IMC 2022: Sessions
Session 308: The Wheat and the Chaff: Anarchist Methodologies for Medieval Sources
Monday 4 July 2022, 16.30-18.00
| Sponsor: | Anarchist Approaches to the Middle Ages |
|---|---|
| Organisers: | Anthony McMullin, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds Moritz Wallenborn, School of History, University of Leeds |
| Moderator/Chair: | Moritz Wallenborn, School of History, University of Leeds |
| Paper 308-a | Absentee Landlords, Anarchist Swamps: Community Structure, Organisation, and Economy in Rural English Wetland Communities (Language: English) Index terms: Daily Life, Demography, Economics - Rural, Geography and Settlement Studies |
| Paper 308-b | Anarchical Narrative Emplotting and Historical Reflection in Early Medieval 'Heroic' Verse (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Language and Literature - Old English |
| Paper 308-c | Privileging the Urban Charter of Privilege: Ideology and the Anti-Seigneurial Possibilities of Urban History (Language: English) Index terms: Administration, Archives and Sources, Historiography - Modern Scholarship |
| Abstract | This session applies anarchist approaches to sources for three types of human activity which are currently of interest to medievalists. They are community life in marginal landscapes, the production of vernacular literature, and the granting of urban privileges. The papers identify and explore sources which elude and subvert hierarchically conceived metanarratives, both medieval and modern. Pihuru's wetland communities of eastern England resist authority and contribute to the anarchist category 'Zomia'. Taranu reads Beowulf, Deor, the Franks Casket, and the Nibelungenlied against the Christo-teleological grain. Makleff's documents indicate alternatives concepts of legitimacy in towns of the 13th- and 14th-century Low Countries. The session thus suggests different ways of understanding a medieval world with which we perhaps consider ourselves already quite familiar. |