Appel à contribution – Networks and Neighbours. A new international journal dedicated to the networking poetics of life in the Early Medieval worlds

Networks and Neighbours. A new international journal dedicated to the networking poetics of life in the early medieval worlds

A Symposium on Early Medieval Correlations

This two-day symposium will take place 27-28 June 2013 at the University of Leeds and will be concerned with varying types of inter-connectivity in the Early Middle Ages. Participants have been invited from four countries (Brazil, Chile, Israel and the U.K.) with an aim to promote not only the study of how people and communities interacted within and without their own world and localities in the Early Middle Ages, but also to promote the study of Early Medieval Networks by an international collaboration of scholars.

This symposium will be the first major event of a new international project titled ‘Networks and Neighbours’, which also will publish an associated journal to begin in 2013. Building upon the excellent work and successes of series such as the ‘Transformation of the Roman World’, HERA ‘Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past’ and ‘Texts and Identities’, we hope to forge novel methodologies and critically informed histories of Early Medieval Europe. As part of this, we set out with the view that if texts present directed meaning because they are sets of signifiers and our minds are developed so as to expect, anticipate and subsequently comprehend complex information through sets, or networks, of ideas, then we can argue that it is the respective, local topology of a past situation, or rather of its functional and malleable discourses, that can provide the modern ‘reader’, or historian, with the framework through which s/he can write a story of the past.

Networks and Neighbours is at its inceptive moment looking forward to developing histories, arguments and modes of thinking that are built from the shared intellectual and research energy of the group as it emerges. However, to begin the conversation let us clarify our initial position and pose some opening questions. We maintain that identity and meaning were not determined by fixed sets and integers, but by a complex network of interrelated signs. In practice, this suggests that a single person within their personal world could have travelled within various worlds and realities, identifying with various neighbours at even single overlapping points of identity; one did not encounter another as a fixed category, either of ‘self’ or ‘other’. Thus, by ‘network’ we do not mean a fixed identifier, a singularizing category, but refer to the complex ways that individuals, groups, institutions etc. constructed self-considered, coherent and singular existences from the multiplicity of mental activity, perceptions, ideas, and the varying confrontation with images, physical and non-human being, languages, sounds, senses, ‘discourses’ and all else that was life in the period. This, then, is how we would like to make sense of the concepts of ‘continuity’ and ‘change’, particularly as they happened ‘on the ground’

Some questions to consider are: where, how and under what conditions did networks meet and communicate? Where and what were the spaces that defined the uniqueness of such connections and how did such negated contours mediate identity, knowledge, awareness and related concepts? Are we approaching a materialist universalism for the early Middle Ages, a way of understanding former existences informed by the constant dialectics between epistemological finitude and infinity, that is, the moments of tangible, neighbourly interaction made sensible against perceived networks?

The event will consist of five sessions over the two days. Papers of no more than 3 000 words will be submitted one month in advance (31 May 2013) and circulated to all participants. This system of early submission will encourage a more in depth and meaningful discussion on the day. Moreover, the format of the symposium will promote the sharing of scholarship within the network of selected scholars. Each individual session will have either an established academic or an early career scholar provide a 10-15 minute response to the three papers, including a brief summary and critical analysis of all three papers, always bearing in the mind the general topic of the session. After the response the floor will be opened up to general questions concerning either the overall theme of the event, or the session in which it is part of.

Possible session topics include: