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?

Excellentissima et merito famosissima historica II

Back again in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre atop Blue Boar Court in Trinity College, Cambridge, I really regretted the no-caffeine resolve when I just about got to the second day of Rosamond McKitterick’s birthday celebration conference on time. Trinity is a very odd mix of styles internally, and really I think it would be fair to call it an odd mix of styles generally. It is full of odd little contradictions to its general ambience and attitude, and some of them are architectural. But anyway. We were safe away from the street, in fact from pretty much everything, so we settled into our seats and listened to the tributary scholarship.

Opening page of the St Petersburg manuscript of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica

Session 3. History and Memory

• Paul Hilliard, “Bede’s Use of History”. A nice clear summation of how Bede’s programme to incorporate the Anglo-Saxons into a universal history of Salvation actually operated, logically.
• Linda Dohmen, “History and Memory: Angilberga and the court of Louis II”. A close study of the public profile of the wife of the third Holy Roman Emperor, one of the most powerful women of the early Middle Ages, who by the twelfth century, in certain chronicles, a figure of feminine evil, Jezebel-style (and where have we heard that before?). Linda presented some extra material that showed that this discourse was not completely fictional, and found the roots in eighth-century politics that had been twisted into romance, which make it hard to discern whether the stories would have been heard as romance or as history.
• Rob Meens, “The Rise and Fall of the Carolingians. Regino of Prüm and his conception of the Carolingian Empire”. A useful presentation of one of the Carolingian period’s gloomiest but most informative chroniclers, arguing that Regino saw the Carolingians’ fall as being brought about by their mismanagement of the proper restraint of sex and violence in due deference to Rome that had brought them to power.

In questions Matthew Innes made the excellent point that one of the things that the chroniclers dealing with the Vikings do is emphasise the way things have gone topsy-turvy by putting the Vikings in the narrative places of the king; instead of royal itineraries and victories you get pagan ones, and the whole world seems shaken out of joint as a result. I wonder how deliberate this would have to be but it’s very sharply observed. I wish, for various reasons, I could catch up with Matthew more often, he has a point like this for almost every discussion.

Psalter of St-Denis, also known as the Psalter of Charles the Bald, Paris BN Lat. 1152, fo 6v.

Session 4. Res italica karolina

• Richard Pollard, “Carolingian Connexions: Reichenau and Nonantola. A new manuscript fragment of Hatto’s Visio wettini“. Seriously complex manuscript stuff trying to work out how the two different versions of this rather odd and surprisingly contemporary text about Charlemagne in Purgatory actually relate to each other, and in the process thickening the links we already knew between these two Carolingian mega-monasteries.
• Clemens Gantner, “The Lombard Recension of the Liber pontificalis Life of Stephen II”. Posited that a part of the LP‘s assembly of papal biographies might have been sanitised of its ethnic abuse and general anti-Lombard rhetoric for the eighth-century political situation in which Lombard support started to seem desirable to the popes, again demonstrated by painstaking manuscript work. This one met with sceptical questions but Clemens was equal to them with the evidence.
• Frances Parton, “Louis the Pious, Lothar and Gregory IV: why was the Pope at the Field of Lies?” By means of a very thorough run-through of the texts, Frances showed that there is considerable uncertainty about Pope Gregory IV’s purpose in coming from Rome to assist Emperor Louis the Pious’s sons in deposing their father, and concluded that while Gregory had seen an opportunity to restore the papal status as arbiter of the Frankish monarchy Lothar had had much smaller ideas for him and kept him from having any such rôle. This also met some tough questions, almost as many of which were answered by Charles West as were asked, if not the other way about, but one thing that was made clear to us all is that Nithard, and possibly other writers of the time, were definitely thinking of the papal approval of Pippin III’s kingship in 751 when they wrote up the doings of 833.

Then there was a really quite nice lunch, and then back to battle/s!

Sarcophagus and crypt of St-Bénigne de Dijon

Session 5. Trouble and Trouble-Makers

• Charles West, “Possessing Power. Unauthorised miracles and Dijon, c. 842″. Keen observers may recognise this title—I certainly lost no time in taxing Charles about it because I’m nice like that—but this was actually a markedly different paper, albeit about the same miraculous episode, largely because Charles had now been able to consult the manuscript that sources it and found it to be probably contemporary and rather out of place in its binding; though a later cover appeared to have been made for it out of a redundant notarial instrument, the actual libellus that tells of the strange events at Dijon in 842 may well be the very one that Bishop Theobald of Langres received from Archbishop Amilo of Lyons and therefore presumably travelled as a letter between the two. The other new emphasis was on the parish structures which Amilo apparently thought, even in 842, should be absorbing these people’s religious energy and piety, rather than crazy cult sites with politically-charged ownership issues. For one small text there’s a huge amount of potential here, I envy Charles the find.
• James Palmer, “Apocalypticism, Computus and the Crisis of 809″. A series of well-aimed kicks at the idea that there was a widespread belief in the years leading up to 800 that that was going to be year 6000 anno mundi and therefore the end of everything, largely as expressed by Richard Landes. James’s position basically is that there is no conspiracy but there are a lot of people really interested in time and how you reckon it. In making this stand, however, he also dismantled in passing a number of the pro-millennial arguments which was a joy to hear. The significance of 809 is that in that year computistical experts were consulted by Charlemagne and his ecclesiastics on the age of the world, according to a council record, but that came on the back of two years’ famine and a defeat by the Slavs so the date may not have been the big issue. I think we all finished this paper remaining comfortably convinced that 800 was a Carolingian high point, not a year everyone spent waiting for the sky to fall on their heads.

These darn summaries are getting longer as I warm up. Let’s see if I can keep this under control.

• Elina Screen, “Adalhard the Seneschal: troublemaker?” As one of the really important nobles of the time of the war between Louis the Pious’s sons, Adalhard has been seen as a kind of destabilising kingmaker figure. Here Elina argued the opposite, that as a kind of ‘shuttle diplomat’ he was frequently one of the few forces holding the fragile confederacy of brother monarchs together, largely because he had so very much to lose if it broke. She rightly pointed out in the course of this that an awful lot of the terminology we use to describe the politics of the mid-ninth century is straight from the Cold War: summit meetings, shuttle diplomats, and so on. I’m not sure what that does for our perspectives, because it does look like that in the sources…

At this point, what should have been the closing remarks were shunted forwards to allow the relevant speaker to make a plane connection, so we were next treated to:

• Mayke de Jong, “Rosamond McKitterick and the Frankish Church”.

This was more of a personal tribute than an academic one, but one of the things Mayke noted is that in a climate of scepticism Rosamond’s early work always took religion seriously and that this is a great strength. And this is true, but more widely, one of Rosamond’s greatest strengths of character is that she takes people, generally, seriously. The fact that one of the most notable professors with whom I’ve ever had contact listens to my ideas and thoughts as if they might be interesting and insightful has helped me wrestle down the imposter syndrome more often than I can tell you, and I’m sure I can’t be the only one. This is one thing I didn’t manage to say in my personal thanks to her so I’ll put it here.

By now people were already gently and quietly making their farewells. People had come from Scotland, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA and Israel, as well as many points of England, and there were planes and trains necessary to catch. Pity, because the last session was just as interesting as any of the others.

Roman tuba or military trumpet

Session 6. Taxes, Trumpets and Texts

• David Pratt, “Taxation and Origins of the Manor in England”. While this paper was not an exception to the statement I just made, because Dr Pratt’s erudition is considerable, I have friends who are a lot more sceptical about the solidity of the terms that litter Anglo-Saxon economic history for the sorts of land that were recognised in law than this, and there was also a somewhat apocalyptic rôle for knight service which didn’t seem to have heard Nicholas Brooks’s new evidence about the date of its introduction. So I’ll forebear from further comment except to say that really, the Institute of Historical Research Earlier Middle Ages Seminars are worth attending if you can, but almost all the Cambridge people only go if they’re speaking. I think exposure to Sally Harvey’s and Professor Brooks’s papers would have made this one a different shape.
• Jesse Billett, “Theuto’s Trumpet: the cantor in the Carolingian Renaissance”. A very unusual paper, as papers on chant usually are, not least because they are usually given by people who aren’t afraid to actually sing their subject, Dr Billett being no exception. Here he focused on one particular mention of a cantor with a trumpet in Ermold the Black‘s In honorem Hludowici and concluded that the usage was probably metaphorical, associating the poem’s military victories, which both mention real trumpets, with the spiritual one of the baptism of the Danish royal Harald Klak in 826.
• Matthew Innes, “The Carolingians and the Archival World: charters and their preservation in the ninth-century Mâconnais—and beyond”. I actually can’t say too much about this one because it was a Lay Archives paper, and I have caused trouble before by talking too much about the Lay Archives project. You can see from his title that my work overlaps with Matthew’s here and this is something that I think we would have wished to avoid, had better communication been possible. Suffice to say that half the paper was stuff I knew nothing about and was fascinating, and of the remaining fifty per cent half is not yet agreed between us… But Matthew’s stuff is as I say always fascinating so wherever this one actually comes out it will be worth the read. (The papers should be printed; but I believe this one may be spoken for already.)

Final questions were fewer, largely because there weren’t many people left to ask them. The closing remarks were given by Walter Pohl, who made the excellent point that while the gathering had been advertised as a Festschrift, that obviously didn’t make a lot of sense to a German-speaker and he proposed instead calling it a Schriftfest, which we all thought worked a lot better. He also emphasised that the sort of open comparison of perspectives in friendship that we’d been able to do these two days was the best way to advance scholarship, and replete with that assurance, we all went our separate ways. I’m very glad to have been able to be part of all this. As long as I’m still in Cambridge it’s nice to be able to join in sometimes, and this was very good to join in with.

Excellentissima et merito famosissima historica I

At last the truth can be revealed. Why was I writing a paper about nuns all of a sudden? Why hadn’t it been in the sidebar as my next due paper? What was all the foreshadowing in that earlier post about? Now it can be told.

Very recently Professor Rosamond McKitterick had a significant birthday and, seeing this coming from some way off, various of her students had had the idea of a birthday conference. This, and its title which forms the subject header, was largely the brainchild of Richard Pollard, who also designed the monogram you see above and generally did the bulk of the donkey-work while the rest of us who were in one way or another participating kept quiet, tried not to tell ask anyone for help that wouldn’t be able to do similarly and, in the case of David McKitterick, her husband, made sure she kept the relevant weekend free without explaining why. And duly at 14:00 on September 12th she was escorted into Trinity College in Cambridge and found a gathering of about forty of her fellows, erstwhile and current students there basically to say thanks. As the person in that gathering with, I think, the longest hair other than Rosamond herself, and possibly one or two of the younger women, I feel myself uniquely qualified to say, “there was a whole lot of love in that room, man”. She’s had an awful lot of students and a lot of them have gone on to be important themselves. Some of us still hoping, also. But, well, it’s a conference. With due discretion and all that, obviously I’m still gonna blog it, if only to list the names…

Rosamond McKitterick, Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

The folder I have my notes stashed in has the monogram on the front. It contains a short biography of Rosamond, the programme, a map and contact details (all very well to hand out on arrival, but surely only useful before! this is my only criticism of the organisation) and a full or as-near-full-as-possible bibliography of Rosamond’s work, which registers (deep breath) six monographs, another co-written, six volumes of essays that she edited, another that she co-edited, and two volumes of collected papers, and eighty-two articles and chapters (not including stuff in the volumes she edited), one alone of which was co-written. If you don’t know Rosamond’s work, this may give you an idea that she is an important scholar in quantity as well as quality. Then, on the specially-printed notepaper (why yes, they did get some funding since you ask…), we have notes on the following papers.

Keynote Address

• Janet Nelson, “New Approaches to Carolingian Reform, or 1969, 1971, 1977 and All That”. The keynote address, which placed Rosamond in the context of her teaching by Walter Ullmann, something that Jinty also went through, and drawing the roots of Rosamond’s first work into the many branches it now has, full of shared remembrance and intriguing background that could have been supplied by no-one else.

Session 1. The Reformatio monastica karolina

• Marios Costambeys, “Paul the Deacon, Rome and the Carolingian Reforms”. Argued that Paul the Deacon‘s conception of Rome deliberately ignores its Christian and recent Imperial heritage, referring to it in terms of its earliest history to place both its history and the new Frankish rule in inarguable and uncontested Antiquity.
• Rutger Kramer, “The Cloister in the Rye: Saint-Seine and the early years of Benedict of Aniane”. More or less as title except that that was the only terrible pun involved, a critical reading of the Vita Benedicti Anianensis pondering whether Benedict was in fact at first one of Carloman’s party not Charlemagne’s and how far his initial monastic conversion might have been a political retreat, then moving into questions of how his initial drive for asceticism apparently transformed to a desire for uniformity ‘that we can believe in’.
• Sven Meeder, “Unity and Uniformity in the Carolingian Reform Efforts”. Argued that the Carolingian ideal of unity should not be mistaken for uniformity and that it was always ready to accept a good deal of diversity to which its own efforts only added. Arguable, but probably not with the Oxford English Dictionary definitions used; Susan Reynolds would have been unable to stay quiet in questions had she been there.

Some critical questions here especially for the latter two papers, and perhaps most notable among them James Palmer asking if, in fact, Carolingian reform could ever have succeeded adequately for its proponents or whether a perception of failure was built in. Sven responded, I think wisely, that the ultimate aim was to make the kingdom favoured by God and so the proof would be seen in events. It’s an interesting cycle of paranoia that this kind of drive might have set up, however. I think we see something similar with Æthelred the Unready‘s vain attempts to prescribe extra piety when the Danes just keep coming in his autumn years.

Session 2. Reform from without, reforms to without

• Benedict Coffin, “The Carolingian Reformation in the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Churches”. Drawing out even more similarities between Carolingian and English reform movements as well as a few crucial differences, not least that in England it was primarily Benedictine not royal.
• Jonathan Jarrett, “Nuns, Signatures and Literacy in late-Carolingian Catalonia”. You basically saw a chunk of this paper already, and I had to leave a lot of detail out, but it went OK and did everything I hoped for. Completely overwhelmed however by…
• Julia M. H. Smith, “Wrapped, Tied and Labelled: importing Jerusalem, recycling Rome in the early Middle Ages”, exploring the contents of the altar in the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran in Rome, which transpires to have been installed by Leo III and to have contained, in 1906 when it was last opened, a mind-boggling assortment of Holy Land soil, branches, twigs, etc. from significant places there, as well as martyr relics probably from the other patriarchal sees, replacing Rome’s pagan history with a new one imported from Jerusalem and elsewhere. The illustrations were fascinating and it was a really interesting paper.

Behind those grilles is the box installed by Leo III

The evening was rounded off, well, for me at least, with a pre-dinner paper given by Yitzhak Hen. I won’t attempt to describe that here except to say that what I’ve written about his work here before may have failed to take his sense of humour into account. Then, there was a wine reception and a dinner, but I, with my usual mismatch of engagements, ran into London for one of the best gigs I’ve been to for a long time. But I was back the next day, aching of neck and back and short of sleep, and I will describe that later.