IMC 2023

IMC 2023 took place from Monday 03 July to Thursday 06 July 2023 and it was our strong intention, coronavirus restrictions permitting, that there was both an in-person and virtual component.

Conference Programme

You can also download the archived PDF programme for IMC 2023 here, or download the IMC 2023 programme in large print here.

Call for Papers: IMC 2023 - Networks & Entanglements

The IMC provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of all aspects of Medieval Studies. Proposals on any topic related to the Middle Ages are welcome, while every year the IMC also chooses a special thematic focus. In 2023 this is ‘Networks and Entanglements’.

‘Networks’ have become a much-employed term in the connected world of the 21st century, and also in scholarship. Historical studies, including medieval studies, have adapted concepts from sociology and digital tools to survey, visualise, and analyse the webs of interaction and relations among individuals, groups, places, artefacts, or polities. These notions emerge from a far-reaching relational approach across disciplines. Networks thus emerge from, or are defined as, multifaceted interdependencies. They highlight linkages between the human and non-human sphere, akin to how medieval people perceived manifold connections between the macro- and the microcosm. ‘Networks’ can address all kinds of relationships, connections, and correlations, their manifestations and structures, dynamics, and limits.

‘Entanglements’ is a term originally employed in studies of materiality to capture mutual dependencies between humans, artefacts, and sites in a fuzzier, but more flexible way. It has a key role in understanding complex connections, correlations, and relationships of diverse groups and cultures. Along similar lines, we invite medievalists of all fields to reflect upon linkages between individuals, groups, communities, and other bodies in various social and intellectual contexts, between humans, localities, and objects, between various species and ecologies, between motifs and iconographies, or between religious ideas, philosophical concepts, and narratives as networks of knowledge production. Especially welcome are attempts to entangle these various spheres, linking disciplines and methods, be they qualitative or quantitative, digital, or non-digital, or coming from archaeology, art history, linguistics, philology, history, or environmental, intellectual, literary, and religious studies.

Themes to be addressed may include, but are not limited to:

Social, economic, or political networks within and between medieval societies
Intellectual communities and networks of knowledge
Religious networks and formations
Spatial networks, architectures, and infrastructures
Ecologies of connected, related, and entangled species
Entanglements through artefacts and communities of practice and consumption
Artistic networks and entangled iconographies and soundscapes
Medieval and modern concepts of connectivity and interdependency
Medieval and modern visualisations of entanglements and networks
Medieval practices of networking
Transnational, transregional, and trans-border networks
Entanglements between the global and the local
Narrative networks, literary and imagined entanglements
Networks, mobilities, circulations, and flows, both real and fictitious
Gendered networks: interconnections, relationships, and entanglements
Network constraints, rules, and social roles
Inclusion and exclusion through networks
Identities, ego-networks, and emotional communities
Network theory and complexity in medieval studies
Digital humanities, linked data, and data ontologies
Networks and networking in medieval scholarship past and present
Ranges, limits, stability, and fragility of networks

The IMC welcomes session and paper proposals submitted in all major languages.

The Special Thematic Strand ‘Networks and Entanglements’ will be co-ordinated by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller (Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien).