Nouvelles Nouvelles Podcast

Interview with Dr. Kathleen Walker-Meikle on Medieval animals

4 - Mark Rankin by Nouvelles Nouvelles Podcast (OSU MedRen Center)

Emily Thornbury is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. She studies Old English and Anglo-Latin, focusing especially on the aesthetics of Latin and vernacular cultures. She's the author of Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England, a study of the various communities and identities from which Anglo-Saxon poets emerged. She is also the co-editor with Rebecca Stevenson of the volume of essays, Latinitity and Identity in Anglo-Saxon England.

We talked about her upcoming project on The Virtue of Ornament, which, she writes, “traces the non-classical largely untheorized aesthetic principles of Anglo-Saxon art and literature through a series of productive encounters with classical forms. Ornament, understood in classical aesthetics mainly as an extraneous overlay or elaboration but by Anglo-Saxons as a transformative act, provides an entryway into a world of thought in which the surface into depth, proportion, symmetry and value itself had very different meanings. By understanding how ornament works for the Anglo-Saxons, we can glimpse alternative ways of reading, seeing, and understanding art.”

Frank T. Coulson is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of Classics and the Director of Palaeography at the Ohio State University. He spoke to us about co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Latin Paleography, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and about the state of the field.

Chris Woodyard is an Ohio writer and historian. She received her BA degree with Honors in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from The Ohio State University, where her emphasis was on art history. She is the author of nine books on Ohio ghost-lore, the Haunted Ohio series, as well as three volumes on historical ghost stories, and The Victorian Book of the Dead, a book on the popular and material culture of Victorian mourning and death. She has given presentations at the Costume Society of America on "The Woman in Black: Victorian Mourning as Criminal Disguise" and "Making Shrouds: Mode, Memory, and Memento Mori." Her chapter on Irish fairylore in the United States entitled “Changelings and Banshees: Irish America” was included in the 2018 book, Magical Folk: British & Irish Fairies 500 AD to the Present, edited by Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook, (London: Gibson Square), a collection of essays on the regional fairy-lore of Britain and Ireland, with a look at how these beliefs translated to the United States. She is a member of the Costume Society of America, The Fairy Investigation Society, and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

She spoke with Steve Barker before her keynote lecture at "Popular Culture and the Deep Past: Fairies and the Fantastic."

Brought to you by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Ohio State University.