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Posted by: mchu 8 years, 2 months ago

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On July 1-4, 2013, the International Medieval Congress (IMC) was held at the University of Leeds. Hilde organised and chaired a session on “Comparative Approaches to Elite History” (session 202) on the first day of the Congress. The panel featured papers by R.I. Moore, Hsien-huei Liao, and “Communication and Empire” research associate Julius Morche. The session explored comparative approaches to late medieval elite history focusing on elite responses to crises. R. I. Moore examined how the eleventh century can be seen as a crisis moment in global history by comparing elite responses to crises across Eurasia. Liao Hsien-huei presented findings from a comparative project on strategies for coping with the future in medieval Asia and Europe, focusing in particular on Chinese elite networks and mantic practices.

 

Julius’s paper, entitled “The Political Dimensions of Venetian Merchant Networks”, investigated the role of Venetian mercantile correspondence as a medium of political communication. Through a textual analysis of the commercial letters of a Venetian family coalition that comprised – by means of consanguineous and marital bonds – members of the Dolfin, Bragadin and Morosini families, the paper demonstrated that correspondence between Venetian elites written in different locations of the Venetian trading post empire in the early fifteenth century already featured an avviso-like structure that frequently contained political news in addition to personal and business information. The paper further highlighted the significance of the patrician family as a long-term business arrangement and thus as a principal pillar of political communication networks: large-scale political developments and events were frequently reported in patrician letters, thus providing valuable insights into the perception of macro-political developments from a micro-historical perspective. The sources also bore testament to the significance of elite communication in the political process with respect to the distribution of political offices and the maintenance of political institutions.

 

Apart from Julius’s presentation, I found two other sessions on network analysis and global medieval history particularly interesting. In the session titled “Byzantium in Context, IV: Networks, Complexities and Communications in the (Early) Medieval World” (session 808) panelists discussed applications of tools and concepts of network analysis to various topics of medieval history. Three presentations, covering the Late Antique and Medieval World, demonstrated the potential, problems and explanatory value of some of the most recent applications of computer-based historical network analysis. The presentations highlighted social as well as geographical entanglements across larger regions and their complexity, also in a comparative perspective. One of the most spectacular presentations was by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller from the Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Abteilung Byzanzforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien. In his presentation titled “Medieval Entanglements: Trans-Border Networks in Byzantium and China in Comparison, c. 300-900”, the travel narrative of the 7^th century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang (ca.602-664) and Chinese ceramics in the shipwreck found in Belitung were used as examples in network analyses. The reconstructed networks show the spatial histories of narratives and objects in the medieval world.

 

Another fascinating session was the roundtable discussion titled “Globalising Medieval Studies: Perspectives from a Worldwide Network” (session 1430). The discussants included Elizabeth Tyler (University of York), Simon Forde (CARMEN: Worldwide Medieval Network), Naomi Standen (University of Birmingham), Felicitas Schmieder (FernUniversität Hagen), and Carol Symes (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Interesting points were raised by various discussants, such as the dual meanings of Global Middle Ages: 1) European Middle Ages studied globally; 2) covering world history in the period of the Middle Ages; the necessity to rethink regional boundaries as well as an Eurocentric/modernity approach in studying the global roots of European medieval developments; the possibility of using a non-European third perspective to study European Medieval History, with an aim to enrich European studies from non-European cultures; and the inclusion of Australia, America and Africa in global medieval studies. Equally inspiring were the questions raised by the participants: Is there really a global medieval history? Or should we just simply stick to global history without being restricted to the Middle Ages? Do historians mainly focus on the connectivity around the globe, while archaeologist and sociologists make comparisons?

For details of the IMC congress, see:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/imc2013.html

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