Scholar Adam Mahler reflects on their experience with researching and writing their article, "'“Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino': The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest," which appears in Speculum 99.3 (July 2024).

Denis of Portugal’s “Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino” [Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green pine] is the medieval monarch’s most famous cantiga de amigo and is one of the best-known songs of the Galician-Portuguese tradition. Many have read Denis’s “pine song” as an allusion to the Pinhal de Leiria, the pine forest that he planted—or so the story went. Though Portuguese historians and paleobotanists have debunked the Leiria forest’s origin story, a preponderance of documentary evidence from Denis’s reign suggests that the monarch recognized forests as poetically generative sites of political and social tension. "The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest" charts ecocritical and new materialist paths through the “pine songs” of Denis and other Galician-Portuguese troubadours by examining the medieval forest in its cultural, commercial, and poetic dimensions. This article contends that Denis’s pines and his poems are affectively and acoustically co-constituted, concluding that the Galician-Portuguese troubadour tradition, particularly in its woman’s-voice compositions, encodes important ecological knowledge.

For more information about Adam, Denis, and medieval Portugal, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

In this episode, four scholars from the "Conques in the Global World" project discuss their research on the diverse ways in which this French village has been (and is still) historicized, museumified, and "Disneylanded," producing a "living" medieval space in the present. This episode spans over one thousand years of history to interrogate questions related to monasticism, aesthetics, urbanism, nationalism, and colonialism at one of the most beloved sites for medieval scholars.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

In this episode, Amanda Valdés Sánchez addresses the crucial role of Marian devotion in the Castilian domination of the former territory of Al-Andalus and its native Islamic population. She analyzes the Castilian exploitation of the local Islamic cult of Maryam as an essential tool for consolidating the Castilian control over the recently conquered territories of the South and the expansion of the colonial project. Her analysis also reveals the fundamental role of Mary in the articulation of the Andalusian Islamic population’s place in the Castilian colonial regime and its transformation. This is an exploration of the political significance of Marian devotion in the convulsive context of Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain, defined by the birth of the Inquisition, the emergence of new communities of converts to Christianity, from Judaism and Islam, and the progressive racialization of religious ancestry and ethnic differences.

In this sense, Valdéz Sánchez inquires into the political meaning of devotional trends in the changing Castilian religious panorama of the 1500s, analyzing its links to the transformation of royal and ecclesiastic policy and social attitudes towards religious and ethnic diversity, especially regarding the forced conversions of 1501 and 1526, the evolution of the collective perception of Moriscos, and the development of the “Morisco Problem.” Finally, Valdéz Sánchez looks into the Morisco response to the significant changes that characterized 16th-century Spain, analyzing how Morisco communities and elites, facing the threat of expulsion and the erosion of their rights and privileges, used the politically charged figure of Mary as a way to vindicate their place in the emerging Spanish Empire.

For more information on Amanda Valdéz Sánchez and this discussion, visit our website at www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

In the centuries after the Norman Conquest, as many as eight languages were spoken in the British Isles: English, Anglo-Norman, Latin, Norse, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Hebrew. Who spoke these languages, and how did they interact and influence each other? In this episode, Austin Benson discusses the linguistic and literary landscape of multilingual Britain, interviewing Dr. Sara Pons-Sanz at Cardiff University about Old Norse, Dr. Shamma Boyarin at the University of Victoria about Hebrew, and Dr. Georgia Henley at Saint Anselm College about Middle Welsh.

For more information about these speakers and their conversation, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

What goes into editing a special issue of a journal? How does the framework of race and race-thinking inform medieval studies today? What is the role of objectivity in the study of the Middle Ages? Join us for this conversation with the editors of the special issue Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Global Middle Ages, published by Speculum (99.2) in April 2024.

This episode is a collaboration between The Multicultural Middle Ages and Speculum, and it was hosted by Katherine L. Jansen and Jonathan F. Correa-Reyes in conversation with Cord J. Whitaker, Nahir Otaño Gracia, and François-Xavier Fauvelle.

For more information about these speakers and their conversation, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

What is the relationship between so-called built and natural environments as they are represented in medieval literature, and what is the value of thinking about this relationship?

Amy Juarez, Chelsea Keane, and Rebecca Davis discuss the nuanced connections between medieval literary representations of “built” and “natural” environments. Their wide-ranging discussion covers the multiplicity of Middle English words, the form of medieval poetic constructions, and the problematics of disciplinary distinctions.

For more on this discussion, check out the episode notes on our website: multiculturalmiddleages.com.

The producers of The Multicultural Middle Ages podcast sit down to talk about where we've been, what it's been like, and what's to come.

www.multiculturalmiddleages.com

Scholars Thomas Morcom and Helen Gittos reflect on their experiences with researching and writing their article, "The Cerne Giant in its Early Medieval Context," which appears in Speculum 99:1.

The Cerne Abbas giant is a well-known figure cut into the chalk of a hillside in Dorset. Recent archaeological investigation has concluded that it had been cut in the early middle ages. Morcom and Gittos argue that he was originally carved as an image of the classical hero Hercules and that this apparently surprising date makes good historical sense. The landscape context of the giant indicates that he is best explained as marking a muster station for the West Saxon army. Although it is widely believed that the earliest written evidence for the giant dates to the seventeenth century, this study makes the case that he was referred to, albeit implicitly, in the liturgy for St Eadwold, whose relics were at Cerne. By the mid eleventh century, the monks of Cerne were re-interpreting the giant as an image of their saint. This is one of the many ways in which the saint has been re- imagined which helps explain why he has been looked after for so long.

This episode is an installment in a special partnership with Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Each episode is designed to bring you behind the scenes of an article published in an upcoming Speculum issue. This episode is hosted by Katherine L. Jansen and Will Beattie. For more about Thomas, Helen, the Cerne Abbas giant, and this conversation, check out our website at www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.