Conferences

CALL FOR PAPERS: for the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 11-14, 2011

Please find below a call for papers for a series of sessions to be held at next year’s Leeds International Medieval Congress (11-14 July 2011).
The sessions will be organised under the umbrella of the ‘Rulership in Byzantium, Islam and the West’ strands that have, for the past five years, been running at Leeds, and the working title is:

Rulership in Byzantium, Islam and the west: the material dimension of power.

If you would like to offer a paper, could you please send a short e-mail with a (provisional) title, your name and institutional affiliation, and no later than 25 September 2010, to Björn Weiler ( bkw@aber.ac.uk ).

If you have questions, pleased feel free to contact:

On matters Byzantine Jonathan Shepard (nshepard@easynet.co.uk) and Catherine Holmes (catherine.holmes@univ.ox.ac.uk) On matters Islamic Jo van Steenbergen (jo.vansteenbergen@ugent.be) On matters Latin Björn Weiler (bkw@aber.ac.uk).

For those who have not participated in one of the Leeds sessions before:

While the overarching theme of the strand is comparative, and while we would ask you to structure your paper around the questions outlined below, individual papers do not have to attempt direct comparisons (comparisons are of course welcome, but …). Parallels and differences are meant to emerge during discussion, and by setting alongside each other papers, which, their geographical and cultural distinctiveness notwithstanding, share a common framework of enquiry. So, westerners do not have to pick up classical Arabic just for at Leeds, and those working on Islam do not need to add Latin to their Arabic and their Persian. The aim is to encourage comparisons, and to facilitate a dialogue on themes and methods that transcends sphere-specific conventions and perspectives.

Thanks and all the best,

Björn Weiler
Catherine Holmes
Jonathan Shepard
Jo van Steenbergen

These sessions assess the material dimension of power. This is not an exercise in economic history, but rather in highlighting the role of wealth and of the material context of power in the conduct of medieval politics. We envisage that papers will approach the topic from a variety of angles, loosely connected to three broad, overlapping categories of inquiry. There was, for instance, the role of wealth in politics, its display both internally (to one's subjects) and externally (to neighbours, peers and distant rulers) - embassies, ceremonial, charity, the organising of festivities and feasts, court culture and similar topics would fall into this rubric. Equally significant were the sources of wealth: how did rulers acquire the means to display wealth? Do the sources of wealth tell us something about the political culture of specific spheres - what, for instance, were the sources of imperial power in Byzantium, of the Caliphate in Cairo and Baghdad, of western monarchs, towns and communities (the list of entities can easily be expanded)? Were there rival claimants to these material resources, how did they interact with one another, with those of greater and those of lesser might? A third category of papers may deal with the moral framework of material power: what were the limitations imposed upon both the acquisition and the exercise of material wealth? What was and what was not permissible? Equally, were there expectations as to how wealth should be spent? What were these expectations, how did they change over time, and how were they met in practice?