2023 Medieval Matters Lecture

The Wilderness and the Early Medieval Mind

A Medieval Matters Lecture hosted by Stanford Manuscript Sciences

Journey with bestselling author Amy Jeffs into a land of wandering spirits, frost-bleached ruins and whales with diabolical schemes. Explore poems in Old English and Middle Welsh, ancient treasures and legends carved in bone. Climb into caves and burial mounds, be amazed by the riddle of the Fens. Witness apocalyptic omens in the sky and dare to dream of paradise. Rooted in research, told through stories, this talk will take an old idea of the wilderness and the people for whom it was real. It will show how, for all their antiquity, their fears mapped onto our own and their strategies for salvation might hold lessons for

us still. 

The event will be in Basement Lecture Hall of the Lane History Corner, (Building 200, Room 002, 450 Jane Stanford Way), at 6.15pm-7.30pm on Tuesday, January 24th.

Dr Amy Jeffs received her PhD in History of Art from the University of Cambridge in 2019. Her research focusses on manuscript illumination from England and France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Her earlier degrees were from the University of Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is now an author and artist printmaker, whose first book STORYLAND: A New Mythology of Britain (2021), was a Sunday Times Bestseller and whose second book, WILD: Tales from Early Medieval Britain, was published in October 2022.  

Parking is free on the Oval and elsewhere after 6pm.