Members of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, both faculty and students, joined with other scholars from the USA and Canada to travel to Notre Dame’s London Center over fall break. In this magnificent location, we hosted a symposium welcoming a group of faculty from Universities throughout the UK and some graduate students as well. Each scholar presented a paper on the topic of the cantor-historian in the Latin Middle Ages. The conversations were lively and the papers were excellent. The role that music and the liturgy has had in the ways that the past was understood is a topic of great interest today, and this interdisciplinary group brought a host of new ideas to the fore in these days of conversation. We were all grateful for this opportunity of collaboration, made possibly by the generosity of Robert Conway through a contribution to the Medieval Institute. The symposium was organized by Margot Fassler and Katie Bugyis who both presented papers. Peter Jeffery also presented a paper, and spent time afterwards in the British Library, whereas Margot Fassler journeyed north to the University of Lancaster to give a paper in the History Department.
A twelfth-century portrait of Osbern of Canterbury, a cantor and a composer of saints’ Lives