The IMC 2006 seemed to live up to its billing as the biggest ever this year if the breakfast queues were anything to go by. Certainly there were people from all over the world and many and various sessions, but was it any good?
With conferences of this type that have lots of parallel sessions going on at the same time, in this case between 25 and 27, the quality is always going to be variable. At Leeds, however, I am always surprised at just how few bad sessions there are, either that or I have been tremendously lucky and avoided most of them. Having said that, there are always the really bad papers that stick in the memory. This year there were several sessions that struck me as being particularly good.
The last two slots yesterday included two sessions on medieval hospitals in urban contexts, which brought together scholars from the UK, Germany, Sweden and Croatia. All of them had actually thought beyond the institutions and were in the main interdisciplinary in their approach. There was a particularly interesting paper given by a graduate student from Goldsmiths, London on St John’s Winchester, which considered the hospital from a spatial perspective. A good discussion was generated – an excellent way of ending the conference.
Wednesday was a similarly good day for sessions with two excellent papers dealing with archaeological approaches to emotion and gesture in burial. I also had the opportunity to attend three papers on heresy. This is an area I found myself teaching by accident this past academic year and it was great to hear cutting edge thinking on a topic that isn’t directly related to my research. It was also essential from a teaching point of view to hear the current debates straight from those shaping it.
From the point of view of this blog, Roach’s paper in the heresy session was particularly interesting. In it, he explained how he used network theory as a basis on which to interpret the inquisitorial records from Languedoc (made famous by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou) and to look at Cathar networks. Occasionally scientific theories do cross over into the humanities, often accompanied by complaints by the scientists that sociologist, literary theorists and so on have misunderstood them, for example, the use of relativity by post-modernists. In this case, the historian concerned seemed to have a very good understanding of the theory from what I could follow, and it seemed an eminently sensible way of interpreting historical evidence. I wonder what Rievers thinks.
[...] presented some of her work on mapping late medieval Winchester. I’d heard her speak before on the hospital of St John, so I was intrigued to see how her work has come on. The emphasis on [...]