We Have to Invent Him: Harley Lyrics, Hereford Maps, and the Life of Roger de Breynton, c.1290-1351

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University Club, Room 212
@ 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Portrait image of Daniel Birkholz in front of book shelves wearing a blue shirt, black jacket, and glasses

Monday Seminar:

Daniel Birkholz

Solmsen Fellow (2009-2010)

English, University of Texas at Austin

 

This interdisciplinary study brings together two major documents of a forgotten period and a backwater region—the Hereford Cathedral Mappamundi [“map of the world”] (c.1305), and British Library Manuscript Harley 2253 (c.1340), a trilingual literary anthology—and reads them alongside a contemporary life that has been reassembled from archival traces. This paper takes as its historical vantage point a mobile and well-connected but now obscure Hereford clerk who knew both map and manuscript well; he appears to have had a custodial relationship to each. His biographical particulars and institutional milieus will be used to animate critical readings of the map and the anthology.

 

Daniel Birkholz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received the President’s Associates Award for Teaching Excellence in 2008. In 2002 he received Pomona College (Claremont, CA)’s Wig Distinguished Professorship Award. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, his M.A. from the University of Toronto, and his B.A. from Carleton College (Northfield, MN). His first book, The King’s Two Maps: Cartography and Culture in Thirteenth-Century England (Routledge, 2004), was awarded the Nebenzahl Prize from the Newberry Library (Chicago)’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography. His essays on cartography and medieval literary history have appeared in New Medieval LiteraturesThe Journal of Medieval and Early Modern StudiesImago MundiStudies in the Age of Chaucer, and The Post Historical Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan).