Clare Egan

ALT LS, AD and JM in conversation with Dr Sophie Ambler.

ALT DR giving the keynote

ALT Dr Lauren Stokeld (University of York) ‘Fighting Talk: Uncovering Old English fortification terms from burh to castel’ By analysing vocabulary choices in historical texts, we gain insight into how contemporaries interpreted and tried to shape the world around them: when people choose their words, they also choose their truths. This presentation analyses accounts of warfare in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles through the lens of historical semantics, showing how chroniclers leveraged the power of connotations around the Old English fortification words geweorc, burh and castel to shape their narratives. Across two centuries of annals, we will see how different uses of these terms chart changing fortunes in a land often beset by invasion. We will discover how a semantic approach can call into question some of our modern assumptions about these words and the defences they represent.

ALT Dr Jonathan Masters (Lancaster University & the Environment Agency) ‘A ditch in time: Managing flood risk and landscape change in latemedieval south-west Lancashire’ Scholars have long acknowledged that wetlands were an essential resource during the medieval period. They had great economic potential but also required great investment in order to manage water levels, given their marginal position and susceptibility to climactic changes. Medieval documents relating to landholding in south-west Lancashire retain crucial topographical details that enhance our understanding of how local communities managed the risk of flooding with land reclamation methods. In particular, medieval toponyms in these documents are a rich, yet under-appreciated source of information that can bring to light environmental, socio-economic and cultural qualities of landscape features. By analysing documents relating to Altcar, Sefton and Ince Blundell, this presentation reconstructs a better understanding

ALT Dr Annabel Dukes (University of York) ‘Ancrene Wisse, Anchorholds and a Malleable “Inner Rule”’ In theory, anchoresses did not leave their small rooms from the time of their enclosure until their death. The author of Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century guide for anchoresses, acknowledges the difficulties of this enclosed life, and the threat of depression and despair. This presentation explores how the imagery in Ancrene Wisse builds a moral and theological environment that is more malleable than the physically constrained one of the anchorhold. The inflexibility of the anchorite’s abode is countered by the vivid presentation of theological and moral ideas in a form that allowed them to be adapted to suit the ideas and experiences of the particular anchoress. That form was brief comparisons that linked together commonplace occurrences – such as walking up a hill or washing cloths – with Christian ideas about the mind and its governance. Contrary to the exceptionally constrained

ALT Professor Denis Renevey (University of Lausanne) ‘Discovering and Re-Fashioning the Self: The Apophatic and Encyclopaedic Journeys of Andrew Boorde (c. 1490-1549)’ This presentation looks at the life journey of Andrew Boorde (c. 1490-1549), Carthusian monk turned physician, informer to Thomas Cromwell, and travel guide writer. It considers the personal, political and religious parameters that led Andrew Boorde to give up self-discovery by means of the inner apophatic journey for a self-knowledge negotiated via European social habits and customs. These changes went hand in hand with life-changing writerly activities: following his initial Carthusian scribal activities, Oxford-educated Boorde composed manuals of medicine, a sermon collection, a treatise upon beards, and two travel guides. Today’s focus is mainly on the processes that led Boorde from his early Carthusian scribal activities to the composition of his Introduction to Knowledge, the first travel guide to the Christian