International Medieval Congress 2016

This week I was at the annual IMC in Leeds, one of the UK's biggest gatherings of medieval specialists from across the arts and humanities. As well as sponsoring a session for our MELTING POT project (of which more, here), I was delighted to have the opportunity to co-present with an old undergraduate supervisee of mine: the multi-talented Flo. We presented in a session on The Materiality of Love, and introduced a new idea based on Flo's dissertation. This involved the development of a theoretical framework for the identification of objects that may have been exchanged through intimate exchange: essentially gifts of love. We then trialled this idea using material from Viking-Age Norway, tying in gifts, relationship, status, and raiding. Kimberley-Joy Knight (University of Sydney, session organiser) then spoke on high-medieval 'rune twigs', before Anna Boeles Rowland (Merton College, Oxford) discussed her research on marriage and gifts in late-medieval society.

The session (co-sponsored by the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and the University of York's Centre for Medieval Studies) was great fun, and I think we all got a lot out of it. Archaeologists don't often engage with the growing field of the History of Emotions, but we found this a really refreshing session. More to come on it soon!

If you'd like to know more about the history of emotions, you could do worse than the links above, or checking out the work of our session organiser, Dr Kimberley-Joy Knight. She's also contributing to a forthcoming volume of Internet Archaeology I am putting together, on the archaeology and history of hair. Watch this space for more on that.