BORDERS AND BORDERLANDS IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE
Friday 10 June 2016
Verdon Smith Room, Royal Fort, University of Bristol
SPEAKERS AND ABSTRACTS
10.30 Professor Mark Ormrod
‘Crossing Borders: Migration and Regulation in Later Medieval England’
In an age when border controls were minimal and nationalities were fluid, how and why did states and societies seek to identify and regulate the 'aliens' in their midst? New data reveal that, over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,the English parliament and government developed not only a general rhetoric of hostility to aliens but also a much more nuanced and flexible attitude to long-term residents born abroad. This raises questions about both the spatial and cultural features of the 'border' that are of general relevance to a wider range of studies.
Mark Ormrod is Professor of Medieval History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of York. Author of a number of books, including Edward III (Yale University Press, 2011), he has been working recently on the theme of immigration to England during the later Middle Ages in connection with his major AHRC-funded project, ‘England’s Immigrants, 1330–1550’.
12.00 Professor Thomas Hahn
‘New Worlds in the Making of National and Transnational European Readerships’
This paper will trace out the circuit traveled by a series of linked images and printed materials over a compressed period of time in German, Dutch, Latin, and English. Between 1508 and 1511 some seven different accounts – sponsored by bankers, merchants, artists, and printers from Bavaria to the Low Countries to England and implicitly to Portugal and India – all fed off one another in advertising Europe’s new global outreach to a wide spectrum of European readers and viewers.
Thomas Hahn teaches medieval and early modern literatures and cultures in the English Department at the University of Rochester. His work has often focused on the ways in which European identities recast the roles of outsiders, including outlaws, Indians, and Jews. Recent publications include “Don’t Cry for Me, Augustinus: Dido and the Dangers of Empathy,” and “East and West, Cosmopolitan and Imperial in the Roman Alexander.”
2.00 Professor Catherine Clarke
‘Hic iacet…? The Tomb of Adam Usk as a Border Space’
Within the parish church of St Mary, Usk, the tomb of the medieval chronicler Adam Usk presents an unusually compact and provocative version of a border space. This paper will examine the Welsh epitaph of Adam Usk, inscribed on a brass plaque in the church, as a way into thinking about questions of place, language and border identities on the medieval March of Wales and beyond. What can Adam’s epitaph tell us about the ways in which he negotiated his multiple roles as lawyer, chronicler, rebel and spy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries? And what kinds of framework or methodology might facilitate collaboration between scholars working on this type of focused ‘case study’ approach?
Catherine Clarke is Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture at the University of Southampton. Her research explores intersections between place, power and identity in the Middle Ages, often with particular attention to border regions. She has led several AHRC-funded collaborative projects bringing together digital mapping, medieval texts and heritage interpretation for public audiences, including ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ (www.medievalchester.ac.uk), ‘Discover Medieval Chester’ (http://discover.medievalchester.ac.uk) and ‘City Witness: Place and Persective in Medieval Swansea’ (www.medievalswansea.ac.uk).
3.15 Professor Jonathan Wooding
‘Interrogating Welsh Borders and Borderlands: Space, Movement and Identity in Wales, c. 1100–1500’
In this presentation I will briefly examine examples from two data-sets with which I wish to interrogate the conceptions of border and borderlands in Wales c. AD 1100-1500. One conception of ‘border’ during this period was that which remains the principal modern conception: namely a land-crossing into England. This was an era, however, in which sea-travel was often more effective than land-travel and the entire coast could be a border. In literature and prophecy, moreover, Welsh identity could also be variously conceived in terms of the whole island of Britain, or as part of a holistic conception of the peoples on the shores of the Irish Sea. Thinking in this way, narratives of movement to and around the shores of Wales assume a particular importance.
My first data-set will comprise some ecclesiastical spaces which are on or adjacent to to the coast, many of them legacies of the Church of the first millennium. They are liminal, remote, spaces when viewed from the east. These spaces are, however, drawn into narratives of pilgrimage (including royal progress), religious affirmation, and monastic retreat that invoke their status as liminal spaces in relation to land and sea (and to Earth and Heaven). The character of English, Irish, Norman, and Norse, as well as Welsh, influence in these coastal centres will also be noted.
A second data-set, related to the first, concerns what I will term ‘directional’ models in Welsh historiography and their dialogue with traditional ‘geopolitical’ models of history. One sub-text of what can be identified as ‘western seaways’ and ‘highland/lowland’ models of medieval Welsh history (models that were strongly developed by Welsh-based scholars in the twentieth century) is a desire to subvert conservative, often nationalist, geopolitical narratives that turn on perceptions of the unity of landmasses; the latter narratives also inspire what we might term the ‘replacement by invasion’ conception of cultural change, which impacts on readings of Welsh medieval history. These reflections on spatial models are intended to facilitate further reflection on the range of possible spaces we might identify as borders and borderlands in medieval Wales.
Jonathan Wooding is Sir Warwick Fairfax Chair of Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney. His research interests include travel narratives in the early Celtic world, Celtic saints’ lives, and pilgrimage and tourism in Celtic countries. Recent books include Living the Hours: Monastic Spirituality in Everyday Life (2010) and the edited collection Ireland and Wales in the Middle Ages (2007).
4.15 Dr Marianne O’Doherty
‘Pelagios’
Marianne Doherty of the University of Southampton explains the online resource, Pelagios, as a tool for mapping historical and related data.