IMC 2026: Sessions

From Western Europe to the Arab world, maps, dream books, religious texts, humanist writings and historiographies reveal how people experienced the present differently in the Middle Ages. They demonstrate how it was shaped, ritualised and cultivated. Through this variety of artefacts, our aim is to highlight the fact that the historical present cannot be viewed merely as a transitional period between the past and the future. Rather, it can be identified as a time and place whose cultural design reveals something about the intersectionality of medieval societies. We use the term 'presentologies' to describe contemporary approaches to the present, tracing how humanists, cartographers, philosophers and chroniclers and other contemporaries thought about, constructed and mobilised their experiences of time in very different ways. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, we explore the interpretive techniques, narrative strategies, and theological models employed by these individuals from the 9th to the 15th century to make the past meaningful, the present understandable, and the future imaginable. What forms of contingency, anticipation, and temporal agency are evident in medieval sources? What insights can such perspectives offer into the (often contentious) politics of time in medieval societies? Against this background, this second of two sessions examines how the present was narrated, mapped, and claimed in late medieval contexts, highlighting the temporal logics of chronicles, cartography, and humanist genealogies.