Talk: ‘Which Shall I Reach for First?’ Gifts of Food in the Early Middle Ages

You are invited to a talk by Dr Hope Williard on Tuesday 28 March, Cargill Lecture Theatre (MB0302) 6pm – 7:30pm.

You can register for this online: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/565460245817. This event will be held both in person and online, and a Zoom link will be shared prior to the event for anyone who wishes to join virtually.

Speaker: Dr Hope Williard

Event synopsis: ‘Many different foodstuffs are showered on me from every side,’ wrote the poet Venantius Fortunatus in the late Sixth Century, ‘which shall I reach for first?’ Fortunatus’ eleven books of poetry offer a remarkable window into an aspect of medieval life we might not associate with the so-called Dark Ages: cultures of food, friendship, and the pleasures of the table. A fifth of Fortunatus’ over two hundred surviving poems were written to his friends at the monastery of the Holy Cross in Poitiers, France: Radegund and Agnes, respectively a former queen and the community’s abbess. Many of these poems celebrate banquets the three friends shared or gifts of food they gave each other. This paper attempts to situate these meals in the late antique tradition of friendly gift exchange, arguing that the poet drew on and transformed long-standing expectation of reciprocity and generosity in his work. Late antique food-writing has usually been examined only in its literary aspect; this paper also examines the food cultures captured within the poems.

Bio:

Hope Williard is an associate lecturer and academic subject librarian for the School of Humanities and Heritage at the University of Lincoln. Her research explores the late Roman world and its legacies, focusing particularly on friendship, letter-writing, and literary culture between the fourth and eighth centuries. Her emerging research interests include the history of manuscript studies, the pedagogy of digital history, and critical librarianship. She earned a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds, and has held visiting research fellowships at the John Rylands Library, Manchester and the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

Story submitted by Renée Ward
rward@lincoln.ac.uk