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 Turning the pages of Textus Roffensis. Image by Christopher Monk ©2014 with permission of the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral. That unstoppable gad-about, Dr Chris Monk, is off on his travels again, only this time it's closer to home, and not the marvellous world of Buenos Aires. On Saturday June 20th he will venture into the capital of nine and tenth-century Viking culture, York city – I'm sorry, blessed readers, I cannot quite bring myself to utter its Viking name. He will be speaking at the conference, 'Researching and Representing the Early Medieval: the 2015 Richard Hall Symposium'. The program has papers on: the Lindisfarne monastery; a Vendel-period helmet in Grobin; Scandinavian female dress in Grobin; Manx Vikings; the boat grave of Scar, Orkney; representations of Merovingian queens in 19th-century France; and early medieval ships and ideas of nation. Dr Monk's paper is entitled 'Textus Roffensis: Turn the Pages of this Hidden Treasure', in which he discusses the work being done at Rochester Cathedral to make this important twelfth-century manuscript accessible to the public. (You can read an update of the project here.) If this all sounds very worthy, beloved, and you're not too afraid to wander into the deviant region of the Danelaw, then you can find out more about the conference at the JORVIK website. Dammit!
Any monk, but especially an Anglo-Saxon one, must keep his word; so please enjoy the pictures below from the world premiere of Daisy Black's 'The Bayeux Tapestry: The Stitches Speak', which was performed as a rehearsed reading last Saturday at the 50th annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. If you missed my review (may the Lord forgive you), you can catch up with it here. All images courtesy of William the Bastard, aka Patricia Bracewell.  Eminent scholars lie dead on the field of Hastings. The play employed the dramatic device of two embroiderers interacting with the scenes of the Bayeux Tapestry as they finish embroidering its text. Here, Master Embroiderer, Gale Owen-Crocker (left) and Apprentice Embroiderer, Daisy Black (the writer and director of the play, right) assess the final battle scene. A bloody mess, by all accounts.
My alter ego and earnest gallivant, Dr Chris Monk, has been describing to me the distinctive delights of Buenos Aires, foremost of which, he reliably informs me, is the Argentine Tango, a dance rooted in nineteenth-century nostalgia and, quite frankly, dripping with debauchery (for which see his postcard below).  Psalm 41:5 'The voice of joy and the noise of feasting'. The Harley Psalter. British Library, Harley 603 (Canterbury, first half of 11th century), fol. 24v. This image is PUBLIC DOMAIN. Please click on it to go to the source. Not one to deny any soul a well-rounded education, and in desperate need of a tenuous link, I will put aside my propensity for monastic modesty and explore with you, blessed readers, the brief history of dance in Anglo-Saxon England...
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