IMC 2008: Sessions

Following last year's two sessions of the Vienna-based project 'Time Archives', which analysed different aspects of time perception and time theories, this year's papers will concentrate on time as a constituent of social space. Considering different sources such as theological treatises, legal texts, chronicles, literature, homilies, prophecies, the central question will focus on how time and the construction of time concepts serve as categories of order and of perception of history, political structures and individual reality.
The discussion will open with one of the papers dealing with apocalyptic texts, which will address the question of interdependency between contemporary events and their adaptations and presentations in 4th- and 5th-century sources, exploring the importance of prophetic beliefs and the role of prophets for the formation of communities (Kitchen, Pollheimer, Wieser). The first paper on that topic will pursue these questions on the basis of texts of Sulpicius Severus, Augustine, and Jerome (Wieser). Another paper will deal with the organisation of society using legal sources, focusing on the construction of legal groups and their differentiation (Mathisen). The third paper will examine Isidore of Seville's changing depiction of the Visigothic 'conquest' of Spain in the two redactions of his History of the Goths in the light of the theories of political leadership and interaction that were developed in his Etymologies (Wood).
The intellectual Christianisation of the Roman empire is investigated on the basis of Virgil's description of the underworld and its reception in Christian writings (Kaufmann). Continuing the prophetic-apocalyptic discussion this paper works with several sources from the middle decades of the 5th century, and gives a comparison of the works of Hydatius, Sidonius Apollinaris, and the Liber genealogus (Kitchen). Resuming the prophetic discussion of the 9th century, the following paper will analyse the significance of the role as a prophet within the context of communication between Carolingian elites, focussing on homilies as an indication of the relation between political and spiritual sphere (Pollheimer).
The third session opens with the reception of Augustinian concepts of time in Walahfrid Strabo's texts, especially in his Visio Wettini (Corradini). The second paper seeks to explore possible relations between the construction of an Old Testament past, and more specifically of the history of the gens Iudaeorum, and concepts of time in early medieval biblical commentaries. Taking texts by Verecundus of Iunca and Bede as starting points, the problem of accomodating the gentes into salvation history, and of appropriating Israel's history as the past of the Christian ecclesia will be linked to moralistic perceptions of time, sequence, and simultaneity (Heydemann). The last paper thematises aspects of the complex relationship between time and economy. It compares the charters of Charles II, Lothar I, and Louis II in the 840s and focuses on the use of relations to the narrative past to provide the positions of the Carolingian rulers for the future (Kaschke).