At this year’s International Medieval Congress in Leeds, SOLEMNE team members presented their research across multiple sessions. In session 1233, Friederike’s paper (“‘Guilty of three crimes’: Redefining Social Norms around Abortion in Early Medieval Canonical Collections?”) demonstrated how abortion carried many overlapping associations in early medieval texts, and how judicious editing by medieval canonists produced different contextualisations of the subject at both the textual and manuscript level. In session 1026, Bruno explored the intertextuality between penitentials and canonical collections in “The Fusion of Canon Law and Penitentials: Insights from the Dacheriana, De paenitentia, and Quadripartitus“. In session 806, Gideon sought to establish a timeline of the available evidence and the manuscripts related to the Sirmondian Constitutions in his paper “An Attempted Timeline for the Sirmondian Constitutions and Their Manuscripts”. In session 508 (held in memory of Jinty Nelson), Jan explored the early life of Louis the Pious, asking what we can learn about the young Louis that might shed light on the man he became. Finally, Gleb presented work undertaken with Lucie Doležalová (Univerzita Karlova, Prague) on the increasing visual complexity and compositional sophistication of book production in fifteenth-century Bohemia, in their paper “Mapping Visual Complexity in 15th-Century Manuscript Page Layouts.”
The sessions were all recorded and can be (re)viewed by those registered at https://imc-leeds.confex.com/imc/2026/meetingapp.cgi/Home/0.
For the IMC 2027, SOLEMNE is planning to organise a number of sessions reflecting on the theme of social history and early medieval normative texts. If you are interested in participating, please do not hesitate to get in touch!
