A Brief Gesture Towards a History of SMRG
on the Occasion of its
50th Anniversary
by
Lola Sharon Davidson
The really extraordinary thing about the Sydney Medieval and Renaissance Group, to give it its full title, is that it is still here to celebrate its 50th anniversary, given that it has so often been declared moribund and more than one appeal has been made for euthanasia.
The Group had its origins in 1963 with a lunchtime meeting at the University of Sydney. We don’t know who had this bright idea but the meeting was chaired by Professor Russell from English and drew in scholars from French, German, History, Latin, and even one from the city’s other university, the University of New South Wales. Given such enthusiasm, another meeting was scheduled at which, prompted by Keith Sinclair, the Group resolved to draw up a memorandum of bibliographical needs for Medieval Studies within Australia and to present it to the university librarian.
Spurred on by this sense of common purpose, the Group began 1964 with the issue of its first newsletter, consisting of 4 roneoed pages. There was at that stage neither constitution, nor subscriptions, nor a list of members, though there was a name for the new association and it is presumably on this basis that we take 2014 as the 50th. The name was The Sydney University Medieval Group and it was run by a triumvirate of Geoffrey Russell, Audrey Meaney and Ian Jack. The Group numbered around 20 members and had commenced its program of lectures, starting with a symposium on Sir Thomas More.
Membership rapidly soared to 130 which Audrey observed to be “probably nearing the limit of those interested in Medieval Studies in Australia and New Zealand”. The newsletters listed members, their affiliation and their research interests. The talks were reported at length, plans were made for co-ordinating a medieval slide collection and a census was drawn up of available films of medieval interest. A candlelit dinner of medieval delicacies, hosted by Fisher Librarian, Harrison Bryan, and his wife, and largely catered by Sybil Jack was enthusiastically attended and consumed. The recipes, drawn from three fifteenth century manuscripts in the British Library were duly published in the newsletter. Thus in the first year of its operation the Group laid down a firm foundation of scholarly exchange and shared conviviality which it has steadfastly pursued to this day.
Two Medieval Latin reading groups were started, a general one run by Miss Begbie and a more specialised one concentrating on the etymology of Early Medieval Latin conducted by Professor Shipp. The Sydney University Press, founded the previous year, came on board with a declared policy of publishing medieval texts and did actually publish some.
Keith Sinclair’s bibliographical project developed into the formation of an Australian Association for Medieval Studies to organise symposia and possibly even publish a journal. It seemed that our infant Group was destined to be swiftly supplanted, almost strangled at birth! While the Group could hardly oppose such a project in principle, it was wary. Possibly in response to this threat, the Group’s December newsletter announced a somewhat more formal structure for the Group, though it didn’t involve any real change of personnel.
When the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ANZMRS, usually pronounced anzamris) was founded in August 1967, during an AULLA conference at the University of Sydney, the Sydney University Medieval Group generously agreed to cease publication of its own newsletter and to allow the machinery set up for it to be used for the production and distribution of the new association’s newsletter. At the same time, the Group reasserted itself by drawing up a constitution. On 21st September the Sydney University Medieval Group constituted itself formally as the Sydney Medieval and Renaissance Group (SMRG) with the declared object of the promotion of medieval and renaissance studies. Membership was open to staff, postgraduates, and senior undergraduates at the universities of Sydney, New South Wales and Macquarie, ‘and to such other persons as the committee may admit’. An annual subscription was levied, set at 50 cents for 1968.
The Group Newsletter bowed out in 1967 with issue 8 and a mailing list of 247. The first issue of the ANZMRS Bulletin, produced by the Sydney Group, appeared in June 1968. In 1970 the Bulletin began independent publication from Canberra and the SMRG committee duly decided to resurrect its own newsletter. The first issue appeared in January 1972. It was christened Studium: The Record of the Sydney Medieval and Renaissance Group and boasted a handsome orange cardboard cover ornamented with a line drawing after a medieval illustration depicting God as the divine architect measuring the universe with a compass. The cover was felt to be particularly appropriate because it symbolised the importance of studium in the creation and understanding of the phenomenal world. The editor concluded his lengthy exposition of the subject: “Thus studium is one of the keys to an understanding of the world that was created by studium”.
Yes, you guessed it. Studium Volume 1 was edited by John Oastler Ward, a role he continued, both alone and with assistance, for the entire life of the publication. Vol. 2 followed perhaps a little too quickly after, for the editor observed: “There have been no replies to any of the projects/ideas put forward in Studium 1.” Nevertheless, the committee persisted with its planning and announced that they would probably do another Summer School and that Betsy Taylor would be staging more medieval plays.
The March 1973 issue was fat and varied with an informative progress, or possibly non-progress, report which deserves quoting in full for the light it throws on the functioning of the Group.
The second year of Studium. Many of the directions offered in Studium no. 1 have not been taken up to any extent: little news came in for reporting, no lists of slides have been received, no details of recordings of medieval and Renaissance music have been sent to us, there is nothing to report on the microfilm project (possibly because the Editor never got round to finishing his own list!), no notes on libraries have we received, nor any lists of Graduate or Undergraduate work in progress. These will continue to be proceeded with as time/information becomes available. One or two items sent to us by members we regret to have been unable to issue. It does help if you have your material typed out well when you send it in. In other respects we shall continue our 1972 policy: as material comes to hand we will issue it, probably with a preference for fewer, larger numbers.
Undiscouraged by the unresponsiveness and inefficiency of its members, the SMRG management persevered in drawing up an exciting array of activities for the forthcoming year. In first term there would be a series of lectures on medieval technology and in third term a series on Southern French culture and the origins of Courtly Love. In association with this, Max Walkley (French, Sydney) was launching a lunchtime reading group in Provençal. For second term, Sybil Jack was organising a production of Respublicae, an interlude for Christmas 1553 attributed to Nicholas Udall. Medieval Music Record Evenings would continue, as would the Latin Reading Class, now run by John Ward and Rodney Thompson.
That year also saw the departure of one of the Group’s original members, Vincent Megaw, who moved on to the University of Leicester. An enthusiastic participant as well as the founding chairman of SMRG, he had been instrumental in drafting its constitution and was a tireless supporter of the medieval plays which had proved not only popular but essential to the financial welfare of the Group. His large and disparate range of acquaintance made him ideally suited for the role of Publicity Officer, so much so that he was its only known incumbent.
It was a little over a year before the next volume of Studium appeared in April 1974 under the sole editorship of John. John defended the change in frequency by citing the labouriousness of the production process.The roneoing, collating, binding and posting of the issues was a task best undertaken by a team and frequent appeals soon lead to a lack of willing volunteers. Meanwhile the editor entered yet another plea for members to list their slides, observing in words that would prove prophetic “universities are increasingly stressing visual aids in teaching” and reminding members that many of the slides had been produced by the Illustrations Departments at the various universities. Looking forward, the year had begun with a number of musical concerts. The Latin and Provençal reading groups were continuing. Betsy Taylor had returned invigorated from sabbatical in England with plans to put on ‘Joseph’s Trouble’, ‘The Three Kings’ and ‘Flight into Egypt’ from the York Mystery Cycle and ‘First Shepherd’s Play’ from the Towneley Cycle. These would be staged in the Great Hall at Sydney by the Renaissance Players. A like-minded group, the University of Queensland Medieval and Renaissance Society, notified SMRG of its projected lectures, for those who happened to be visiting the northern capital. Continuing the tradition of light relief begun in the previous issue, the section concluded with a small selection of those perennial academic favourites, examination howlers.
SMRG held its first Summer School in Medieval Studies from 15th to 26th January 1973 at the University of Sydney. The ten day course ran over two weeks for 6 hours a day and covered a wide range of medieval themes. It concluded on the final night with a Grand Medieval Feast organised by Diane Speed in the cellar of the Sydney University Union and attended by ‘some hundred and forty lords and ladies’. The suckling pigs, fat fowls, fair fishes, sweetmeats and fermented liquors had attracted rather more than the 78 students and 23 lecturers attending the School itself. The Renaissance Players under the direction of Winsome Evans provided musical accompaniment and the audience was also treated to a medieval play, the (translated) Latin comedy, Dulcitius, by the German nun Hrostvitha of Gandersheim, with students playing the triumphantly martyred virgins and John O. Ward as the ineffectual Emperor Diocletian. SMRG management was happy and relieved to emerge in profit from the undertaking, with the sum of $138.22 and promptly began planning a repeat.
1973 represented a new height in the Group’s organization, possibly due to the fact that it now had Sybil Jack at the helm, with the result that the relevant Studium was able to feature the Treasurer’s Report, the Secretary’s Report and the minutes of the AGM. Thanks to the Summer School, it had been a profitable year, culminating in funds $629.26, a sum deemed so exorbitant that Audrey Meaney suggested that such irresponsible accumulation should be avoided in future.
The Group had by now accepted the inevitable pronunciation of its acronym to the extent that the Secretary referred to it as SMERG in his report, presumably taking advantage of the e in Medieval and wishing to avoid the logical but uneuphonious SMARG (doubtless lest it be confused with the evil dragon in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings). The Committee organised 8 public lectures which were attended by 27 people (medieval mining), 17 (maps and ship-building) and 15 (chemical technology), 12 (pageant wagons), 7 (literary merits of Respublicae), 9 (the Wakefield Cycle), 20 (apocalypse). The talks on Irish High Crosses and the laws of Henry I of England were held at members’ homes and the numbers were not recorded. SMRG members had also given and attended talks on medieval themes at a variety of other institutions including Macquarie University whose medievalists had begun organising a lunch-time talk once a term. John Ward observed:
A contributing factor in the poor or patchy attendance at our special lectures may be the rather forbidding aspect of a university lecture room at 8 p.m. in winter, usually with no liquid refreshment and always with no supper. Another general point to be borne in mind is the fragmented and specialist nature of academic life at over-large bureaucratic universities such as Sydney. Whatever the cause, the fact now is that attendance at our regular lectures is down to a scattering of interested undergraduates and a few junior or middling staff members.
Perhaps continuing a mood of disenchantment, John announced bluntly, “The University of N.S.W. has no news to report”. Conal Condren was keeping the SMERG flag flying there and was to be joined by Margaret Dorrell who was moving from Sydney. At Macquarie University, Alanna Emmett had begun a reading class in medieval Latin, with some success. Meanwhile at Sydney great plans were afoot to launch a Graduate Course in Medieval Studies. A committee to advance this project was mooted but since the membership would have been identical to that of the SMRG committee it was judged sensible to delegate the task to the existing body.
The medieval community was going through various changes. Graeme Ross, John Pryor and Michael Bennett joined History at Sydney. Peter Goodall arrived to lecture in Early English at Macquarie; Mark Pritchard joined Fine Arts at Sydney; Dr Shboul came from Jordan to Semitic Studies at Sydney, accompanied by his wife Linda, whose focus was Islamic culture and Arab history; and Dr Michael Jeffreys and Mrs Elizabeth Jeffreys began teaching modern (and some medieval) Greek at Sydney. Elizabeth Jeffreys promptly began setting up an Australian Association of Byzantinists with a conference planned for May 1978. There had, of course, been departures as well. Graham Ross had left the History Department at Sydney to move to Queensland as a school teacher and Michael Bennett had moved to the University of Tasmania where Rodney Thompson was by now establishing a strong medieval base and where they were joined by John Scott, having completed his Sydney M.A. on William of Malmesbury’s Antiquities of Glastonbury.
Sydney’s M.A. in Medieval Studies materialised but had difficulty in he minimum 5 students despite the rare opportunity it offered to transcend the fragmentation that modern academic specialisation inflicts upon the culture of the period. Macquarie University was continuing a similar M.A. with only two students, under the guidance of Audrey Meaney. Nevertheless, Sydney medieval forces had been boosted yet again by the addition of Lynette Olsen to the History Department. Old students continued to come and go.
SMRG’s finances were in a healthy condition because it had held yet another Summer School. Organised by John Pryor, it ran for a week in January 1977 at Women’s College and attracted close to 100 students. It concluded with the usual Friday night festivities including two farces, music, dancing and medieval food arranged by Illma Sheratt and Stella St.Clair Harris. The editor solicited photos and comments for future events. There is no reason to believe either were forthcoming. Max Walkely was still running his popular lunchtime Provencal classes and the Latin Reading Class was meeting on Thursday evenings in John Ward’s office to read the Vulgate, presumably the most read of all Latin texts during the Middle Ages. Possibly emboldened by this success, John Ward and John Pryor proposed a Latin Palaeography Class tracing the different types of Latin script from the first to the fifteenth centuries A.D., an ambitious project, not for the faint-hearted or the visually challenged. A trial version had already been under way for some months. SMRG’s main activities for the year were a 7 part series of talks on ‘The British Isles in the Anglo-Saxon Period’.
The 1977 Annual General Meeting was a lively one. Although the Group’s activities seem much as they had always been, they failed to satisfy the aspirations of all members. The outgoing Chairman was particularly withering. John Pryor had presided for two years as Chairman of SMRG and in a scathing farewell address he made it clear that he considered the association to be in serious trouble.
SMRG’s paid-up membership (either 1976 or 1977) currently totals 81. This may seem a healthy figure but, unfortunately, like the Holy Roman Empire, its apparent numerical superiority is entirely negated by its internal division and weakness. Of the 81, 8 do not live in Sydney. Of the remaining 73, 33 are academics and 40 either students or members of the public.
Attendance at 1 or more meetings this year: Academics 14
(to the best of my knowledge) Non-academics 6
That means that we may expect 56% of our academic membership and 85% of our non-academic membership to attend nothing at all - ever. The point of retaining such members in the Group escapes me.
Moreover, even of those members that do occasionally attend, by far the great majority attend only those functions which lie within the special area of their competence, be that medieval Greek, Arabic, Commerce, French, Latin culture, Booze or Women (or Men). Those that have demonstrated a genuine interest in all aspects of medieval life and thought by their attendance, number I think less than half a dozen. There may be more that genuinely have a broad interest, but if they have it, they have not demonstrated it. My conclusion is that any genuine interest in Medieval Studies as a general study is virtually non-existent. For that reason I believe that the M.A. programmes in Medieval Studies at Sydney and Macquarie have a snowball’s chance in Hell of succeeding.
Pryor concluded by thanking Michael Nelson for his tireless efforts as Secretary, Ian and Sybil Jack for looking after the accounts, and John Ward for editing Studium and lending the Group what little intellectual calibre it possessed. Pryor expressed the view that John Ward was the only person who could breathe life into SMRG again and should accordingly be the next Chairman. John Ward refused.
John Ward did, however, as host of the occasion and devoted rhetorician, feel it incumbent upon him to provide a response to the retiring Chairman’s lament. Once order had been restored, he praised John Pryor’s administration and assured him that SMRG’s ailing state had nothing at all to do with him and that as far as he could remember SMRG had always been moribund. He continued:
Indeed, if anything, it was a good deal more lively now than it had been when he himself joined - then attendance at special lectures was often down to the secretary and the passing janitor. However insulted, lecturers continued to be found, and some very successful small meetings had been had from time to time in private houses. Indeed, memories of the few gigantic block-busting box office successes (John James on Architecture) suggested that small meetings were preferable.
He went on to refute the charge of colonial cringe based on the higher attendance at the talks of overseas lecturers but conceded that a more popular approach might be more appropriate than attempts to replicate the atmosphere of a European learned academy. In declining the nomination to Chairman, he suggested that if past chairmen were being asked to serve again it might be sensible to draw up a list and start repeating from the beginning. He himself had, in any case, been a SMRG office-holder for 7 or 8 years continuously.
The evening concluded with a calming if necessarily anti-climactic paper by Michael Nelson on ‘The German enthusiasm for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the early nineteenth century’, giving those present scope to ponder in post-talk discussion whether it was greater or less than that of twentieth century Australia.
Studium ceased publication in 1981 amidst intentions, unrealised to this day, of launching a more prestigious translation series, to be entitled unimaginatively but accurately, Sydney University Medieval Texts in Translation or SUMTIT. It’s not that the translations were never done. That was the easy bit. It was just that no one could ever get around to publishing them. However from the point of view of our little Group, the consequence was that there was hereafter no continuous record of its activities, just large piles of odd bits of paper, which I am still sifting through. Most should clearly be thrown out.
When Kendall took over as Chairperson, sometime around 2000, she was appalled to discover that the Group appeared to have no records, not even lists of past officers, indeed nothing beyond a list of current members. She hoped herself to write a history of SMRG but I fear that her appeals for information met the same lack of response as all previous appeals seem to have met.
On 1st December 2000 an Extraordinary General Meeting was held at the home of John and Gail Ward. While we have a record of some 8 apologies we have only an indirect indication of those who actually attended. The Group was undergoing a crisis of identity following the establishment of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney. Kendall was striving energetically to breathe new life into it. She had succeeded in attracting some new members through ads in local newspapers but although the Group boasted some 79 paid up members, few seemed interested in attending its events. Readers of this history will be aware that this was not a new problem. The motions put forward for the EGM reflected the increasing complexity of the modern world, as the association faced problems of insurance, taxation and the digital revolution. Was SMRG to take out Public Liability Insurance, register as a charity or become an incorporated society? In the absence of greater member participation it was up to the Committee to decide. Jonathan Marshall was appointed SMRG’s first Web Officer, presaging his scholastic shift from medieval alchemy to internet culture. The AGM was moved to April, hence our presence here tonight, and the subscription was increased to $15, $8 concession with a donation of $2 for members and $5 for non-members per event, essentially to cover food and drink. Meetings were then held on the third Tuesday of each month in the homes of members, hence the insurance problem.
After the meeting and before the Christmas party proper there was a performance of the Noah’s Flood play from the Chester cycle. Even before the event, some anxiety was expressed as to whether there would be any audience, given that almost all the active members of SMRG were involved in the production itself. The play was produced by Helen Kaye-Watts who also served as the narrator. John Ward was cast as God, Jonathan Marshall played Noah, Stella was Noah’s wife, Luke was Shem, Diana was Shem’s wife, Nicholas Alexandrou played Ham, Barbara Munday was Ham’s wife, Japheth was played by Matthew Glozier, Japheth’s wife by Jan Scott and the Gossip who failed to make it onto the Ark by Avril Craighead. John Rosauer was responsible for the special effects.
Whatever the size of the audience, those present enjoyed themselves sufficiently to plan another for the following year. The play chosen was by Hrostwitha of Gandersheim and was usually known as Dulcitius but on this occasion was retitled The Three Virgin Martyrs and a Chicken. The participants were much the same as the previous year. We know from a hand-written note by John Ward that the only non-actors to attend the 2001 Christmas party were the hostess, Gail, Sybil’s husband, Ernest, Catherine’s husband, Dan, Barbara Munday, Lyn and Michael. It was, of course, a difficult time of year. The usual attendance at meetings was estimated as somewhere between 12 and 15.
And so we find ourselves here to tonight, rejoicing in the fact that 50 years of dogged determination by a tiny core of devotees has continued to bring to a fluctuating membership, often noted more for its good intentions than its regular attendance, a steady program of learned talks, entertaining plays and convivial feasting in celebration of our favourite period. Long may we continue!
Lola Sharon Davidson