Universidad de Salamanca (and online)
22 November 2024

Extended deadline CFP 31 July 2024

Is your research about rural areas during the Late Antiquity or Early Middle Ages? Not sure where to begin, or already started but feeling a bit lost? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Ever wondered what makes up a local community and who belongs to it? How to figure out who’s who based on their social status? And how do you connect them to the manuscripts that are out there? What kinds of documents were being created? Who wrote them, and what were they like physically? How do you tackle a thorough, interdisciplinary study without getting mixed up in all the different terms and methods?

If you’re nodding your head to any of these questions, why not join us at our workshop? We’ll be swapping problems and brainstorming solutions to help build a clearer picture of society and writing in non-elite, local settings.

All we need from you is some basic information, such as your name and your institution. Please also include a brief description of your research challenges or the resources you have used. Send it by email to ainoacastro@usal.es – please, state in the subject «Workshop: New approaches to the cultural history of writing».

The workshop is free of charge and will take place in a hybrid format (in-person at Salamanca, encouraged, and online).

Workshop’s Aims & Objectives: 

The ERC project « The Secret Life of Writing » has been developing studies for more than four years, dedicated to providing a renewed perspective on the significance of written culture among common people in the Early Middle Ages. Challenging the common notion of widespread illiteracy during that time, it has been able to offer a new understanding of the extent of pragmatic literacy in local societies, how it was related to different members of society, and the role that writing played in the everyday lives of many people in that era. These topics have been addressed internally by the project members and their Advisory Board; we now want to open them up to a broader discussion.

This workshop serves as a meeting point for various approaches to studying written culture and its role in society during the Early Middle Ages. Running parallel to the activities of the project itself, it will facilitate mutual enrichment among researchers from disciplines related to this rich theme. The workshop sessions aim to achieve a better understanding of the theme by addressing it from various perspectives and with the participation of accomplished specialists as discussants.

This activity aims to achieve the following objectives:

– To disseminate recent progress in studying written culture during the Early Middle Ages.

– To create a forum for discussion among different disciplines studying Early Medieval written culture and its role in society.

– To open the debates held within the project to all contributions that researchers from different disciplines could make on this topic.

– To integrate studies conducted in the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Middle Ages into discussions addressing the theme in other European spaces and the Mediterranean region.

We seek external participation from researchers at all stages of their careers who can submit proposals on thematic specializations in the following groups:

– Materiality of writing

– Social differentiation and its relationship with writing

– Scripts in the Early Middle Ages

– Economy and written production

– Intellectual networks and writing

– Pragmatic literacy in the Early Middle Ages

– Memory and writing