IMC 2018: Sessions

Paper -a:
This article explores the little-charted territory of hospitality and host-guest relationships as a way of understanding the meetings between the Christian crusaders and settlers and their heathen or newly converted adversaries in 13th-century Livonia. It demonstrates how a broad focus on the institutions, concepts, and discourses of hospitality can be used to explore the oscillation between confrontational and amicable attitudes on the Baltic frontier, and the consequences these processes had for the formation of local identities. The article addresses also the topics of frontier religious syncretism and the means and motivations of crusading in this age and region and what roles saunas played in all this.

Paper -b:
I examine how two crusading chronicles, the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, and the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle helped lay foundations for the future justification of the 12th-13th-century Christianization and conquest of Livonia and Estonia, on the Latin Christian Baltic frontier, in the context of Latin Christian narrative tradition. The chronicles provide cornerstones for future justification of the Christian claims on the Baltic frontier against the local people, their Orthodox counterparts and each other. These texts were meant to record the events described for posterity and justify them.

Paper -c:
The paper I propose for the 25th International Medieval Congress refers to Forgetting and Oblivion: Natural Processes vs. Damnatio Memoriae. My intention is to study a few extraordinary cases of forgetting of earlier rulers in the chronicles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania written in the 15th and 16th centuries. The purpose of the paper is to emphasise that their omissions in historical annals owed more to a conscious politics of new ruling dynasties than to a fragile nature of human memory. The ultimate aim is to bring understanding of a collective forgetting in the Middle Ages as a largely deliberate, purposeful, and regulated process.