06.07.2026 – 11.07.2025
International Medieval Congress 2026, Leeds

This session series invites contributions that explore the medieval present as a category of knowledge, narration, and power: How was the present conceptualised, made intelligible, and put to use? What models, scripts, and strategies shaped the temporal regimes of medieval actors and texts? We propose to explore these dynamics under the umbrella term ‘presentologies’—that is: ways of thinking, constructing, and mobilising the present as a distinct temporal regime.

Time is not neutral—and never has been. Rather, it is narrated, charged, measured, ritualised or even silenced. The present in medieval contexts, too, was not simply a moment between past and future but a site of orientation, intervention, and temporal authority: For it reveals time as a productive epistemic mode—capable of structuring the past, anticipating futures, and legitimising decisions.

This session series invites contributions that explore the medieval present as a category of knowledge, narration, and power: How was the present conceptualised, made intelligible, and put to use? What models, scripts, and strategies shaped the temporal regimes of medieval actors and texts? We propose to explore these dynamics under the umbrella term ‘presentologies’—that is: ways of thinking, constructing, and mobilising the present as a distinct temporal regime. Presentologies attend to how medieval actors (and modern scholars) conceptualise the ‘here and now’ not as a neutral point in linear time but as a site of epistemic productivity, strategic positioning, and imaginative expansion.

Rather than viewing the time that we generally call ‘the Middle Ages’ as trapped in eschatological stasis or prophetic timelessness, we ask how actors—whether lay or clerical, individuals or collective—produced knowledge through and about time. What interpretive techniques, narrative strategies, or theological models were used to render the past meaningful, the present intelligible, and the future imaginable? What forms of contingency, anticipation, or temporal agency are visible in medieval sources? And what can such perspectives tell us about the (contested) politics of time in medieval societies?

We invite contributions that examine the temporal logics and narrative strategies through which medieval actors made sense of their world. Contributions may focus on the epistemology of time, the uses of the past, present, and future or the politics of temporal representation. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

– temporal epistemologies and the uses of the present and future in medieval texts
– prognostic and anticipatory modes in narrative, visionary, legal, or ritual sources
– time as a framework for authority, legitimation, and political negotiation
– strategies for managing uncertainty, contingency, or unstable futures
– intersections of eschatology, prediction, and temporal planning
– techniques of shaping the future through representations of the present
– synergies of the topics mentioned above

We especially welcome theoretical and interdisciplinary contributions from a variety of sources, as well as work that engages critically with modern temporal assumptions projected onto the Middle Ages. Contributions may include case studies, conceptual reflections, teaching examples or work-in-progress. Each speaker will be allotted 15–20 minutes and will be invited into a collective discussion following the session.

Please send your proposal with a 250-word abstract and a short CV (and any questions you might have) to maria.kammerlander@geschichte.uni-freiburg.de and rike.szill@geschichte.uni-tuebingen.de by 31 August 2025 at the latest. We will get in touch by the end of September.

Source : H-Soz-Kult