Medieval Latin Reading Group
Medieval Latin Reading Group is a weekly workshop dedicated to reading and interpreting works of Latin literature of the medieval period, roughly 400–1400 C.E. The group meets on Fridays at midday, and spends an hour reading aloud and collaboratively sight-translating material, offering syntactical and stylistic commentary viva voce. The reading group warmly invites graduate students and other Yale affiliates in various fields, including Medieval Studies, English, Classics, Music History, and Early Modern Studies. Texts are selected according to the interests of participants: sometimes a group-member requests that an extra set of eyes be cast over a piece through which they have been puzzling in their research; other times the conveners pick a text at random from the massive online corpora. Since we are not bound to a particular curriculum or geographic area, the types of texts read reflect the whole gamut of medieval literature: in the past, we have examined specimens of hagiography, rhythmical and quantitative poetry, historiography, and scientific/didactic literature, from early medieval Britain, late medieval France and the Low Countries, North Africa, and the predominantly Greek-speaking East. This year we hope to incorporate more practice in the adjacent discipline of palaeography – the study of ancient handwritings – by reading documents in digital facsimiles of medieval manuscripts. We may additionally plan a field trip to the Beinecke Rare Books Library to consult some texts in the original.
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