Call for papers for two sessions at Leeds IMC July 2014

*Empire between Empires: Understanding Empire in the long seventh century*

*Session at the International Medieval Congress (IMC), Leeds, 7-10 July 2014*

Much of the history of the seventh century is dominated by struggles between empires; between the Sassanians and Byzantines in the earlier years and between those two and the rising power of the Islamic caliphate later on.  One of the great empires of antiquity, the Persian, ends in this period.    

How did seventh century peoples conceptualise empire in a period where it no longer had a clear meaning?  Did universal empire retain power as a political/ideological goal?  Was the meaning of empire transformed in the period?  Was empire an aspiration among peoples of the time?  Did visions of past and future empires colour understandings of the present?

*Empire between Empires: Understanding Empire in the long seventh century* proposes to examine the ways in which seventh century peoples conceptualized Empire across cultures and seeks to find meaningful common points as well as divergencies between the visions of Empire in the period.   This examination will take place within the context of the 2014 IMC.

The IMC, an annual conference running continuously since 1994, is the biggest humanities event in Europe, attracting over 1800 delegates in 2013, and provides a unique forum for sharing and comparing approaches across a wealth of disciplines.

Responding to the 2014 theme ‘Empire’, *Empire between Empires: Understanding Empire in the long seventh century* will offer further opportunities for fruitful exchange between scholars working on concepts of imperialism, ideology, apocalyptic and historiography across a broad range of languages and cultures but within a narrow chronological period.

Proposals for papers are warmly invited from new and established researchers in the field, and topics may include:

• Imagining empire: the idea of empire in the seventh century Latin west

• Islam and Empire: the early Islamic view of Roman and Persian empires

• Empires and the End: the idea of empire in seventh century apocalyptic

• Salvaging Empire: the idea of empire and Byzantine survival

• New Empires of the Mind? The idea of empire as ideology in previously non-imperial societies (Franks, Goths, Arabs, etc)

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*The Empire Never Ended?  Letting go of Roman identity in the post-Imperial world*

*Session at the International Medieval Congress (IMC), Leeds, 7-10 July 2014*

Dating the end of the Roman Empire has long been a popular parlour game.  Numerous years can be proposed as date of the ‘fall’ of the empire.  Yet all of these ignore the obvious question of when did the peoples of the Roman Empire themselves come to think of themselves as living in a post-imperial era?

The answer seems far from simple and varies from region to region but it is clear that, whenever people ceased to think of themselves as living within the Empire, it was long after the Empire had ceased to rule over them.

The strand *The Empire Never Ended?  Letting go of Roman identity in the post-Imperial world* proposes to examine when and how that rupture in thinking occurred within the framework of the IMC 2014.

The IMC, an annual conference running continuously since 1994, is the biggest humanities event in Europe, attracting over 1800 delegates in 2013, and provides a unique forum for sharing and comparing approaches across a wealth of disciplines.

Responding to the 2014 theme ‘Empire’, *The Empire Never Ended?  Letting go of Roman identity in the post-Imperial world* will offer further opportunities for fruitful exchange between scholars working on concepts of identity, community, and authority throughout the post-Roman world.

Proposals for papers are warmly invited from new and established researchers in the field, and topics may include:

• Being ‘Roman’ along the frontier: the formation of Roman ‘ethnic’ identities in post-Roman environments

• The Empire as a thing of the past: literary identification of the Roman Empire as a historical subject in the early middle ages

• Waiting for the Restoration?  Continuing Roman identity long after the legions have left

These are only a few possible ways of looking at the question.  Researchers looking at all aspects of it are strongly encouraged to join the discussion.

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If you are interested in offering a 20-minute paper within either session please send a title and a brief abstract of 100 words by 1 September 2013 to Thomas J. MacMaster at empireatleeds@gmail.com

Please note: Speakers invited cannot present a paper in another session at the IMC. All speakers will have to pay the appropriate IMC registration fee to attend.

For more information on the IMC see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/, and for the call for papers for the 2014 Congress, see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/imc/imc2014_call.html

The twentieth International Medieval Congress will take place on the University of Leeds campus in Leeds from 7-10 July 2014.

The Seventh Century Across Cultures: a panel at Kalamazoo, May 2014

Please forward and/or circulate to anyone who might be interested. Thanks!

Call for Papers: The Seventh Century Across Cultures

Panel sponsored by the Seventh Century Studies Network
49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 8-11, 2014

Drawing inspiration from the recent Edinburgh Seventh Century Colloquium, this session will attempt to bring together scholars from different disciplines studying the seventh century in order to promote discussion and the cross-fertilization of ideas.  We will explore how wider perspectives can be used to formulate new approaches to source material, drawing out fresh perspectives on both the familiar and unfamiliar.

The session will be an examination of whether the seventh century can be studied as a unit across regions or whether the period represents a break in the longue durée.  What was the level of discontinuity between the ‘long sixth’ and ‘long eighth’ centuries? 

We invite those working in archaeology, art history, history, literature, numismatics, and religion, as well as in fields including Byzantine, Celtic, Classics, Islamic, and Late Antique studies to submit 100 word abstracts for papers of approximately 20 minutes that engage with aspects of continuity and/or discontinuity during the long seventh century.

We seek to have an interdisciplinary panel that reflects the various ways that questions of continuity and discontinuity can be addressed.

Please send proposals and a Participant Information Form (link below) to
edinburgh7th@gmail.com  by September 1.

The Participant Information Form can be downloaded in MS Word or pdf
format from
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF

The future of the seventh century?

Dear everyone,

Before discussing the future of the seventh century, I want again to extend my deepest thanks to everyone who made our colloquium so successful, to my fellow organisers and our assistants, our wearied partners and supervisors, but, especially, I want to thank all of our speakers, respondents, and interrogators.  Without the amazing communications contributed by so many, the Colloquium could not have been the tremendous success that it was.  Again thanks!

We hope to publish a volume based on the proceedings from the colloquium.  We are currently working to ensure a subvention and hope to have that finalized soon.  We will be communicating individually with all our authors in the weeks ahead regarding what we will need from them.

We are also hoping that this colloquium will not be a one-off event and have already begun informal discussions regarding the 2014 Edinburgh Seventh Century Colloquium, an event that we hope will be even better.  All of you, of course, will hear from us once we have some sort of details regarding that!

We don’t, however, only want whatever comes out of this to be an exclusively Edinburgh project but something that will foster further collaboration between different universities, disciplines, nationalities, and perspectives.  As a very first step, we will host a social gathering at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds on 2 July.  One of our speakers, Kıvılcım Yavuz (University of Leeds) has generously helped arrange this.  Details can be found on facebook at:

https://www.facebook.com/events/453087098113496/  

We will also be submitting applications for sponsored panels at the medieval congress in Kalamazoo for 2014 within a few days as well as for the 2014 IMC in Leeds.  Once these are prepared, they will also be circulated to everyone on our mailing lists.

In hopes of fostering dialogue and sharing ideas, as well as news of events relevant to our period, an on-line mailing list/newsgroup will be formed.  (For the moment, I will serve as moderator though a volunteer for a second would be helpful.)  This will serve as a forum for communication.  Members will be encouraged to post cfps, publication announcements, reviews, articles, etc. as well as use it as a place to seek advice or comments, for help with translations and so on (this will be similar to the H-MEM, BYZANS, and other existent lists).

Similarly, the blog will be transformed from simply carrying information about the Edinburgh colloquium to being a news and announcement site.  (Again, for the moment, I will continue as webmaster).

All of this will be in aid of forming an ongoing Seventh Century Studies network.  For the moment, this will be informal, but, when we meet again, we may discuss something more developed.

If you are interested in any of these projects, please let us know!

Hopefully, this is only the beginning!

Gratefully,

Tom MacMaster

(on behalf of the entire organizing committee)

Late registration

Our pre-registration page has closed.  Fortunately, we still have a few spaces available.  If you are interested in attending, please send an email to: edinburgh7th@gmail.com 

Only 24 hours left to register!

There are only twenty four hours left to register for the Seventh Century Colloquium!

We've had an incredible response; we only have space for 15 more people.

If you want to be one of them, register NOW!

http://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=1059&deptid=69&catid=6

Session 1 – Maintaining and changing identities

Session 1 – Maintaining and changing identities

Moderator: Bethan Morris, University of Edinburgh

A: Richard Broome

                Approaches to the Frankish Community in the Chronicle of Fredegar and Liber Historiae Francorum

This paper will attempt to assess attitudes towards and understanding of the early-medieval Frankish community during the seventh century by providing a direct comparison between two important but often under-appreciated historical texts; the so-called ‘Chronicle of Fredegar’ (c.660) and the anonymous Liber Historiae Francorum (727). Building on the work of scholars such as Paul Fouracre, Richard Gerberding and Ian Wood, the present paper will examine several key aspects of how the two authors portrayed the community of which they thought themselves a part. Who or what did they understand by the term ‘Franks’? For the author of LHF, this seems to have referred specifically the Neustrians, whereas Fredegar presents a more ‘pan-Frankish’ history. What were the origins of the community and its rulers? Both traced these origins back to the Trojan War – unlike their historian-predecessor Gregory of Tours – but each told a slightly different version of the story, while Fredegar also narrated the mysterious story about Merovech’s alleged descent from the monstrous Quinotaur. How important were kings to their respective visions of community, and what role did they have? Both saw kings as central, but the author of LHF portrayed a world where consensus depended on dynastic stability, while Fredegar explored the idea of Merovingian decline and fallibility more explicitly despite having written earlier. In order to properly contextualise these comparisons and understand their significance it will also be necessary to refer to the authors’ contemporary texts, particularly seventh-century works of hagiography, but also to earlier and later authors – Gregory of Tours in the former case, and, for example, the early Carolingian annalists in the latter. By doing this we will be able to provide a greater understanding of how seventh-century visions of community compared to earlier and later visions, and whether we can talk about a ‘long eighth century’ when examining this issue.

Response: Roger Collins

B: Soléna Cheny

                The Seventh Century in Maghreb: between the Latin Antiquity and Islamic Middle Ages

The question of the seventh century is really relevant for the Maghreb. In Europe, the Barbarian invasions opened a new era while North of Africa was in a transition period. The Berber world had experienced the appetite of the powers of the Mediterranean, from the Phoenicians to the Byzantines. Cultures, languages, political tutelage shaped the land and its people. The Vandal invasion, although very short (430 to 533) allowed the Berber tribes to take control of the territory of the provinces and build autonomous political entities comprising tribal, Romanized and Christianized Africans and descendants of Roman colonists. The Byzantine reconquest found it difficult to establish the mythologized Roman model when Muslim troops entered from the east, destroying the structures in place before moving quickly to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and enter the Iberian Peninsula. A new tutelage was then installed with its codes, its laws and its civilization. Thereafter, African identity would never be the same, Islam leaving a profound mark. This long seventh century, which could stretch from 533 (the Byzantine invasion) to 711 (when the Muslims invaded Spain), more than tipping in the medieval era, is for the Maghreb, the basis of its current identity.

Response: Thomas J. MacMaster

See the full schedule for more!