This year’s annual symposium organized by the International Medieval Society focuses on the medieval city in France
After the decline of the ancient city during the fifth and sixth centuries, a renewal of cities began in the eleventh century. As documented by archaeological investigations and new historical research, this phenomenon radically transformed the medieval society.
The aim of the 12th symposium organized by the International Medieval Society is to present new research focusing on the medieval city in France from the 11th to the 15th centuries. Cartographic explorations, monuments, the spacial organisation of cities, city-politics and cultural history will be on the programme. Themes to be explored will be:
- urban morphologies, urban planning, architecture
- the city as performance – urban rituals, processions, musical performances, theatres
- intellectual, spiritual and material cultural practices
- development of literate and political cultures
- the role of markets
- the daily life in the medieval city
- the development of intellectual institutions: schools, universities, philanthropy, beggars, etc.).
- urban philosophies – what was the idea of the city?
The symposium will take place in Paris from 25.06.2015 – 27.06.2015
Programme:
25.06.2015
9:00-9:30 Welcome / Accueil et inscriptions.
9:30-10:00 Introduction: Sarah Long and Fanny Madeline
10:00-11:30 Boris Bove: De l’histoire des villes à l’histoire urbaine : état des lieux du champ historiographique”
12:00-13:30
Session 1: Acteurs et morphologie urbaine / The Form of the City
Chair: Fanny Madeline
– Kathryn E. Salzer, “Creating the Physical Localities of Medieval Cambrai”
– Annarita Teodosio and Simona Talenti, “Salerne, capitale normande”
– Catherine Barrett, “Concepts of urban development in town charters of the counts of Toulouse and their Lieutenants”
Session 2: La pensée politique de la ville / Political thought and the city
Chair: Julian Führer
– Nicole Hochner: “Nicole Oresme (c. 1320-1382) et la ville”
– Daniele Dibello: “Aristotelian thought and governance of a medieval city-state: the case of Venice”
16:30-18:00 Session 3: La ville représentatée / The City in images
Chair: Anna Russakoff
– Caroline Ziolko: “Ville, regard et imagerie médiatique”
– Caroline Simonet: “Les villes sigillaires : topographies utopiques et traces du réel”
– Juliette Dumasy: “Plans et vues de villes en France à la fin du Moyen Age”
26.06.2015
9.30-11:00 Emma Dillon: “Listening to the medieval city: perspectives from musicology and sound studies”
Session 4: Les fonctions rituelles de l’espace urbain / Ritual functions of urban spaces
Chair: Kristin Hoefener
– Ewoud Waerniers: “Ritual use of the urban space in times of communal unrest. Cambrai, c. 1150-1227”
– Tova Leigh-Choate: “The Sacred Topography of Medieval Paris: Relics, Routes, and Song in the City of Saint Denis”
– Jeannette D. Jones: “La sainte épine: Ritual at the Bourbonnais Court in Moulins”
Session 5: Les usages sociaux et symboliques de la ville / Social and symbolic uses of the city
Chair: Sarah Long
– Nathan A. Daniels, “ ‘Pour un vers de chanson’: Minstrels, Guilds, and the Social Construction of Urban Space in the Fourteenth Century”
– Troy J. Tice, “Penitential Paris: Thomas of Bailly and the Penitential Anxieties of Medieval Parisians”
– Margaret E. Hadley: “French Pilgrims’ Internal Paths through Jerusalem via Arma Christi Miniatures”
16:00-18:00 Visite/visit – Medieval Paris
27.06.2015
9:30-11:00 Carol Symes: “L’espace public à Londres et Arras, 1086-1215: Cultures documentaires, coutumes urbaines, et libertés civiques”
Session 6: Comparer les villes / Comparing cities
Chair: Mary Franklin-Brown
– Martin Schwarz: “Old Paris, New Athens: Translatio Studii in the Vie de St Denis (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms fr 2090-2)”
– Emerson S. F. Richards: “New Jerusalem and Old Manuscripts: Text and Image. Representations of New Jerusalem in 13th century French and English Manuscripts”
– Frans W. G. W. Camphuijsen: “Late medieval law courts and urban space: the cases of Paris and Utrecht”
Session 7: “Le développement urbain: les villes de Champagne/ Urban development: the towns of Champagne”
Chair: Raeleen Chai-Elsholz
– Claire Bourguignon: Approche de la fabrique d’une ville médiévale : Troyes (Aube) au tournant du haut Moyen Âge et du Moyen Âge central
– Cléo Rager: Aménagements municipaux et identité urbaine : voirie et « voyeurs » à Troyes au XVe siècle
– Julien Briand: Un théâtre du pouvoir : la ville de Reims en ses registres (XIVe – XVe siècles)
16:00-16.30 Conclusions
16.30-17:00 Final discussion
SOURCE:
International Medieval Society
ESSENTIAL READING BY GUESTS OF HONOUR:
Le Paris du Moyen Âge
By Boris Bove and Claude Gauvard
Belin 2014
This book, which contains over 80 illustrations and maps, brings together presentations from a conference organized in 2012 by the History Committee of the City of Paris on the theme of Paris in the Middle Ages. Nine historians presents specific aspects the history of Paris as reflected in their research. Questions addressed are
- the place of the founding saints in the city
- the role of the bishop
- the role of the intellectuals
- the role of the bourgeoisie
- the position of women
- the king in his palace
- paris during civil wars
The aim is to present a rounded picture of Paris, which cannot be characterized in the same way as Ghent (the industrial city), Bologna (the university city) or Venice (the commercial hub).
The book is edited by Claude Gauvard , who is Professor Emeritus of History of the Middle Ages at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and an honorary member of the University Institute of France and Boris Bove, who is a lecturer in medieval history at Paris VIII.
The Sense of Sound. Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330
By Emma Dillon
The New Cultural History of Music Series
Oxford University Press 2012
ISBN: 9780199732951
Among the most memorable innovations of music and poetry in thirteenth-century France was a genre that seemed to privilege sound over sense. The polytextual motet is especially well-known to scholars of the Middle Ages for its tendency to conceal complex allegorical meaning in a texture that, in performance, made words less, rather than more, audible. It is with such musical sound that this book is concerned. What did it mean to create a musical effect so potentially independent from the meaning of words? Is it possible such supermusical effects themselves had significance? The Sense of Sound offers a radical recontextualization of French song in the heyday of the motet c.1260–1330, and makes the case for listening to musical sound against a range of other potently meaningful sonorities, often premised on non-verbal meaning. In identifying new audible interlocutors to music, it opens our ears to a broad spectrum of sounds often left out of historical inquiry, from the hubbub of the medieval city; to the eloquent babble of madmen; to the violent clamor of charivari; to the charismatic chatter of prayer. Drawing on a rich array of artistic evidence (music, manuscripts, poetry, and images) and contemporary cultural theory, it locates musical production in this period within a larger cultural environment concerned with representing sound and its emotional, ethical, and social effects. In so doing, The Sense of Sound offers an experiment in how we might place central the most elusive aspect of music’s history: sound’s vibrating, living effect.. Companion website offers an innovative means of making the visual evidence accessible to the reader
A Common Stage. Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras
By Carol Symes
Cornell University Press 2007
ISBN-10 0801445817
ISBN-13 978-0-8014-4581-1
Medieval Arras was a thriving town on the frontier between the kingdom of France and the county of Flanders, and home to Europe’s earliest surviving vernacular plays: The Play of St. Nicholas, The Courtly Lad of Arras, The Boy and the Blind Man, The Play of the Bower, and The Play about Robin and about Marion. In A Common Stage, Carol Symes undertakes a cultural archeology of these artifacts, analyzing the processes by which a handful of entertainments were conceived, transmitted, received, and recorded during the thirteenth century. She then places the resulting scripts alongside other documented performances with which plays shared a common space and vocabulary: the crying of news, publication of law, preaching of sermons, telling of stories, celebration of liturgies, and arrangement of civic spectacles. She thereby shows how groups and individuals gained access to various means of publicity, participated in public life, and shaped public opinion. And she reveals that the theater of the Middle Ages was not merely a mirror of society but a social and political sphere, a vital site for the exchange of information and ideas, and a vibrant medium for debate, deliberation, and dispute.
The result is a book that closes the gap between the scattered textual remnants of medieval drama and the culture of performance from which that drama emerged. A Common Stage thus challenges the prevalent understanding of theater history while offering the first comprehensive history of a community often credited with the invention of French as a powerful literary language.
CHECK OUT:
Next years conference organized by The British Archaeological society is held in Paris and focuses on Paris 500 – 1500. The Powers that Shape a City
FEATURED PHOTO:
The Right Hand of God Protecting the Faithful against the Demons
Artist: Jean Fouquet (French, Tours ca. 1425–ca. 1478 Tours)
Date: ca. 1452–1460
Medium: Tempera and gold leaf on parchment
Dimensions: leaf: 7 5/8 x 5 3/4 in. (19.4 x 14.6 cm)
Classification: Manuscripts and Illuminations
Credit Line: Robert Lehman Collection, 1975
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Accession Number: 1975.1.2490
Available by Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) via the Met’s Website
The “Hours of Étienne Chevalier” is one of the most famous and lavishly illuminated manuscripts of the fifteenth century. It was painted for the treasurer of France by Jean Fouquet, court artist to kings Charles VII and Louis XI, who worked not only as a miniaturist but also as a panel painter. The Lehman miniature decorates the page that contains the opening words of the evening prayer (vespers) for the Hours of the Holy Spirit. It shows the faithful standing in the foreground on a terrace, looking up at the hand of God, as demons flee to the left and right. The subject is highly unusual, as is the topographically accurate depiction of medieval Paris, in which the cathedral of Notre Dame, the spire of Saint-Chapelle, the Pont Saint-Michel, and other monuments of the Île de la Cité (including the Hôtel de Nesle, where the figures stand) are immediately recognizable.