International colloquium - Medievalisms of the Margins
Staging Medieval Memories in Outside Western Europe
Since the 19th century, the Middle Ages have often been made up of mythemes such as castles, forests, princesses, knights and unicorns, which may meet populations living in the desert to the south, decadence or barbarism to the east and savage Vikings to the north on the margins, but the latter act as representatives of the Other, the Stranger. Indeed, these imaginative geographies reflect the European geopolitical and cultural situation of the 19th century, with France and Great Britain at the centre and the rest of Europe in the periphery and even on the margins. In the fictional medieval world, these geographies have changed little to the present day, even when adapted for use in new media. However, from these supposed margins, writers, artists and other cultural mediators have launched projects to update and reuse medieval sources and ideas for their own cultural, aesthetic and political projects. This conference aims to explore the medieval strategies of authors from Eastern, Central and Northern and what was later called East-Central Europe, who often construct their visions of the Middle Ages in tension with the dominant discourses of medievalism.
We are particularly interested in studies that cross the boundaries of traditional disciplines and propose case studies in which actors, artefacts or media from different parts of these supposed margins interact. Such studies might, for example, focus on the function of the Byzantine and Muslim worlds, since the imagined encounter with actors from an even more distant East often serves as an incentive for the dramatic logic of national myths.
The colloquium is organised by Tatiana Victoroff and Thomas Mohnike from the University of Strasbourg, Giuseppina Giuliano (University of Salerno, Italy), Yordan Lyutskanov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and Alexander Medvedev (independent scholar), with support from the abovenamed oganisations as well as from Strasbourg’s National and University Library (BNU), the association "Modernités médiévales" and USIAS.
