This week saw more than 2,500 scholars of the Middle Ages descend on the University of Leeds (England) for the 25th annual International Medieval Congress. There, over the course of 4 days and more than 1,900 independent sessions, scholars from across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa shared their research and teaching with one another.
The (loose) theme of "memory" chosen for this year seemed particularly appropriate, given the conference's primary focus on events that happened somewhere between roughly 500-1500 years ago. And as might be expected from such a diverse group of scholars, the topics of the presentations understandably varied widely. Here you found talks on much of what you might expect - the Crusades, Anglo-Saxon literature and the legend of King Arthur, the great ruler Charlemagne, the visionary Hildegard of Bingen, monks and nuns, etc. But you found a lot more too and in every case, what united all the presentations, was an new, expansive understanding of what the "medieval" actually means.
The phrase "Middle Ages" shows off its European origins. Deriving from the Latin phrase medium aevum ("a middle age"), it was first brought into circulation by writers (primarily in Italy) during the 14th and 15th centuries, who thought their own time was more like ancient Rome than the centuries immediately before theirs. Then, writers and historians during the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries cemented this conception in the popular imagination - the ancient world had been destroyed by the "Fall of Rome," leading to a rise of superstition during the Middle Ages. Human progress only restarted with the so-called "Renaissance."
The problem with this understanding of dividing history in this way, however, is that this story of events is only concerned with what happened in Europe. And, as I wrote about earlier in relation to King Arthur's legendary castle, Europe has always been connected both physically and intellectually to elsewhere, from antiquity through the Middle Ages.
Just to take one example from the period itself, many maps created in medieval Europe were known as "T-O" because of their shape. As you can see from the late medieval copy of one such map above, Europe (which appears on the bottom-right) is just one small part of a much larger world. Asia dominates and Africa is just as important. This idea never left the medieval imagination.
The richness of the research presented at this year's International Medieval Congress shows this interconnection well.
A series of linked sessions highlighted Ethiopia and Nubia in the period, and how trade connected them to the Mediterranean and beyond. Another set of presentations focused on the sub-Saharan kingdom of Mali, which was well-known to medieval Europe of the 14th century.
Other presentations demonstrated connections through Europe and the Middle East to East Asia, with one paper for example showing the intriguing similarities between tales about kings and warriors collected from China and France from the same time period. And lest we forget, during the so-called Middle Ages the Atlantic had been crossed first by Scandinavians then by Italians and Spaniards.
The richness and variety of research on display at the 2018 International Medieval Congress points towards a new "Global Middle Ages" and by doing so reminds all of us that the period between ca. 500-1500 CE wasn't chronologically in the middle of anything. To say so is an act of imagination that we might now want to dispel. After all, there's overwhelming evidence that contact across continents was constant and the histories of the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas are - and always have been - the history of the peoples of Europe as well.
