International Medieval Congress

The International Medieval Congress (IMC) is organised and administered by the Institute for Medieval Studies (IMS). Since its start in 1994, the Congress has established itself as an annual event with an attendance of over 2,200 medievalists from all over the world. It is the largest conference of its kind in Europe.

Drawing medievalists from over 50 countries, with over 2,000 individual papers and 750 academic sessions and a wide range of concerts, performances, readings, round tables, excursions, bookfair and associated events, the Leeds International Medieval Congress is Europe's largest annual gathering in the humanities.

The 25th anniversary IMC took place from 2-5 July 2018, with a Special Thematic Strand on Memory.

There are many kinds of memory - personal and social, natural and artificial, political and cultural. Along the lines of this general taxonomy, memory operates in many diverse modes: as a mechanism, process, instrument, and cognitive framework relating to, and concerning recreations of, the past - the social past, the institutional past as well as the past of an individual. Central in the process of storing, retrieving, and (re)constructing the past, memory is by no means a stable entity; it is always undergoing transformation.

In recent decades, memory has become a very fashionable research topic. In Medieval Studies, the concept of memory has been studied as permeating history, literature, language, religion, science, philosophy, and other fields. In addition to treating the processes of storing and retrieving information, the study of memory now naturally also encompasses personal and communal identity and self-fashioning, conceptualization of the world, perception of time and space, intellectual cognition and emotional reactions, established patterns and creativity, continuity and discontinuity, memorization and forgetting - to name but a few conceptual domains under scrutiny. This, however, also means that the study of memory has gradually become very complex and even somewhat elusive. In this sense, this special thematic strand offers a unique opportunity for a fresh and vigorous treatment of the field of memory in its astonishing breadth and variety.