IMC 2024: Sessions

This comparative session examines how particular landscapes and geographies are historicised in a variety of texts from different regions, illuminating common models and influences, while highlighting important variation in detail and approach. The writings of Paulus Orosius and Isidore of Seville inform the narratives examined which emanate from England, Ireland and regions of central Europe, primarily in the period from the tenth century down to the thirteenth. Linguistically they cross both Latin and vernaculars, but Latin expresses what are in essence local etymologies, and Old English and Middle Irish are used to present a broader worldview, illustrating the entangled nature of language use. In content also, the texts complicate initial assumptions: the subject matter of Dindshenchas Érenn (Knowledge concerning Ireland’s Notable Places), an extensive corpus of landscape literature from medieval Ireland, may be the places of that territory, both real and imagined, but the underlying frame facilitates the linking of the River Boyne to the Tiber of the Romans, and on to the Jordan and Euphrates in the East, as will be explored in the first paper. The materials added to the Old English Orosius are concerned not with England, but are in fact central European, as the second paper will show. The third paper will focus on central Europe and on the pivotal use of etymology in inscribing the past into the physical environment in ways that resonate with the English and Irish material. The three papers speak to each other to offer more complex ideas of what ‘vernacular' languages were and the nature of their relationships with Latin in the central Middle Ages.