Conference 7-8 July 2006
Friday 7th and Saturday 8th July 2006: Urban Witness: Languages of the Medieval Italian Commune
[Posted on 24 June 2005]
Conference Announcement 2006
The subject of the conference was launched at the 2005 meeting of The International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo 5 May. The panel was convened with participants from Bristol, St. Andrews and the University of Madison Wisconsin as part of the 'Medieval Multilingualism' initiative within the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Medieval strand.
The Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bristol in conjunction with the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) 'Multilingualism' project announces the forthcoming plenary conference at The Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies University of London 7-8 July 2006. Plenary speakers include Nigel Vincent (Manchester), Carol Lansing (University of California, Santa Barbara), Lawrin Armstrong (Toronto), Robert Black (Leeds), Claudio Giunta (Trento), Joe Canning (Bangor), Edward Coleman (Dublin), Alison Cornish (Michigan), Nicola De Blasi (Naples), Claire Honess (Leeds), Magnus Ryan (Warburg Institute, London), Catherine Keen (UCL, London), F. Thomas Luongo (New Orleans, Tulane), Carrie Benes (New College, Florida), Lorenzo Tomasin (SNS, Pisa) and Nello Bertoletti (Pisa). The aim of the 2006 conference is to bring together scholars whose work engages with the urban communes of late medieval Italy but whose disciplinary orientation means they often work in isolation from each other. |
 |
| By inviting a cross-section of scholars studying medieval lyric, legal history and jurisprudence, communal rhetorical and dictaminal commentary, sermon studies, medieval Italian linguistics, early communal political thought, and chronicle writing, the aim of the two day plenary event is to investigate the manner in which shared concerns permeated these different literary registers and found simultaneous expression in the writings of individuals who wrote in more than one discourse: lawyers who were also poets, poets who were also preachers, rhetoricians who were also political thinkers and diarists, and so on. All these literary forms were produced within the urban centres of late medieval Italy between 1200-1400 in reaction to, and as readings of, the urban experience in its multiple guises. By juxtaposing the loci and styles of communal literary production the hope is to examine the literary and spatial commonplaces shared by these various forms of urban narrative and reflect upon what their witness to civic communion revealed about the tensions and benefits of social aggregation within self-determining urban communities. | |
If you would like to learn more about this event and be added to the mailing list, please contact Dr Stephen Milner, c/o Department of Italian, University of Bristol, 19 Woodland Rd., Bristol, BS7 9DG or email: Stephen.J.Milner@bristol.ac.uk