IMC 2025: Sessions
Session 1740: Sounds of Battle, Battle of Sounds: Warfare and the Belliphonic, II
Thursday 10 July 2025, 14:15-15:45
| Sponsor: | DFG Projekt 'Der laute Krieg und die Laute des Krieges: Belliphonie im Mittelalter', Technische Universität Chemnitz |
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| Organiser: | Christoph Pretzer, Professur für Geschichte Europas im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, Technische Universität Chemnitz |
| Moderator/Chair: | Alan V. Murray, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds |
| Paper 1740-a | Unsung Heroes, Untold Wars: Belliphonic Soundscapes in the Kings' Sagas (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Scandinavian, Pagan Religions |
| Paper 1740-b | What Sound Does a City Make When It Falls? (Language: English) Index terms: Crusades, Historiography - Medieval, Military History |
| Paper 1740-c | The Sound of Battle in the Hundred Years War (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Military History |
| Abstract | As an intense sensory experience, pre-modern war was understood and reflected by contemporary observers as an acoustic event. Thus, in order to understand how wars were planned, waged, perceived, and portrayed, is has been established as a productive novel approach to ‘listen’ to medieval warfare: the sounds of weapons, screams, speeches, music, and signals, which created and structured social spaces and narrations organised around war and warfare. These sounds are what is studied under the term ‘the belliphonic’. This session brings together papers exploring the weaponisation and utilisation of sound and its perception for the purposes of warfare focusing on the following topics: • Sonic warfare. • Sound and noise as psychological warfare. • Pragmatic sounds as a means of communication like commands and signals. • Hearing (and not hearing) as analytical tool in warfare. • The purposeful suppression of sound as a tactic. • All other aspects of the belliphonic. |