Call for Papers for a Session at the International Medieval Congress (IMC), Leeds, July 7-10, 2025, "Craftspeople and Ways of Learning".

Organisers: Prof. Dr. Sabine von Heusinger and Dr. Eva-Maria Cersovsky (Univ. of Cologne)

Medieval Craftspeople knew how to make things – ranging from everyday objects to luxury products, from serial articles to single pieces, from well-known devices to innovative tools and machines. Moreover, medieval artisans did not only possess skills specific to craft production. Many also knew how to calculate and how to write account books, recipes, or purchasing lists. During the later Middle Ages, some committed to paper whole tracts and how-to manuals pertaining to their craft, others wrote family and/or city chronicles.

The proposed in-person session seeks to focus on how craftspeople obtained their knowledge and skills regarding materials, specific techniques, calculating, and/or writing. We therefore invite new arguments and insights into the different ways, forms, and sites of artisanal learning. This may include discussions of skills that were learned by experimenting while making objects; a form of practical, embodied knowledge notoriously difficult to reconstruct. Submissions may also consider different locales of learning – such as urban workshops, schools and homes as well as cloisters and royal courts – or the formalisation and regulation of knowledge transmission, for example via apprenticeships and periods as a journeyman in the context of guilds. Further possible topics in relation to craftspeople and learning may include, but are by no means limited to:

- Artisans as agents of knowledge and methods of artisanal teaching as performed in practice, put into writing, and/or visualized in images
- Standardisation of working processes and products
- The role of migration, cross-cultural, and/or inter-religious collaboration
- Forms of solidarity, collaboration, mutual dependency, bondage, or coercion in relationships of learning and teaching
- Dis/ability and learning
- Gender and learning
- Ways of testing and certifying skills and knowledge
- Representations of artisanal learning in literature and art
- Methods of reconstructing learning processes, techniques, and knowledge in different source types

Please submit abstracts of approximately 300 words for 20-minute papers to Eva-Maria Cersovsky (cersovseuni-koeln.de) by August 31, 2024.
The proposal should also include your contact information, academic affiliation, and a short biography.