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IMC 2019: Sessions

Session 204: Writing as Plan B: Creativity in Exile

Monday 1 July 2019, 14.15-15.45

Sponsor:Centre for Medieval Literature, Syddansk Universitet, Odense / University of York
Organiser:Réka Forrai, Centre for Medieval Literature, Syddansk Universitet, Odense
Moderator/Chair:Lars Boje Mortensen, Institut for Historie, Syddansk Universitet, Odense
Paper 204-aIsaac Comnenus's 'Poem to the Virgin': Exile as an Occasion for Self-Fashioning and Self-Propaganda in 12th-Century Byzantium
(Language: English)
Valeria Flavia Lovato, Centre for Medieval Literature, Syddansk Universitet, Odense
Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Language and Literature - Greek, Mentalities, Rhetoric
Paper 204-bUnlikely Authors: The Latin East as a Place for Literary Mobility
(Language: English)
Julian J. T. Yolles, Department of Classics, Harvard University
Index terms: Crusades, Language and Literature - Latin, Mentalities, Politics and Diplomacy
Paper 204-cExiled into Another Language: Displaced Translators in the Middle Ages
(Language: English)
Réka Forrai, Centre for Medieval Literature, Syddansk Universitet, Odense
Index terms: Language and Literature - Greek, Language and Literature - Latin, Politics and Diplomacy
Paper 204-dHistoriography between Establishment and Exile, c. 1100-1300
(Language: English)
Lars Boje Mortensen, Institut for Historie, Syddansk Universitet, Odense
Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Latin, Politics and Diplomacy
Abstract

The session plans to follow Latin and Greek authors from 1100 to 1500 into their exile in order to shed light on the relationship between creativity and displacement. A significant amount of groundbreaking texts spring from periods of exile. The most canonical work of the European Middle Ages, Dante's Divina Commedia, would not have been written but for the exile of the author. Involuntary, unplanned, and planned displacement of people may account for important undiscovered trends in medieval European literature. Writing (or translating) becomes a survival strategy even for those who had not authored anything else before. It is also a means to tap into one's own literary tradition, which through exile, (and possible loss of libraries, contacts) suddenly became unavailable or hard to reach.