Medieval Fair Free Lecture Series

Come learn more about the Middle Ages just for the fun of learning! No papers, no tests, just interesting information about life long ago. Two more Medieval Fair Free Lectures will be presented in February and March.

February 17, 2012, 6:30 p.m.

Norman Public Library

Randi Eldevik, Associate Professor of English, Oklahoma State University

"What the Middle Ages knew that the Renaissance forgot: Cultural continuity in the Baltic/North Sea region circa 1000 A.D.”

Professor Randi Eldevik of Oklahoma State University discusses King Canute, who in the first half of the eleventh century ruled a North Sea empire comprising not only Denmark and Norway but also England.  He would have been surprised to know that only five hundred years later, English sailors thought they had just "discovered" a northern sea route to the Slavic countries.  Half-Slavic on his mother's side, Canute would have taken for granted the easy access to Slavic territory that every seafaring man in the North knew about--and England belonged very much to the North.  A bit later in the eleventh century, the Norwegian king and adventurer Harald Hardrada, who had Slavic connections through marriage--his late wife had been a daughter of Jaroslav, ruler of Kiev--found it entirely natural to turn his gaze westward and set his sights on England as an objective of conquest.  In those days, the farther one went toward the Arctic Circle; the closer was the convergence of East and West.  Five hundred years later, lands and seas had not physically changed but cultural alignments had shifted, and the thread of continuity that once existed from Greenland to the Baltic had been broken.

March 9, 2012, 6:30 p.m., Norman Public Library

Steven J. Livesey, Department of the History of Science, The University of Oklahoma

“The Fortunes of Academic Life in the Middle Ages: Jean Buridan and Pierre d’Allouagne.” 

He will say a little about universities in the middle ages, and then most of the talk will be about these two contemporaries from the Pas-de-Calais region in north France, who studied at the University of Paris.

For more information contact Ann Marie Eckart at The Medieval Fair, ameckart@ou.edu, 405-325-8610