of Michigan Press next year. Her past research has focused on chess and political organization in the late Middle Ages, and she has articles on this and other subjects in *Studies in the Age of Chaucer*, the *Journal of English and Germanic Philology*, *Essays in Medieval Studies*, *The Chaucer Review*, *Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching*, and the *Journal of Popular Culture*. Her book, *Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages*(University of Pennsylvania Press) appeared in 2006, and her edition of William Caxton’s *The Game and Playe of the Chesse* (TEAMS Middle English Texts series) came out in 2009. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, and the ACLS.
All are welcome! Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the library building.