Celebrating Excess? Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Court, Consumption and Authority, Session at 23rd International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 4–7, 2016

The International Medieval Congress, an annual conference running continuously since 1994, is the biggest humanities event in Europe, attracting over 2000 delegates in 2014. It provides a unique forum for sharing and comparing approaches across a wealth of disciplines. The 2016 theme is ‘Food, Feast & Famine.’ Taking the feast as a starting point, these panels interrogate medieval writers’ assessments of rulership and authority via the discussion of consumption and ostentation in court settings.

By no means restricted to the luxury register of feast and plenty, we invite explorations of the tensions between distributive and extractive functions in court, and their relation to ideal, normative and transgressive behaviour in monarchs, factions, officials, rich and poor. This will illuminate contemporary characterisations of the court as a setting for the playing out of rule and authority as participation in, and focus of, economic flows, and the interrelation of these with the performance of authority and rulers’, retinues’, bureaucracies’ and populations’ places in the divine and human order.

We welcome contributions on courts across methodologies and disciplines, and across and beyond Europe’s fuzzy bounds - the panels build on the growing presence at Leeds of scholars working on geographical and cultural contexts across Eurasia to offer further opportunities for fruitful exchange and cross-cultural comparison.

Organizers
Sami Kalliosaari, University of Leeds
Geoff Humble, University of Birmingham