IMC 2026: Sessions

This session is intended to explore the ways in which the literati of the late medieval period approached time and space, and how these approaches were perpetuated in the early modern era. These approaches were deeply rooted in manuscript culture, which laid the foundations for visual modes, chromatic codes, and scribal practices that were neither nullified nor abandoned in the wake of the post-medieval media and scientific revolutions. Indeed, the tools developed by medieval intellectuals continued to be employed by later users. The three papers will examine these processes through examples from various regions of Europe, such as the impact of Ptolemy’s Geography on perceptions of space and the expression of local identities in fifteenth-century Dalmatia, the use of colour in early printed calendars from Cracow, and the intellectual toolbox of a sixteenth-century Lusatian astronomer and scholar. In doing so, they demonstrate the longue durée of medieval communicative practices.