Date/Time
Date(s) - 29 Jan 2015
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
University of Pennsylvania Medieval Studies Lecture Series: Professor Adam Kosto (Columbia, History), January 29th, 5-7 PM
Professor Adam Kosto
History, Columbia University
http://history.columbia.edu/faculty/Kosto.html
“Documenting Safe Conduct in the Middle Ages”
Thursday, January 29th, 5:00 PM
Medieval Studies Faculty Working Group
Class of ’55 Room, 2nd Floor, Van Pelt Library
The early history of safe conduct has principally been studied as a question of protection—of merchants, students, ambassadors, soldiers, pilgrims, and other travelers in “foreign” jurisdictions. It is also a question, however, of information: how did officials know that a particular person had been granted safe conduct? Documents of safe conduct—less proto-passports than proto-visas—demonstrate the possibilities and problems of information processing in the premodern world.
Professor Kosto’s lecture will be followed by a viewing of medieval legal documents from Penn’s collections.
Adam Kosto specializes in the institutional history of medieval Europe, with a focus on Catalonia and the Mediterranean. He received his B.A. from Yale (1989), an M.Phil. from Cambridge (1990), and his Ph.D. from Harvard (1996). He is the author of Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000-1200 (Cambridge UP, 2001) and Hostages in the Middle Ages (Oxford UP, 2012), and co-editor of The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe , 950-1350 (Ashgate, 2005), Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West (PIMS, 2002), and Documentary Practices and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 2012).