Johanneke Uphof and Joanka van der Laan:

Leken en religieuze cultuur in de laatmiddeleeuwse Nederlanden

Voorjaarslezingen Ruusbroecgenootschap, University of Antwerp, 25 May 2018

Margriet Hoogvliet:

Religious Reading and Sacred Books in the Late Medieval Household: An Approach to Religious Places and Spaces, Conceptualizing Sacred Space(s): Perspectives from the Study of Culture, International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus Liebig University of Giessen, D, 23–25 May 2018

Sabrina Corbellini:

Religious Literacies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Challenging a Paradigm, Congress Renaissance Society of America (New Orleans, 24 March 2018)

The Power of Books. A Social History of Reading in Late Medieval Europe, keynote lecture workshop Medieval Women and the Arts: Literacy, Education, and Visual Culture (Barcelona, 3-4 April 2018)

Signing a Pact with the Reader, workshop The Medieval City: A Question of Trust (King’s College, Cambridge, 20 April 2018)

International congress IRCVM “Escriure i llegir a l’Edat Mitjana”/”Reading and Writing in the Middle Ages” (Barcelona, 25-27 April 2018)

Sabrina Corbellini:
A Call to Write: Writing and the Construction of Identities in Late Medieval Italy,

Margriet Hoogvliet:
Textual and Visual Cultures in the Religious Household during the Late Middle Ages in Northern France

Rethinking borders and identities in northern France and the southern Low Countries
(c. 1350-c. 1550)
First Rethinking the Medieval Frontier Conference, Leeds University, UK, 10 April 2018.

The area roughly between Antwerp and Paris-Rouen is now divided by political borders: between the nation states France and Belgium, as well as the federal border in Belgium between Flanders and Wallonia. Next to this, a linguistic border between Romance (French, Picard, Walloon) languages and Dutch/Flemish/Nederlands can be detected in this area. National and Federal identities are commonly believed to be strongly linked to one, commonly shared language.

The presentation challenges claims that these modern borders can be justified with history-based arguments, because they would build further on Roman limes and Medieval borders. Firstly, political and territorial borders were continuously shifting throughout the ages and especially in the fifteenth century, often causing uncertainties and endless disputes. Secondly the linguistic situation is strongly marked by bilinguality; stretching from micro examples of code mixing to situations where both languages were commonly used alongside each other, for instance in Saint-Omer (with on top of this a strong presence of English). A final example is the Bruges printer Colard Mansion, who printed texts in both Middle Dutch and French/Picard and who used both languages for the administration of his confraternity, thus confirming the hypothesis that language and identity were much more loosely connected in the fifteenth century than we experience it nowadays.