IMC Leeds 2010 report

After a couple of nights in Whitley Bay with my sister’s family, it was on to Leeds for the annual International Medieval Congress. This was, in fact, the ninth congress I’d attended, which makes me feel rather old. This year can be summed up simply as ‘good papers, good beer and good company’.

For reasons best known to ourselves and following on from last year’s round table, a couple of colleagues and myself organised a strand on ‘Journeying along medieval routes’. So carried away did we get that this strand comprised four sessions and a round table. I think this may well have to wait for another post, but it is sufficient to say at this point that the sessions were a) well attended, b) exceptionally good and c) very coherent. This did mean, however, that our Leeds was incredibly pressured this year and there was little time to catch up with friends from elsewhere. Some I managed a few words with, others I could only hail from a distance.

I can’t say anything about Monday as I didn’t get there until tea-time. Tuesday’s highlight was the first session of the day ‘Travelling through maps: recreating townscapes’. Carly Deering (Liverpool) 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 this session was very much on using technology to help us recreate (though I have problems with that term) medieval townscapes. Carly’s work used ‘Sketchup‘, software that is freely available through Google, to map various zones in Winchester to understand the working and living spaces of various craft groups, particularly the butchers. As she pointed out, in this sphere, medievalists could learn a lot from the gaming industry which is far ahead of us in conceptualising historic landscapes. She offered the use of such technology as a means of getting round the problem of the anecdotal nature of much evidence regarding the use of space, as it allows zones to be plotted. The second paper, given by Gareth Dean, focused on York and the difficulty presented by archaeological mapping (by trench) which looks at fixed events. He is involved in using GIS plotting of older sites (both features and artefacts to understand changes in the townscape that may be lost through a concentration on trenches. His case study was the lost church of St Benedict near Swinegate. Careful plotting revealed that previous assumptions about the antiquity of the route were wrong. What was thought to be an Anglo-Scandinavian road was in fact much later. The final paper was given by Tim Bisschops on Antwerp who was using title deeds to gain spatial data for GIS plotting. Again, much use was made of Google Earth and other representational technologies. Discussion after the papers focused on the viability of technology and the problem of archiving electronic data. There was little discussion of how useful these models are as tools for thinking: do they constrain as much as elucidate?

I shall say nothing about the second session of the day, except to say I always go to one bad session at Leeds and that was it.

Given the task ahead of us all on Wednesday (a very long journey from the top of Norway to Jerusalem and beyond), I took Tuesday afternoon off for looking at the books and various meetings prior to going to the ‘Maps and Mapping’ round table. This was stuffed with very eminent people, including Felicitas Schmieder,  Patrick Dalche and Keith Lilley. The idea was to consider how maps are defined/conceived, what logic they use, what their character is/was and how they are produced and consumed. The panel also wished to consider the differences between historical maps and those we produce as historians, geographers, archaeologists, art historians and cartographers. The problem with round tables is that sometimes the participants do get tied up in knots and, to a certain extent, this is what happened. It was also very formal with limited audience participation. In terms of the panel, the best point was made by Prof. Dalche who talked more about representations of space than ‘maps’. There was little consideration of the idea that maps didn’t have to be purely pictorial. In an intervention from the floor, Ryan Lavelle pointed out that describing boundaries in a charter was not a means of avoiding drawing a map, but part of the same mental world, i.e, they’re maps!

Wednesday was taken up with a very long journey. More later (perhaps).

On Thursday, I returned to the more familiar Norman and Anglo-Norman world. In a session on charters, David Bates expanded and developed some of the material he discussed in the Ford lectures (discussed elsewhere in this blog). By using two charters for the abbey of Montebourg in Normandy detailing transfers and donations of land by Adeliza, widow of Richard de Redvers, David constructed a narrative of cross-channel operations, the dynamism of empire, the importance of place and family memory and the importance of women and notions of gender in the exercise of power. Unlike the Ford lectures, there was no Clock of Doom and everything was far more relaxed.

My final task at Leeds was to chair a session on ‘Perceptions of the past in thirteenth-century Normandy’. This I was very glad to do for a number of reasons, not least of all being the fact that all the speakers (plus me) were current or former students of Elisabeth van Houts. There was a very real sense of continuing a tradition of scholarship. Greg Fedorenko (who has no website, but plays in various Cambridge brass bands as well as being a medievalist) gave us a lively paper on ‘Richard the Lionheart: Norman hero’ in the vernacular continuations of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum. As he was keen to point out, there was ‘no qualifying question mark’ in the title. As well as the assessment of Richard, who was seen almost exclusively as duke of Normandy seen against the French as the primary enemy, there was a great deal of untangling of manuscript traditions. Alison Alexander (who will be speaking at Battle later this month) picked up where Greg left off, talking about the importance of 1204 in the Norman annals. The loss of Normandy was a significant event and the annals of Rouen, Fecamp and Jumieges reflected this at a time when other monasteries and cathedrals were not updating their records. King John’s absence, a wary attitude to the incoming French and the importance of localised military activity were all recurrent themes. The final paper was given by Elma Brenner on the memorial  book of the hospital of La Madeleine in Rouen. Although this book only survives as a fifteenth-century copy, it does contain earlier material. Elma used this to look at processes of memorialisation through gift-giving and pious acts. She stressed the importance of beds, a very personal and very useful gift, as a means of close association with the sick. This session had everything from grand sweeps to intimate detail and it was a shame that a) it was timetabled against the second Anglo-Norman charters session and b) last thing as it deserved a far bigger audience.

Leeds this year as a great conference. Although the weather was pretty horrible (including a large thunderstorm on the Wednesday night that caused the rooms to leak in Boddington) and the timetabling hectic, it was very productive. Next year though, I am resolved to have a year off. I may appear in my journal guise, but my brain definitely needs a rest.

Advertisement