16-18 April 2015, Senatssaal, Becher-Weg 21, JGU Mainz
The Research Unit Historical Cultural Sciences of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz will host a conference on bodies in battle in the middle ages in spring 2015. The conference shall offer insights to conceptions, imaginations and practices of violent exertions of bodies of medieval combatants. On the one hand the body will be analyzed as a cultural artifact, on the other as a lived body and a place of self-experience.
While the human body has gained much prominence in recent research in the humanities and cultural studies – especially in the field of gender studies – it’s use for military purposes for instance in medieval studies is to a large extent unexplored. Setting the dichotomy of having a body and being a body as a starting point, the conference will ask, what kind of relation medieval combatants had to their body. It has to be asked, in which ways warriors attributed meaning to their bodily integrity and the ability to control their bodies, as well as for the value their bodies had for them. What bodily experiences did fighters make through their lifetime and especially in violent conflicts? How did they interpret, speak or write about these experiences? To what extent ideal fighting bodies were trained and shaped both systematically and in a targeted way? Which techniques did they actually use to achieve and maintain bodily fitness and how did they treat bodies which were no longer capable of violent actions?
Ranging geographically from Byzantium in the East to Spain in the West and temporally from the fourth to the sixteenth century, the following questions will be treated in the course of the conference:
Which practices were used to make bodies fit for battle? What bodily techniques were taught and trained?
What were the conditions and objectives under which the own body was risked? How did fighters experience bodily dangers and how did they speak about them?
What kind of injuries and violations appeared? How did fighters experience bodily injuries and how did they communicate about? How did people treat injured bodies – individually and within the social context?
How did fighters experience the killing of (hostile) and the dying of (befriended, allied, kindred) combatants? How did they speak and write about it?
How did a fighter’s approach to and the dealing with the own mortality differ from the concepts of non-fighters? How did they deal with their fear of death? How were dead fighters treated?
Program
Thursday, April 16th
14:00 Arrival
14:30 Jörg Rogge (Mainz): Opening Speech
Chair: Thomas Scharff (Braunschweig)
15:00 Guido M. Berndt (Erlangen/Nürnberg): Bedrohen, Verletzen, Töten. Über individuelle und kollektive Gewaltpraktiken gotischer Warlords und ihrer Kriegergruppen
16:00 Coffee Break
16:15 Bogdan-Petru Maleon (Iaşi): The torture of bodies in Byzantium after the battles (sec. IV-VIII)
17:15 Michelle T. Hufschmid (Oxford): The Archbishop’s Body in Battle: The Archbishops’ of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz Military Involvements during the Crusades against the Hohenstaufen
19:00 Dinner
Friday, April 17th
Chair: Martin Kaufhold (Augsburg)
10:00 Iain MacInnes (Dornoch): ‘Pierced by a lance through his mouth to his brain’: the experience and depiction of battlefield injury in Anglo-Scottish warfare, 1296-1403
11:00 Trevor Russell Smith (Leeds): Willing Body, Willing Mind: Morally Killing Non-Combatants during the Hundred Years War
12:00 Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis (Leeds): Wars bloody, long, and violent: The iconography of injury and death during the Italian Wars
13:00 Lunch
Chair: Christine Reinle (Gießen)
14:00 Eric Burkart (Dresden): Körpertechniken des Kämpfens. Die Darstellung von Kampfkunst in den Fechtbüchern des Hans Talhofer (1443-1467)
15:00 Daniel Jaquet (Genève): Six weeks to prepare for combat. Instruction and practices from the Fight Books at the end of the middle ages, a note on ritualised single combats
16:00 Coffee Break
16:15 Giulia Morosini (Padua): The link between physical pain and military boldness as it was interpreted in Italy during the XV century
17:15 Alistair MacDonald (Aberdeen): Two Kinds of War? Brutality and Atrocity in Later Medieval Scotland
19:00 Dinner
Saturday, April 18th
Chair: Jörg Rogge (Mainz)
09:30 Judith Mengler (Mainz): Heeresversorgung und militärische Logistik in der Crònica des Ramon Muntaner
10:30 Dominik Schuh (Mainz): Summary and Conclusions
11:30 Discussion
12:00 End of the Conference
Guests are welcome. Please register via E-Mail to: hkw@uni-mainz.de?Subject=Conference .