Recycling, Revision, and Relocation in the Middle Ages, session at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 9–12, 2019
The goal of this panel is to continue the lively, ongoing scholarly conversation about the movement and/or circulation of texts, objects, and ideas throughout the Middle Ages.
Contemporary society is not the first to grapple with how to best dispose of and/or benefit from objects, opinions and knowledge that come from distant places or times. The medieval circulation of texts, objects, and ideas has received renewed scholarly attention in recent years, including at a conference we organized at Harvard University in February 2018. The intellectual excitement surrounding this conference has led us to push to continue the conversation at next year’s Congress. Similar threads were not absent from the 2018 congress: panels on manuscript fragments and textual reconstruction shared space with investigations of new digital approaches to archaeology and “Travelers, Transmission, and Transport across Africa, Asia, and Europe” (session 537). The proposed panel for the 2019 Congress would combine these conversations, bringing scholars working on texts together with scholars working on material objects to spark an interdisciplinary conversation.
Some of the questions that might be addressed by our presenters include: what was the perceived utility of revision and reuse – i.e., what could new versions and contexts accomplish that old ones could not? What role did time and/or physical location play in the reception and meaning of events or artifacts? Why and how did medieval works endure and remain relevant in cultural contexts far removed from those in which they first existed? What sociocultural factors account for the popularity of objects and texts in particular places at particular times? Are there hitherto unseen patterns in terms of where reuse occurs and of what?
Session Organizers
Joseph Shack, Harvard University
Hannah Weaver, Harvard University
Session Sponsor
Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies