Medieval Group Seminar

Kaan Gorman (IMS) and Geoffrey Humble (University of Birmingham) will present a joint seminar titled 'Exemplifying the Odd? Dread, Diversion and Doctrine in Strange Tales from East and West'.

This joint seminar will explore ghostly tales from medieval Western Europe and Mongol-era East Asia (13th-14th centuries), interrogating the ways in which boundaries and their crossings portrayed in these texts map out shared and contrasting visions of mental and physical space. By their very nature, tales of the supernatural and the strange sketch out margins of the mundane, the feasible and anomalous, reflecting, reinforcing and sometimes subverting tropes and expectations in the process. Each researcher will present a selection of stories that permit glimpses of real and imagined life beyond those of our more usual categorizations and reconstructions. 

Kaan Gorman, IMS PG researcher, focuses on the relationship between medieval English laity and the evolution of the Carthusian Order. Geoffrey Humble has recently completed a PhD at the University of Birmingham and holds an MA and a Postgraduate Diploma from the University of Leeds; he is currently employed at the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences and is working on a narrative in Chinese-language historiography on the Mongol Empire. 

Tea and biscuits are served at 17:00, with the seminar beginning at 17:30. A full list of Medieval Group events is available here.