This year, from October the 5th to the 7th, the Institute for Medieval Studies (IEM | NOVA-FCSH) and the municipality of Castelo de Vide are organizing the II International Conference on the Middle Ages, under the theme “Space and Power in medieval urban Europe”.
The medieval city can be faced as a palimpsest, able to reveal aspects about the society by which it has been shaped and occupied, it can also express tensions between the natural forces –crucial for the choosing and the use of the site– and what results from human action. By interpreting the correlation between every-day life and spatial arrangement, the medieval city can also reveal the identity of urban and peri-urban areas. In fact, understanding urban landscapes can be a way to perceive the degree of diversity of its social body, the different levels of population density, the organization of work, the religious dynamism, and most of all, the dynamic of powers at play within.
Nevertheless, it’s paramount to integrate history when analysing the shaping and evolution of urban spaces, since it’s with history that we are able to achieve chronological precision and unravel the parameters driving the societies who organized and occupied these spaces. Consecutively, space analysis must consider that the city itself is the most complex form of interdependency between people, organizing its social existence by means of specific rules.
When regarding medieval cities we also need to keep in mind that they integrate a determining phenomenon, of large scale and meaning, which has asserted itself in a time when Europe was mostly ruralized. For this reason, the understanding of urban areas cannot take place separately from its country surroundings. Embedded in a Christian feudal society who considered the countryside as the favoured territory, cities usually asserted themselves as a confronting body, opposed to systems of prevalent beliefs. This position naturally made cities a place of tension and unstable balance that can only be fully understood when those influences are identified.
The meeting will have three plenary conferences carried out by researchers invited by the organization and thematic sessions. Each session will integrate three paper presentations and will be 60 minutes long. Interested researchers can submit organized sessions or individual papers which will be gathered by the organizing committee in coherent panels. It will also be possible to submit poster proposals within the conference’s thematic panels.
The meeting will also have a sociocultural program with a guided tour to Castelo de Vide’s historical centre, the Conference Dinner and also a tour to Marvão and Ammaia at the end of the scientific program. It will also be launched the book which resulted from de 1st edition of the International Conference on the Middle Ages (Castelo de Vide, October 2016).
The conference languages are Portuguese, Spanish, French and English.