Professor Jaumà Gives a Lesson at the Monestir de Sant Cugat

On Friday 28 June members of the Departament of English and German Studies gathered in Sant Cugat for a guided tour of the monastery led by Professor Josep Maria Jaumà, who retired from the department in 2006. A long-time resident of Sant Cugat, Jaumà has spent years studying the ornately carved capitals in the cloister. Religious historians and other scholars have discussed the significance of each capital individually, but Jaumà has developed a theory linking the capitals as part of a broader coherent narrative, pitting the forces of earthly violence and sin against the Christian promise of a better world—a narrative legible, until now, only to the monks that inhabited the monastery. Indeed, Jaumà contends that the difficulty of "reading" the cloister is part of the message: only those who have dedicated themselves to a life of prayer could reveal its truth. Jaumà has dedicated the better part of his own life to teaching and translating literature, and so it is no surprise that he has identified a narrative structure rendered in stone that others have overlooked or ignored. At any rate, this group of English literature and language professors emerged from the monastery fully convinced!