A very short note here, just to say that the Books of Law in the Very Long Tenth Century workshop took place last week, on Thursday the 5th and Friday the 6th September here in the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of the Sciences, in Vienna. Here’s the poster with which it was advertised, with an image of the replacement folios in the Lombard law-book, Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS 188. As that manuscript originally dates to the mid-eighth century, and the additional folios are from the first decades of the ninth at the latest, it pushes the definition of ‘very long tenth century’ further than any of the contributors did! Although having said that, we comfortably spread from the ninth through into the eleventh, and happily considered cross-overs and developments across that expense. Centuries, like periodisation as a whole, are tricky, and better left as guidelines than rules.
The conference was, I think I can honestly say, a great success, and we had ten very thoughtful and engaging papers, all of which shone light onto obscure corners of legal history, book cultures and the overlap thereof; some of which have re-written major parts of the field and will open new and re-open some old debates. Hopefully these will come to light and the public eye in the near future, and the next step for the workshop will be for me to assemble and submit a book proposal to a suitable academic publisher, while the contributors turn their already engaging and rigourous papers into final chapters. Watch this space for further information.
Once again, thank you to all the contributors for making this small but focused workshop such a great success!
thomgobbitt 