2006 Medieval Workshop

The Performance of the Past: History and Histrionics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages The 36th Annual Medieval Workshop 27 - 28 October 2006 Keynote speaker: John Matthews, Yale University “Resetting the Urban Scene: The Material Presence of the Past in Constantine's New Capital" Friday, Oct. 27, 12 noon Buchanan A102, Main Campus   The keynote addresse is open to the public without registration.

This conference will explore the dynamic relationships among memory, history, and the media through which both were realized in the first millennium of the Common Era. Because the present was understood in relation to the past, the new in terms of the old, memory-as recent scholarship has emphasized-was a crucial site of meaning-production. But the memorial production of meaning is always a mediated process. Given that present demands dictated a (re)staging of the past, our conference seeks to illuminate the variety of means and ways by which the genres, settings, casts, and publics of remembrance (and forgetting) shaped historical plot in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Some of the meaningful, memorable performances to be discussed involve hymns, funerary art and architecture, autobiography, invective, hagiography, public spectacles, panegyric, royal diplomas, manuscript illumination, and coded texts.

In particular, we shall seek

* to distinguish the various interpretive modes according to which authors composed their histories.

* to differentiate the demands and possibilities that particular interpretive modes placed on and provided to those who employed them, whether author or audience;

* to ascertain the degree to which a specifically dramatic consciousness-i.e., thinking shaped by the inherited conventions and constraints of theatre and genres of drama-influenced interpretation and historical representation;

* to investigate the interplay and synthesis of drama with other interpretive modes and examine the contexts in which such combinations occur;

* to plot the diversity of contexts in which the past is performed in order to mark shifts in the sites of its constitution (remembering) or deletion (forgetting);

* to consider how far modern historical narratives or "meta-narratives" of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages rely upon or even replicate the dramatic devices of ancient and medieval sources.

An overriding aim of the conference will be to foster closer dialogue between scholars in the respective fields of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Attendance at the workshop is open to all who are interested; see registration information below.

This workshop is supported by funds from the following at the University of British Columbia:

The President's Committee on Lectures
The Office of the Vice-President (Research)
The Office of the Dean of Arts
The Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies
The Department of English
The Department of History
The Committee on Medieval Studies
The Canada Research Chair in Literature / Christianity, UBC

 

 

Links:

2006 Program (PDF)

Registration form (MSWord)

Accommodation

Vancouver tourist information