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.
