Trojan Temporalities. Constructing Hybrid Antiquities in Medieval Troy Narratives

International Workshop Hosted by Andrew James Johnston, Wolfram R. Keller and Margitta Rouse

31 August - 2 September 2017

Conference Venue: Freie Universität Berlin, TOPOI Villa, Hittorfstr. 18, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem

Program

Thursday, 31 August 2017

14:00	Registration
15:15	Bernhard Huss (Freie Universität Berlin) Welcome
15:35	Wolfram R. Keller (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Introduction: Trojan Temporalities
16:35	Coffee
17:05	Simon Gaunt (King's College London) On the Temporality of Style in the Fifth Mise en Prose of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie
18:30	Reception

Friday, 1 September 2017

09:00	Anke Bernau (Manchester University) Making Time
10:05	Francis Ingledew (Fairleigh Dickinson University) What We Lose When We Lose History: Thirteenth Century English Law in Trojan Time and British Space
11:05	Coffee
11:35	Randy P. Schiff (University at Buffalo) Managing Time and Ethnicity. Beyond Benoît's and Chaucer's Troy
12:35	Lunch
14:30	Margitta Rouse (Freie Universität Berlin) What's New? Unearthing Trojan Temporalities in St Erkenwald's 'New Werke'
15:35	James Simpson (Harvard University) Anti-Vigilianism in Late Medieval Troy Narratives
16:35	Coffee
17:05	Robert R. Edwards (Pennsylvania State University) Trojan Temporalities and Chaucerian Retrospect

Saturday, 2 September 2017

09:00	Andrew James Johnston (Freie Universität Berlin) Trojan Iconophobia: Pictorial Politics in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
10:05	Alex Mueller (University of Massachusetts Boston) Guido's Sovereignty of Style: The Rhetorical Time of Lydgate's Troy Book
11:05	Coffee
11:35	Sarah Salih (King's College London) Playing Trojans: Lydgate's Mummings (and Brexit) as Re-Enactment
12:35	Lunch
14:30	Patricia Clare Ingham (Indiana University, Bloomington) Providential Novelties: The Timing of Troy in Werner Rolevinck's Universal Timelines
15:35	Sylvia Federico (Bates College, Lewiston) Reading Troy Instead of Time: Richard II in the Second Tetralogy Simon
16:35	Coffee
17:05	Patrick Cheney (Pennsylvania State University) Temporality and Sublimity: The Author, Phantasia and the Ecphrasis of Trojan Time in Early Modern England

From the very beginning, narratives of Troy have served as testing grounds for temporal hybridity, as they constitute both the medium and the source of continuous renegotiations of the temporal. A set of complex and conflicted traditions, medieval Troy narratives generated a network of ever-shifting historical perspectives, frequently marked by forms of creative hybridisation: thus, in medieval England, a Galfridian strand linking Troy to the Arthurian tradition competed with views of antiquity originating in Guido delle Colonne's adaptation of Benoit's Roman de Troie. And even as the English began to adapt Guido's work, Chaucer could be seen responding to early forms of Italian humanism and concomitant 'new' approaches to classical traditions (esp. Boccaccio). Precisely because narratives of Troy self-consciously negotiate the problem of tradition, and especially that of competing traditions, do they offer themselves as sites where the innovative, the novel and the new can be conceptualized over and against the conventional, the time-honoured and the old. Our workshop seeks to understand how narratives of Troy reconfigure the old versus the new, the innovative versus the obsolete, as well as the various kinds of in-between, that is, those temporal hybridities deriving, as Bruno Latour observes, from the very act of separating the oldfrom the new.
Contributors to this workshop will pursue all manner of investigations into the aesthetic and ideological products resulting from the manifold forms of temporalisation that the matter of T roy was subjected to between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.