Between 4 and 6 June, CEU’s Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies hosted the international conference ‘Education and Literature in a Medieval Eurasian Context’, organized as a collaboration between CEU (Baukje van den Berg) and the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Panagiotis Agapitos). The conference brought together an international group of 17 scholars from diverse fields to discuss the interactions between education and literature or culture more broadly in premodern Eurasia, from the Coptic, Syriac, and Greek worlds of Late Antiquity to the Latin, Ottoman, Arabic, Persian, and Byzantine worlds of medieval times (see here for the full program).
The conference opened on June 4 with a keynote lecture by Vasileios Marinis (Yale University), who explored the teaching of the liturgy through commentaries and visual representations in Late Byzantium. During the following two days, the conference participants – together with interested CEU faculty and students, as well as guests from the Viennese academic community – shared their ongoing research on questions such as: How did the training received in schools impact modes of writing and reading literature? How did school curricula develop over time and how did these developments relate to broader changes in medieval culture and literature? And what was the role of texts and manuscripts in this context? The lively discussions brought to light unexpected connections and sparked conversations that, it is hoped, will continue beyond the end of the conference.
Written by Baukje van den Berg