IMC 2026: Sessions

Paper 107-a:

This paper investigates the topic of self-deception in Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster’s Anglo-French penitential treatise, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines (1354), in order to uncover how writers in the late Middle Ages understood and represented the human mind’s unsettling ability to conceal knowledge from itself and to justify its misbeliefs. Informed by recent scholarship on epistemological skepticism in the medieval period, I use Lancaster’s Livre as a case study to explore the emotionally fraught self-reflections of one high-ranking nobleman and the devotional allegories that he elaborated to probe the limitations of human introspection.

Paper 107-b:

Around the turn of the fifteenth century, Konrad Kyeser of Eichstätt (1366–after 1405) composed a work on military and other technologies under the title Bellifortis. In addition to the obscure hexametric captions in Latin composed by the author (which I discussed in my presentation at IMC 2024), the Bellifortis incorporates both verse and prose passages lifted from previously existing sources. One such case is the version of the Liber ignium included in the main manuscript, Göttingen ms. philos. 63 cim. In his prologue, Konrad explicitly states that he has collected material from "authentic authors”, among whom explicitly mentioned in the course of his work are Vegetius, Aristotle, Galen, and Philo of Byzantium. Other sources quoted without attribution include the Liber vaccae, a book on magic translated from Arabic. My paper, which is based on my on-going research project, will elucidate Konrad’s use of his sources, confirming his use of Giles of Rome, questioning his use of Pseudo-Albert the Great's De mirabilibus mundi as suggested in previous research, and offering new identifications.

Paper 107-c:

The Historia Calamitatum has sometimes struck readers as a disunified and disjointed work. Abelard begins by portraying himself as a knight in the service of Minerva, soon to abandon this chivalric metaphor when he characterizes himself as a lustful Ovidian lover and later an earnest and faithful abbot. It is also a tale of academic envy in which those seeking vengeance, ironically, suffer vengeance—or something like it—themselves. Despite this morass of motifs and genres, Abelard succeeds in unifying this work through his application of the concepts of custom (usus) and ingenuity (ingenium), which play explanatory roles across all the work’s episodes: Ingenuity explains his success in fighting for truth, his turning others’ vengeance against them, and Heloise’s startling but accurate insights into love and marriage.