Centre of Medieval Studies hosts International Conference












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            * Centre of Medieval Studies hosts International Conference
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            On the 17th and 18th of October, the Centre of Medieval Studies [ URL "http://cms.flu.cas.

            old/e_info.htm"] hosted a conference on the financial aspects of the medieval economy. The
            conference Financial Aspects of the Medieval Economy [ URL "http://fhs.cuni.cz/FHS-1-versi
            prague_conference_programme.pdf"] , of which the Faculty of Humanities of Charles Universi

            the organizers, attracted academics and scholars from across Central and Western Europe, w
            debated a number of topics related to the main theme.
            Split into 7 sessions of 3 to 4 talks, each featuring a different theme, the conference ga

            some fascinating aspects of medieval economics, from the late Dark Ages to the early moder
            talks were centred chiefly on examples from Central Europe; however examples from Italy, E

            Netherlands were also given.
            Following an opening lecture from Dr Roman Zaoral from the Faculty of Humanities of Charle
            round of talks began with Professor Peter Spufford of the University of Cambridge discussi

            Rates and the Real Economy”, using three examples from across Europe in the 15th and 16th 
            second session featured Italy heavily, with talks on reconstructing money flows in Europe 
            from the Libri Di Cambio, the archive of the Italian merchant Francesco di Marco Datini, a

            company records and the 1433 tax census of the Florentine Republic (delivered by Dr Anthon
            University of Reading and Katalin Prajda of the Central European University in Budapest re
            Grzegorz Myśliwski’s (from the University of Warsaw) talk about what we can gleam from wha

            late 14th to early 16th century accounting books of the merchants of the medieval trading 
            sparked off the main academic debate. Myśliwski’s hypothesis that double-entry bookkeeping
            used in Breslau as early as the mid-15th century drew polite doubt from some of the academ

            there is no evidence of such bookkeeping occurring in nearby Bohemia in the same period; s
            later addressed in Mgr. Pavla Slavíčková’s (of Palacký University in the Czech Republic) p
            October about the techniques and operation of accounting records in town offices in Bohemi

            before 1750.
            On the second day of the conference a diverse mix of topics was once again discussed. One 
            assembled academics found quite amusing was the talk delivered by Dr Antonín Kalous of Pal

            entitled “Financing a Legation: Papal Legates and Money in the Later Medieval Ages”; parti
            of Legates who were paid substantial amounts of money after claiming that the funds they w
            “insufficient”.

            The international mix of academics in the conference enabled scholars from different natio
            examples and viewpoints on the same topic. This occurred in during the fourth session on t
            when a talk by Mgr. Stanislav Bárta of Masaryk University in Brno on the pledge policies o

            of Luxembourg in Bohemia, was followed by a talk by Janos Incze from the Central European 
            in Budapest on the same king, and the same policy, but this time in Hungary ( the aforemen
            Sigismund himself, according to Incze, was once derided for his pledge policy and seen as 

            financial administrator, but is now seen as a financial genius). Another interesting point
            was raised by Dr Moore, who pointed out that the two previous talks had displayed the diff
            the same topic between Central and Eastern Europe, and England. Another interesting paper 

            18th October from Mgr. Marek Suchý (from the Prague Castle Archives) about the economic as
            construction of Prague’s St Vitus Cathedral. According to the information in the Cathedral
            building accounts, we can learn about the wages of those involved (from the well-paid arch

            more lowly labourers, whose wages were, to say the least, insufficient), the daily expendi
            different classes of workers, and where individual stonemasons who worked on the Cathedral
            can even pinpoint what part of the Cathedral individual stonemasons worked on.

            The final paper of the conference was delivered by Dr Georg Vogeler of Karl-Franzens Unive
            Austria, in which he argued a case for editing medieval account books digitally (something
            attempted over 20 years ago), and attempted the show the benefits to historians and philol

            applying such method. With the end of his talk, thus ended what seems to have been a succe
            interesting conference, with hopefully more of such nature appearing in the not-to-distant


                                                                                                      
                                                William Francis Hannell is an Erasmus student from Bri
                                                Arts in Charles University.                           
                                                Email is wfh(zavinac)hannellfamily.plus.com [ MAIL "wf