Periodic Reporting for period 5 - MALMECC (Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures: Towards a Trans-Disciplinary and Post-National Cultural Poetics of the Performative Arts)
Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-12-31
Late-medieval European court cultures have traditionally been studied from a mono-disciplinary and national(ist) perspective. This has obscured much of the interplay of cultural performances that informed ‘courtly life’. Recent research has begun to reverse this, focusing on issues such as the tensions between orality, writing, and performance; the socio-cultural dimensions of making and owning manuscripts (musical and otherwise); the interstices between musical, literary, and visual texts and political, social, and religious rituals; and the impact of gender, kinship, and social status on the genesis and transmission of culture and music. These ‘new medievalist’ studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the cultural meanings of singing, listening, and sound in late-medieval times.
Taking a decisive step further, MALMECC systematically explored late-medieval (c. 1250-1500) court cultures and their music synoptically across Europe. The project was designed as a large-scale comparative study that focused on the role of sounds and music in courtly life. It embedded music within a multidisciplinary framework encompassing all the arts as well as politics and religion. England, the Low Countries, Iberia, Avignon, Bohemia, Austria, south-eastern Germany/Salzburg, Savoy, northern Italy, and Cyprus were selected for study. These were vibrant sites of cultural production which were relatively neglected due to prevailing discursive formations favouring ‘centres’ like Paris and Florence.
The MALMECC approach was designed to provide new insights into late-medieval cultures and the societies that produced them. This enabled the project to contribute directly to Europeans’ understanding of the often enigmatic artefacts they see in museums, or the equally obscure pieces of medieval music that they hear in concerts and on recordings. By reconstructing cultural practices and the performances that shaped and surrounded these pieces, MALMECC was able to reveal submerged cultural links across Europe.
Taking a decisive step further, MALMECC systematically explored late-medieval (c. 1250-1500) court cultures and their music synoptically across Europe. The project was designed as a large-scale comparative study that focused on the role of sounds and music in courtly life. It embedded music within a multidisciplinary framework encompassing all the arts as well as politics and religion. England, the Low Countries, Iberia, Avignon, Bohemia, Austria, south-eastern Germany/Salzburg, Savoy, northern Italy, and Cyprus were selected for study. These were vibrant sites of cultural production which were relatively neglected due to prevailing discursive formations favouring ‘centres’ like Paris and Florence.
The MALMECC approach was designed to provide new insights into late-medieval cultures and the societies that produced them. This enabled the project to contribute directly to Europeans’ understanding of the often enigmatic artefacts they see in museums, or the equally obscure pieces of medieval music that they hear in concerts and on recordings. By reconstructing cultural practices and the performances that shaped and surrounded these pieces, MALMECC was able to reveal submerged cultural links across Europe.
The MALMECC project began in January 2016 and transferred to Oxford in September 2016. As soon as recruitment was completed, the multidisciplinary team launched into an intensive period of knowledge exchange, both within the team and with selected external experts. This exploratory phase, designed to establish a common base of knowledge and a shared sense of purpose and identity, culminated in the project workshop, ‘Methodological Innovation in Late-Medieval Studies’, at Wadham College (27-28 April 2017).
Summer 2019 brought significant changes in the team’s composition. Each of the first group of post-doctoral scholars (Laura Slater, Christophe Masson, David Murray), moved on to prestigious new appointments at Cambridge, Liège and Utrecht. An international search led to the appointment of three new post-doctoral scholars, who contributed additional sub-projects on late-medieval Castile (David Catalunya), the Imperial court under the first Habsburgs (Grantley McDonald), and the Francophone world around 1400 (Uri Smilansky), thereby significantly enlarging the scope of the project. Also in 2019, three external researchers sought informal association with the MALMECC team, underscoring the project’s growing impact on the wider research community.
Building on the workshop’s success, the new team added a series of international ‘study days’ to their work plan in the next, research-driven phase of the MALMECC project. Each study day explored one of the main themes of the MALMECC research in particular depth. The MALMECC Project Conference was held in the Faculty of Music, St Aldate’s, on 26-27 September 2019. We were delighted to welcome 17 scholars from six European countries and the United States from a diverse range of disciplines, who presented a string of fascinating papers that offered a striking, truly transdisciplinary window on late-medieval courtly life across Europe. After the conference, the project entered its final, synthetic stage. To accommodate the quality and quantity of the team’s research, in early 2020, a project extension amendment to the end of December 2021 was granted. The Covid-19 outbreak brought this series of dissemination activities to a halt in early 2020; two further study days planned for spring 2020 with partners in Prague and Meissen were cancelled (Prague) or postponed indefinitely (Meissen). A unique essay collection was created from the papers for the former event. The impact of the pandemic on the project was therefore significant, but was balanced by two project extensions of six months each.
Team members produced 65 blog posts, 6 project-related videos, and numerous international conference papers. Written outputs include two substantial essay collections, two monographs (Masson, Smilansky) and many international peer-reviewed journal articles by team members. The project website, which served as the key dissemination platform for the project throughout its active period, will be updated to reflect project-related publications that appear after the end of the project term, then archived by the University of Oxford. The project was also active on Twitter, which was used to publicise events and outputs, such as the blogs that were hosted on the website.
Summer 2019 brought significant changes in the team’s composition. Each of the first group of post-doctoral scholars (Laura Slater, Christophe Masson, David Murray), moved on to prestigious new appointments at Cambridge, Liège and Utrecht. An international search led to the appointment of three new post-doctoral scholars, who contributed additional sub-projects on late-medieval Castile (David Catalunya), the Imperial court under the first Habsburgs (Grantley McDonald), and the Francophone world around 1400 (Uri Smilansky), thereby significantly enlarging the scope of the project. Also in 2019, three external researchers sought informal association with the MALMECC team, underscoring the project’s growing impact on the wider research community.
Building on the workshop’s success, the new team added a series of international ‘study days’ to their work plan in the next, research-driven phase of the MALMECC project. Each study day explored one of the main themes of the MALMECC research in particular depth. The MALMECC Project Conference was held in the Faculty of Music, St Aldate’s, on 26-27 September 2019. We were delighted to welcome 17 scholars from six European countries and the United States from a diverse range of disciplines, who presented a string of fascinating papers that offered a striking, truly transdisciplinary window on late-medieval courtly life across Europe. After the conference, the project entered its final, synthetic stage. To accommodate the quality and quantity of the team’s research, in early 2020, a project extension amendment to the end of December 2021 was granted. The Covid-19 outbreak brought this series of dissemination activities to a halt in early 2020; two further study days planned for spring 2020 with partners in Prague and Meissen were cancelled (Prague) or postponed indefinitely (Meissen). A unique essay collection was created from the papers for the former event. The impact of the pandemic on the project was therefore significant, but was balanced by two project extensions of six months each.
Team members produced 65 blog posts, 6 project-related videos, and numerous international conference papers. Written outputs include two substantial essay collections, two monographs (Masson, Smilansky) and many international peer-reviewed journal articles by team members. The project website, which served as the key dissemination platform for the project throughout its active period, will be updated to reflect project-related publications that appear after the end of the project term, then archived by the University of Oxford. The project was also active on Twitter, which was used to publicise events and outputs, such as the blogs that were hosted on the website.
The project was designed to explore the possibility of a transdisciplinary and post-national(ist), team-based methodology, exemplified by a set of interconnected case studies dedicated to late-medieval European court cultures. Over the past seven years, internally generated, research-driven features like our international study days and, in the later stage, the MALMECC online seminars were added to the project. These additional features, all of which grew from inside the project once work had begun, combined with the changes in the composition of the team, and the collaborations with associate researchers that developed as a result of the publicity generated by the project, afforded unexpected additional research opportunities. These made it possible to significantly broaden the project’s geographic and thematic scope. In the end, the project’s range extended well beyond what was first anticipated.
The favourable internal dynamics created by the team-in-action provided an ideal framework for testing the validity of the project’s underlying hypotheses. While long-term results will become fully visible in the upcoming period only, several elements indicating significant progress beyond the state of the art have emerged already. These include our highlighting of the highly distinctive role of ecclesiastics, and of ecclesiastic courts, in late-medieval courtly life; the vital part played by dynastic ties and, related to that, nuances in social status within the fabric of late-medieval courtly networks; the complexities of female agency in both the secular and sacred spheres of court culture; and our demonstrating the heuristic value inherent in breaking down national(ist) and disciplinary historiographical tropes. Pursuing these strands made visible over and over again the submerged transregional or transcontinental networks that were constitutive for the cultural fabric of late-medieval Europe.
Please see the Further Information tab for additional analysis.
The favourable internal dynamics created by the team-in-action provided an ideal framework for testing the validity of the project’s underlying hypotheses. While long-term results will become fully visible in the upcoming period only, several elements indicating significant progress beyond the state of the art have emerged already. These include our highlighting of the highly distinctive role of ecclesiastics, and of ecclesiastic courts, in late-medieval courtly life; the vital part played by dynastic ties and, related to that, nuances in social status within the fabric of late-medieval courtly networks; the complexities of female agency in both the secular and sacred spheres of court culture; and our demonstrating the heuristic value inherent in breaking down national(ist) and disciplinary historiographical tropes. Pursuing these strands made visible over and over again the submerged transregional or transcontinental networks that were constitutive for the cultural fabric of late-medieval Europe.
Please see the Further Information tab for additional analysis.