"On the Edge"/My first conference

For the past two years, post-graduate researchers in the GCMS (Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies) department at Reading have organised conferences based on a central theme connected to their doctoral work.

This year, I decided to take on the role and last Saturday (21^st March), around 30 people attended “On the Edge” in Reading.  There were 12 papers in total (1 speaker was unfortunately unable to attend) arranged under four topics and the event was live-tweeted throughout the day by myself and other attendees (because I’ve always wanted to do something like that!).

All the tweets from today can be viewed on one page here: 
https://storify.com/Nunastic/on-the-edge-conference

Beginning the day, Marco Prost (Université de Lausanne) spoke on “Female cunning on the edges of chivalry in Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation to the Conte du Graal” before being followed Katherine Sedovic (Trinity College Dublin) “Seeking the Sacred within the Secular: A Study of the Aspremont-Kievraing Psalter’s Marginalia” and Laura Wood (Royal Holloway, University of London) “Sisters Doing it for Themselves: Vowesses, c. 1450-1540”. 

I was really pleased at how well the three papers meshed together under the session’s topic of The Edges of Gender. You can try and organise this all you want, but inevitably at conferences someone’s abstract and title doesn’t fit what they actually talk about. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case for once! 

The second session was focused upon Boundaries of Religion and the Religious with papers from Tamsin Gardner (University of Exeter) “'Room Available – Flexible Space with all mod cons': The adaptability of the spaces of the medieval Cistercian monastic infirmary”, Bridget Riley (University of Reading) “On the edge of orthodoxy; Richard FitzRalph, Archbishop of Armagh” and William Thompson (University of California, Santa Barbara ) “Churchwardens in early Tudor England: On the Edge of Sacred and Secular”. I also spoke in this session on “Prayer at the Gate of the monastery” as it was the creation of this paper (and the thesis chapter it springs from) which formed the seed of the conference. 

Tamsin is a good friend which makes it all the worse that on her name label, conference programme and on the attendee information I wrote she was from Essex, not Exeter. A time machine would be REALLY useful when organising events like this.

Lunch followed the morning sessions which gave me time to update twitter and read what others were posting as well.

The afternoon’s sessions began with Political and Geographical Borders. Julia Watson (University of Reading) led the way with “Fulbert of Chartres - a bishop with too many borders” before being followed by Katie Phillips (University of Reading) “Taking Up Alms: Royal Charity in New Borders in Thirteenth-Century France” and Mark Whelan (Royal Holloway, University of London) “On the Edge of their Empire? The German Kings and the Reich in the fifteenth century”. 

These again meshed together well although due to a mess up with lunch (and the previous session over-running by 15 minutes), many of the audience were late back. Thwarted by student catering! Another lesson learnt…

The final session was A Medieval Miscellany and consisted of two very different papers chosen to demonstrate the variety of disciplines and ideas that can be discussed under a single theme, but also to round the day off with a bit of fun. 

Margarita Vázquez Corbal (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) spoke on “The southwestern border between Galicia and Portugal during the 12th and 13th centuries: A space for experimentation and artistic transmission” and Jessica Monteith-Chachuat (University of Reading) rounded the day off with her paper “'The Description of a Monstrous Pig' & other weird and wonderful cases of human hybridity”.

Amongst other thoughts and questions, the last paper inspired the following tweet from Tamsin Gardner as it took us on a whistle-stop tour of monsters from classical to medieval: 

 

As academics, the chance to use the word “slutshamed” is always appealing. 

A wine reception concluded the day before the conference dinner and inevitable drinks afterwards (final note to self – buy more wine next time). 

It was both a challenge and a pleasure to organise and host such an event and I found it hugely enjoyable, as well as useful, to meet so many people from far and wide and from a variety of disciplines all working on topics related to my own. Made me genuinely excited about my own work and I’m looking forward to the next challenge which is….

….publishing the conference proceedings! For the last two events, selected papers have been peer-reviewed and edited before being published in the online journal The Reading Medievalist. It’ll take about a year to get it all done (at least) but some of the papers definitely deserve to be in print.

Of course, after the conference dinner, the pub was inevitable. Here I am with Alexander Thomas and Marco Prost in The Horn in Reading sampling some well-deserved pints. 

A jolly good day all in all and despite the endless typos and university bureaucracy it was a brilliant day to organise.

Thank you again to all my speakers and attendees for making it what it was!