@ International Medieval Congress
Stables Pub at Weetwood Hall (Leeds).
Title Seals and Sigillography:
What Is Their Future in a Digital Age? - A Round Table Discussion
Date/Time Monday 9 July 2012: 19.30-20.30
Abstract Arranged
in the year that Sigillum, the website for the encouragement of research and
the study of seals, was established, this round table will discuss the future
for the study of seals and sigillography in the digital age. Is sigillography a
study in its own right or is it simply the handmaid of history and art history?
One of the goals of Sigillum is to encourage the use of seal and seal matrices
in the study, teaching and writing of history (of all kinds, including social
history and art history), archaeology, palaeography, archival studies, and
other allied subjects. Whatever its status, how should the study develop in
this digital age? All those interested in seals and seal matrices, of whatever
country and period, are warmly invited.
Session 627
Title Mabillon's Heirs: New
Diplomatics - Young Scholars
Date/Time Tuesday 10 July 2012: 11.15-12.45
Abstract Diplomatic studies, as an old
science, have renewed themselves these last years with the new perspectives
brought by the study of literacy. The famous technical way of studying
documents is not only used for the discrimen veri ac falsi, but also to
bring into new light the practices of writing in particular societies, in
connection with social studies and cultural studies. These two sessions aim to
focus on new projects initiated by young scholars at the beginning of their
research, in order to help them to connect themselves with the scientific
community and to improve their own way of searching.
Session 727
Title Producing, Keeping, and
Reusing Documents: Charters and Cartularies from Northern Iberia, 9th-12th
Century
Date/Time Tuesday 10 July 2012: 14.15-15.45
Abstract The session will address the ways in
which documents were kept, copied and reused in northern Iberia in the period
between the late 9th and the 12th century. The first paper will focus on the
single charters which survive from the earlier end of this period to
investigate how documents were produced and kept before the production of the
later monastic cartularies, while the second and the third paper will discuss
the rationale behind the construction of some of the most significant
cartularies which were compiled in that region between the end of the 11th and
the 12th century.
Session 728
Title Playing with the Middle
Ages: Video Game Medievalisms, I
Date/Time Tuesday 10 July 2012: 14.15-15.45
Abstract Video games are one of the most
popular ways in which the public engages with the Middle Ages today. While they
often may present romanticised or (more often) completely fantastical versions
of the period, these are a vibrant way in which the public comes to know the
Middle Ages today.
Session 828
Title Playing with the Middle
Ages: Video Game Medievalisms, II
Date/Time Tuesday 10 July 2012: 16.30-18.00
Abstract Video games are one of the most
popular ways in which the public engages with the Middle Ages today. While they
often may present romanticised or (more often) completely fantastical versions
of the period, these are a vibrant way in which the public comes to know the
Middle Ages today.
Session 1015
Title Medievalism: Medieval
Rules in Modern Culture and Literature
Date/Time Wednesday 11 July 2012: 09.00-10.30
Abstract There are a lot of everyday rules,
cultural rules and agreements, literary structures and rules, religious orders
and rules of the Middle Aages that have survived up to modern times. But they
have not been the same ones. For instance sometimes only a word still exists
with another meaning or not exactly equivalent meaning, as 'Ritterlichkeit' or
with different meaning 'wib : weib'. We still know some religious customs and
rules but they don't have this high relevance for our everyday life as they had
in the middle ages. For some occasions we still have dress-codes but they are
aimed other events and other groups of people and other dressings. We still
know the lyrics and the epics, the literary texts of the Middle Ages but
nowadays they are told in a different way, sometimes for a different audience
and, of course, they appear in another media. This session will give three
exemples of this turn of rules.
Session 1119
Title 'Ruling' the Script, I:
Playing with the Rule
Date/Time Wednesday 11 July 2012: 11.15-12.45
Abstract Medieval writing, as part of the
interpersonal communication process, had to follow rules that ensure the
legibility and convey the meaning of a text. Latin or vernacular, spoken or
read, charter on parchment, painting, or stained-glass: different functions,
social contexts, and publics lead to variations in the use of scripts during
the Middle Ages. This session explores the representational modes of the text as
an image and the concept of 'liberty' for scripts in regard to the staging of
spoken or vernacular texts in epigraphy (Latin/vernacular) and to the degree of
stability and variation in vernacular scripts.
Session 1303
Title GIS as a Tool for
Understanding Medieval Road Systems
Date/Time Wednesday 11 July 2012: 16.30-18.00
Abstract This session is primarily concerned
with the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in creating a method of
modeling historical roads. Very often, medieval roads cited in historical
sources are no longer existent, and locating a known route could be impossible;
GIS surveys, combined with an extensive analysis of historical sources and
archeological data, can be an excellent tool to reconstruct the outline of a
road, or of a network of roads, offering the historians an invaluable help.
Session 1319
Title 'Ruling' the Script, III:
Measure and Sense
Date/Time Wednesday 11 July 2012: 16.30-18.00
Abstract Medieval writing, as part of the
interpersonal communication process, had to follow rules that ensure the
legibility and convey the meaning of a text. The digital humanities in
palaeography give birth to a renewed quantitative approach, either as
computer-aided palaeography or as digital palaeography with automated
image-analysis softwares. This session explores what can be measured (angles,
inclination, collective scribal profiles, and allographs) and how this new data
can be analysed (databases, factorial analysis, cross-validation). The results
give new insights on the dynamic of script evolution, and how it relates to the
social contexts of written production.
Session 1402
Title 'The Paradox of Medieval
Scotland' Database as a Research Tool - A Round Table Discussion
Date/Time Wednesday 11 July 2012: 19.30-20.30
Abstract 'The
Paradox of Medieval Scotland' database covers all individuals mentioned in the
6014 charters (broadly defined) that survive from the period 1093-1286.
Relationships between individuals, as well as information about them, are
represented as this has been constructed in the documents themselves. The
database, completed towards the end of 2010, has been designed as a research tool
not only for historians of Scotland, but for anyone with an interest in the
process of 'Europeanisation', or who wishes to include a comparative dimension
to their research. The workshop will consist of a brief introduction to the
database, a couple of case studies where it has been used in research, followed
by questions and discussion.
Session 1706
Title Vicissitudes of Cultural
Transfers: Case Studies from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages
Date/Time Thursday 12 July 2012: 14.15-15.45
Abstracts
My paper explores ornamental metalwork mountings
(Lower Saxon and Venetian,12th- through 13th-century) that adorned, mimicked,
and/or otherwise dialogued meaningfully with newly obtained treasury objects of
Islamic and Byzantine origin. While art historians have studied overt ways in
which high-medieval and post-1204 Western treasury objects emulated Islamic and
Byzantine imports (e.g. regarding relic visibility), episodes of subtler
metalwork evocation (eg, filigree patterns and ornament disposition) have yet
to be firmly detailed and analyzed. My paper, broadly contextualized by debates
over ornament-embodied meaning, specifically considers a narrow selection of
Western, Byzantine, and Islamic treasury objects at Halberstadt, San Marco, and
Eichstätt.
In the late
medieval period, no vernacular language text enjoyed as wide circulation as The
Book of Sir John Mandeville. This travel account proposed an image of the
knowable world, mediated by the eyewitness observations of its now infamous
author/narrator. Included in Mandeville's description of diverse regions is a
running commentary about the alphabets in use by exotic peoples. My
investigation into the illustrated manuscripts of the Book conceives of these
alphabets within cartographic and ethnographic systems upon which landscape and
body are mutually constituted. This paper looks at the pictorial evolution of
these alphabets throughout the book's transmission.
Info
Source: DM
