So, our next engagement as a team will be the FIDEM congress in Porto. The congress gathers around 400-500 medievalists of various sorts and meets every 5 years. FIDEM itself is a network of institutes for medieval studies, with individual as well as institutional membership, and has been running since 1987. Greti sits on the executive board. Jose Mereinhos very kindy and enthusiastically accepted our suggestion that we might present the project in Porto.
We will have three more traditional sesssions, presenting our work on the treatise on light (de luce), as we run up to the submission of various articles and the main edition, and the most recent work on that on the rainbow (de iride). Not perhaps quite as dramatic as Grosseteste’s expanding, and then compressing, universe, but no less fascinating as an example of Grosseteste’s exposition of Aristotle – in this case the Meteorology. There are one or two surprises in the manuscript tradition which Greti will be talking about as well.
Alongside these sessions, we have organised three ’roundtables’, organised around the themes of ‘Modelling’, ‘Translation’ and ‘Diagrams and Words’. These are all issues and areas that we have found lie particularly at the intersections of disciplinary frameworks. We will explore our thinking on these areas, however, in a practical way; offering a workshop-style reading of the treatises on which we are commenting. So, the De luce and the De iride, will form the basis for collaborative, interdisciplinary reading. As when we organise workshops in Durham, these sessions are democratic – all are welcome; we will have copies of the Latin texts and the translations (in whatever state of integration with our analysis); and the aim is to explore the themes through the activity of shared reading, thinking aloud (and in private), and drawing.
Please do be in touch if you would like to know more about the Ordered Universe / Durham Grosseteste Project at Durham. We are able to be there courtesy of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, of one of whose International Network Grants we are the very grateful recipients. The Network is entitled Lost Legacies and a Living Past, and it is precisely on those grounds that we are inspired to continue to work through and present the scientific works of Grosseteste. There will be a second gathering, in October 2013, in Durham. More on that anon!