My first keynote address was about frontiers (of course)

As warned, this is a slight post, which I hope to make up for tomorrow. Its slightness is because after the previous post from my academic life of the past, I looked at what was next and discovered it was something which, for professional reasons, I’d already written about, and what that was a postgraduate conference that happened in May 2018 entitled Boundaries and Frontiers in the Middle Ages, at the University of Nottingham.

Cover image of the conference materials, apparently a colourised version of a woodcut of the city of Constantinople from the 1494 Nuremberg Chronicle; thanks to Gary Vellenzer for the attribution!

Now, you may reasonably ask why I was interested in a postgraduate conference, being rather far in years from that status by now, and indeed, I usually avoid them since I assume that they are in some sense supposed to be safe space where scary senior academics don’t turn up and frighten people. (As a phenomenon, they rather postdate my own postgraduate studies, but even then I figured that if one had to pay for a conference, one should at least pay to meet people who could help you up, so I stuck to the full-strength ones.) But in this case I’m very glad I did go, and the reasons I was interested were threefold. Firstly, frontiers, obviously. Secondly, one of the organisers was now-Dr Marco Panato, who had spoken in my own frontiers conference but a month before. And thirdly, they’d asked me to deliver the keynote…

Now, as you can deduce, I had never been asked to be a keynote speaker before, and I have to say, they made the experience an extremely good one. But! I did already write about this, by way of generating material for the Rethinking the Medieval Frontier blog back in 2018 itself. So if this interests you, you can go and read more about what was said there. Here is the link:

Further conferring on frontiers

And just so that you have some reason, I’ll give the running order of the other papers below. And then I’ll leave you to make your own decisions and be back again tomorrow with a report on a day-workshop we did at Leeds about working in the heritage sector. So tune in again then!

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Faith-Based Boundaries

• Esther Lewis, ‘The Parish, Suburb and City: A Discussion of Boundaries in the Pious Lives of Fifteenth-Century Bristolians’
• Tim McManus, ‘The Disgusting Languedoc: Boundaries of the Mind and the Revival of Heresy in the 12th Century’
• Virgina Ghelarducci, ‘Behind That Wall: Jewish Communities and Ambiguities of Neighbourliness in Medieval Spain’

Occupational Boundaries

• Mark Robinson, ‘Men of Blood: The Church’s Textual Response to Mercenary Violence, 1179-1215’
• Christopher Booth, ‘Physician, Apothecary, Surgeon or Quack? The Medieval Roots of Professional Boundaries in Later Medieval Practice’

Dividing and Connecting Polities

• Alessandro Carabia, ‘Living in a Frontier Region in Late Sixth Century Byzantine Italy’
• Callum Watson, ‘Crossing the Boundary Between Scottish and English in Barbour’s Bruce‘
• Carl Dixon, ‘The Teeth of the Taurus: Understanding the Frontiers of Asia Minor, c.650-950’
• Alex M. Feldman, ‘Bullion, Barter and Borders in the Rus’ Coinless Period, 11-14th c.’

“Real” Boundaries

• Christopher Tinmouth, ‘Frontiers of Faith: The Impact of the Insular British Frontier upon the Identity of Furness Abbey’
• Harry Wilkinson, ‘Between Day and Night in Anglo-Saxon England’
• Robin Alexander Shields, ‘The Epirote Frontier – the Republic of Venice and Carlo II Tocco’
• Katherine Rich, ‘High Paths, Poetic Feet: Walking the Boundaries in Saga Verse’

Conceptual Boundaries

• James Aitcheson, ‘Dreams Come True: Predicting the Future in Late Anglo-Saxon England’
• Julia O’Connell, ‘Emotional Boundaries in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’
• Markus Eldegard Mindrebø, ‘Boundaries of Female Agency in the Ynglinga Saga’