After three years, it’s finally time for the After Empire project to come to a close. Over the course of our project, our ten members have been hard at work collaborating with each other and with people both inside and outside of academia on tenth- and eleventh-century history in a variety of forms.
In addition to our project meetings and attendance at HERA conferences, we’ve hosted four different research conferences, from Berlin to Barcelona and Vic to Vienna, where we shared our research with other academics as well as with the public. In York, we worked with our external partners at the Historical Association to hold a workshop for secondary teachers who are offering modules in early medieval history. We’re also proud to have organised and sponsored 13 panels (with 39 speakers!) across the Leeds International Medieval Congresses in 2017, 2018 and 2019, as well as four panels at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo in 2019.
Each of these events sparked new research, and we’re delighted that some of the papers which were first heard at our Berlin conference will now be available in our project’s forthcoming edited collection of essays with Routledge: Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire, c. 900-c.1050. This volume will be available in late 2019, featuring 15 chapters of cutting-edge research ranging across all regions of post-Carolingian Europe. The papers heard at our final Vienna conference will also soon be available as a special issue of medieval worlds – for both the volume and the special issue, we’ll post more details here when they become available.
Our project website has been extremely productive: in the past three years, we’ve published over 60 research blog posts from our project members as well as other historians. They provide overviews of new research, introductions to texts, conference reports, and translations of primary sources into modern languages. The website also now hosts a wide range of resources for those interested in this period of medieval history, with primary source bibliographies, overviews of audio, video and textual teaching materials available online, and a brand-new archive of material-culture artefacts. All of this material will remain online, so that future students and teachers of this period may continue to access them.
Our formal network might be ending, but we still have a few exciting new resources to be launched on our website and our partner site in Barcelona. In addition to the maps and manuscript overview that they have already produced, our Barcelona sub-project will host a virtual and physical exhibition of Catalan manuscripts: ‘Routes of Scriptoria in the Monasteries and Cathedrals of 10th- and 11th-century Catalonia’. Back on this website, we will very soon be revealing our final addition to our resource section: three new maps, which will present visual snapshots of the development of kingdoms and polities in our period over time (watch this space for more information!). While this will mark the completion of our website resources and research blog, we hope you’ll continue to enjoy discovering more about medieval history on our site in the years to come.
