From the 2nd to the 6th of September, the UB will hold the 18th International Conference of the Spanish Association on Medieval Literature. There will be 150 researchers from Spain, Italy, England, France, Japan, United States and several countries from Latin America participating in the meeting. The event will have two headquarters: the Faculty of Philology (Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585), and the Faculty of Geography and History (C/ Montalegre, 6).
The conference program includes five plenary conferences and 150 communications distributed in fifty sessions. Moreover, there will be three roundtables, which show the will of conciliating tradition and modernity and completing medieval literature from several disciplines. These will touch on the revolution of the new technologies and the so-called digital humanities in the field of material philology, as well as the challenges of this new scene: from a necessary collaboration between philologists and historians, which requires a study of medieval literature and the several methodological and epistemological perspectives from which this collaboration can be treated; and the current affairs of the Middle Ages, exploring several ways of recreating the medieval past times.
This last chapter will treat fields like from archaeology, which was revolutionized with the apparition of the SIG apps, among other technological advances, musicology and neo-medievalism and which is shown in different phenomena such as the historical novel, cinema and videogames; and popular science. Other elements to be analysed from a critical perspective are the keys of the growing interest in everything related to the Middle Ages and whether what lies behind is the intention to reproduce the medieval past or the will to recreate it from a contemporary view.
"The conference, unlike others, is marked by a clear will of being open to multidisciplinary and the reflection on the connections between the medieval past and contemporaneity, resulting from the idea that only by studying the past we will see the complexity of the present through a critical eye", says Meritxell Simó, director of the Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures (IRCVM) of the University of Barcelona and president of the organizing committee.
The organizing committee of the conference is formed by members of the IRCVM of the UB, the Institute on Medieval Studies of UAB, and counts on the collaboration of MNAC and the Library of Catalonia.
Tradition of medieval studies at the UB
The UB has a long and prestigious tradition on medieval studies, from Milà i Fontanals, through the legacy of Martí de Riquer which was continued by his disciples, mainly, in the sections of Catalan, Spanish and Romance language philology. Without reducing this rich heritage, the last reforms of syllabuses had not contributed to put these in value. "Hypertrophy of specialization that occurred in some cases overlapped the nuclear role of essential subjects from other times such as Romance Languages", says Simó.
The scientific and academic debate this situation created brought the UB medievalists to create IRCVM in 2008. It gathers more than a hundred researchers from ten UB faculties and it has as an affiliate unit the medievalists from the CSIC Milà i Fontanals Institution; the creation of the Master's degree in Medieval Cultures of the UB; the creation of the doctoral studies on Medieval Cultures of the UB, and some initiatives that were recently launched to constitute an international network of institute and centers on medieval studies.
"We think this conference being held at the university is a great occasion to see the critical mass of medieval studies at the UB, as well as the rich, old and prestigious tradition in which they join", concludes Simó.
About the Spanish Association of Medieval Literature
The Spanish Association of Medieval Literature (AHLM) was born in 1984 and its objectives were to promote research on the medieval literature written in Latin and all languages that were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, and to internationalize and share the most innovative results carried out in this area. At the moment, with more than 500 members distributed around the world, this is one of the most prestigious medievalist associations at a national and international level.
AHLM has organized a biennale international conference since 1985 and a monographic annual meeting since 2008. It also has the AGLM bibliographic newsletter, a complex research tool organized into language areas and which allows researchers to be up to date regarding the latest news about several disciplinary areas of medieval studies. AHLM, acknowledges as official languages, in an equality plan, the four languages of the peninsula (Catalan, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese).
