Storytelling in Court and Cloister

Literature scholars offer models for thinking about questions of fiction and narrative within written stories, in imagined or recounted tales, romance and history. Such models have shaped historical and art-historical approaches to the past and memory. This interdisciplinary conference will draw on this rich field, to think about storytelling within and beyond the page, by exploring the act of telling stories in a social context.

We will take as our framework the medieval court (legal and political) and the religious cloister, to explore how individuals or communities used stories to reimagine or shape their world. Discussion might include: storytelling as an active process, in text, image or speech; the ways in which circumstance or an awareness of audience compel a story and shape its narrative; the construction of narrative when arguing a case or asserting a new order; narratology and storytelling in the middle ages; the relationships between narrative and 'fact', as one may construct or deconstruct the other; and the self‐consciousness of story and its forms as a tool to engage and to convince, challenge or play.

Confirmed speakers: Anthony Bale (Birkbeck), Ross Balzaretti (Nottingham), Bronach Kane (Cardiff), Henrietta Leyser (Oxford), Christopher Norton (York), Tom Pickles (Chester), David Rundle (Essex), Elisabeth van Houts (Cambridge)

See the full programme: Storytelling in Court and Cloister (PDF , 63kb)

Registration: £30 (full); £20 (students/unwaged). There is a £10 reduction for members of the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures.

To register, contact cms‐office@york.ac.uk

Enquiries: sethina.watson@york.ac.uk