Niall Ó Súilleabháin – Medieval Historian

This is just a short post to advertise the various conferences I’ll be heading to over the next few months, both in the UK and on the Continent.

First up, next weekend I’ll be speaking at the University of Lincoln at Loyalty in the Medieval World, a wonderful conference being organised by Hannah Boston and Chris Lewis. I’m up in one of the first sessions on Saturday morning, and I’ll be giving a paper entitled “More Servorum: Loyalty and Unfreedom in Late- and Post-Carolingian France, c. 850 – c. 1100″. It will be my first time in Lincoln and the overall programme looks super, so I can’t wait to attend. Registration is open until midnight (BST) tomorrow night (Weds April 3rd) and the conference is fully hybrid, so don’t hesitate to sign up!

The second event will be at the end of May and will see me travel to the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies in Germany, to take part in Humans as Gifts: Historical and Anthropological Approaches, organised by Vitali Bartash. Although the final programme hasn’t been published online yet, the previsional one that I’ve seen has a fantastic range of studies from ancient Mesopotamia to twentieth-century Africa and Ecuador. I’ll be speaking on the first day of the conference (23rd May) on “Donations of Human Beings to the Church in Northern France (c. AD 900 – c. AD 1100)”.

Finally, there’s the big one at the start of July – the annual International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. I’ve been going to Leeds for the best part of a decade now and it’s always a fantastic opportunity to meet up with old friends and to make new ones. I’m particularly looking forward to getting back to Yorkshire, given I missed last year’s IMC. This year I’ll be speaking in the Wednesday morning session 1035 Peasant Movements, Resistance, and Revolts: Societal Crisis across Medieval Europe, I giving a paper entitled “Resisting Unfreedom: A Window on the Logic of Rural Domination in Post-Carolingian France”. This is part of two sessions being organised by Hugo Small on peasant movements in the middle ages (I’m also chairing the second session in the strand later on Wednesday morning). Finally, I’ll also be taking part in a roundtable discussion on Wednesday evening: Session 1403 – Globalism and Early Medieval Flanders: A Round Table Discussion. My involvement here relates to a chapter I’m writing on unfreedom and dependency in early medieval Flanders for a volume being edited by Dave Defries, Brigitte Meijns and Wim de Clercq and the roundtable will give me and some of the other contributors a chance to talk about some of the wider goals of the project.

So that’s what I’ll be up to in the next few months! I’ll try to write blog posts reporting on each of the conferences afterwards, reflecting on my papers and on the events more broadly – but for now I’ve got some papers to write!