IMC 2010: Sessions

The three sessions investigate the ways in which the object was presented, treated, described, and received by a medieval audience. Each session will consider a single object, or object type, using different varieties of literary and visual sources, such as Old French epic, courtly romance, etc., and actual objects, or things. More particularly, speakers will consider how the biography of things real, faked, or forged, was built up in the 11th and 12th centuries, studying their transfer from one media into the other. The papers consider two kinds of objects: first, the ones that were called into existence after having been created textually, such as Roland's or Charlemagne's horn, in what may be called a concretion, or precipitation; and second, the ones that were singled out among others thanks to a network of written texts, and which gave in turn an impulse for further stories, such as St Martin's vase in Saint-Maurice Abbey treasure. It is hoped that, through these sessions, we will raise and begin to answer a number of key questions about the process of materialization which emerged in the course of the 11th century, about the status of the object, and about the interplay between textual and concrete entities in the Middle Ages. That should also allows one to question the status of the realia, and meanwhile to write a new chapter of the 'analysis of things' (or Dingforschung).