“Transmitting Ideas to the Peripheries: Scandinavian Texts and their European Context in the Later Middle Ages”, Dr Kimberley Knight (University of Sydney)

Date: Wednesday 31 August, 2016
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Venue: SLC Common Room, Brennan McCallum Building (5th floor, Room 536), The University of Sydney

“City, Nation, and Globalisation in the Medieval World”, Professor Helen Fulton (University of Bristol)

Date: Wednesday 7 September, 2016
Time: 5:00-7:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building (A22), The University of Sydney
More information and RSVP: helene.sirantoine@sydney.edu.au

This lecture suggests that modern debates about globalisation and the decline of the nation state are prefigured by the medieval condition of loosely-defined nations which pre-dated the nation state. It discusses evidence of ‘globalisation’ as an economic and ideological phenomenon articulated in medieval literary texts. In the Middle Ages, before the establishment of the nation state as the dominant model of political organisation, city and empire were the defining frameworks of social and political relations, with international trade providing a global network of shared ideologies. Now, once again, in the ‘post-national’ age of globalisation, national boundaries are becoming permeable and the global city provides the major framework of social and cultural identity.

Helen Fulton is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. She is the Convenor of the Bristol Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and WUN Research Group, ‘Borders and Borderlands in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’.