Last week, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) continued its spring lecture series on new understandings of the Bubonic plague. Kenny Roggenkamp, a Ph.D. candidate in English, gave his talk, “Revelation in a Time of Death: Julian of Norwich’s ‘Shewings’ in a Pandemic Context” last Wednesday in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Conference Room. The talk is part of a series of five public lectures that will be taking place between March 20 and April 17 of this year.

Roggenkamp’s lecture focused on the meaning of mourning within “Shewings,” a recounting of a series of visions that Julian of Norwich, a historical religious figure, experienced seven days of illness in 1373. Roggenkamp used “Shewings” to demonstrate how plague death is used to position Christ as a site of universal mourning, and placed recent scholarship on “Shewings” within a broader context of historical philosophy. Most importantly, Roggenkamp said that his lecture questions the state of grief in the wake of a mass catastrophe.

“How can one grieve when the conditions that inspired grief in the first place seem to be at least recurrent and perhaps permanent?” Roggenkamp said during his lecture.

Marilynn Desmond, distinguished research professor in English and medieval studies, discussed how Roggenkamp’s talk demonstrated the endurance and continued relevance of Julian’s writings on pandemic trauma.

“‘All will be well, all manner of thing will be well,’” Desmond wrote in an email. “This saying [from Julian] became a mantra during [COVID-19] — it was quoted by the BBC, Andrew Cuomo and Pope Francis, among many others. The media’s use of a text that emerged in the aftermath of the Black Plague during the [pandemic] suggests that medieval and modern cultures are more similar than different. But perhaps most importantly, it suggests that the cultural responses to the global pandemic of bubonic plague in the 1340’s foreshadowed some of our responses to the [pandemic].”

Indeed, the lecture series is quite timely. As Roggenkamp’s talk showed, the discussion of grief in a ‘post’ COVID-19 landscape allows the community to consider broader social impacts of the recent global pandemic.

“I think that the variety of angles of approach to a topic like a pandemic is a strong reminder to us in the post-COVID-19 period that we are nowhere close to understanding the implications of a global pandemic,” Roggenkamp wrote in an email. “The debates that still swirl around the origins and transmissions of the Bubonic plague in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries should be a clear, interdisciplinary provocation to keep exploring the scientific and cultural implications of COVID-19.”

Roggenkamp’s lecture opened the floor to questions about how the audience and community experience grief following the pandemic.

“I think that putting [Julian of Norwich’s] writings back into the pandemic context from which they originate helps us see a new way of thinking about grieving mass tragedy and [how] a way [of] acknowledging the universal nature of something like a global pandemic can act as a first step toward a healthy grieving process,” Roggenkamp wrote. “The recurrences of the bubonic plague throughout Julian’s life are, to my mind, precisely the kind of event that opens the space for radically new thought, and Julian’s text are nothing as much as they are absolutely novel innovations in the history of thought in English.”

John Marchiel, a former CEMERS department intern and a senior double-majoring in economics and English, explained that the CEMERS lecture series is a great way for students to expand their horizons.

“I would encourage students to attend CEMERS lectures on topics they are interested in, even if only tangentially,” Marchiel wrote in an email. “In the few years we spend at university, there are so many easily overlooked opportunities to be in the room at the forefront of an academic dialogue that could change a field for decades, and the CEMERS lectures are one of them.”