Interdisciplinary Conference "Personal Stories from the Literary Landscapes"
Personal stories in rhetoricized texts (such as letters, poems, or orations) are important source material for the writing of history on a microlevel in medieval studies, as they are often the only detailed accounts of individuals describing the world they lived in that remain to us. More than the large-scale historiographical narratives, they offer us precious glimpses into specific historical moments and what they meant to various individuals. At the same time, writing in the Middle Ages was often highly formalized – a fact that holds especially true for the transmitted texts. When occasional texts entered the manuscript tradition, they were often adapted: they sometimes lost traces of their quotidian character (such as concrete forms of address, names, or even the main ‘message’). What we have today is either what medieval readers considered worthy of preservation for future generations, or what has survived by chance. Hence, every personal text must be read between the poles of documentary evidence (or factuality) and literary work (with a certain degree of fictionalization).
This conference aims to look at texts telling personal stories from the later Middle Ages, taking as its starting point the (formerly) Byzantine territories in the European East and Anatolia. At the end of the twelfth century, the southern Balkans including mainland Greece, the western portions of Anatolia, and the eastern Mediterranean islands had formed a relatively coherent cultural space for many centuries, dominated by the Byzantine Empire, its Orthodox religion, and the Greek language. When in 1204 the Crusaders captured Constantinople, this cultural and political coherence vanished for good. The following centuries saw numerous political subversions and social dislocations in this area, which resulted in an increased cultural entanglement: the proliferation of religious encounters between Christians and Muslims, or between the various Christian churches; the profound reordering of patronage networks; and a new linguistic diversity. By the mid-16th century, political and cultural supremacy had passed definitively from the Byzantines to the Ottoman Empire.
While several scholarly disciplines (such as Byzantine Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Medieval Studies etc.) have worked on individual authors and texts from this period and space, there are as yet only a few endeavours which have treated the area described here as a literary landscape best understood from the perspectives of various linguistic and cultural traditions. This conference thus has a deeply interdisciplinary focus and intends to include papers on a wide range of languages (such as Greek, Ottoman Turkic, Latin, Romance languages, Armenian, and Slavonic). It will investigate how the tumults of the later Middle Ages left their imprint on literary texts and how individual authors shaped their worlds through their writing.
You can download the programme here.
Copyrightvermerk: „Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum, fol. 257r. Tempest in Constantinople in 1490. © Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Rar. 287.“