Vlaamse Werkgroep Mediëvistiek

Op 8 Mei 2018 vindt de jaarlijkse prestigieuze Pirenne-lezing plaats, georganiseerd door de Vlaamse Werkgroep Mediëvistiek en gezamenlijk gefinancierd door de Vlaamse Werkgroep Mediëvistiek en de Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies. Dit jaar werd Emeritus Professor Thomas F.X. Noble (University of Notre Dame, USA) uitgenodigd om te spreken over ‘Virtual Materiality’.

For about two decades many historians have been making the “material turn”.  That is, they have been incorporating physical objects more often and more effectively into their explanations and thereby building up a sub-field of the historical discipline entitled “material culture.”  This lecture joins that conversation by investigating some different material realities that are today known to us only by textual representations.  The lecture will draw upon different kinds of texts—poems and histories, for example—to ask what these texts actually say and how we might understand their words.  The lecture proceeds from the assumption that the objects described did really exist and that texts give us access to those objects even if their reality for us now can be no more that “virtual.”  The kinds of descriptions that the lecture includes are to be sharply differentiated from the classical genre of ekphrasis which artfully described things that existed in poetic but not in physical reality.

Thomas Noble is emeritus professor geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Notre Dame. Hij is lang directeeur geweest aan het Medieval Institute in Notre Dame. Zijn onderzoek behelst de geschiedenis van de stad Rome, de geschiedenis van het pausschap en relaties met de Karolingische hof, en de contacten en uitwisselingen tussen het Westen en Byzantium.
Een aantal van zijn belangrijkste publicaties zijn The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1984), Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Envisioning Experience in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages: Dynamic Patterns in texts and Images, uitgegeven in samewerking met Giselle de Nie (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012) en European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, uitgegeven in samewerking met John Van Engen Notre Dame (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

De lezing gaat van start om 18.30 uur in zaal de Oude Infirmerie in Het Pand, Onderbergen 1, 9000 Gent. Achteraf wordt er een receptie aangeboden op dezelfde locatie (gratis voor leden van de VWM, 10 euro voor niet-leden). Contactpersoon: Micol Long (micol.long@ugent.be).

De brochure kan gedownload worden hier: Brochure Pirenne Lezing 2018.

Gelieve in te schrijven vóór 16 april via het onderstaande formulier: 

Research seminar with Bruce Campbell (Queen’s University Belfast), organized by the Antwerp Centre for Urban History.

Antwerp, Monday 19^th of March 2018, 15:00-17:30

Venue? UAntwerpen, Meerminne, M003 https://www.uantwerpen.be/images/uantwerpen/container1161/files/CST_17_NED.pdf

With The Great Transition. Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World (CUP, 2016), Bruce Campbell has rewritten the history of both the Black Death and the European economy in the later Middle Ages. After the Great Transition the economic history of the pre-industrial world can no longer be told without taking into account climate and ecology. The Great Transition also fundamentally challenges our view of post-Black Death Europe: once the tipping point of the 1340s had been passed, Europe gradually found itself in conditions which no longer resembled the world of growth and expansion of the 12^th and 13^th centuries. Instead repeated plague outbreaks, demographic contraction, bullion famine, economic depression and commercial isolation characterized Europe between c. 1390 and c. 1490. For historians of the ‘Burgundian’ Low Countries, this might be a rather ‘shocking’ perspective. While not dismissing the crisis of the Later Middle Ages all together, historians of the Low Countries often tend to focus on the persistent urban economic, political and cultural dynamics of this period. Did the urban Low Countries escape the ‘systemic changes’ of the Later Middle Ages? Or, were they rather the exception to the rule, an island of ‘prosperity amidst adversity’? Or do we have to reassert the scale and depth of economic contraction and declining employment in the Later Middle Ages, even in the core regions of the Low Countries?

In this afternoon seminar, Bruce Campbell presents recent estimates of English GDP per head, daily real wage rates of men and women and annual earnings. These invite us to rethink the transformation of labour after the Black Death, starting from debates on the so-called Golden Age of Labour, declining employment and a growing leisure preference. His presentation will be followed by two papers on the Low Countries.

1. Monday 19^th March 2018, 15:00-17:30 M003

15:00: Bruce M.S. Campbell (The Queen’s University of Belfast)

Unemployment, leisure and industriousness in late-medieval and renaissance Europe

15:50: Sam Geens and Tim Soens (UAntwerp):

A golden age of leisure? Employment rates in coastal Flanders between the 13th and 15th century.

16:15: Peter Stabel (UAntwerp):

Winners and losers. Urban labour and economic decline in the post-Black Death Low Countries

16:40: Discussion

17:15: Drinks

1. Tuesday 20^th March, 10:30-12:30, R008

On Tuesday, Bruce Campbell will give a second lecture on: The Black Death: an enduring enigma.

Venue: UAntwerpen, City Campus, R008

How to attend?

Attendance of both seminar and lecture is free, but please register in advance by e-mail: tim.soens@uantwerpen.be 

The complete flyer can can be downloaded here.