IMC 2023: Sessions

In our sessions we aim to re-describe how the Middle Ages (c. 800 to c. 1500) dealt with different pasts, more specifically: with artefacts of preceding times. We would like to discuss constructions and conceptions of temporality associated with the practice of using 'old' objects for political and religious purposes. The phenomena we want to address have been discussed under various terms within the disciplines. On the one hand, there are historical conceptions such as renovatio, auctoritas, or translatio. Modern concepts on the other hand, such as copy, quotation, adaptation, reception, or 'retro-style', with which the humanities try to grasp the conscious reflection of the past in their own present, are also part of our considerations. In a DFG funded network we discuss these and other questions since May 2022. To grasp the various comparable phenomena, the network uses the ambivalent notion of the concept of 'gaps' or as we put it here 'seams' in time (Zeitfuge: the German allows a play with the ambivalent meaning of Fuge as both fugue, gap, and connection), since it can be used to describe fractions and yet signify cohesion. We are interested in questions of aesthetic perception and appreciation expressed in the conscious actualisation and constant visibility of the old and the potentiality that lay in the connections and adaptations thus created. These gaps in time are to be analysed in an interdisciplinary approach and placed within their own theoretical framework.