IMC 2011: Sessions
Session 1101: The Power of 'Things' in the Anglo-Saxon World
Wednesday 13 July 2011, 11.15-12.45
| Sponsor: | Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, King's College London |
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| Organiser: | James Antonio Paz, School of English, University of Leeds |
| Moderator/Chair: | James Antonio Paz, School of English, University of Leeds |
| Paper 1101-a | The Franks Casket Speaks Back (Language: English) Index terms: Archaeology - Artefacts, Art History - General |
| Paper 1101-b | Disappearing Things: Similar Effects of Opposing Visualities in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Old English, Language and Literature - Middle English |
| Paper 1101-c | Rivers and Tides, Things and Buildings: Meeting and Imagining the Human and Non-Human in Anglo-Saxon England (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Old English |
| Abstract | This session looks at the various ways in which power could accrue around non-human 'things' in Anglo-Saxon literature, art, and culture. On the one hand, swords and helmets, buckles, pectoral crosses, caskets, and illuminated manuscripts could mediate and substantiate power on behalf of their human owners and users. Yet this session also seeks to ask how such things might themselves have power. Can early medieval artifacts, monuments, or buildings influence and alter the world of humans? If so, where does their agency come from, where is it located, where does it gather? The speakers will rethink the relation between the animate and inanimate, the abstract and the material, bodies, things, and ideas. |