THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIEVAL CONGRESS at LEEDS 2013

This major annual event attracts 2,000 delegates from across the world to 430 sessions of 1300 talks on every aspect of the middle ages. After 20 years at Boddington and Weetwood Halls on the outskirts of Leeds, the Congress took over the main campus of the University of Leeds on 1-4 July 2013. Prominent among the delegates were a dozen representatives of the University of Winchester: staff – Michael Hicks, Ryan Lavelle, and Ellie Woodacre; researchers Helen Bradley, John Hare, Winifred Harwood, and Tom James; and recent and current research students Karl Alvestad, Alex Brondarbit, Angela Clarke, Courtnay Konshuh, Gordon McKelvie, and Kate Weikert. IMC is a great opportunity to find out about anything medieval, to locate and purchase relevant books, heavily discounted but often amazingly expensive, – to meet like-minded people, and especially to present one’s first 20 minute papers. Hicks, Hare, Harwood and James presented the Overland Trade Project – http://www.overlandtrade.org – a ten-year project the goes live on 31 July 2013– to an audience of 40 that posed some difficult questions. Woodacre chaired one of many sessions on international royalty. Kate Weikert, on behalf of the research students, organised three sessions on hostages to which Lavelle, McKelvie, and Brondarbit contributed, and which are to become a book. Konshuh talked about the Anglo-Saxon fyrd. Clarke and Alverstad were there to learn. Hicks also moderated the evening presentation on the scientific findings of the discovery of Richard III’s remains by the Leicester archaeologists Richard Bradley and Jo Appleby and Robert Wonsum-Savage of the Royal Armouries.