We once again had a great run of International Medieval Congress sessions this year, with two panels and a roundtable covering a wide array of approaches and aspects of life in the medieval Caucasus.
Our first panel focused on religious responses to crisis: Kate Franklin and Ani Honarchian gave the first paper, looking at how different texts encoded different relationships between landscape and the body in Armenian medieval writings, and how the ‘pollution’ of bodies could act as a literary proxy for wider fears and crises. Whitney Kite discussed the now almost inaccessible monastery at Hoṙomos, its floodplain-island position and its proximity to Ani. We then turned to the very early middle ages, with Alexander Kavtaradze giving a paper on Viroy, a Caucasian Albanian leader and bishop who also took on key roles as a secular authority, and Cassandre Lejosne discussed the paradoxical ‘golden age’ of church building in Armenia during the turbulent start of the 7th century amid the Byzantine-Persian wars of Khosrow II.
Our second panel covered secular responses to conflict: Karaman Pagava gave an account of the the factors leading towards the 1177 civil war in Georgia, and Irakli Tezelashivili offered a discussion of the re-dating of medieval wall painting figures and what this might mean for a reassessment of their political impacts. We also looked at response to conflict below the state level: Will Anderson and Michelle Cleary gave a paper discussing the archaeology of pastoralist life in medieval southern Georgia, tracing the ways in which people moved to different levels of the mountain landscape through the year and how this might have provided resilience in the face of conflict and change.
In our roundtable with Ani Honarchian, Nik Matheou, and James Baillie, ably moderated by Nick Evans, we discussed crisis from a range of angles. This included James discussing its operation on different levels from historiographically constructed century-long or even ‘eternal’ crises of culture or state, often important to modern historical ideas but effectively invisible to those living through them, to the idea of personal and individual crises and breaks that function at more human scales. Hannah Barker discussed crisis as an external imposition on areas like the Caucasus, used in the context of late medieval slave trading and in subsequent historiography as a way to avoid incorporating the social dynamics of the region into discussions of enslavement – with a consequent impact on the crisis of identities enslaved people may have faced under those conditions. Ani Honarchian further explored some of the ideas about scales and types of crisis, building on her earlier paper with Kate Franklin, and Nik meanwhile discussed crisis in the academy and society more widely, and discussed how present-day societal crisis can bring challenges but also opportunities to reshape our field and its impacts on new generations of scholarship. We then opened the discussion out into a great comparison of how these ideas can help reshape our approach to crises in the Caucasus and the interactions between historical ideas of crisis and our modern frameworks for thinking about the region’s past.
Overall it was a hugely fruitful day of discussions – we’re always very excited to help create these spaces to share the latest work and approaches in the field, and build better spaces for a more diverse array of voices to approach our region of study. We’ll be back next year for IMC2025 – call for papers coming soon!