We’ve just had this year’s International Medieval Congress, and once again we had some excellent discussions on the region hosted at the University of Leeds as part of one of the world’s largest discussion spaces for medieval history.
We had two panels this year: the first covered a range of ways that the social and geopolitical history in the region can be seen through time, with papers on the temporal construction of Christianisation and the origin stories of medieval Georgia, on recent castle excavations and the use and reuse of fortifications down the trade routes of the Adjaran border, and on the ways in which the expansive senses of the ‘medieval’ in Georgian conceptualisations create particular historiographical opportunities for states, empires, and transnational narratives.
Our second panel looked more at temporalities in art and intellectual history, discussing the reception of ancient monuments in the Armenian highlands in the medieval period, the impact of hesychasm on church art in Georgia, and the structures of time presented in Ioane Petritsi’s neoplatonist thought.
We’ll be back next year with more panels, so please do keep your eyes open for our next call for papers which will be published later this summer!