On November 6 and 7, we held the final workshop in the Multilingualisms workshop series, part of the EurAsian Transformations Cluster of Excellence. As a whole, the series built on the spatial turn in historiography and approached the multilingual challenge through the lens of Eurasian cities and towns as administrative, religious, and commercial centers. The final event in the series examined commercial languages and texts in a context that stretched from Ireland to Japan and spanned many centuries.
This workshop opened with a keynote by Prof. Dagmar Schäfer. Her talk reflected the geographical range for the workshop, covering large areas of Eastern Eurasia. She showed how writing systems and "correct" language are never neutral. This was followed by a panel on Mongol invasions and expansions, which, as a whole, emphasized the importance of Turkic languages within areas ruled by Mongol Khanates. In essence, a Pax Turcica, rather than a Pax Mongolica. The panels after lunch expanded this geographical range further, from the most western parts of Eurasia in England and Bavaria, through the area of modern day Ukraine, and onto India and Japan.
The second day of the workshop focused more on areas of Central and Eastern Europe. We opened with talks on multilingualism in sixteenth century Germany, Italy and Hungary. These were followed by considerations of language use in the eastern parts of Europe, in Moldavia, Banat, and Sibiu from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The workshop ended with a discussion over the connections between space, place, orality and literacy.
Maps were a key part of the workshop. They visualized space and put the talks within a clear context understandable to the audience who came from many different historical areas. However, these maps also visualized power relations, trade networks, and, particularly in the case of early modern Japan, the ways in which space is constructed.
Finally, we also discussed how communication was controlled and limited. How, for example, medieval merchants learnt and taught different languages, and for what purpose(s). This was also seen in multilingual texts from the Mongol empire, and the way in which words moved between languages, and changed their meaning to reflect and control the lives of those living in urban centers. Throughout the workshop, the papers emphasised the interdicplinary nature of this study, and the value that is found when moving beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.