Institute for Medieval Studies

Session	116
Title	Border(line) Cities: The Changing Faces of Medieval Border Cities
Date/Time	Monday 4 July 2022: 11.15-12.45
Sponsor	EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Project (MCSA) 'CITYFALL', Institut für Klassische Philologie, Universität Bern
Organiser	Christoph Pretzer, Institut für Klassische Philologie, Universität Bern
Moderator/Chair	Doriane Zerka, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics, University of Cambridge
Paper 116-a	Loss, Lament, and the Last Things: The City of Acre as an Eschatological Borderland (Language: English) Christoph Pretzer, Institut für Klassische Philologie, Universität Bern Index Terms: Crusades; Historiography - Medieval; Language and Literature - German; Theology
Paper 116-b	Depictions of Cities in William of Tyre's Chronicon: An Attempt to Overcome (Religious) Borders? (Language: English) Lena Tröger, Institut für Historische Theologie, Universität Bern Index Terms: Crusades; Geography and Settlement Studies; Historiography - Medieval; Language and Literature - Latin
Paper 116-c	'The Lord will fight for you' (Exodus 14:14): Crossing Borders in Oliver of Paderborn's History of the Fifth Crusade (Language: English) Roman Tischer, Fachbereich Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Index Terms: Crusades; Ecclesiastical History
Abstract	This session looks at cities at borders, but not per se, but rather at examples of these cities themselves crossing, negotiating or drawing borders. These processes are understood to signify a city's transformative interaction with a qualitative threshold. A threshold which has been or can be conceptualised as the marker of a distinctive temporal 'before' and 'after' or spatial 'here' and 'there' for a city. This can cover instances of profound societal or economical change, narratives of conquest, destruction, or moral decline, and also material or mental campaigns of reinvention, reconstruction, and refurbishment.