CMRC and English Celebrate Career of Bella Millett with Colloquium on Medieval Pastoral Care

English, the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, and the University of Southampton will on 10 July 2010 host a one-day colloquium in celebration of Professor Bella Millett.

Bella will retire from the University of Southampton, though certainly not from scholarship, at the end of this session. She has worked at Southampton since graduating from Oxford. During her forty years of service, her hair has got shorter and her dress more sombre, but she has given Southampton: English an international status for its medieval work, through a range of truly ground-breaking studies. Her magnum opus is her two volume edition of Ancrene Wisse for the Early English Text Society, but she continues to strike out on new paths, and to publish challenging and innovative ideas. The colloquium will not be an elegiac one; rather it will be a celebration of Bella's continuing journey, and of the benefits which that journey continues to bring to other scholars. Appropriately, the colloquium will include the finest recent work on medieval traditions of pastoral care from established and emerging talents. This field of study may not be yours, but, as with all of Bella's university courses, you will be able to astonish your friends after only one day!