IMC 2026: Sessions

This is the second of a group of three sessions that are part of the same event (Temporality and Measurement in Late-Medieval Italy and the Mediterranean. Day of Studies at Leeds IMC 2026)

Below you will find the abstract of the whole event (1) and the abstract specific to this session (2):

(1) General event abstract:

How did the inhabitants of late-medieval Italian cities measure, keep track of, and evaluate the time and space in which they lived? What do their record-keeping practices tell us about their understanding of temporality and spatiality – and how does this compare to other late-medieval societies across the Mediterranean? What was the relationship between time, profit, and fairness? And how did times of spiritual renewal affect not only the cities, but also their surrounding environment? By engaging with these and other questions, the three panels included in this proposal for a full ‘Day of Studies’ seek to make a substantial contribution to the study of medieval temporalities using the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages – within their wider Mediterranean context – as case studies. Central to any understanding and representation of time is measurement: therefore, our main focus will be on how medieval people developed new tools to understand themselves and their society – but also on how, in turn, contemporary record-keeping practices and the survival rate of records affect our own interpretations and understanding of medieval history. Ultimately, our aim is also to bring together, for the first time, the voices of emerging scholars of Italian and Mediterranean medieval history. The long-term goal is to find a home in the Leeds IMC, recurring like the fairs of twelfth-century Champagne: a place to meet, discuss, and listen to new research avenues in our field.

(2) Session Abstract (Part II):

Building on the first session (ID:9199), the thread is continued by the second panel. Having taken stock of the importance of record-keeping and measurement in the society of high and late medieval Italy (and beyond), the three papers in this session look into how contemporaries perceived, explained, and sought to represent the political ‘quality’ of the temporalities they experienced and shaped. Scholars have showed that the Italian cities of the high and late Middle Ages experienced long-term turbulence. However, when we turn to the analysis of the sources – historical narratives, court records, literature, and the arts – we find that contemporaries often had the impression that they could, after all, experience times of stability – or anyway sought to portray idealised images of their society. At the same time, the inhabitants of late-medieval Italian cities distinguished between times of prosperity and times of perceived crisis. So, how did they measure stability? What were, according to them, the causes of instability? And how did political propaganda affect and shape the perception of historical time?