L'Agenda des Médiévistes

The international conference Reconsidering Courtly Environments, c. 1200–1800: Interconnecting Court Cultures and the Role of Natural Environments and Landscapes, organised by the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Households and Environmental Studies (HES), Centre for Research on Courts and Residences (DaR), and the Society for Court Studies, will take place on 20 and 21 November 2025 at the Academy Conference Centre (Husova 4a, 110 00 Prague). 

A variety of courts (royal, princely, aristocratic, and others) have been defined as being the physical residence or household of the ruler and its inhabitants, including the ruler’s family, servants, advisors, entourage and government officials. Additionally, the court has also been recognised as being itinerant, moving with the ruler to various residences or foreign visits. Therefore, the court was wherever the ruler happened to be. (1) However, despite the rich scholarship within the field of court studies on the distinctions and definitions of the court, questions remain, and discussions have continued about what constitutes a court or courtly spaces. Within this discussion, the natural environments and landscapes are largely absent.

All too often courtly ceremonies, rituals, celebrations and entertainments took place in outdoor spaces, or the surrounding landscape connected to a ruler’s palace or residence. In these instances, what happens when courts are operating in outdoor environments or travelling across the landscape? Do these natural environments (i.e., gardens, forests, parks) become courtly spaces or merely serve as extensions of the court? And how are events organised in these natural spaces and by whom? These questions urge us to reconsider the relationship between courts and natural environments.

This two-day workshop aims to bring together scholars from court studies, environmental history/historical ecology, and other relevant disciplines to not only examine the interconnections between European courts, natural environments and landscapes in the medieval and early modern period (c. 1200-1800), but also explore the development of approaches and methodologies to study courts and environments.

The Scientific Committee invites scholars to submit individual or panel proposals with diverse perspectives, geographical scopes, types of courts and topics related to the workshop’s central theme. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Theorising and conceptualising natural environments as court spaces
• Materiality of courts in natural environments and landscapes
• Types of environments used by courts (i.e., parks, gardens, rivers, lodges)
• Itinerant courts and landscapes
• Management of natural environments & ecological resources within court cultures (i.e., forestry & agricultural consumption)
• Logistics and organisation of outdoor court spectacles, festivals, and entertainments
• Role and function of people (i.e., courtiers, servants, local peasants, diplomats) in outdoor court events
• Relationship between courts and environments connected to martial practices and warfare
• Human-animal encounters through outdoor court events
• Architectural spaces and built environments used by courts

Call for Papers

The workshop will be held in English and German. Proposal will be accepted in either language and must contain a presentation title, presenter name(s), abstract (500 words max), and a short bio of presenter(s). Proposals should be submitted by 15 March 2025 via email to vokurka@hiu.cas.cz.

Source : Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences

April 24, 2025, Prague, Czech Republic

This doctoral workshop aims to explore approaches that interrogate the flow of objects, practices, and techniques within the broadly understood realm of material culture, in contexts of production or consumption. The title of this workshop focuses on geographical Europe, but the emphasis on the European Middle Ages is first and foremost a way of accounting for a material unity on a European scale, beyond political entities. Firstly, it turns out that, when everyday objects used by a large number of people become mass-consumed products, forms of standardization on a large spatial scale must be questionned, as well as its consequences, i.e. a number of similarities. These similarities are to be found in the form of objects themselves, but also in their materials and the ways in which they are made, and how different objects are produced using similar shaping methods. Secondly, even in the absence of mass consumption, motifs, representations and uses cross Europe, networks of practices emerge, which material culture carries with it, as shown in A united Europe of things. Portable material culture acrooss medieval Europe (eds. J. Sawicki, M. Lewis, M. Vargha).

The aim is therefore to examine the similarities and differences in the production and consumption of material culture in Europe, from East to West and vice versa. We will be particularly careful not to dissolve the notions of transfer, circulation and dissemination into a single reality, and to consider practices and techniques in their heterogeneity as well, avoiding a linear vision in which dissemination would be homogeneous. In other words, the aim is not to reduce local variations, forms of distinction from neighbours or forms of rejection of novelty. Obstacles to the circulation of practices and techniques must also be studied, as must adaptations and translations of circulating practices (cf. L. Hilaire-Pérez, C. Verna in Technology and culture, 2006).

Where archaeology tends to focus on particular cases, due to the organization of archaeological work and the need for site monographs, the aim is to reflect on an inter-regional scale and a comparative approach, using .various types of sources, including archaeological artifacts and written archives. but the comparative approach between these ares does not exclude a more local focus on influences, imitations, adaptations, exogenous characteristics or other evidence of the circulation of people, objects, practices or techniques. The circulation of practices and techniques, as well as the mobility of objects, which can also be vectors of technical transfers, such as the diffusion of ways of consuming, will ideally be examined on a multiscalar basis, moving from the micro scale (of the document or the site) to the macro scale, that of medieval Europe, and vice versa. From a methodological point of view, it will also be an opportunity to explore how to move back and forth between different scales of analysis and how to consider technical and cultural transfers.

The workshop will be aimed at young researchers or young PhDs working on their theses or other studies. Papers are invited on a wide range of objects, techniques and materials that make up the material culture of the Middle Ages. This scope expands beyond the traditional focus of archaeologists, embracing all aspects of materiality, including those more recently examined by text historians following the material turn of the 2000s. Contributions on heritage objects in the broadest sense of the term, from belt buckles and archaeological ceramics to museum objects, parchment and inscribed materials are welcome, as long as they take account of the dimension of circulation, whether of the objects themselves, the techniques and know-how they imply, or the practices that result from their use.

Organisation 

• Lise Saussus, Centre de recherches historiques, UMR 8558, École des hautes études en sciences sociales
• Jakub Sawicki, Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
• Tomasz Cymbalak, National Heritage Institute, Prague
• Nicolas Thomas, Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives, Laboratoire de médiévistique occidentale de Paris.

Key dates and informations

Submission deadline: February 10, 2025.

Submit abstract (max. 300 words, in English) to Lise Saussus : lise.saussus@ehess.fr

The abstract must be completed with your university affiliation and the name of your PhD supervisor(s).

Notification to authors: February 28, 2025

Workshop location

Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales (CEFRES), Na Florenci 3, CZ-110 00 Prague

Partial refund of travel expenses could be offered, on demand, by CEFRES to PhD students (in case of its impossibility at their main institutions).

Source : Calenda