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’.

The 2010 Ford lectures II: the experience of empire

In the second of this year’s Ford lectures, David Bates started where he’d left off in the first one: Orderic Vitalis as a ten-year-old boy being packed off to St-Evroul to begin a new life in that monastery on the southern border of Normandy. Certainly Orderic experience uncertainly in leaving England – he did not know the French dialect spoken by the Normans – but he found kindness within the community. Bates thus cast Orderic as a ‘child of empire’ and a good person with which to begin a lecture focusing on the personal experience of empire and how this might form the basis for the exercise of power.

The 2010 Ford Lectures I: The Normans and empire

This year the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford are being given by Prof. David Bates (UEA and Caen-Basse-Normandie) on the subject of ‘The Normans and Empire’. This series is named after James Ford who left a legacy to endow a lectureship in British history. Thankfully, the rules are flexible enough to encompass a large slice of European history courtesy of David Bates and the Normans. I hope to be able to attend all six and blog about them in due course.

Normans on the edge and an edgy Normanist.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a new project at Lancaster called ‘The Norman Edge‘ and briefly commented on its first symposium. Unfortunately, I missed the second one in the summer due to a combination of circumstances, but did make it to the third one on ‘Colonial mentalities’ last week. Not only was this a very interesting collection of high quality papers, but it left me feeling reinvigorated after a long term. There are very few occasions as an historian when you feel part of something much bigger than your own research, but the Norman Edge is really fostering an idea of scholarly community, and what is more, inclusive of people at all stages of their careers from MA students right the way through to distinguished professorial types.