Medieval Settlement Research Group Spring Conference 2025
Call for papers.
The MSRG Spring Conference 2025 will take place over the weekend of 7-8 June at the University of Leicester on the theme of Adaptations: Medieval Responses to Environmental Change.
Proposals are invited for papers that explore or showcase examples of adaptation to changing environmental circumstance across the medieval millennium (500-1500CE). We are especially keen for papers that focus on every corner of Britain and Ireland and invite comparative studies from across Europe.
Such adaptations may have been responsive to both improved or deteriorating situations; to global forces such as warming or cooling temperatures; or to local shifts such as resource availability.
They may have been responses to insidious, long-term circumstantial change; or rapid responses to imminent, short-term crises or upturns. We are interested to learn about examples of both successful adaptations and reactive failures; why they worked, when they did, and why others proved futile.
We are especially keen for papers that examine adaptive responses to new and closing opportunities in different environmental contexts—upland, wetland, coastal, riparian, woodland, champion—and in relation to different modes of medieval rural settlement in particular. We invite papers that deal with the adaptation in agrarian practices and pastoral husbandry, natural resource management, settlement location, building design, and infrastructural responses including roads, bridges, and river usage. Papers might also address social restructuring and institutional, communal, and legal innovations spurred by and designed to counter or exploit environmental change.
As a subsidiary strand we are also interested in papers that address the threats to surviving medieval settlement remains in the context of contemporary environmental change.
It is our intention to invite contributors to this symposium to publish their papers, either as an edited volume or as stand-alone articles in Medieval Settlement Research. We therefore ask potential contributors to consider presenting currently unpublished work that examine subjects appropriate for treatment in 8-10k written words.
Please submit a 200-word abstract plus title to Richard Jones (rlcj1@leicester.ac.uk) and Susan Kilby (sk565@leicester.ac.uk) by Saturday 30th November.
Dr Susan Kilby
Centre for Regional and Local History
University of Leicester
Hon. Secretary, Medieval Settlement Research Group
