Situations and occasions of hospitality are often considered to have played a socially integrative role. During the Middle Ages host-guest relations were routinely used to create social bonds, assure peace, and establish participants’ identities. What has not been sufficiently explored, however, are the risks associated with such relations and the ways hospitality had to be negotiated or could potentially fail to produce trust between parties. This ambiguous, occasionally disruptive character of host-guest was felt particularly acutely on the borderlands during the expansion of the Latin European culture in the High Middle Ages, c.1000–1350. Focusing on the ambiguous aspects of hospitality will help us understand how medieval people exercised, conceptualized, and exploited it in intercultural meetings and relations.
The conference will explore the ambiguities of hospitality as it manifests itself in cultural, social, and political relations and phenomena in the central medieval period. We welcome proposals focusing on anyone or more region in the global middle ages.
We are excited to announce that Dr Kate Franklin (Birkbeck, University of London) will be delivering the keynote lecture.
We would in particular welcome proposals that feature one or more of the below:
- Studies of the hospitality in cultural borderlands and frontier zones or in interactions between different cultures and faiths
- Hospitality’s potential to enhance both cohesion and enmity
- Negotiation of differing cultural codes and norms of host-guest relations and conviviality
- Theoretically or methodologically reflective approaches to the study of host-guest relations
- Interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to discourses, practices, and rituals of hospitality
- The ambivalent position of hostages as special types of guest and objects of hospitality
- Investigations into linguistic, practical, and institutional ambiguity of hosts’ and guests’ positions
- Ambiguity of feasts and cultures of food and drink in intercultural contacts
- Spatial, visual, and material approaches to host-guest relations and their ambiguity
- Approaches to hospitality through digital analytical methods like text mining etc.
Papers should be 15–20 minutes long. Proposals should be no more than 250 words alongside a CV of 1–2 pages, to be submitted to: ambiguoushospitality@gmail.com by the 20th February, 2022.
Accepted participants will be notified by mid-March 2022.
The organizers will seek funding to fully cover participants’ costs for travel and accommodation.
The organizers intend to publish a volume of selected papers.
The conference forms part of the project "Ambiguities of Hospitality: Intercultural Integration and Conflict in Host-Guest Relations on the European Borderlands, c. 1000–1350" funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and is organized in cooperation with the Centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm University.