IMC through a screen: the International Medieval Congress for 2021

The late post this Bank Holiday weekend is partly because of various stuff involving builders and friends that has kept me from a keyboard. But, it is also, I admit, because when I looked at where I was in my backlog I realised it was up to the International Medieval Congress of July 2021, and then my brain rapidly grabbed at anything else that would be easier to do for a while. And I asked myself as usual, what is the point in reporting on conferences from years ago? But on reviewing my notes quickly just now, it seemed to me that there was still a point, partly because apparently I saw some very interesting papers, but also because in 2021 the IMC was still fully virtual and I’ve never reported one of those before.

Postcard for the 2021 International Medieval Congress, Special Thematic Strand: Climates

Even that very modern feature has now acquired depths of history, however. After a reasonably successful trial the year before, when I just hadn’t been able to face being involved, the IMC had this year pinned their conference on a piece of conference software called Pathable. Now, I realise that there are quite a lot of tools for virtual conferencing, but the IMC, which usually runs between 24 and 30 parallel sessions over 4 days, day and full registration, and quite a few extras besides, scales up beyond what almost any of them will cope with. Pathable, I thought, was not bad given what we were asking it to do; it filled in its graphics behind loading the page in such a way that where you thought you were kept jumping away from you, but otherwise as an interface it was usable; it didn’t crash, which was kind of critical and always possible; and it managed to replicate or at least imitate a lot of the possibilities of the real conference. By that I mean it had facilities for inter-delegate messaging and personal meeting slots one could book between each other, standing pages for the various sellers (even if these were just static links out to their normal webpages) and so on. The one thing I don’t think it had was any way of replicating the serendipitous on-campus meeting, and looking back it occurs to me that maybe what it needed was an old-fashioned talker or something more like an IRC channel, where just anyone could chat with anyone else who was there. Maybe it did have that; or maybe we decided that was a netiquette horror-show waiting to be screened and forbade it; but either way I don’t remember it being bruited as a possibility. But whatever we might also have wished, it made the conference possible to hold, and we used it again for the hybrid portion the next year, and I think we’d have gone on using it had the company not gone out of business in spring 2023, hence all my past tenses in this paragraph. (Although, as the link above suggests, something seems still to exist, so it may be that a path out of bankruptcy was found… I don’t know, but we stopped using it.) Oh well…

Entry page for the 2022 IMC Pathable site

Anyway. Using this software, I had a pretty good conference, and this is what I went to. The sessions titles are linked through to their static webpages, where the abstracts can be found. Detail comments on at least some of them follow below the cut.

Monday 5th July 2021

A day mainly of fine-grained Iberian Peninsula documentary stuff, with some Carolingian breaks out, a very on-brand bit of Jarrett conference paper selection, including in the former my sole actual contribution to the conference.

1. Keynote Lectures 2021

• Innocent Pikirayi, "Towards New Climate and Environment Change Understanding in Africa: Re-Engaging the Medieval Climate Optimum/Anomaly and the Little Ice Age"
• Jean-Pierre Devroey, "How to Write and Think about Political, Social, and Economic History in Dialogue with Climate and Environmental Data: a case-study in the age of Charlemagne, 740‒820"

103. Proprietary Memories: Notitiae-Inventories in Early Medieval Iberia, I – Making and Copying Lists

• Wendy Davies, "List-Making in Old Castile before the Year 1000"
• Julio Escalona, "An Inventory in Time: two versions of a San Millán List of Property"
• R. M. Quetglas Munar, "Church Consecrations in Early Medieval Catalonia: the liturgy of making an inventory"

203. Proprietary Memories: Notitiae-Inventories in Early Medieval Iberia, II – Inventories and Serfs

• David Peterson, "'Casati' and 'Collazos' in the Inventories of San Millán"
• Lluís To Figueras, "Inventories and the Development of Serfdom in Catalonia in the High Middle Ages"
• Letícia Agúndez San Miguel, "Counting People: lists of monastic dependents in the Kingdom of Castile and León (10th-13th Centuries)"

318. Living in the Carolingian World, II: peasants and the limits of social organisation

• Noah Blan, "Conserve and Cultivate: peasants and a Carolingian moral economy"
• Elina Screen, "Life in a Royal Landscape: evidence from ninth-century Carolingian royal charters"
• Ellen Arnold, "Finding the Fishermen: hagiography and medieval traditional ecological knowledge"

403. Proprietary Memories: Notitiae-Inventories in Early Medieval Iberia, III – Inventories as Windows on Early Medieval Societies

Round Table featuring Graham Barrett, Álvaro Carvajal Castro, Jonathan Jarrett (who he?) and André Marques

Tuesday 6th July 2021

A day principally composed of sessions missing one person and a single super-powered keynote.

613. Frontiers and Crossroads of Italy in the Early Middle Ages

• Christopher Heath, "Across the Border: communications, collaboration, and contact – Avars and Lombards, 567‒662"
• Clemens Gantner, "Living in Interesting Times: the south Italian frontier in the ninth century"

699. Keynote Lectures 2021

Ling Zhang, "Geoengineering an Empire – the Consumptive Mode of Analysis and China’s Medieval Economic Revolution"

718. Living in the Carolingian World III: testing the limits of the Carolingian world

• Eric Goldberg, "Living in the Carolingian World during the Viking Invasions"
• Richard M. Pollard, "Imagining a Post-Political Carolingian Afterlife"

813. Climate, the Environment, and the Natural World in Byzantium, III: environmental adaptation and social history

• Anna Kelley, "Cotton Production and Environmental Adaptation in the First Millennium – a Chicken or Egg Argument"
• Daniel Reynolds, "Political Climates: climatology in the Byzantine Negev and the politics of state building during the British Mandate"

Wednesday 7th July 2021

A day where I had to do my first digital moderating and apparently found it so taxing that I then missed almost all the rest of it.

1014. When Natures Punishes Humankind

• Nikolas Hächler, "Natural and Supernatural Explanatons for Famines, Plagues, Natural Catastrophes and War under the Reign of Heraclius, 610‒641"
• Chloe Patterson, "Contempt for the World? Apocalyptic Piety and Natural Retribution in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum"
• Roque Sampedro López, "The 'Climate' of Political Opinion in the Libro de Gracián in Castile during the Reign of John II, 1405‒1454"

1303. New Faces in Medieval Iberian Studies, IV

• Elisa Manzo & Donato Sitaro, "Orosius’s Hispania and Gildas’s Britannia: Roman imperialism through the Christian mirror"
• Lilian Gonçalves Diniz, "Religion and Culture in Early Medieval Galicia: Christianisation, religious crafting, and popular piety on the outskirts of the world"
• Abel Lorenzo Rodríguez, "Killing Bill? Murder Accounts and their Consequences through Documentary and Economy in Early Medieval Iberia"

Thursday 8th July 2021

A day in which I mainly stretched eastwards and backwards in time.

1501. Between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, I: settlement and movement between limits of Erānshahr and the eastern Roman Empire

• Kodad Rezakhani, "Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Byzantium, Sasanians, and north Syrian trade in the 6th century"
• Domiziana Rossi, "How Did the Environment Affect the Spread of the So-Called Justinianic Plague?: New Reflections on Settlements and Movements between Persia and Byzantium"

1601. Between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, II: the climate of leadership between Erānshahr and the eastern Roman Empire

• Alberto Bernard, "Persian Military Officers: social and geographic mobility in the late Sasanian Empire"
• Spencer C. Woolley, "Imperial Sacred Violence: Heraclius and ideological climate change between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia"
• Sean Strong, "Vindicated, Dismissed, or Crushed: Roman-Sasanian Generalship and Punishment in the Late 6th Century"

1709. Late Antique Frontiers, I: authors and texts

• E. V. Mulhern, “From Aurora to Britannia: Claudian and the limits of empire"
• Allen Jones, "'It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)': Gregory of Tours, c. 594"
• Conor Whately, "Ammianus Marcellinus on Frontier Landscapes and Romanity in the Fourth Century World"

1801. Between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, IV: the climate of religious warfare between Erānshahr and the eastern Roman Empire

• Callan Meynell, "From 'Eastern Rome' to 'Byzantium'? The Impact of the Last Roman-Sasanian War on the Intellectual Climate of the Miracles of St Demetrius"
• Joaquin Serrano, "Relics, Icons, and Christian Holy Devices in the Roman-Persian Wars, 4th-7th Centuries"
• Cosimo Paravano, "Political and Religious Warfare through Hagiography: The Case of St Golinduch between Byzantium and Persia in the Reign of Maurice, 582-602"

Even with all those missing papers, that’s still quite a lot. Where to start? Perhaps the best way now is to get one takeaway thing at most from each paper. That looks something like this:

Pikirayi: what must then have been very recent work has found that Great Zimbabwe responded to increasing aridity in the later phases of its existence by excavating massive cisterns and joining them to irrigation systems to carry farming through the dry seasons; I immediately thought of Indian step-wells, mostly of the same period and perhaps dealing with the same changes to climate.¹



The plain below the city of Great Zimbabwe, from a publicity image for a lecture of Professor Pikirayi’s at Edinburgh


Devroey: with lots of detail thanks to a heroic twenty-minute over-run, this showed us a Carolingian state trying to manage what seem to have been drier but colder years at the end of the eighth century with stocking, siloing, favouring resilient crops over the highest yield ones (spelt rather than emmer wheat, for example) and probably still messing things up by pushing for monoculture; but it was also worth listening to for the number of threats to harvest which were not, or were only indirectly, linked to climate, but still colour our sources’ perception that everything was going badly.²
Screen later chased these concerns down to the level of the peasants who had to actually get the stuff out of the ground, which we can occasionally reach, while Blan framed this as a set of moral obligations for nobles to answer based on the idea that Adam cultivated Eden and so it was in some way holy work. Devroey had been sceptical about how well the Carolingian farmer, or even farm manager, was able to understand the causes and effects of things like empty seed-heads; in the same session as Screen and Blan, Arnold tried instead to build up our readiness to consider the value of traditional ecological knowledge in these communities through a very careful critical reading of the Life of Sturm. It took Rutger Kramer, however, to raise perhaps the most critical question any of us can get from reading Carolingian agricultural sources, some version of: what on earth did the monastery of St-Denis do with the 9,500 eggs it received each November?³ Really massive Christmas cakes?
Meanwhile in Iberia, Davies, Escalona and Peterson were all noting that the Castilian monastery of San Millán de Cogolla has preserved more lists of things, property transactions (as distinct from the charters which actually record the transactions—but also updated as the charters were not), serfs and their renders and so on, than we have from most places; but they all look like useful and indeed used records, so is it just that other places had these and didn’t keep them?⁴ In the later round table, Carvajal argued that the answer is clearly yes, as sometimes what we do have refers to records we don’t.⁵ This should all be being published soon, and I should be there with it, so should find out; I’ll let you know… I won’t be in it for what I said there, however, which was a bit of a messy consideration of what made a polyptych such as the first strand of sessions was considering different from the inventories we were considering (answer: supra-local focus; polyptychs were collections of inventories. It’s not deep, really). André Marques was working downwards here instead of upwards; he wanted any kind of list we can find to be under consideration, and actually there are quite a lot when you count in scribbles on the edges of other documents, and Barrett and Carvajal together agreed that Galicia and Portugal might be the area where the habit was strongest; but why?



A list of eleventh-century popes at the end of a copy of Hippocrates’s Aphorisms, handily providing a terminus ante quem for the whole manuscript, which is Bethesda, National Library of Medicine, MS E 8, fo. 148v. But why did anyone put it there?


Quetglas and To both looked at the rituals behind the creation of at least some such lists, church consecrations for Quetglas, a sort of document we only have for Catalonia and which includes a list of the new endowment, and lists of serfs for To, both created under oath before solemn witnesses.⁶
The previous, cancelled, year’s theme had of course been supposed to be "Borders", and so some sessions had been allowed to roll over to 2022, but others were happening now, which is why we had Heath looking for where the Lombards and the Avars thought their mutual border was, through frustratingly indirect evidence; and we had Gantner looking at how readily bits of Southern Italy sprang free of royal, but especially Carolingian rule, whenever the chance arose, a real indictment of any Carolingian attempt to draw such peoples to the attractive pole of the centre.⁷
Ling Zhang returned us to empires trying to manage climate, with a detailed (if vaguely sourced; "according to historical records" was a phrase that cropped up a lot, but then of course imperial China did actually make official historical records…) account of massive-scale Song Chinese attempts to embank and direct the empire’s massive rivers, with grass-and-brushwood fascine rolls, whose raw materials were levied on a scale which eventually caused deforestation and soil erosion in the areas that grew them, making them less and less obtainable and thus leaving the final state of things worse than the first. (In some places, the trees and bushes which grew out of the embankments were themselves cut to pay the levies, literally undoing the whole endeavour…) There was obviously a lesson or two to be drawn from this, but it was perhaps carefully not stated, so neither shall I. But it was fascinating and really well-theorised.
Goldberg looked at the various policing measures we see in Carolingian sources of the Viking period and argued that, while there definitely was a moral discourse about amending sins to remove God’s punishment from the people going on, there were probably also a lot of local responses to plunder by Frankish forces, being mobilised too quickly for provisions to be supplied to them via the elderly army provisioning system designed for slow annual campaigns. In questions, this got into two parallel conversations between the out-loud questions and the online chat, both of which tended to try to separate the Carolingian state project’s membership identity and the ethnic, gentile or local identities beneath it which might, as in Southern Italy, have seen that project more as imposition than as protection, especially in the Viking era…
Kelley tackled a historiography which has tended to see cotton production as being added into the Middle Age mix by the rise of Islam favouring it as a trade good; she argued that it was already being grown before Islam, and that while it then spreads after the conquests, despite some written sources being vocal about its trade the limited archæology suggests that it was always mostly being used locally.⁸ I think this is probably telling us how marginal long-distance luxury trade still was even in the tenth century, myself, but we wait for more.
Hächler, Patterson and Sampedro I had the honour to moderate, and the poor souls got an audience of six, even online, so the virtual format definitely preserved that aspect of the conference experience, sadly… Getting a question together which covered all of their very sensitive analysis of three very mutually distant chronicles was a challenge, but I thought they might together be showing a medieval shift from people blaming themselves for whatever dire situation portended, via the mechanism of divine punishment, to people blaming other, more specific, people, who were doing things wrong. They did all do a nice job of considering this and we decided the difference was more about the intended audience of the texts than the mood of the age, but I felt I’d done my job starting the hare anyway.
Gonçalves had noticed a lot of stuff, but in particular an Iberian tendency to build churches specifically dedicated to Saint Eulalie (of Mérida, not of Barcelona) on sites which already had pools of water dug into them, for purposes of bathing or pagan worship; she knew of a dozen cases, which does begin to look like an otherwise-undetectable association of ideas…
And you remember we told a story here a while back of a ninth-century murder mystery? It turns out there are more, and Lorenzo-Rodríguez knew where the bodies were buried, having sought accounts of violence in documents from the Galician monastery of Celanova and the Kitab of one Ibn Sahl, I guess Joseph ben Jacob Ibn Sahl, 11th-century leader of the Jews in Córdoba though specificity would have been nice. Whatever the work is, though, it apparently contains at least 15 more murder cases, so I hope someone is already working on the series of novels…⁹
Then there was all the Sasanian stuff, wasn’t there? Rezakhani was looking at the trade-limiting measures of Byzantine-Persian treaties and claiming they were unenforceable, and that the north Syrian frontier was only brought under control by giving it its own jurisdiction in the seventh century. I am trying to publish one person who disagrees with the former and another who probably agrees with the latter at the moment, so watch these spaces… Knowing this, though, I then queried the amount of 6th-century trade going on and was referred to new work by Seth Priestman. Some time later I managed to be part of a conversation with Priestman in which he made it clear that on the basis of that work he agreed with me and the scholar I’m publishing. What can you do?
The other papers in those sessions struggled more, firstly with getting secure references to Persian personalities and events out of Islamic sources written long after Persia’s dissolution, secondly with saying some of the names out loud (my students find Heraclius difficult to say, for some reason – I usually get "Herculius" or a hesitant set of half-attempts designed to make me say it for them – but I don’t expect it of actual native-Anglophone scholars), and thirdly with any kind of critical take on things like the supposed letter of the prophet Muhammad to that same emperor, and there came a point where I could actually take no more mispronunciations and just switched off.¹⁰
It was something of a relief, therefore, when I tuned back in with a cup of tea, to be told by Mulhern that we can’t trust Claudian‘s estimates of the extent of the Roman Empire, as he only admitted any limits to it when they were keeping threats away, and otherwise thought it should be the world; and from Whately that attempts to get solid political theory about the Roman frontier out of Ammianus Marcellinus are doomed to failure as the man himself doesn’t seem to have had one. These weren’t positive findings but at least I could believe them, even if I wasn’t sure anyone else in the session had a working definition of frontiers either.
And then Meynell and Serrano somewhat redeemed the Sasanian sessions by telling oddly human stories of Roman-Byzantine writers looking for saints, rulers or images, really anything, that they could enlist and beseech for divine help against invaders, a reminder that whatever we want to minimise or downgrade about their presentations, even our tendentious sources were written by people who’d often been through some difficult times, more difficult than most of us would hope ever to face (though we were, of course, right then in the later stages of a global pandemic… but still). Interestingly, Parvano found his sources blaming other people instead of beseeching God, and he was dealing with the seventh century still, so one could argue that my conference ended with the collapsing of a silly theory I’d only come up with during it…

There was, as I recall, something nice about being able literally to switch the tumult of a full-on international conference off when I got up from the laptop. I might still, then, have rather been able to go out to the bar with people; but actually, after that long working at home or behind a mask, maybe I still wouldn’t have. As a staged return to the intensity of the real thing this was a good halfway measure. But as it subsequently turned out, halfway was probably about as far as this historian still felt like going…

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1. This must have been very new news at the time, as it came out only the year after as Innocent Pikirayi, Federica Sulas, Bongumenzi Nxumalo, Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, David Stott, Søren M. Kristiansen, Shadreck Chirikure and Tendai Musindo, "Climate-smart harvesting and storing of water: The legacy of dhaka pits at Great Zimbabwe" in Anthropocene Vol. 40 (Amsterdam 2022), 100357, DOI: 10.1016/j.ancene.2022.100357.

2. Devroey was here obviously drawing on his recent book, La nature et le roi: environnement, pouvoir et société à l’âge de Charlemagne (740-820), L’évolution de l’humanité (Paris 2019).

3. Rutger probably had this on his mind at this time because of then supervising Benjamin Pate, "A Storm of Chickens: Reevaluating the 9th Century Frankish Countryside" (Master’s Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen, 2021), which I think is on its way out as an article somewhere but which is a thoroughly good read and far better than any master’s thesis has a right to be.

4. The thing to see here is now probably José Miguel Andrade Cernadas, "Documentary production and dispute records in Galicia before the year 1100" in Isabel Alfonso, José Miguel Andrade Cernadas and André Evangelista Marques (edd.), Records and Processes of Dispute Settlement in Early Medieval Societies: Iberia and Beyond, Medieval Law and its Practice 41 (Leiden 2024), pp. 37–66, which actually came out of IMC sessions from the following year, not this one, but does the job.

5. Álvaro cited María Inés Carzolio de Rossi, "Cresconio, preposito de Celanova: un personaje gallego al filo del siglo XI" in Cuadernos de historia de España Vol. 57-58 (Buenos Aires 1973), pp. 225–279.

6. On the consecration acts, though I’m sure Rosa is working on it, what I know to cite is still Ramon Ordeig i Mata, "La consagració i la dotació d’esglésies a Catalunya en les segles IX-XI" in Frederic Udina i Martorell (ed.), Symposium Internacional sobre els Orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII-XI) (Barcelona 1991), 2 vols, ii, pp. 85–101, online here; and Lluís has been working on this since his El monestir de Santa Maria de Cervià i la pagesia: una anàlisi local del canvi feudal. Diplomatari, segles X-XII, Publicacions de la Fundació Salvador Vives i Casajuana 109 (Barcelona 1991).

7. There must be more recent stuff on this, but what I can quickly find is Stefano Gasparri, "Un governo difficile: Note per uno studio dell’Italia nella prima età carolingia" in Ivana Ait and Anna Esposito (edd.), Agricoltura, lavoro, società: studi sul Medioevo per Alfio Cortonesi, Biblioteca di storia agraria medievale 40 (Bologna 2020), pp. 305–318, online here, which I haven’t read and leaves me reaching still for G. V. B. West, "Charlemagne’s Involvement in Central and Southern Italy: power and the limits of authority" in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 8 (Oxford 1999), pp. 341–367.

8. The target here is Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: the diffusion of crops and farming techniques, 700-1100, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge 1983), still very interesting but apparently quite often wrong; Anna cited instead Michael Decker, "Plants and Progress: Rethinking the Islamic Agricultural Revolution" in Journal of World History Vol. 20 (Baltimore MD 2009), pp. 187–206, DOI: 10.1353/jwh.0.0058.

9. I really do wish there had been some better identification of this text. I’m not even sure the Ibn Sahl in question is the 11th-century Jewish poet, but if it is then I can’t find any sign that his work survives except in others’ quotations; and what his Kitāb might be I can’t find out at all. In the paper there was reference to a recent thesis by someone called Harper which had translated it; but I can’t find any trace of that either, at least not with the limited search terms available to me. So I probably misheard something, but I wouldn’t mind knowing what.

10. If you want something reasonable on those very interesting, but surely not authentic, texts, see Nadia Maria El-Cheikh, "Muḥammad and Heraclius: A Study in Legitimacy" in Studia Islamica no. 89 (Paris 1999), pp. 5–21, online here.