Identifying the Blocks that Build Global History in the Middle Ages
Eduardo Manzano
British Academy Global Professorship programme (BA Project Reference GP1\100540) (2019-2023)
There continues to be a tendency in medieval scholarship towards geographic and cultural fragmentation due to discipline specialisation, oftentimes resulting in field isolation. As a consequence, historiographies of different political, social and cultural areas are uneven and disjointed, making any understanding of the global context of the Middle Ages difficult.
The main aim of this project is to challenge this ongoing trend by setting up common research agendas across specific cultural and political areas in order to build a more comparative and connective medieval historiography than the one produced by past Eurocentric narratives. With this goal, the project proposes a comparative enquiry on a series of social, institutional and cultural topics related to medieval Afro-Eurasia. The idea is to formulate a number of common research topics that can be addressed from a comparative perspective fostering conclusions that will be relevant for all the fields involved.
The project is divided into four thematic strands:
1) Power and institutions
2) Economic systems
3) Government and political dissent
4) Material representations of power
Between 2020 and 2023 the project will organise a number of workshops and conferences which will deal with these topics and results will be published in a series of edited volumes and monographs.
PI: Eduardo Manzano
Posdoctoral Fellow: Anna Kelleys