Place and date: University of Padua, 26-28 May 2027
Organiser: Serena Galasso (University of Padua – DiSSGeA)
Keynote speaker: Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard University)

What material forms can memory take? Through which media and tools can it be elicited, stored, or transmitted? This conference addresses these questions in the medieval societies of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, bringing into dialogue three fields of inquiry rarely considered within a common framework: memory studies, from commemorative practices to mnemonic techniques; the history of documentary practices; and the study of objects and materiality.

The period offers a privileged vantage point, marked as it is by profound cultural and socio-economic change. On the one hand, the gradual spread of writing across Western societies reconfigures the relationship between textual and oral memory, producing new methods and techniques for ordering and storing information. On the other hand, material culture undergoes equally profound transformations. The development of commercial exchange sets new materials and objects in circulation, while increasingly socially stratified consumption reshapes attitudes towards things and property. How this changing materiality could also serve as a carrier of memory for people from different social backgrounds has yet to be fully investigated. Weaving these processes together, the conference aims to explore modes of remembering through writings and objects from a historical perspective, open to dialogue with art history and archaeology.

Contributions may address, but are not limited to, one or more of the following strands:

• Written and material memory. How did individuals, families, and communities rely on objects, material spaces, and written records to build memorial identities or foster remembrance? Conversely, how did strategies of forgetting lead to the dispersal or erasure of certain things and records? To what extent did social status and gender affect these processes?

• Writing things into order. Through which documentary strategies was the memory of goods put in writing and transmitted? How did these practices evolve over time? How do they shape our knowledge of past material cultures?

• The sensory qualities of things. In the wake of the “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences, objects are no longer seen as inert or immutable: they actively mediate human relationships and can even affect them in ways that humans neither control nor anticipate. How did the colour, texture, weight, smell, or sound of things trigger recollection, and how were these sensory qualities used to make memory last?

• Everyday goods in transformation. In medieval societies, everyday goods were constantly on the move: exchanged, repaired, reused, and recycled, they changed function and meaning with every passage from hand to hand and every new use. To what extent, and how, do objects retain the traces of their successive lives (e.g. visible alterations, marks of ownership), becoming palimpsests of memory?

• Mnemonic techniques. Beyond the learned tradition of the ars memoriae, how did things complement the mnemonic function of writing, serving as instruments and aids to memorisation?

The conference is part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action ThiMa – Things that Matter: Mobility and Agency of Everyday Objects in Late Medieval Italy [Grant Agreement No. 101154204]. A selection of papers will be published in an edited volume with an international publisher.

Proposals, comprising a title, an abstract in English (max. 300 words), and a short biography (max. 200 words including affiliation and research interests), should be sent to serena.galasso@unipd.it by 15 December 2026.

Applicants will be notified of the outcome by 15 January 2027. Travel costs and accommodation in Padua will be covered.

Deadline: 15 December 2026