IMC 2024: Sessions

These sessions are devoted to current scholarship on the Iberian Peninsula and neighboring regions in the medieval period. They have the explicit goal of bringing together contributions from diverse scholarly and national communities, since many different groups are working on the Peninsula, and via these sessions we hope to encourage stronger interaction between these groups. The third session is devoted to textual constructions of Iberian origin. The first paper investigates hagiographic and liturgical texts as to how these reflect conflicts and political changes between c.650 and c.900; it discusses how the same changes affected the veneration of saints. The second paper examines the sermon collection of John of Aragon, archbishop of Toledo, penned in the early fourteenth century. The fact that he was a close associate of the pope engendered political conflicts in his diocese on which his sermons can shed intriguing new light. The third paper is devoted to the Usatges of Barcelona, a collection of customary law, originally penned in Latin but later translated into Old Catalan. It examines these two versions comparatively, in order to show how different languages can affect the exact nature of legal norms.