IMC 2026: Sessions

Paper 1019-a:

Far from serving as mere remnants of a collapsed empire, ruins articulate a distinctly medieval consciousness shaped by historical reflection and the fragility of worldly achievement. These vestiges link Arthurian legend to Rome’s fallen grandeur, creating a dialogue between past empires and the narratives that succeed them. This study examines how Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum, the Old English poem The Ruin, and the ruin-themed imagery of The Wanderer employ structural decay not as background but as an active symbolic presence that evokes the impermanence of cultural power.

Within a worldview that understands time as cyclical, ruins become sites where mortality and historical continuity intersect. In De gestis Britonum, Arthur’s coronation amid Roman remains anchors his kingship in a landscape shaped by imperial rise and decline, while the preservation of Trojan customs gestures toward intangible ruins carried through tradition. The Ruin transforms crumbling stonework into a meditation on fate, while The Wanderer extends this meditation into the realm of collective memory. Through these texts, ruins function as temporal markers that expose patterns of imperial succession. Drawing upon frameworks of temporal loci, symbolic structures, memento mori, and ubi sunt, this analysis reveals medieval preoccupations with human fragility and cultural remembrance.

Paper 1019-b:

The museal space is deeply engrained in modernity, impacted by late 18th century culture, the French Revolution and its aftermath. The modern, public museum emerged alongside a new temporality of disconnection from history, of the fragment and of memory-loss, of re-enactment, preservation and of literally strolling through a past one could somehow experience.

However, things are not that clear-cut, as medieval and early modern proto-museal evolutions reveal. Two cases in point in this respect are the monastery of Saint-Victor in Marseille and the funeral basilica of Saint-Honorat at the paleo-christian gravesite of les Alyscamps in Arles, and its long history. In this paper will be shown, first, how a particular theological, devotional and communal temporality defined these loca martyrium as proto-museal spaces, involving (quasi-)liturgical circumambulation, exhibiting and re-enacting the sacred. These are studied in vitae, like that of Isarn or Hilarius, and in devotional practices surrounding the relic - the material corps, the tomb, the site, the trajectory, and the building as a shell. Second, it will be argued how the transformation/discontinuation into the (modern) museum was equally a matter of evolving temporalities.

Paper 1019-c:

Le Morte Darthur by Sir Thomas Malory is a really interesting text to study as it was written in a time when people experienced a media revolution, a revolution of dimensions comparable to that we experience today. Comparing its two earliest surviving textual witnesses, BL Additional MS 59678 and William Caxton´s Printed Edition, offers us an insight into this transitional period. Contrary to the usual assumption the invention of the printing press did not just replace the production of manuscripts, the two media coexisted for quite a while and some printed editions even imitated manuscript layouts. But how does the layout of a text affect the ways in which we perceive it? This is one of the most important questions I would like to address with my research and one that remains important even in our times.