§1st session: Wednesday 2nd February (week 3), 4.30-5.30pm UK time (please note the changed venue: Ho Tim Room, China Centre )

Laura Massetti (Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies / University of Oxford) 

The Sun, the Wheel, a Wife and Her Chariot: On the Gender Differentiation of the IE Sun-deity in Vedic, Baltic and Greek

Within the field of Indo-European Studies, the grammatical category of ‘gender’ has long been used to establish a relative chronology of the daughter languages. In this paper, however, I will try to use this same category as a heuristic device to approach the pantheon of different IE peoples.

IE peoples had a Sun-deity whose name is mostly derived from a neuter substantive commonly reconstructed as *séh2u̯l̥-/-n-, cf. Vedic súvar ‘sun’, Go. sauil, dat. sunnin ‘id.’, Lat. sol, Gk. ἥλιος. However, the gender of the Sun-deity fluctuates: some religious and/or mythological traditions (Latvian, Lithuanian, Old Norse, Old High German, Russian) document a She-Sun, others (Old Indic, Greek and Latin) a He-Sun. Additionally, the Vedic pantheon presents a special situation: beside a ‘He-Sun’, Sūrya, there is evidence for a ‘She-Sun’, Sūryā, who is also identified as the Daughter of the ‘He-Sun’ Sūrya.

My phraseological analysis will focus on Sūrya and Sūryā within the Vedic tradition and then benefit from a comparative mythological angle (Baltic, Greek). My study will show that it is possible to reconstruct the origin of the ‘She-Sun’ as the Solar Bride in both Old Indic and Baltic. In Old Indic, although the Sun-deity is a god, the Sun marries as a bride on occasion of the solar wedding. Moreover, in both Old Indic and Baltic the solar bride is closely associated with the Divine Twins (Ved. Aśvinā or Nāsatyā; Latv. Dieva dēli). I propose that this association is crucial for attempting a possible relative chronology of the ‘solar bride.’ Indeed, the development of the imaginary connected with the Divine Twins is a possible terminus post quem for the figure of the ‘She-Sun’ in Vedic and Baltic.


§2nd session: Friday 18th February (week 5), 4.30-5.30pm UK time

Adam Hexley (University of Cambridge)

Hypermetric Lines in Beowulf

I will be focussing on the Old English poem Beowulf, which tells the story of the eponymous Beowulf and his heroic battles against three monsters in his quest to epitomise what it meant to be a ‘hero’ in the early Germanic era. I will be analysing the text from both a metrical and analytic perspective, focussing upon ‘hypermetric’ (i.e. extended) lines, since these lines violate the common metrical structure utilised in the vast majority of Old English (and wider Old Germanic) poetry. I am working on considering these lines in their wider literary context to ascertain whether there are any clear links between them and what purpose they are used for.


§3rd session: Thursday 3rd March (week 7), 4.30-5.30pm UK time

Nora Schmid (University of Oxford)

Legal Paraenesis in Muḥammad’s Farewell Sermon

On the occasion of the pilgrimage to Mecca in the year 10/632, the Islamic Prophet Muḥammad is said to have given a sermon. Different versions of the Farewell Sermon have been preserved in early Islamic historical works, ḥadīth compilations, and literary works. On account of the sermon’s legal and ethical subject matter, I propose to study it as a form of legal paraenesis. The sermon’s links to Qur’anic and late antique legal hortatory rhetoric suggest that this form of legal instruction played an important role in early Islamic times, well before the emergence of the Islamic legal disciplines. I will identify different legal paraenetic elements in the Farewell Sermon and compare them to the Qur’an and late antique sermons. I will also show how Islamic jurists and preachers later entered into competition in the field of legal knowledge formation; the original link between paraenesis and legal instruction was therefore deemphasized.


§4th session: Thursday 10th March (week 8), 4.30-5.30pm UK time

Flaminia Pischedda (University of Oxford)

The Xici zhuan 繫辭傳 (Part A): Textual Structure and Readership

The Xici zhuan 繫辭傳 (Commentary to the Appended Sentences), also called Dazhuan 大傳 (Great Commentary), is included in the commentarial section attached to the Zhouyi 周易 (Zhou Changes), or Yijing 易經 (Classic of Changes), a pre-imperial Chinese divination text. Traditionally attributed to Confucius, the Xici was most likely composed by multiple authors between the end of the 3rd and the 1st century BCE — the earliest extant manuscript version dating to the 168 BCE, retrieved at Mawangdui 馬王堆, Changsha 長沙 in the ‘70s. The received text is divided into part A and B, and it exposes, in a fairly coherent manner, the cosmological and philosophical principles underlying the divinatory practice related to the Zhouyi. The reading group session will focus on part A and will address issues of formal textual structure and readership.