Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College

The inaugural lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College

The inaugural lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College

The inaugural lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Examination Schools

The lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Examination Schools

The lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College

The inaugural lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

While the idea that Henry V made English a state language cannot survive close inspection, English became an established language of culture and (to some extent) a language of record in Britain in the fifteenth century. But francophone continuities persisted in culturally specific ways in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland alongside shifts in the relations between French and English. Some of these are seen in the pioneering teaching of French in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when manuals for French (first seen in thirteenth-century England) began to conceptualize French less as a language of England and more as an adjunct of external relations.  French texts continued to circulate, and were printed in greater numbers than English-language works.  English was a regional language throughout the Middle Ages and French and Latin remained important vectors of communication for Britain’s external relations well into the early modern period. The medieval history of Britain’s French helps challenge any sense of English as ‘naturally’ attaining its current prevalence.

French in Medieval Britain: Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500

Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)

French played a major, though not the only role, in the pervasive multilingualism of British history and culture.  As Britain’s only medieval ‘global’ vernacular, it was also important to a wide range of people for their participation in external theatres of empire, trade, culture, conflict, and crusade.  Displacing the long shadow of nineteenth-century nationalizing conceptions of language and their entrenchment in modern university disciplinary divisions, emerging histories of French in England and increasingly of French in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland offer new ways of understanding language and identity.  These lectures trace francophone medieval Britain in a chronological sequence across its four main centuries, interpolating two thematic lectures on areas especially needing integration into our histories, medieval women and French in Britain, and French Bible translation in medieval England. 

Speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

This lecture has to perform a double act, resisting the nationalizing teleology attached to the late fourteenth century that makes French always already about to die, while acknowledging the vigorous growth of English as a written language of culture (though not an official language of the crown) in the later part of the century.  Accordingly, it anchors the continuing but shifting multilingualism of the fourteenth century by looking forward from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries before turning to some domains of literature, record, and administration to address changes and continuities in the latter half of the century. As some eloquent modern scholarship has shown, the fluctuations of war and truce between English and French contemporaries entangled them more intensely in their shared French vernacular.  English’s expanding domains and the great English-language late medieval literary experimentation and consolidation are neither the outcome of conflict nor evidence of serial monolingualism.

French in Medieval Britain: Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500

Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)

French played a major, though not the only role, in the pervasive multilingualism of British history and culture.  As Britain’s only medieval ‘global’ vernacular, it was also important to a wide range of people for their participation in external theatres of empire, trade, culture, conflict, and crusade.  Displacing the long shadow of nineteenth-century nationalizing conceptions of language and their entrenchment in modern university disciplinary divisions, emerging histories of French in England and increasingly of French in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland offer new ways of understanding language and identity.  These lectures trace francophone medieval Britain in a chronological sequence across its four main centuries, interpolating two thematic lectures on areas especially needing integration into our histories, medieval women and French in Britain, and French Bible translation in medieval England.