| Abstract | Paper -a:
The illuminations of maritime travels in the manuscripts of the prose Merlin underline the structure of the narrative by staging key political events and symbolic episodes, reflecting the mixed nature of the Arthurian world. Political relationships played a leading role in these exchanges: princes went into exile and came back, messengers and armies travelled between England, Gaul, and the Roman Empire; fleeing through the sea could also be the ultimate refuge for defeated troops. But the appeal of the Arthurian court also appeared in its capacity to attract knightly aspirants form overseas. Navigation itself is not systematically illustrated, but manuscripts present and use its representations, in single or serial illuminations, connecting different sets of episodes through the recurrence of the motif and the variations in its composition.
Paper -b:
Biography of Jacobus Boksica (d. 1497), canon of the cathedrals of Gnesnen and Cracow, dean of facultas artium at the Jagiellonian University, gives perfect material for analysing the various aspects of travelling in the medieval Kingdom of Poland. Boksica's efforts to attain the successive academic degrees and ecclesiastical posts were related to the numerous travels (domestic and abroad). On the other hand, he had something completely different in view, when he planned (1474) and accomplished his travel to the Holy Land (1484). This pilgrimage was commemorated in the pyxis-reliquary, which decoration forms visual relatio peregrinationis, full of various references to that pilgrimage, its destinations, and presumable stages.
Paper-c:
The wreck of the White Ship off the coast of Normandy in November of 1120 brought turmoil both personal and political to English King Henry I (1100–35) and his Anglo-Norman realm. When the White Ship capsized, the newly-designated heir to the throne, Prince William, along with two other royal children, chief members of the nobility, and many of the king's household, perished. Such a calamity was duly noted by contemporary historians, whose number, activity, and quality of work distinguish the first decades of the 12th century as a flourishing age in English historiography. My MPhil dissertation at Cambridge will examine the dozen or so surviving 12th-century accounts of the wreck in order to determine Anglo-Norman attitudes towards the sea, which was a dangerous but central feature of the Anglo-Norman realm and its governance. This paper will explore how a historian might investigate literary tropes, in conjunction with other sources such as iconographic ones, to discover how commentators of the 12th century presented a well-known nautical event and, more generally, seafaring in the English Channel. While my analysis is mostly textual, I will welcome participants' input on further iconographic sources that might inform my research.
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