The Medieval Colloquium of the Department of English and Comparative Literature is excited to host a virtual roundtable with Dr. Erica Weaver (UCLA) this Friday, April 9 at 6:30PM EST. Zoom link may be found here: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/96495206729
Dr. Weaver will present her paper, "Chanting Lips and Wandering Minds: Textual Overfamiliarity and the Psalms." The abstract is as follows:
"It is now a common assertion that we live in an increasingly—and uniquely—distracted world. But this was also a medieval concern, which posed a particular threat to religious life. Indeed, distraction opened the door to all other temptations and invalidated central devotional acts like reading, praying, and reciting the Psalms. At the same time, as the central texts of monastic life, these poems proved particularly susceptible to mental wandering. Monks and nuns would begin their educations by learning the Psalms and would recite all one hundred fifty every week in repeated cycles that risked becoming overly repetitive. I argue that this textual overfamiliarity thus presented a quandary for medieval reading and interpretation: Monks and nuns needed to know texts like the Psalms intimately, but they couldn’t allow their experience of them to become rote. While medieval reading practices and memory arts are usually associated with the need to learn texts by heart, this talk will thus reveal that perfect familiarity posed its own problem, particularly for devotional matter: texts internalized so well that reading them no longer required any active engagement at all."
A note about the ongoing strike: the Medieval Colloquium has decided to proceed with this event, in view of the fact that our meetings -- and especially this event -- primarily benefit graduate students and their education. We are eager to see the university afford its graduate student workers a fair contract.
