Exploring transitions in medieval buildings

Saturday 19 November 2011, 9.30AM to 3:30pm

Speaker: Speakers: Aleks McClain, Kate Giles, Anthony Masinton, Stefania Perring, Rob Collins, Jane-Heloise Nancarrow, and Matt Jenkins

Medieval buildings in transition

Buildings are some of the most significant material remnants of human social structure, spiritual belief, military activity, and domestic life left to us from the Middle Ages. They embody in their fabric the motivations, actions, and personal and collective identities of the people who inhabited them, and they provided socially meaningful spaces for interaction and communication. In buildings, people would have actively engaged with each other, the fabric of the structure itself, and with the material culture and landscapes which formed buildings' internal and external contexts. As medieval buildings were substantial physical presences, loci of social and economic investment, and fundamental parts of everyday life, they would have played key roles in transition periods, as places where change could be either subtly negotiated or forcefully effected. This workshop intends to explore the character of the built environment during various transition periods in the Middle Ages, and the wide variety of ways in which people utilized buildings to cope with change.

This is the second in a series of three one-day workshops hosted by the Departments of Archaeology at Durham University and the University of York, and the School of History at the University of Newcastle examining transitions and material culture in the Middle Ages. The purpose of the workshops is to discuss how political, social, religious and cultural transitions are manifested in the archaeological evidence, and how various forms of material culture were used to redefine and negotiate social change in those periods. Papers will encompass the whole spectrum of the Middle Ages, from the end of the Roman period, to the cusp of the early modern era.

These events will provide a forum for scholars working on transitions throughout the medieval world to discuss their latest thoughts and findings.  The workshops are open to all archaeologists examining transitions within and around the medieval period (5^th to 16^th century A.D.), and we'd like to particularly encourage attendance by taught and research postgraduates and interested undergraduates.

For more information on the workshop series, programmes of events, and to register, please visit:

http://sites.google.com/site/medtransitions

Location: King's Manor, University of York

Admission: If you would like to attend, please register at the website above. The workshop is free, but be aware that places may be limited.

Email: aleksandra.mcclain@york.ac.uk