CARMEN Annual Meeting in Prague, September 4-5, 2019: Communities: Division, Connection, Interaction

October 8, 2019

CARMEN: Exciting New Medievalist Projects Unveiled in the City of a Hundred Spires

World-wide medieval network CARMEN held its annual meeting in Prague, on September 4-5, 2019, united by the theme “Communities: Division, Connection, Interaction.” After the keynote lecture, “The Hussites as a Community in the Late Medieval Church” by Pavel Soukup (Center for Medieval Studies, Prague), the busy program included a forum where participants presented their newest projects, programs, and publications, as well as workshops for exchanging information about recent and prospective projects. The medievalist get-together brought together many CEU alumni, including Petra Mutlová, and Judit Majorossy, as well as Zsuzsanna Reed who participated on behalf of the Medieval Studies Department at CEU.

Special workshops included presentations about ongoing research projects such as Black Death Digital Archive (presented by Joris Roosen, Economic and Social History, Utrecht University); Magistri Joannis Hus Opera omnia (Petra Mutlová, Brno, Department of Classical Studies); Visions of community (Katerina Hornickova/ Christina Lutter); Networking among Noble Families: Cases from the Japanese Medieval Experience (Rieko Kamei-Dyche & Andrew Kamei-Dyche, Rissho University (Tokyo)/  Saitama University). Ulrike Wuttke (Fachhochschule Potsdam/ RDMO) gave a practical workshop on making digital research more sustainable and visible through data sharing and data management techniques tools available for digital medievalists.

Workshops sharing the plans of projects in preparation included the presentation of “Revitalizing Saxon Monuments in Transylvania” (Ioan-Cosmin Ignat, ASTRA Museum Sibiu); “From Performativity to Institutionalization: Handling Conflict in the Late Middle Ages” (Pavel Soukup); and a prospective COST Action, entitled “Cultures of Europe’s Historic Routes” (Marianne O’Doherty, Southampton; and Anthony Bale, Birkbeck). The projected “Historic Routes” action to be submitted next year seeks to enable scholars to think about the ‘route’ as an axis for the development and transmission of cultural phenomena, and work comparatively across a range of different types of trans-continental routes in the Middle Ages.

Joining this exciting new project, Dr Reed signed up as a core partner participating in the work of the “Historic Routes” application drafting group. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is an intergovernmental framework dedicated to capacity building and increasing connectedness in currently less research-intensive countries (Inclusiveness Target Countries/ITC), which currently include Hungary. Successful applicants receive funding for collaboration activities, such as workshops, conferences, working group meetings, training schools, as well as dissemination and communication. CEU’s Medieval Studies Department in Budapest qualifies as an ITC institution, and Dr Reed is now working on establishing a CEU-coordinated Hungarian ITC work group in the “Historic Routes” project, bringing together experts from various institutions and diverse fields of Medieval Studies to meet at and benefit from the interdisciplinary academic events, functions and training opportunities to be fostered by the COST Action in the future.