WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
Marcin Markowicz
Centre for Canadian Literature
Fireweed: a feminist quarterly of writing, politics, art and culture & the politics of diversity
Established in 1978 in Toronto by the Fireweed collective, Fireweed: a feminist quarterly of writing, politics, art & culture was a pioneering feminist literary magazine that became a legitimating platform for women writers across Canada. In my presentation, I will trace the work of Fireweed in the first twelve years of its existence by taking a holistic look at the aesthetic and publishing practices of the quarterly in the context of second- and third-wave feminism(s) in Canada. While focusing particularly on how the policy of diversity adopted by the founding collective played itself out in the pages of the magazine, the presentation sheds light on the ways in which women editors at Fireweed acted as facilitators of change within the women’s movement in Canada and Canadian literature and culture in general.
The talk is based on an article forthcoming in “Resurfacing: Women’s Writing Across Canada in the 1970s,” a special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature.
Dr. Paulina Zagórska
Department of the History of English
Twelfth-century forged legal documents as a source of linguistic data: a language imagined
The Norman Conquest affected virtually every aspect of life in England, including the social and legal reality. First of all, the majority of the English land fell into the Norman hands - according to Daniell (2003: 17), as early as in 1086, around 5000 pre-Conquest estates were controlled by 200 major tenants-in-chief of Norman origin. Secondly, the Normans introduced a new legal order, moving from the Anglo-Saxon oral tradition to the continental written tradition, which resulted in massive document production after 1066 (Newman 1998: 19). Moreover, although William the Conqueror presented himself as a rightful heir and thus stressed the legitimacy and lawfulness of his rule, at the same time illegal seizure of land was the most common complaint of the local landlords following the Conquest (Daniell 2003: 20). One way of keeping the land was to prove the antiquity of the rights of the pre-Conquest owners to their property. It is thus hardly surprising that the years 1066-1500 are the “Golden Age” of forgery in England (Hiatt 2004: 22).
This paper is a part of a research grant studying twelfth century English production of forged documents. Its aim is to identify, analyse and catalogue original elements of the 12th century English language from the forged documents that were supposed to pass as being written in Old English. In the present paper I am looking at some examples of confirmed forgeries of episcopal acta in order to see what linguistic means of authentication in terms of nominal morphology were employed by their forgers. The 12th-century forgers’ imperfect impressions of Old English can tell us to what extent Old English survived the Conquest as the language of the written record. The overall aim of this paper is to show that unorthodox texts – in that case, forgeries – can be useful in historical linguistics research, allowing insight into various ideas of what a legal document was, concerning its physical aspects, linguistic characteristics, and the role it played in its local community (Hiatt 2004: 3).
Selected references
Daniell, Christopher. 2003. From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta. England 1066-1215. London: Routledge.
Harper-Bill, Christopher (ed.). 1999. Anglo-Norman Studies. XXI. Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1998. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
Harper-Bill, Christopher and Elizabeth van Hoots (eds.). 2002. A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
Hiatt, Alfred. 2004. The Making of Medieval Forgeries: false documents in Fifteenth-Century England. London: British Library.
Hudson, John. 1996. The Formation of the English Common Law. Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta. London: Longman.
Kricks, Julia and Elizabeth van Hoots (eds.). 2011. A Social History of England. 900-1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newman, Charlotte A. 1988. The Anglo-Norman Nobility in the Reign of Henry I: The Second Generation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Jerzy Koch i Piotr Śliwiński o poezji Breytena Breytenbacha w Teatrze Ósmego Dnia, 5.04, godz.19:00
Wielkie Dyktando Języka Niderlandzkiego, 9 kwietnia, 12:00, DS Jowita, sala A
The Department of the History of English has the pleasure to announce that the next meeting of the HELL Reading Club this academic year will take place on Tuesday April the 9th at 4.45p.m, in Room C Collegium Martineum.
The Department of the History of English has the pleasure to announce that the next meeting of the Fun with Old English study group this academic year will take place on Tuesday, April the 9th, at 5:45 p.m. in Room C Collegium Martineum.
_0.jpg){kind=logo}
